the complicated facts involved, give to the subject the best judgment
which imperfect human nature allows. With the wide diversity of opinion
that prevails, each of us must make concessions in order to secure such
a measure as will accomplish the objects sought for without impairing
the public credit or the general interests of our people. This is no
time for visionary theories of political economy. We must deal with
facts as we find them and not as we wish them. We must aim at results
based upon practical experience, for what has been probably will be. The
best prophet of the future is the past.

To know what measures ought to be adopted we should have a clear
conception of what we wish to accomplish. I believe a majority of
the Senate desire, first, to provide an increase of money to meet the
increasing wants of our rapidly growing country and population, and
to supply the reduction in our circulation caused by the retiring of
national-bank notes; second, to increase the market value of silver not
only in the United States but in the world, in the belief that this is
essential to the success of any measure proposed, and in the hope that
our efforts will advance silver to its legal ratio with gold, and induce
the great commercial nations to join with us in maintaining the legal
parity of the two metals, or in agreeing with us in a new ratio of their
relative value; and third, to secure a genuine bimetallic standard, one
that will not demonetize gold or cause it to be hoarded or exported, but
that will establish both gold and silver as standards of value not only
in the United States, but among all the civilized nations of the world.

Believing that these are the chief objects aimed at by us all, and that
we differ only as to the best means to obtain them, I will discuss
the pending propositions to test how far they tend, in my opinion, to
promote or defeat these obtects.