f $1.045 per ounce. The highest price
paid during the year was $1.2025 and the lowest $O.9636. In exchange for
this silver bullion there have been issued $50,577,498 of the Treasury
notes authorized by the act. The lowest price of silver reached during
the fiscal year was $O.9636 on April 22, 1891; but on November 1 the
market price was only $O.96, which would give to the silver dollar a
bullion value of 74-1/4 cents.

Before the influence of the prospective silver legislation was felt
in the market silver was worth in New York about $O.955 per ounce.
The ablest advocates of free coinage in the last Congress were most
confident in their predictions that the purchases by the Government
required by the law would at once bring the price of silver to $1.2929
per ounce, which would make the bullion value of a dollar 100 cents and
hold it there. The prophecies of the antisilver men of disasters to
result from the coinage of $2,000,000 per month were not wider of the
mark. The friends of free silver are not agreed, I think, as to the
causes that brought their hopeful predictions to naught. Some facts are
known. The exports of silver from London to India during the first nine
months of this calendar year fell off over 50 per cent, or $17,202,730,
compared with the same months of the preceding year. The exports of
domestic silver bullion from this country, which had averaged for the
last ten years over $17,000,000, fell in the last fiscal year to
$13,797,391, while for the first time in recent years the imports of
silver into this country exceeded the exports by the sum of $2,745,365.
In the previous year the net exports of silver from the United States
amounted to $8,545,455. The production of the United States increased
from 50,000,000 ounces in 1889 to 54,500,000 in 1890. The Government is
now buying and putting aside annually 54,000,000 ounces, which, allowing
for 7,140,000 ounces of new bullion used in the arts, is 6,640,000 more
than our domestic products available for coinage.

I hope the depression in the price of silver is temporary and that a
further trial of this legislation will more favorably affect it. That
the increased volume of currency thus supplied for the use of the people
was needed and that beneficial results upon trade and prices have
followed this legislation I think must be very clear to everyone. Nor
should it be forgotten that for every dollar of these notes issued a
full dollar's worth of silver bull