From the Preface.
The question of the relative merits of bi-metallism and the single gold standard, and of the consequences involved in an attempt to give universality to the gold standard, has attracted but little attention and elicited less popular discussion in this country. Although our Government invited an International Convention on the question, and has been instructed by Congress to take further steps to promote the universal acceptance of the double standard on a basis to be fixed by treaty between all the great commercial powers, the import of its action appears to be but little understood by those who, without having considered European opinion on the subject, dispose of it as though it were but an unimportant local question, and treat that which is pre-eminently an international question as though it were exclusively a national one.
The following pages by Baron William von Kardorff-Wabnitz, will give the reader an idea of the breadth and earnestness of the continental discussion of this question. The profound and general study which Baron Kardorff has given to it is illustrated by every page of his pamphlet. He many years ago avowed himself a disciple of Henry C. Carey. He accepted and labored earnestly to promote the establishment of the Empire; but he dissented from the action of the Government when it abandoned the protectionist traditions of Germany, and substituted approximate free trade for the system of protective duties which had grown up under the Zoll-Verein — the customs union, the avowed object of which, while giving freedom of intercourse to the German people among themselves, was to protect their industries against foreign competition, and which gave that breadth, stability, and power to those industries, and that union among the several German states which resulted in the great German Empire of 1866-70.
During his more than ten years' service in the Reichstag, when the cause of protection seemed utterly hopeless, like his great teacher in similar periods of discouragement in this country. Baron Kardorff proclaimed the true doctrines of Social Science and National Economy, both on the floor of the Reichstag and in many popular letters and addresses. With Herr Windhorst, who led the Ultra-Montane wing of the Conservative forces of 1879, he shared the honor of re-establishing the protective policy as that of the German Empire.
From the first, he also dissented from the attempt to abandon the use of silver and establish a gold standard in a country whose metallic money consisted exclusively of silver; and in his earliest writings on the subject portrayed scarcely less clearly than did Messrs. Wolowski and Seyd at the close of the Paris Monetary Convention of 1867, the paralysis of trade that would be produced by the attempt to demonetize one-half of the metallic money of the world. To Germany he therefore speaks as an authority, and his rapid discussion of the times in which and the means by which the gold standard was established in England, the United States, and Germany, and his portrayal of the superior management of France, cannot fail to be full of interest, and to carry great weight with the American people.