Going through a long list in the same manner, we find that the ten-ounce bar of uncoined silver would buy in ’73, in New York city, twenty-three and a half bushels of corn, to-day twenty-four bushels; of cotton then eighty pounds, to-day eighty-six pounds—­and there is “a great speculative boom in cotton,” and has been for some time, but on the average price of this year silver would buy much more.  Of rye, then about fifteen bushels (grading not well settled), to-day thirteen bushels; of bar iron then 310 pounds, to-day 460 pounds, and so on through the market.  In the Central West in 1873 it would have taken ten such silver bars to buy a standard farm horse, Clydesdale or Percheron-Norman.

Will it take anymore bars to-day at $6.90 each?

There is another way to calculate the decline, and that is by taking the average farm value instead of the export or New York city price, and including all roots and garden products not exported, and this makes the showing far more favorable to silver.  The Agricultural Department at Washington has recently issued a pamphlet showing the crops of every year since 1870, and the average home or farm price, together with the total for which the whole crop was sold.  Send for it and contrast the prices given in it with those known to you to-day, and you will find that in rye, barley, oats, potatoes, and many other things the decline has been very much greater than is given above.  In short, it takes more farm produce to buy an ounce of silver than it did in 1873, and twice as much to buy an ounce of gold.  Of Ohio medium scoured wool, for instance—­and that is the standard wool of the market—­it would have taken in 1873 two and a half pounds to have bought an ounce of silver, while to-day it will take considerably over three pounds.  The monometallists habitually talk, and have talked it so long that they believe it themselves, as if silver had become so cheap that the farmer ought to rank it with tin, lead, or spelter; but if the farmer will try the experiment he will find that it takes a good deal more of his product to buy a given amount of silver than it did in 1873.

The plain truth of the matter is that the time has come for both gold and silver to increase in purchasing power; but by reason of demonetization almost the entire increase has been concentrated in gold, leaving silver almost stationary as to commodities in general, but somewhat enhanced as to farm products.  In the name of common, honesty, is it not a high-handed outrage to make the old debts of that period payable in the rapidly appreciating metal, instead of one that has merely retained its value? and is it not hypocrisy to speak of such a system as “honest money,” and affect to deplore the dishonesty of those who insist upon their right to pay in the least variable metal, which was constitutional and the unit of our money from the very start?

=We certainly do want to pay our debts in honest money.=