stability of international exchange insured. This was the last attempt to "do something for silver" by international agreement. 1 Total of debt less cash in the Treasury. NOTE. In 1913 the revenues from customs were $318,891,396 and from all sources except postal $747,512,080. The disbursements exclusive of postal were $748,703,574. The interest-bearing debt amounted to $965,706,610 with an annual interest charge of $22,835,330; the debt bearing no interest, including certificates issued against gold, silver and currency deposited in Treasury, was $1,948,838,753, making the total outstanding principal $2,916,204,913, while the total net debt less cash in the Treasury was $1,028,564,055. The per capita debt in 1903 was $11.44, in 1906, $11.25, in 1908, $10.55, and in 1913, $10.60. NOTE. There has been no coinage of silver dollars since 1904. The total stock of silver dollars in the United States on December 31, 1913 was $568,272,478 of which $74,326,345 was outside the Treasury. The total stock of silver coin and bullion on June 30, 1914, was $753,563,709. CHAPTER XXII DEFECTS OF THE OLD SYSTEM AND PROPOSED REFORMS THE gold standard was accepted by the country as an accomplished fact, although Bryan and his followers were as determined as ever in their contentions. Judge Alton B. Parker, of New York, a very strong and able man, was made the Democratic nominee for the Presidency in 1904. He required as a condition in accepting the nomination, that all demand for the free coinage of silver be omitted from the Democratic platform. The convention reluctantly complied with Judge Parker's requirements and with undisguised hostility on the part of the ultra-champions of the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. His opponent was elected by a majority so large that people concluded he had been knifed at the polls by the extreme cheap money element of his party. For a long period no serious attempt was made to reform the unscientific and unsafe currency and credit systems, the evils of which had been so long experienced. Business activity and prosperity were world-wide; existing business was being expanded and new enterprises were being developed; the tall-building craze possessed our larger towns; real estate was being converted into personal property by the fiction of stock and bond capitalization, largely in excess of present values, thus seeking to capitalize the future; latent resources were being wastefully exploited with no thought of conservation; this boom was in evidence in all the great commercial nations, in varying forms germane to local conditions; the world did not possess sufficient mobile capital to supply the demands resulting from this overtrading and overexpansion. To far-seeing men |