October 17

Flint, MI (Excerpt)

William Jennings Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1896), 562.

"My attention has been called to an incident which occurred in this town and which illustrates how well the farmer understands the money question and how ignorant the average financier often is on the subject. One of your bankers called a farmer into his room and said to him, "If Bryan is elected President, I shall foreclose the mortgage on your farm." The farmer replied, "If McKinley is elected you can have the farm, because I will not be able to pay it, but if Bryan is elected you cannot foreclose the mortgage because under bimetallism I will be able to pay it off." Who understood the money question, the farmer or the banker? Our opponents spend a part of their time in declaring that bimetallism will give us cheap dollars and then occupy the rest of the time telling us that the dollar will be harder to secure under bimetallism than it is now.

Let me call your attention to a local interest. This is a great city for the manufacture of wagons, carriages and buggies. I want to ask those who make carriages to think for a moment and see whether they sell their wagons to financiers or to farmers; and if they sell their wagons to farmers, I want them to figure out how a farmer can buy more wagons when he gets less for his products. I want those who sell wagons to farmers to realize that their prosperity depends upon the prosperity of the farmer who buys wagons, and not upon the prosperity of a financier who charges interest on the money loaned to the wagon maker. If you sell buggies, I want to ask you whether you are interested in selling more buggies than you are selling now. If you are, remember that you can only sell more buggies when more people are able to buy buggies. When you lessen the number of people who can buy buggies, you lessen the product of your buggy factories, and when you lessen the product of your buggy factories you lessen the number of men employed in making buggies; and when less men are employed in making buggies, your storekeepers have less people to sell goods to.

My friends, we are able to meet the arguments of our opponents, and the best evidence that they have lost faith in their cause, in the logic of their arguments and the justice of the gold standard, is to be found in the fact that instead of submitting their case to the judgment of the people, they have resorted to coercion and intimidation in order to secure by force that which they cannot secure by reason."