time about a dollar an ounce, this represented
an increase, for the time being, over the maximum allowed under the
Bland-Allison Act and more than double the minimum required by that
measure, which was all the Treasury had ever purchased. But the Silver
Purchase Act failed to check the downward trend in the value of the
metal. The bullion in a silver dollar, which had been worth $1.02 in
1872, had declined to seventy-two cents in 1889. It rose to seventy-six
in 1891 but then declined rapidly to sixty in 1898, and during the next
three years the intrinsic value of a "cartwheel" was just about half its
legal tender value.

* John Sherman, then Secretary of Treasury, had a large
share in giving final form to the bill, which he favored
only for fear of a still more objectionable measure. See
Sherman's Recollections, pp. 1069, 1188.

Even under the Bland-Allison Act the Treasury Department had experienced
great difficulty in keeping in circulation a reasonable proportion of
the silver dollars and the silver certificates which were issued in lieu
of part of them, and in maintaining a sufficient gold reserve to insure
the stability of the currency. When the Silver Purchase Act went into
operation, therefore, the monetary situation contributed its share to
conditions which produced the panic of 1893. Thereupon the silver issue
became more than ever a matter of nation-wide discussion.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific the country was flooded with
controversial writing, much of it cast in a form to make an appeal to
classes which had neither the leisure nor the training to master this
very intricate economic problem. W. H. Harvey's Coin's Financial School
was the most widely read campaign document, although hundreds of similar
pamphlets and books had an enormous circulation. The pithy and plausible
arguments of "Coin" and his ready answers to questions supposedly put by
prominent editors, bankers, and university professors, as well as by J.
R. Sovereign, master workman of the Knights of Labor, tickled the fancy
of thousands of farmers who saw their own plight depicted in the crude
but telling woodcuts which sprinkled the pages of the book. In his
mythical school "the smooth little financier" converted to silver many
who had been arguing for gold; but--what is more to the point--he also
convinced hundreds of voters that gold was the weapon with which the
bankers of England and America had slain silver in orde