Excerpt from Coinage of Silver Dollars: Speech of Hon. Timothy O. Howe, of Wisconsin, in the Senate of the United States, February 5, 1878

Mr. President. Only that courage which is born of conviction would induce me to present my own views immediately succeed ing the very able and the very eloquent speech to which the Sen ate has just listened. Sir, it is not my purpose to-night to attempt to persuade any one else how to vote. My object is as briefly as pos sible to explain my own vote. I do that in the presence of the Senate because your rules require it to be done here; but my object, I con fess in the outset, is to make myself intelligible if I can, rather to a few constituents of my own for whose judgment I have great respect but whose views on the question now before the Senate do not cor respond with my own. From some of those constituents I have heard within a few days.

Mr. President, if the millions comprising the people of the United States had just been scattered over the country, if we had no coin age, no currency, no organized industry, no commerce; and if we had contracted no debts, public or private, then we should be quite at liberty to adopt such system of finance, such system of currency, to adopt such medium of exchange, to accept such standard of value, whether single or double or quadruple, as we might think best cal culated to open up the future before us. That is not our condition. We have a coinage and a currency and a commerce and a productive industry, and we have contracted an enormous, almost an incalculable indebtedness. Therefore it seems to me that the primary condition to all change in our coinage should be that we do not cripple our business energies, that we do not shackle our industry, that we do not fetter our commerce, and above all, that we neither appreciate nor depreciate outstanding securities by whomsoever issued.

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