In January 1896, Mr. Sun Wen left Japan and sailed to the United States with some anti-Qing fighters. According to his agreement with Chen Guang in advance, those aspirants there will receive training from the American Blackwater Security Company for six months, and then decide whether to continue their "further studies" according to the situation. Mr. Sun himself, through Chen Guang's connection, met some high-level officials of the MacDonald consortium, and according to the research of some later experts, even Shi Scroozhi, who had been staying in Duck Fort or Dashi Yàn Room and was almost in a state of seclusion, also met with Mr. Sun. However, this claim has not been supported by any reliable historical sources, neither in Mr. Sun's letters nor in Scrooge's memoirs. However, since then, in the process of China's old democratic revolution, we can indeed find the hidden figure of the Macdonald consortium, and at the same time, we can also observe that with the formation of China's old democratic revolution and the ensuing secession, the business of the Macdonald consortium has gradually penetrated into China.

Truth be told, however, buying and selling China is not yet at the top of the MacDonald's agenda, and the two most important issues on the Macdonald's agenda are the same: the currency standard and the opening of new markets.

In recent years, the economic situation has not been particularly good. While economic crises in Europe are one after another, the United States is in a slightly better situation. Because the vast western region can always provide some buffer for the United States, just as the Red Rabbit country in later generations was able to use the large-scale development of the western region to solve part of the problem of insufficient demand when the international economy was in a bad downturn, and the western part of the United States also played a buffer role.

Over the years, the vast western region has been accommodating more new immigrants, which has greatly alleviated the crisis in the United States, but as the western region has gradually been developed, the ability of the western region to alleviate the economic crisis has gradually declined. The economic crisis that swept the world in 1893 had just hit the American economy hard, and the American economy was even more costly than Britain. Today, the United States, more precisely Scrooge and a large number of wealthy people represented by him, are desperately in need of a larger market exclusive to the United States.

For the United States, the South American continent is almost naturally an appendage of the North American continent. If European power can be expelled from South America, then the vast market of the whole of South America will be enough to relieve the economic pressure for a considerable period of time. In order to do this, it is necessary to take Cuba, which is now the most important stronghold of European countries in the Americas, especially in Central and South America. By pulling out this stronghold, European power will have no good foothold in Central America and South America, and in this era of gunboat diplomacy, there will be no reliable naval base that can provide supply and maintenance close enough, and the combat effectiveness of the navy will be greatly affected. And without a strong navy, then what kind of gunboat diplomacy is played?

It is true that, apart from Cuba, Europeans have other footholds in South America, such as French Guiana, such as the Falkland Islands, which the British control. But none of them can compare with Cuba. The ports of French Guiana were quite rudimentary, with no dock facilities for ship repairs, no large coal depots, ammunition depots, or anything to support a large-scale combat fleet. As for Falkland, in addition to the above problems, there is also the problem that Zài is too far south and too far from the Central American region. So, once Cuba is taken, most of the European influence in South America can be said to be squeezed out. The European market in South America depended to a large extent on their ability to project power in the Americas, and the loss of the American market was almost immediately foreseeable without the support of military power.

Therefore, Cuba is extremely important not only for the vampires who rely on colonial taxes and blood sucks like Spain, but also for European industrial countries like Britain. In a sense, Cuba was not much less important to Britain than it was to Spain.

In terms of military strength alone, the strength of the US Navy and Army has long surpassed that of Spain, and if other factors were not considered, Cuba could have been directly seized long ago. The main reason why he has not done it all this time is because he is afraid of the British. After all, although the Americans claimed to have won a great victory in the Second American-British War, if someone asked the Yankees if they wanted to be so great again, the Americans would never want to. For the British, the world's boss, the Americans were still a little scared at that time.

Therefore, if you want to control the whole of America, you must first control Cuba, if you want to control Cuba, you must first defeat Spain, and if you want to defeat Spain, you must first ...... And so on, and so on, and we must not deduce it like this, because if we really deduce it like this, it will become a completely Japanese strategic deduction. The final result will certainly be a strategic idea similar to "to solve the China incident, we must obtain Southeast Asian oil, and in order to obtain Southeast Asian oil, we must defeat the United States......" and replace a smaller trouble with a greater danger. And the United States cannot go down such a path. So at this most critical step, the Americans' strategy became "you have to wait for the British to have a problem."

Britain controls a quarter of the world's land by virtue of only a small island on its own soil, with a territory of 33.67 million square kilometers and 400 million alien races. With such a large scope, it's no wonder that there are no problems. Nowadays, the problem has arisen, and it is getting more and more serious, and that is the South African problem. While the British are caught up in South Africa, it will be a rare opportunity to make a move against Spain.

