Sending our gold to Europe, then, would raise prices there, which would raise the price of our staple exports, such as wheat, meat, and cotton; the great rise in the price of these would, of course, stimulate exports, and thus aid us in maintaining a favorable balance, would restore to the farmers that income which they have lost by the decline of prices, would thus put into their hands the power to buy manufactured goods and to pay our annual interest debt to Europe by commodities instead of gold.  In short, if the gold went abroad, it would necessarily be but a short time till much of it would come back to pay for our agricultural exports, and at the same time our farmers would get the benefit of higher prices by both operations.  If any man doubts that an increased gold supply in Europe would increase the selling price of our farm surplus, I ask him to examine the figures for the twelve years following the discovery of gold in California, or the history of prices in the century following the discovery of America—­an era described by all economists as one of inflation.  Is there any reason why a like cause should not now produce like effects?

=In the meantime, however, all the other nations would dump their silver upon us and we should be overloaded with it.=

Where would the silver come from?  The best authorities agree that there is not enough free silver in the world to even fill the place of our gold, which, you say, would be expelled.  And right here is where the advocates of the gold standard contradict every well-established principle of political economy, and every lesson of experience, by declaring that the transfer of all our gold to Europe would not cheapen it there, and that free coinage would not increase the value of silver.  They insist that we should still have “50-cent dollars.”  Stripped of all its fine garniture of rhetoric, their proposition simply amounts to this:  The sudden addition of 20 per cent. to Europe’s supply of gold would not cheapen it, and making a market here for all the free silver in the world would not raise its value; laying the burden of sustaining an enormous mass of credit currency on one metal instead of two has added nothing to the value of that metal; a thirty years’ war on the other metal was not the cause of its depreciation in terms of gold, and if the conditions were reversed, greatly increasing the demand for silver and decreasing the demand for gold, they would remain in relative values just the same.  If those propositions are true, all political economy is false.

=Government cannot create values, in silver or anything else.=