A REAL CROSS OF GOLD
THEcountry decided for the continuance of the gold standard, and its decision was crystallized into law by the act of March 14, 1900. This act set aside for the protection of the greenbacks the sum of $150,000,000 in gold, to be kept inviolate from all other uses, and declared the bonds and other obligations of the Government to be redeemable in gold and in gold only. But the causes that were operating prior to 1892 to cause contraction in the monetary stock were reversed after that date by the great outpouring of new gold from the mines of South Africa and the Klondike. New processes of separating gold from low-grade ores made profitable fields that in earlier years would have been considered unavailable. The gold production of the world rose from $113,000,000 in 1890 to $202,251,000 in 1896 and $454,000,000 in 1910. Gold flowed into the Bank of England in the summer of 1896, even while Mr. Bryan was making his canvass for free silver, to an amount never before recorded in monetary history; and the beneficent flood soon overflowed the coffers of the advanced commercial nations and filled up the void in metallic money in such developing countries as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and India. In place of the fear of a scarcity of gold, which hung like a pall over some minds at the close of the last century, such a redundancy of the yellow metal arose that swollen bank reserves stimulated loans at low rates, manufacturing plants were extended, and prices of commodities advanced with a rapidity which lessened the purchasing power of wages and threatened to reduce the world to the unfortunate state of Midas, making gold a curse instead of a blessing.
It is this situation which has reduced the real income of the laborer, the professional man, and other classes, through the diminished purchasing power of their money, which is imposing a true cross of gold on the world to-day, and which presents to a new administration the problem of finding a way to establish and maintain an equitable standard of value.
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Owned by Ernest W. Longfellow and now in the Boston Museum of Art. Half-tone plate engraved by H. DavidsonTHE WIDOWFROM THE PAINTING BY COUTURE(EXAMPLES OF FRENCH PORTRAITURE)❏LARGER IMAGE
Owned by Ernest W. Longfellow and now in the Boston Museum of Art. Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
THE WIDOW
FROM THE PAINTING BY COUTURE
(EXAMPLES OF FRENCH PORTRAITURE)
❏LARGER IMAGE