Any one who can overlook these causes and attribute low prices to a want of domestic currency, that has increased and is increasing continually, must be blind to the great forces that in recent times throughout the world are tending by improved methods and modern inventions to lessen the prices of all commodities.

These fluctuations depend upon the law of supply and demand, involving facts too numerous to state, but rarely depending on the volume of money in circulation.  An increase of currency can have no effect to advance prices unless we cheapen and degrade it by making it less valuable; and if that is the intention now, the direct and honest way is to put fewer grains of gold or silver in our dollar.  This was the old way, by clipping the coin, adding base metal.

If we want a cheaper dollar we have the clear constitutional right to put in it 15 grains of gold instead of 23, or 300 grains of silver instead of 412 1/2, but you have no power to say how many bushels of wheat the new dollar shall buy.  You can, if you choose, cheapen the dollar under your power to coin money, and thus enable a debtor to pay his debts with fewer grains of silver or gold, under the pretext that gold or silver has risen in value, but in this way you would destroy all forms of credit and make it impossible for nations or individuals to borrow money for a period of time.  It is a species of repudiation.

The best standard of value is one that measures for the longest period its equivalent in other products.  Its relative value may vary from time to time.  If it falls, the creditor loses; if it increases, the debtor loses; and these changes are the chances of all trade and commerce and all loaning and borrowing.  The duty of the Government is performed when it coins money and provides convenient credit representatives of coin.  The purchasing power of money for other commodities depends upon changing conditions over which the Government has no control.  Even its power to issue paper money has been denied until recently, but this may be considered as settled by the recent decisions of the Supreme Court in the legal-tender cases.  All that Congress ought to do is to provide a sufficient amount of money, either of coin or its equivalent of paper money, to meet the current wants of business.  This it has done in the twelve years last passed at a ratio of increase far in excess of any in our previous history.

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Under the law of February, 1878, the purchase of $2,000,000 worth of silver bullion a month has by coinage produced annually an average of nearly $3,000,000 a month for a period of twelve years, but this amount, in view of the retirement of the bank notes, will not increase our currency in proportion to our increase in population.  If our present currency is estimated at $1,400,000,000, and our population is increasing at the ratio of 3 per cent. per annum, it would require $42,000,000