=Silver Demonetized in 1873.=—­So things stood in 1873.  At that time, Congress, in enacting a mintage law, discontinued the coinage of the standard silver dollar, then practically out of circulation.  This act was denounced later by the friends of silver as “the crime of ’73,” a conspiracy devised by the money power and secretly carried out.  This contention the debates in Congress do not seem to sustain.  In the course of the argument on the mint law it was distinctly said by one speaker at least:  “This bill provides for the making of changes in the legal tender coin of the country and for substituting as legal tender, coin of only one metal instead of two as heretofore.”

=The Decline in the Value of Silver.=—­Absorbed in the greenback controversy, the people apparently did not appreciate, at the time, the significance of the “demonetization” of silver; but within a few years several events united in making it the center of a political storm.  Germany, having abandoned silver in 1871, steadily increased her demand for gold.  Three years later, the countries of the Latin Union followed this example, thus helping to enhance the price of the yellow metal.  All the while, new silver lodes, discovered in the Far West, were pouring into the market great streams of the white metal, bearing down the price.  Then came the resumption of specie payment, which, in effect, placed the paper money on a gold basis.  Within twenty years silver was worth in gold only about half the price of 1870.

That there had been a real decline in silver was denied by the friends of that metal.  They alleged that gold had gone up because it had been given a monopoly in the coinage markets of civilized governments.  This monopoly, they continued, was the fruit of a conspiracy against the people conceived by the bankers of the world.  Moreover, they went on, the placing of the greenbacks on a gold basis had itself worked a contraction of the currency; it lowered the prices of labor and produce to the advantage of the holders of long-term investments bearing a fixed rate of interest.  When wheat sold at sixty-four cents a bushel, their search for relief became desperate, and they at last concentrated their efforts on opening the mints of the government for the free coinage of silver at the ratio of sixteen to one.

=Republicans and Democrats Divided.=—­On this question both Republicans and Democrats were divided, the line being drawn between the East on the one hand and the South and West on the other, rather than between the two leading parties.  So trusted a leader as James G. Blaine avowed, in a speech delivered in the Senate in 1878, that, as the Constitution required Congress to make both gold and silver the money of the land, the only question left was that of fixing the ratio between them.  He affirmed, moreover, the main contention of the silver faction that a reopening of the government mints of the world to silver would bring it up to its old relation with gold.  He