$1,400 silver seems absolutely ludicrous to me, but maybe not $300 silver.
The Coinage Act of 1792 fixed the ratio of silver to gold at 15:1. Gold then was $19.39 and silver was $1.29.
The Coinage Act of 1873 effectively ended this bimetallism in the United States in favor of gold but was not widely understood to have done so until after the fact. By 1913 silver averaged about only sixty cents, for various reasons, and the silver to gold ratio went to about 34:1.
Gold at $4,533 on Friday implies silver at $302 at the 15:1 ratio, but silver is actually only about $80. Divided by 34, however, the implied silver price is about $133. The ratio at about $80 is 57:1.
The main driver of the silver price in our time is industrial, but the ratio is instructive for contextualizing, as the kids say, its relative value.
