The gold bill at the North.
Chase's gold bill, which he got through Congress, has not been effective in keeping gold down in New York. The following predictions from the New York World before its passage have been pretty well verified:‘ Heaven knows we should like to keep the price of gold down. Mr. Chase's inflated irredeemable paper currency reduced our profits last year by a good many thousand dollars, and we shall be thankful it this year is not worse. If the gold bill would keep down the price of gold it would certainly be for our interest to urge its passage. But it will not keep down the price of gold, and if the bill passes our reasoning will soon enough find abundant confirmation in the fact.
’ On the gold reserve depends at last the credit of the nation. It is the one prop left. Other props Mr. Chase and his co-laborers have knocked away. It is the grossest violation of public faith with the nation's creditors to knock away this prop also. It encourages a financial immorality which will teach the people the shameful lesson of repudiation.
But if it is useless in these times to preach strict financial morals, let us repeat, that the gold bill will not accomplish what those who east patriotic votes for it hope it will accomplish. The purposes of members who sold gold and then voted for the gold bill, and who will so vote again it doubtless may accomplish. It will put down the price temporarily. But the measure of its depression will be less than the measure of its lavation when Mr. Chase comes to want the gold again. What he may gain now he must lose then, and we reiterate that with our present debt, to say nothing of its enormous rate of increase, Mr. Chase has not had, has not now, and will not have, any too much cold to discharge the obligations of the Government.
There is but one way to reduce the price of gold permanently. Its value is stable, of course, depending on cost of production, the price-fluctuations rising above or falling below that exact mark, with the instability of supply and demand perpetually adjusting themselves to an equilibrium. To reduce the price of gold is to say, raise the price of the paper, which, except in California, Mr. Chase has made his financial yard stick. And since the cost of production of an inconvertible paper currency is practically nothing, and its value must depend more exclusively than ever upon its supply, after the issue of enough to displace specie and the convertible currency, to raise the price of green-backs, diminish the supply of green backs. Then gold will tall, and not till then. But no; Mr. Chase is pouring out new issues, and more are yet to come. Congress potters over such financial fiddle fiddled as the gold bill, and never looks to the sluices which the Secretary guards. Gold will rise — that is, legal render money will fall — in value; a paper dollar will soon be worth less than fifty pennies, and there will be politicians like Greeley who will make fools like his followers believe that speculation makes the difference between Chase's paper and nature's gold; that with fresh issues of legal tender the premium on gold can be slightly "reduced," and the nation will pay as the bitter price of its fully is electing fanatics to power not only the billions in which we reckon the cost of the war which they conspired with Southern fanatics to rekindle, but also still other billions, of which the Government is depriving the laboring classes exclusively, by a daily, constant, impoverishing drain.
