e bar of uncoined silver sold in New York
city for $13 in gold, or $14.82 in greenbacks. To-day the ten-ounce bar
sells there for $6.90.

"Awful depreciation," isn't it? "Debased money," and all that sort of
thing. But hold on. Let us see how it is with other things. For prices in
the first half of 1873 we will take the United States Abstract, and for
present prices to-day's issue of the New York _Tribune_. Wheat then was
$1.40 in New York city, so our silver bar would have brought ten and
four-sevenths bushels; to-day wheat is "unsteady" in the near neighborhood
of 64 cents, and our silver bar would buy ten and five-sixths bushels. No.
2 red is the standard in both cases.

Going through a long list in the same manner, we find that the ten-ounce
bar of uncoined silver would buy in '73, in New York city, twenty-three
and a half bushels of corn, to-day twenty-four bushels; of cotton then
eighty pounds, to-day eighty-six pounds--and there is "a great speculative
boom in cotton," and has been for some time, but on the average price of
this year silver would buy much more. Of rye, then about fifteen bushels
(grading not well settled), to-day thirteen bushels; of bar iron then 310
pounds, to-day 460 pounds, and so on through the market. In the Central
West in 1873 it would have taken ten such silver bars to buy a standard
farm horse, Clydesdale or Percheron-Norman.

Will it take anymore bars to-day at $6.90 each?

There is another way to calculate the decline, and that is by taking the
average farm value instead of the export or New York city price, and
including all roots and garden products not exported, and this makes the
showing far more favorable to silver. The Agricultural Department at
Washington has recently issued a pamphlet showing the crops of every year
since 1870, and the average home or farm price, together with the total
for which the whole crop was sold. Send for it and contrast the prices
given in it with those known to you to-day, and you will find that in rye,
barley, oats, potatoes, and many other things the decline has been very
much greater than is given above. In short, it takes more farm produce to
buy an ounce of silver than it did in 1873, and twice as much to buy an
ounce of gold. Of Ohio medium scoured wool, for instance--and that is the
standard wool of the market--it would have taken in 1873 two and a half
pounds to have bought an ounce of silver, while to-day it will take
considerably over th