Very true. And the question of what is the best can only be determined by
science and experience. It is certain that gold standing alone is not; for
its fluctuations in purchasing power have been so tremendous as again and
again to throw the commercial world into jimjams. History shows that it
has varied 100 per cent. in a century, and we have seen in this country
that its value declined about 25 per cent. from 1848 to 1857, and that it
has increased something like 60 per cent. since 1873. Without desiring to
be ill-natured, I must say it seems to me that a man has a queerly
constituted mind who insists that that is the only "honest money."


=But we don't want 50-cent dollars.=

And you can't have 'em, my dear sir. A dollar consists of 100 cents. The
phrase "50-cent dollar" and that other phrase "honest money" remind me of
what I used to hear in my boyhood when the slavery question was debated
with such heat: "What! Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?
Whoosh!" It was assumed, if a man denounced slavery, that he wanted the
colored man for a brother-in-law. Men who employ such phrases show a
secret consciousness of having a weak cause. And while I am about it I may
as well add that I do not admire the way some of our fellows have of
denouncing gold as "British money." Great fools, indeed, the British would
be if they did not fight for a gold basis, for by reason of it they get
twice as much of our wheat, meat, and cotton for the $200,000,000 per year
we have to pay them in interest. According to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, the world owes England $12,000,000,000, on which she realizes a
little over four and a half per cent., or pretty nearly $600,000,000 per
year. Fully that, if we add income from property her citizens own in this
and other countries. On the day we demonetized silver, that $600,000,000
could have been paid in gold in the port of New York with 450,000,000