As Friedman noted, if the price of silver had remained high, the exclusion of the silver dollar from the 1873 act would have been irrelevant. By 1874, the effect of the new mines in the Far West, and the sale of silver in Germany following its demonetization there, combined to force the price of silver down. Silver producers had not been aware of the statutory change, and only learned of it when they sought to present silver at the mints for coining. According to numismatic historian Don Taxay, "an agitation followed, during which several pious Congressmen feigned ignorance of the repeal, maintaining it had been worked into the Mint bill surreptitiously." One Delaware manufacturer wrote to his senator, Thomas F. Bayard, in 1878, "at the beginning ... I was totally ignorant of all that related to the silver question—so much in fact that (I find now like almost everyone else not excluding Congressmen!) I did not know Silver had been demonetized."