Comparing the year ending March 31, 1878, with the year ending March 31, 1879, the India silver absorption fell suddenly from $73,331,675 to $19,853,470, or by the great sum of $53,478,205. This is about double the annual amount absorbed in our silver dollars, under an unfriendly exercise of a discretion which is left to Secretaries of the Treasury.

The new demand of the American Mint in 1878, it is true, did not raise the gold price of silver, or even prevent some degree of fall in its price, but that was because the new demand was for $27,000,000, while the India demand was diminished twice that amount. The probability is that if the new demand of the American Mint had not been created by our legislation, the falling off in the India demand would have caused a fall at least as low as the panic quotation of 46d. per ounce in the London market in 1876. Without the new demand of the American Mint it is probable that the proposal to suspend the silver coinage in India would have been adopted.

The Eastern demand for silver, reduced by disastrous famines in both India and China, has not revived. From Great Britain, which principally supplies that demand, the excess of silver export to India and China over imports was $19,436,925 during the first eleven months of 1881, as compared with $26,005,180 during the corresponding months of 1880.

Our small coinage of silver has kept the London quotations since May, 1879, at an average of 52d. per ounce, and with remarkable steadiness, notwithstanding the fact that the Eastern demand during that time has been abnormally small. The conclusion is irresistible that our coinage, even if not increased, must raise the price as soon as the Eastern demand revives. We have thus every encouragement to persevere steadily and firmly in the policy which we adopted in 1878, after the fullest deliberation.

The discretion given to the Treasury Department by the act of 1878 to purchase for the mints from two to four million dollars' worth of silver bullion in each month was not intended to be a merely arbitrary discretion. It ought to have been and

ought now to be exercised upon legitimate considerations, among which the hostility of a Secretary of the Treasury to any silver coinage at all is not one. Without undertaking to state all the considerations which ought to govern him and which are legitimate, it seems to me that the amount of our domestic silver production and the magnitude of the Asiatic demand are certainly two. The policy of this country, as settled by the act of 1878, is to coin silver, and on that account, and from a proper regard to the large domestic industry of mining silver, as well as from the importance of preserving bimetallism, it is for the interest of this country to sustain the value of that metal. To that end, the whole of our silver production which is available for coinage should be kept out of the markets of the world when the Asiatic consumption is at a low ebb.

A policy like this would have tended to restore the old relation of market value between gold and silver, and in my opinion would have restored it by this time.

London is the great silver receiving and distributing point for the world. For the year 1881 Great Britain imported silver to the amount of $34,509,810, and exported it to the amount of $35,019,910. The export demand for silver, to say nothing of the wants of British home consumption, is thus shown to have been greater than the supply, even when the principal demand, which is from Asia, was exceedingly small. Manifestly it needed only a little more demand or a little less supply to have caused an important rise in the price. In view of this condition of things how extraordinary is the fact that of the total British silver import of $34,509,810 during the year 1881 there was a net import, or excess of import over export, of $12,991,465 from the United States, a country profoundly interested in sustaining the price of silver.

The whole of the $12,991,465 of silver exported by us to England during the year 1881, and with the effect of depressing the London price of that metal, might and ought to have been, absorbed in coining dollars at our mints under the law of 1878. To have administered the law in that way would

have been to carry out its spirit and object; and it will not lessen the public wonder at the manner in which it has been administered to learn that Great Britain imported more silver from the United States during the year referred to than from any other quarter.

Those who advise us to suspend the coinage of silver until England and Germany join us in coining it know very well that this means the indefinite suspension of silver coinage. Upon the sound principle that intelligent men intend what is the necessary effect of their own acts, the persons who give this advice must be held to intend and desire such a depreciation of silver as will not only prevent its restoration as money in European countries, but put an end to its free coinage in India. If we wait for England and Germany we shall wait long enough for the purposes of these advisers. What they really mean by such advice was inadvertently exposed in an editorial notice in the New York Times of December 1, 1881:

If the adoption of the double standard shall be dependent on a compact between the leading commercial nations, including Germany and Great Britain, for the free and unlimited coinage of gold and silver at a fixed ratio, we shall be tolerably secure against it.

