To this end I respectfully call your attention to a few suggestions:
First. The necessity of an increased revenue to carry out the obligation
of adding to the sinking fund annually 1 per cent of the public debt,
amounting now to about $34,000,000 per annum, and to carry out the
promises of this measure to redeem, under certain contingencies, eighty
millions of the present legal-tenders, and, without contingency, the
fractional currency now in circulation.
How to increase the surplus revenue is for Congress to devise, but
I will venture to suggest that the duty on tea and coffee might be
restored without permanently enhancing the cost to the consumers, and
that the 10 per cent horizontal reduction of the tariff on articles
specified in the law of June 6, 1872, be repealed. The supply of tea and
coffee already on hand in the United States would in all probability be
advanced in price by adopting this measure. But it is known that the
adoption of free entry to those articles of necessity did not cheapen
them, but merely added to the profits of the countries producing them,
or of the middlemen in those countries, who have the exclusive trade
in them.
Second. The first section of the bill now under consideration provides
that the fractional currency shall be redeemed in silver coin as rapidly
as practicable.
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