On silver coinage and treasury notes;

United states senate, June 5, 1890.

I approach the discussion of this bill and the kindred bills and amendments pending in the two Houses with unaffected diffidence.  No problem is submitted to us of equal importance and difficulty.  Our action will affect the value of all the property of the people of the United States, and the wages of labor of every kind, and our trade and commerce with all the world.  In the consideration of such a question we should not be controlled by previous opinions or bound by local interests, but with the lights of experience and full knowledge of all the complicated facts involved, give to the subject the best judgment which imperfect human nature allows.  With the wide diversity of opinion that prevails, each of us must make concessions in order to secure such a measure as will accomplish the objects sought for without impairing the public credit or the general interests of our people.  This is no time for visionary theories of political economy.  We must deal with facts as we find them and not as we wish them.  We must aim at results based upon practical experience, for what has been probably will be.  The best prophet of the future is the past.

To know what measures ought to be adopted we should have a clear conception of what we wish to accomplish.  I believe a majority of the Senate desire, first, to provide an increase of money to meet the increasing wants of our rapidly growing country and population, and to supply the reduction in our circulation caused by the retiring of national-bank notes; second, to increase the market value of silver not only in the United States but in the world, in the belief that this is essential to the success of any measure proposed, and in the hope that our efforts will advance silver to its legal ratio with gold, and induce the great commercial nations to join with us in maintaining the legal parity of the two metals, or in agreeing with us in a new ratio of their relative value; and third, to secure a genuine bimetallic standard, one that will not demonetize gold or cause it to be hoarded or exported, but that will establish both gold and silver as standards of value not only in the United States, but among all the civilized nations of the world.

Believing that these are the chief objects aimed at by us all, and that we differ only as to the best means to obtain them, I will discuss the pending propositions to test how far they tend, in my opinion, to promote or defeat these obtects.

And, first, as to the amount of currency necessary to meet the wants of the people.

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