Leadership Quote by Richard Parks Bland

A ratio can sound like bookkeeping, but Bland is really drawing a battle line. “Maintained precisely as it is” isn’t technocratic fussiness; it’s a political dare. In the late 19th-century bimetallism fight, the question wasn’t merely how many ounces of silver should equal an ounce of gold. It was who gets relief and who gets disciplined. By insisting on “the present ratio...16 to 1,” Bland is staking out the classic pro-silver position: keep silver legally overvalued relative to market conditions so more silver can be coined, expanding the money supply.

That expansion mattered because the era’s deflation punished debtors. Farmers and small-town borrowers watched crop prices sag while fixed debts stayed stubborn. “Free silver” offered a workaround: more coinage, more circulating money, gentler repayment in cheaper dollars. Bland’s phrasing smuggles in a moral claim without stating it: stability for ordinary people, not purity for Eastern financiers. The sentence performs populism through specificity. Numbers read as neutral; Bland uses them as camouflage for a redistributive choice.

The subtext is also defensive. After the “Crime of ’73” (the effective demonetization of silver), pro-silver Democrats needed to sound like they were restoring an older American standard, not launching an inflation scheme. “At whatever ratio is fixed” concedes the legitimacy of government setting value, then immediately insists that the chosen value must serve his coalition. Bland’s precision is the point: in a currency war, the smallest ratio is a referendum on power.