ABSTRACT
Two major countries, outside Europe, were concerned in their different ways, with the question of bimetallism. These were the United States and India.
THE UNITED STATES-INTRODUCTION
In the United States bimetallism was a major issue, for reasons other than in France. Silver was the major industry of certain thinly populated states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah) and in the US political system, these are over-represented in the Senate. Their allies were the ‘soft money’ lobby who had tasted blood with the greenbacks, only to see prices falling sharply in the run up to 1879, and continuing through what we used to call the ‘Great Depression’. They regarded free coinage of silver as second best (or as General Walker (1888) commented, ‘second worst’). For much of the period when Europe was discussing Latin Monetary Union and indeed when the so-called ‘Crime of ‘73’ was perpetrated, the issue was not in fact particularly relevant. The Americans had an inconvertible paper currency, the Greenbacks, from 1861, when the Civil War began, until 1879, long after it was over.
