Note 152 — Chapter II

This measure was the subject of a strange controversy. The gold men argued that it was deliberately adopted, while the silver men decried it as a surreptitious act due to a “combination of rascally contrivance and rascally connivance.” Prof. Laughlin has well cleared the mystery surrounding this Act. He shows by reference to debates in Congress on the legislation of 1853 that Congress knew that by refusing to alter the ratio between gold and silver it was placing the country on a gold standard. Too much consideration, he thinks, has been wasted on the Act of 1873, which merely took legal notice of the consequences of the Act of 1853. Cf. his History of Bimetallism, pp. 80 and 93–95.