For Great Britain and Ireland........  $8,000,000,000
For Germany..........................   8,500,000,000
For France...........................   3,850,000,000
For Russia...........................   3,250,000,000
For Austria..........................   1,500,000,000
For Italy............................   2,675,000,000
And for all other European countries.   3,050,000,000

A total of nearly $31,000,000,000.

Hon. Samuel Smith, M. P., places the mortgages of England at something over $2,000,000,000, which is more than half the value of the landed property, and those of Scotland and Ireland (the latter one of the worst mortgaged countries in the world) make up the grand total given above.

A highly suggestive fact is that, as experience develops the enormous evils of the monometallic system, the number of conversions among prominent men to bimetallism steadily increases, and they become more outspoken and radical in their views.

At the Paris Monetary Conference of 1867, Mr. Mees, President of the Bank of the Netherlands, protested against a single gold standard and foretold literally what has followed.  Two years later Baron Alphonse de Rothschild said:  “As a sequel we should have to demonetize silver completely.  That would be to destroy an enormous part of the world’s capital; that would be ruin.”

At the conference of 1878, Mr. Henry Hucks Gibbs, director and former governor of the Bank of England, was an advocate of the single gold standard; but a few years’ experience so completely changed his views that he said:  “Mr. Goschen and I were together in the conference in Paris; both of us were sturdy defenders of gold monometallism; but I have changed my mind.  I do not say Mr. Goschen has changed his mind, but he has somewhat modified it.”

In the Paris Conference of 1878, Mr. Goschen said:  “If other states were to carry on a propaganda in favor of a gold standard and of the demonetization of silver, the Indian Government would be obliged to reconsider its position, and might be forced by events to take measures similar to those taken elsewhere.  In that case the scramble to get rid of silver might provoke one of the gravest crises ever undergone by commerce.”

As it is the fashion of our monometallists to sneer at the possibility of bimetallism, it may be well to quote here the report of the Royal Commission on gold and silver, made in 1888.  This commission was composed of six monometallists and six bimetallists, but they assented unanimously to this proposition: 

“Section 107.  We think that in any conditions fairly to be contemplated in the future, so far as we can forecast them from the experience of the past, a stable ratio might be maintained if the nations we have alluded to (herein), the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Latin Union, were to accept and strictly adhere to bimetallism at the suggested ratio.  We think