But right now, even this issue is not the biggest problem that the McDonald consortium has to face and deal with. At present, the most important question is how to change the US currency from a composite gold and silver standard to a direct gold standard.

The United States has always practiced a composite gold and silver standard, that is, gold and silver are recognized as legal tender at the same time. For example, since 1792, according to the law, silver coins of ten, five dollars, and all the way up to 2.5 dollars are gold coins, and one dollar to five cents are silver coins. One cent and five cents are both copper coins. (If this rule can be continued, five cents is much higher than five cents.) If a single gold standard were used, the dollar to five cents would be too small to be used.

The laws of the United States allow for free coinage. That is, as long as you have gold or silver in your hand, you can go to the mint and mint it into dollars yourself. If the price of gold and silver can be stable forever, this system is certainly fine. However, although the price of silver and gold is relatively stable, there are always fluctuations. This brings up a series of problems.

The 1792 Coinage Act stipulated that the ratio of gold to silver was 1:15, but by the beginning of the 19th century, when gold mines in Russia were exhausted and large silver mines were discovered in Mexico, gold appreciated and silver depreciated in the international market, and by 1805 the ratio of gold to silver had become 1:15.75. As a result, a large number of speculators soon appeared, who first took the dollar gold coins, went to the market to buy silver at a price of 1:15.75, and then minted the silver into dollar silver coins, and then went to the bank to exchange the gold dollar coins, so that each currency unit could earn him 0.75 shares of silver. It's not just individuals who do this, but banks do it too, and the result is that the country's gold reserves bottom out almost in the blink of an eye, and then there are no more gold dollars on the market. Large commercial settlements become particularly inconvenient. In the end, the U.S. Congress had no choice but to amend the law and change the price ratio of gold and silver coins to 1:16.

However, only a few decades later, the discovery of a large gold mine in San Francisco, USA, triggered a gold rush, and as a result, the price of gold plummeted, so the above story was reversed, and silver coins became "good coins" and gold coins became "bad coins". Soon there were fewer and fewer silver coins in circulation, and by 1850 it was hard to find silver coins on the market. One of the consequences is that it becomes very troublesome to go to the street to buy vegetables or something, because large amounts of gold coins cannot be found, so the grocery buyers and the aunts who sell vegetables must bring a large number of copper coins.

In order to solve this problem, in 1873, Congress finally made a painful decision and passed the "Coinage Reform Act", announcing the abolition of silver's legal tender status and the introduction of the gold standard. This was supposed to be the end of the matter, but, damn it, the next year, there was an economic crisis in the United States, and then, even more damned, there was a big silver mine in the Midwest.

As a result, some guys in the Midwest immediately began to clamore for the restoration of the gold-silver composite standard, and they shouted "Heavenly Punishment Coin Reform Law, return my silver coin minting rights" and made a fuss. This is not only because they have silver mines on their hands, but also because if the right to mint silver coins is opened, it will also stimulate the price increase in the market, is there a better legal means of debt than inflation for the local consortiums in the central and western regions that owe a lot of debt to the financial consortiums in the east?

The Democrats jumped the most aggressively on this issue. Because since the Civil War, the Democratic Party has been suppressed very strongly, whether it is Congress or the White House, for a long time it has been the Republican Party. As a result, the Democratic Party had no choice but to seek development in the central and western regions while stabilizing the south as much as possible. With the continuous influx of immigrants, the central and western states have become increasingly important on the political map. So as soon as the discovery of silver in the Midwest, the Democrats took the position of the Midwest states and shouted. And because of this, there is widespread support in these states.

Of course, this requirement is not a good thing for the financial capitalists represented by Morgan. This is first of all because if the composite standard of gold and silver is reintroduced, a large number of silver coins will flood the market, which will inevitably lead to inflation, which is definitely not a good thing for creditors. So Morgan, of course, they hated this request.

The MacDonald consortium, on the other hand, has been relatively neutral on this issue. Compared with the Morgan consortium in finance, the resurrection of silver coins has less impact on the McDonald consortium, which is the largest in the mining industry, and even in a certain way, moderate inflation has certain benefits for the manufacturing industry. So the MacDonald consortium's attitude on this issue is relatively ambiguous. There is even a faint meaning of support. This also led the Democrats to take this opportunity to turn around and regain control of Congress and the White House. Despite the opposition of the Morgan consortium, they passed the Guò bill in succession in order to restore the status of Silver. This affected the interests of the Morgan consortium. And Morgan knew that in order to drive these Democrats out of the White House and Capitol Hill, they would have to get the support and understanding of the McDonald consortium. So, Morgan, who had rarely gone out and about, came to Duckburg in person to have a long talk with Scrooge. R1058