[Pamphlet; economics ] A Plain Statement of the Currency Question, with Reasons why we should restore the old English law of Bimetallism

23pp., 8vo, disbound, lacking front wrap, chipped, title and back wrap dusted, poor condition but text complete. Wigan Free Library blind stamp on title. "What the world now needs is to stop this artificial fall of prices and raise them slowly to a moderate level. The only practicable means of doing this is to restore the old law of coining silver as freely as gold and to let people pay their debts in either metal at the choice of the debtor. This arrangement is called bimetallism, or the use of a joint standard" (p5). Twigg (an Englishman who served in the 1860s in the Bengal Civil Service) offers the example of the "prosperity which has always resulted from an increase in metallic money" in the conditions which followed the Australian gold discoveries; he states that the annual supply of gold and silver "suddenly increased from an average of £10,000,000 to £35,000,000", resulting in an era of prosperity with rising wages, enormous increases in imports & exports, and crime & misery and emigration (from Australia) diminished (p10).