The great creditors are savings-banks, insurance companies, widows and orphans, and provident farmers, and business men on a small scale.  The great operators are the great borrowers and owe more than is due them.  Their credit is their capital and they need not have even money enough to pay their rent.

But how will this change affect the great mass of our fellow-citizens who depend upon their daily labor?  A dollar to them means so much food, clothing, and rent.  If you cheapen the dollar it will buy less of these.  You may say they will get more dollars for their labor, but all experience shows that labor and land are the last to feel the change in monetary standards, and the same resistance will be made to an advance of wages on the silver standard as on the gold standard, and when the advance is won it will be found that the purchasing power of the new dollar is less than the old.  No principle of political economy is better established than that the producing classes are the first to suffer and the last to gain by monetary changes.

I might apply this argument to the farmer, the merchant, the professional man, and to all classes except the speculator or the debtor who wishes to lessen the burden of his obligations; but it is not necessary.

It is sometimes said that all this is a false alarm, that our demand for silver will absorb all that will be offered and bring it to par with gold at the old ratio.  I have no faith in such a miracle.  If they really thought so, many would lose their interest in the question.  What they want is a cheaper dollar that would pay debts easier.  Others do not want either silver or gold, but want numbers, numerals, the fruit of the printing-press, to be fixed every year by Congress as we do an appropriation bill.

Now, sir, I am willing to do all I can with safety even to taking great risks to increase the value of silver to gold at the old ratio, and to supply paper substitutes for both for circulation, but there is one immutable, unchangeable, ever-existing condition, that the paper substitute must always have the same purchasing power as gold and silver coin, maintained at their legal ratio with each other.  I feel a conviction, as strong as the human mind can have, that the free coinage of silver now by the United States will be a grave mistake and a misfortune to all classes and conditions of our fellow-citizens.  I also have a hope and belief, but far from a certainty, that the measure proposed for the purchase of silver bullion to a limited amount, and the issue of Treasury notes for it, will bring silver and gold to the old ratio, and will lead to an agreement with other commercial nations to maintain the free coinage of both metals.