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Page 20
France has an area less than that of Texas by some 60,000 square miles,
yet its aggregate wealth is two-thirds that of the United States; and on
the basis of assessed value her agricultural wealth is very much greater
than ours. Mulhall, the great British statistician, says of France that
she is "the best cultivated country in Europe." Her 6,000,000 peasant
proprietors are the owners of nearly all her cultivatable soil, which is
worth, on an average, $160 per acre. She has over 400,000 miles of the
finest common roads in the world, which have cost her, at the ordinary
rate of labor, over $5,000,000,000. Their benefit goes chiefly to
agriculture, binding the farmers of different provinces and farmers and
city dwellers together. She has over 10,000 miles of canals and canalized
rivers; she has 25,000 miles of railways, all in the highest state of
efficiency. She has, during her bimetallic period, become the second
colonial power of the world, and has acquired foreign territory at such a
rate as to excite the jealousy of England. She has become the second naval
power on the globe, and the second exporting nation, her exports averaging
some $900,000,000 per year, an amount larger than the exports from this
country, which has a population nearly double that of France, nearly all
of it being manufactures; and had the same rate of growth continued as was
maintained before France became monometallic, it is fair to presume that
her exports at this time would have equalled those of Great Britain. Best
of all, the great increase of wealth is in the hands of those who created
it. It is the universal testimony of all observers that the condition of
the French people and the general aspect of France has steadily improved
throughout this century. It is a country in which poor-houses are unknown;
in her cities a beggar is a curiosity. In their country's emergency the
common people came forward and out of their savings paid $1,000,000,000
accumulated during the bimetallic period. Despite the loss of $240,000,000
in the Panama Canal and of $1,000,000,000 in the indemnity to Germany, as
well as two of her richest provinces, France has accumulated hundreds of
millions of dollars in the securities of other countries, and has only
recently been able to subscribe twenty-five times over the Russian loan,
and is negotiating a loan to China, the money for which is to be supplied
by her working people.
Be it noted also that the debt of France is held by the people of France,
largely by the industrial class, and especially by the agricultural class,
and the interest thereon paid, instead of being a foreign drain, is a
perpetual renewal of the current circulation.
One more brief contrast between France and England. No reader of current
literature need be told of the appalling prevalence of poverty in Great
Britain. As France is a country without poor-houses, so it may be said
that England is a land of poor rates and poor unions. The latest official
announcement is that the agricultural interest is declining more rapidly
than ever before; and in regions where only fifteen years ago the land
rented readily at several pounds per acre, statesmen and economists are
appalled at the sight of that which so alarmed our New England people a
few years ago: the phenomenon of abandoned farms. We are told that there
is a revival of industry because British capitalists have withdrawn their
money from other countries and will put it in anything rather than have it
entirely idle; but the condition of agriculture steadily grows worse.
And have we anything to boast of in our own happy land in comparison with
France? Our natural resources so far exceed those of any old country that
a comparison would be ridiculous; and the monometallists tell us, when
they are trying to prove that gold is not enhanced in value, that, by
reason of inventions, a day's labor will produce at least twice as much as
in 1870, and in many lines a great deal more than twice as much. Why,
then, does not the laborer receive twice as much as he did in 1870? As
wages are labor's dividend of its own product, and as capital had its
dividend then as now, if a day's labor does not bring the laborer twice
what it did, he is wronged; and, considering our resources, if we are not
five times as well off as the French people, the only reason can be that
we have slighted our opportunities, and blundered most fearfully in our
management.
The monometallists profess to be great sticklers for experience and
demonstrated fact; to have a horror of "theory." We present them the
example of France as an unanswerable proof that one great nation can
maintain bimetallism, and that by maintaining it she escaped the worst
evils that have affected the monometallic countries, and assured for
herself an extraordinary progress and prosperity. We present them, in
contrast, the example of England, and point them especially to the great
difference in the progress of the common people of the two countries. We
ask them, with this experience, to consider the present condition of this
country, and the evils that have affected it since 1873, and seriously to
consider the question as to whether something is not radically wrong;
whether some malign influence has not gone between us and the reward of
our work, and robbed us of that to which we are honestly entitled.
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