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with leading members of Congress and officers of the Government brought about the demonetization of silver.' It was said that he brought with him $500,000 to bribe certain members of Congress and the Comptroller of the Currency" (cited in Barnett 1964, p. 178). If that had been true, there would indeed have been a crime in every sense of the term. But no evidence has ever been offered to indicate that the story was true. In fact, Seyd was anything but a "designing bullionist." He was a British bimetallist who objected strongly to the demonetization of silver by the United States (Nugent 1968, [>], [>]). No allegation of bribery has ever been made, let alone documented, against any individual member of Congress or any government official in connection with the passage of the Coinage Act of 1873. The act was discussed at great length both in committee and on the floor of Congress and was openly voted for by large majorities—though later critics claimed that the key provision to which they objected had been barely mentioned and not further discussed on the floor.* In the literal dictionary sense of a crime—"an act punishable by law, as being forbidden by statute or injurious to the public welfare"—there was no crime.

On the other hand, in what the dictionary calls a "more general" use of the term—"an evil or injurious act; an offence, a sin"†—the existence of a crime is a question of opinion. What is not open to question is that the omission of the standard silver dollar from the list of coins to be minted was intentional, in full knowledge of the likely consequences and in the belief that those consequences were desirable. That was made clear by H. R. Linderman, who was the director of the U.S. Mint at the time of the passage of the act, in a book published not long afterward (1877, chapter 9). In his Report to the Secretary of the Treasury in November 1872, when the coinage act was pending in Congress, he wrote: "The fluctuations in the relative value of gold and silver during the last hundred years have not been very great, but several causes are now at work, all tending to an excess of supply over demand for silver, and its consequent depreciation" (cited in 1877, p. 48).

On the consequences of the act, Linderman wrote: "The declaration in the Coinage Act of 1873, that the gold dollar was to be thereafter the unit of value, and the omission of the silver dollar from the coins to be struck under the provisions of the Act, placed the United States upon the single gold standard.... [T]he weight of opinion in Europe and America was against the practicability of maintaining a double standard on any basis which might be selected, and in favor of a single gold standard" (p. 44).

In a later chapter, he said: "The advocates of the restoration of the old silver dollar ... appear to think that an error, if not a wrong, was committed in discontinuing its coinage; and they desire to correct the same without reference to the question, whether it would be possible to maintain concurrent circulation of gold and silver coins after resumption in 1879" ([>]).

Further, as Walter Nugent documents in great detail, Senator John Sherman, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had been determined to demonetize silver from at least 1867, and he had arranged to have a bill to that effect drafted at the end of 1869. From then on, Senator Sherman, Linderman, John Jay Knox (the deputy comptroller of the currency and then the comptroller), and Secretary of the Treasury George Boutwell cooperated in pushing a coinage bill that included the demonetization of silver (1968, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]). "Were Knox, Linderman, Boutwell, Sherman, and others aware of what they were doing when they planned to drop the silver dollar?" Nugent asks. "It is inconceivable," he goes on, "that they were not.... But did they urge it because they feared a drop in silver prices? No one made an explicit statement to that effect, but it was undoubtedly the case" (p. 137).

In addition, as Francis Walker wrote two decades later: "So completely without observation