c mind.

Of the many singular features in the present overheated controversy,
probably the most singular is the fact that comparatively few bimetallists
know of, or, at any rate, say much about, this demonetization of gold,
while the monometallists ignore it entirely, and many of them, who ought
to know better, absolutely deny it.

So extensive was this demonetization of gold, and so far-reaching were its
consequences, that it may easily be believed that it was the beginning of
all our misfortunes, and that the crime of the century, instead of being
the demonetization of silver in 1873, was really the demonetization of
gold in 1857; for that was the first general or preconcerted international
action to destroy the monetary functions of one of the metals and throw
the burden upon the other, and it first familiarized the minds of
financiers, and especially of the creditor classes, with the fact that the
thing might easily be done and that it would work enormously to their
advantage.

It may also be said that it led logically to the action of 1867, which was
but the beginning of a general demonetization of silver.

The history of gold demonetization is full of instruction and is here
given in detail.

In 1840-45 the world was hungering for gold. All the leading nations had
just passed through financial convulsions which shook the very foundations
of society. Several American states had either repudiated their debts
outright or scaled them in ways that to the English mind looked dishonest,
and there was a general uneasiness among the creditor classes of the
world. A universal fall of prices had produced the same results with which
we are now so painfully familiar. In the half century terminating with
1840 the world had produced but $529,942,000 in gold, coinage value, and
$1,364,697,000 in silver, or some forty ounces of silver to one of gold;
yet their ratio of values had varied but little, and the variation was not
increasing. Why? Monometallists have raked the world in vain for an
answer. Bimetallists point to the only one that is satisfactory, namely,
the persistence of France in treating both metals equally at her mints.
But there were grave apprehensions that France alone could not maintain
the parity, and so, as aforesaid, all the world was hungry for gold.

And in all the world there was not one observer who dreamed that this
hunger would soon be far more than satiated, and the philosopher who
should have pred