JOINT-METALLISM. FIRST LETTER. To the Editor of the "New York Times" : SIR: To make business generally prosperous, it is necessary to find a safe and honest plan by which both gold and silver, permanently and at their relative market values, may be made available as the metallic basis of currency. For a long period of years the money of the world has been, in total value, about half gold and half silver. Recently some nations have demonetized silver, and other countries have attempted to maintain it at a ratio that did not regard the relative values of the two precious metals. This, at a time when the world's indebtedness has increased to a danger ous point, has naturally caused distrust and depression of trade. The known debts of the world amount to more than eight times the total amount of gold in the world. To incur a debt that must be paid on a gold basis is to sell gold short when the short interest is known to be eight times as great as the total amount of the stock in existence. Large owners of money prefer to keep it in banks or trust companies at 2 per cent. or less interest rather than to use it in the production or purchase of goods or property which must decline in value as the purchasing power of money, based on gold alone, increases. Money is hoarded and enterprise halts, trade languishes, laborers are unemployed, incomes are reduced, and times are hard. The following plan for joint-metallism would enable both the precious metals to be safely used together, without frequent recoinings and without danger of one metal driving out the other, and would afford an honest, adequate, self-regulating, and permanent basis of currency : Let there be silver coins containing the same weight of silver as there is weight of gold in the present $5 gold-piece. Let those silver coins be called standards. Let it be enacted that for all debts, public or private, of $10 and upward, contracted after six months from the passage of the act, it shall be lawful to pay half in gold coins and half in such number of standards as shall be approximately equal thereto, according to the Government ratio to be fixed as follows: On the first lawful day of each month, after six months from the passage of the act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall declare what number of standards most nearly represent a $5 gold-piece, according to the average relative market values of gold and silver, from the time of the passage of the act and based on the average market values of all the intervening months. This number is to be the ratio for that current month. A $5 gold-piece, plus said number of standards, will constitute $10 in lawful money during said month. |