ABSTRACT
Silver, which in one form or another dominated the monetary controversies of the world during the last third of the nineteenth century, is again playing an important role on the American monetary stage. The "arm-in-arm drunken men" argument has lost much of its former weight in recent years, because for most of the time since 1896 the values of gold and silver in terms of commodities have been moving in the same direction. In the late spring of 1934 the average value of the silver content of the United States silver dollar in the free market of London, at current exchange rates, was equivalent to only 35 cents of the new American paper dollar. The advocates of the plan to permit silver to constitute part of the legal reserves of the Federal Reserve banks seem to believe that the mere holding of this silver in the reserves would be sufficient.
