exposed, although small coins, being handled with less care, suffer most.  The well-ascertained result is that it costs from fifteen to twenty-five times more to keep silver afloat than it does to maintain the same amount in gold.  To sustain the silver standard would annually cost about one per cent. for abrasion; but that of gold would not exceed one-twentieth of one per cent.  This is a trouble-some charge, forever to bristle up in the path-way of a silver standard.  It must also be borne in mind that the mint cost of coining silver is many times greater than that of the same amount in gold.  More than sixteen tons of silver are required as the equivalent of one ton of gold.  As a cold matter of fact, silver is neither the best nor the cheapest standard.  It is far dearer to plant and forever dearer to maintain.

A double standard put forth by us on the terms now proposed by the commission or by the House bill would be so only in name.  The perfect dual ideal of theorists, based upon an exact equilibrium of values, cannot be realized while the intrinsic value of either of the component parts is overrated or remains a debatable question and everywhere more or less open to suspicion.  A standard of value linked to the changing fortunes of two metals instead of one, when combined with an existing disjointed and all-pervading confusion in the ratio of value, must necessarily be linked to the hazard of double perturbations and become an alternating standard in perpetual motion.

The bimetallic scheme, with silver predominant—­largely everywhere else suspended, if not repudiated—­is pressed upon us now with a ratio that will leave nothing in circulation but silver, as a profitable mode of providing a new and cheaper way of pinching and paying the national debt; but a mode which would leave even a possible cloud upon our national credit should find neither favor nor tolerance among a proud and independent people.

The proposition is openly and squarely made to pay the public debt at our option in whichever metal, gold or silver, happens to be cheapest, and chiefly for the reason that silver already happens to be at 10 per cent. the cheapest.  In 1873, to have paid the debt in silver would have cost 3 per cent. more than to have paid it in gold, and then there was no unwillingness on the part of the present non-contents to pay in gold.  Silver was worth more then to sell than to pay on debts.  No one then pulled out the hair of his head to cure grief for the disappearance of the nominal silver option.  Since that time it has been and would be now cheaper nominally to pay in silver if we had it; and therefore we are urged to repudiate our former action and to claim the power to resume an option already once supposed to have been profitably exercised, of which the world was called upon to take notice, and to pay in silver to-day or to let it alone to-morrow.  I know that the detestable doctrine of Machiavelli was that “a