It is said sometimes that if the United States shall go to a gold standard by arresting the coinage of silver it will bring on such a contraction of money, fall in prices, and depression in trade and industries that Europe will be forced to restore bimetallism, while this .country, from its greater natural resources, can better bear the strain and can afford to wait until commercial distress causes a change of policy on the other side of the Atlantic. But are we sure, or is there really any reason to believe, that any degree of enhancement of the value of money, of fall in prices, and of that commercial and industrial distress which is inseparable from a fall in prices, would have any other effect than to induce the interests which are now actually dominant in both England and Germany to cling to the gold policy with a more relentless perseverance? Did we find that the industrial distress in Europe from 1873 to 1879, unparalleled as it was in degree and duration, served in

any manner to persuade those interests to relax that contraction of money which was not only the real but the avowed object of their gold policy?

How was it in the United States in 1878, when the bankruptcies were multiplied on every side; when an enormous proportion of the property of the country was being foreclosed and auctioned off at sheriffs' sales; and when the violence of starving and desperate tramps was restrained only by displays of the military force of the nation? Did the interests in this country to be benefited by a gold standard then relax in the slightest degree the tenacity and aggressive vigor with which they insisted upon it? Are the bankers of London and Frankfort so sensitive to tender and humane impulses, and so accustomed to prefer the good of others to their own, that they will forthwith abandon a policy, however much it may enrich themselves, as soon as they are satisfied by a trial of it that it is injurious to the community around them?

The European partisans of gold desire nothing so much as the abandonment of silver coinage at the American Mint. Their most persistent and thoroughly reliable exponent, the London Economist, says in its issue of December 10, 1881, in reference to the last annual report from our Treasury Department:

He would have Congress repeal the Bland law, which compels the Treasury to coin silver to the value of £400,000 each month. The folly of coining silver which no one wants has now become so apparent that probably Congress will not hesitate to repeal an act which ought never to have been passed.

And after noticing that a desire to "coerce" England into adopting bimetallism is assigned as one of the reasons for Mr. Folger's recommendations that the coinage of silver be stopped, the Economist observes:

If these recommendations are in themselves sound, as we believe them to be, it does not matter materially what motives are prompting them, and we can quite afford to look with composure upon the legislation proposed.

The monometallists of England and Germany manifestly have no apprehension of being driven into silver coinage by

our abandonment of it. The fall in prices and the increased value of money, which would result from the closure of our mints to silver, are precisely what they desire. And after the trial they have had of their own power during the unprecedented commercial and industrial distress which followed the German silver demonetization, they have no occasion to distrust their ability to compel submission among their own people to any degree of financial misery which may come from the practical adhesion of the United States to the policy of discarding silver as money.

We are sometimes told that while the non-coinage of silver here might injure our miners by depressing its price, it would injure England still more by deranging the Indian exchange. But the truth plainly is, that the British Government can make the rate of exchange between England and India just what it pleases by suspending or limiting the silver coinage at the Indian mints, and can thus leave us to bear the loss of the break-down in the price of silver without even the poor consolation of having inflicted an injury upon the trade between Great Britain and its Asiatic dependency. The suspension of the Indian silver coinage is certain to follow our suspension of it. The vice-regal government of India, at the end of 1878, asked authority to suspend it in consequence of the low price of silver (50d. per ounce) in the London market, and the British cabinet held the request for a long time under advisement. It was not until May, 1879, that the cabinet refused to grant it. Their refusal was announced on the day after Bismarck ordered the suspension of silver sales in Germany. Nothing can be surer than that if we now strike down the market for silver by closing our mints, the British cabinet will promptly meet the emergency by permitting the local government of India to do what it asked permission to do in 1878.

I cannot see what is to limit the resulting fall in silver to even the panic quotation of 1876. Confidence in its value will receive a shock from which a recovery will be difficult if not impossible; and while we are vainly dreaming that we