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On the other hand, suppose bimetallism had been adopted in 1896 at a ratio of, say, 35 to 1. The immediate effect would have been negligible. The United States would have remained on an effective gold standard. There would have been no immediate additional demand for silver or additional supply of gold. The only effect on the price of either silver or gold would have been on expectations about possible future developments. The reaction to the depressed 1890s in the United States, and to the inflation in the rest of the world, would have proceeded for the time being as it actually did. The hypothetical adoption of bimetallism at 35 to 1 would not have made any real difference until about 1901 or 1902, when the market gold-silver price ratio began to rise above 35 to 1 by more than trivial amounts and for more than brief periods. The ratio remained above 35 to 1 until 1905 and then fell below 35 to 1 for a few years, before rising above it again for most of the period until 1914.

From 1902 on, bimetallism in the United States would doubtless have kept the ratio at 35 to 1. However, in view of the actual course of the price ratio, that would not have required large silver purchases by the United States or resulted in large gold outflows, would have involved no change in the exchange rate of the dollar in terms of the currencies of gold-standard countries, and would have produced greater stability of the exchange rate in terms of the currency of the few silver-standard countries, of which the principal one was China. In retrospect, the minor increase in inflation in both the United States and the gold-standard world that might have occurred would have been a low price to pay for a superior monetary system.

Unfortunately, the heated political atmosphere surrounding the silver issue prevented serious consideration of any alternative to a 16 to 1 ratio. As Simon Newcomb, an internationally famous mathematician and astronomer as well as one of the ablest economists and monetary theorists of the period, wrote in an 1893 article: "The writer has no objections to the principles of bimetallism, if properly and correctly applied. One of the misfortunes of the monetary situation is that the logical and consistent bimetallist seems to have disappeared from the field of battle, leaving only silver monometallists and gold monometallists. Every one ought to know that the free coinage of silver on the present basis means silver monometallism.... Free coinage on the present ratio of 16 to 1 would at the present moment be a simple cataclysm, and it is not likely that a ratio of 20 to 1 would work much better" (p. 511).

One "logical and consistent bimetallist" was General Francis A. Walker, described in the New Palgrave dictionary as "internationally the most widely known and esteemed American economist of his generation" and successively a professor of political economy and history at Yale University and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He supported international bimetallism—that is, an agreement by a number of countries to adopt a bimetallic standard at the same gold-silver price ratio—but he opposed the adoption of bimetallism in a single country and hence did not favor Bryan's free-silver plank. I do not know whether he was active in the 1896 campaign in opposition to Bryan. However, in the "Address on International Bimetallism" that he delivered a few days after the 1896 election, he referred to the defeat of Bryan as "the passing of a great storm" ([1896a] 1899, 1:251). So far as I know, he never suggested the unilateral adoption of bimetallism at a ratio other than 16 to 1, and, indeed, he continued to favor the adoption of international bimetallism, even at a ratio of 15.5 to 1, the ratio that France had maintained (1896b, [>]).

Had the United States adopted bimetallism in 1896, whether at the ratio of 16 to 1 or 35 to 1, it is not impossible that other countries would have joined and adopted the same ratio. By 1896, the United States was probably a greater power