If we are surprised that the sordid selfishness of the privileged
classes of Europe should have induced them to perpetrate so gross an act
of injustice, we are reminded that the legislation of monarchical
countries has usually been controlled in the interest of the privileged
classes. But what shall be said in defense of the demonetization of
silver by the United States? No such stupendous act of folly and
injustice was ever before perpetrated by the representatives of a free
people.
Our position differed materially from that of Great Britain. This was
not a creditor nation. Our people did not, and do not, own thousands of
millions of dollars of foreign bonds, on which to receive semi-annual
interest in a constantly appreciating money, which would have to be paid
from the current earnings of foreign labor. Instead, therefore, of our
demonetization unjustly enriching our creditor-classes at the expense of
foreigners, it enabled the creditors at home here to rob and despoil the
debtors among their own countrymen. Instead of despoiling the Canadian,
the Australian, the East Indian, the Egyptian, or the Turk, the
spoliation arranged for by our adoption of the gold standard was a
spoliation of the debtors in our own communities. In so far, however, as
our debt was held abroad, it provided for a spoliation of our citizens
by the foreign bondholders also. And as nearly all our public debt was
so held, we had presented to us in 1873 the extraordinary spectacle of
representatives, sent here to enact laws for the welfare and advancement
of our own people, devoting all their energies, whether aware of it or
not, to the upbuilding of the fortunes of the moneyed aristocracies of
other countries, at the expense of the producers of the United States.