Carl Schurz

“ Is it thus that capital can be called from its retirement to trust itself to the chances of enterprise? Is it thus that credit can be stimulated to set in quicker motion again the wheels of our business machinery? Is it thus that you expect to open your factories, again inviting the laboring masses, so long out of employment? I appeal to you, my fellow citizens, of whatever occupation or walk of life, consider the outlook a moment with that unprejudiced calmness, which befits sensible men. ”

“ When the expansion of the greenback currency produced an inflation of prices, the average businessman, seeing his goods rise in nominal value, did not stop to inquire, elated as he was at his apparent gains, whether those gains were real as well as nominal. He had no experience of the consequences, and so he went on from venture to venture with blind confidence, as if there could be no end to it. The capitalist, also, with no experience of the final effects of such government currency expansion to warn him, risked his means in enterprise after enterprise without distrust. ”

“ The disproportion between your wages and the cost of living has become so great that at last the employer must agree to pay you more. But will your wages he raised to the full amount of the rise of prices? — Never, — and why not? Because the employer will plead again the same uncertainty as to prices at which the products of your labor can be sold when they reach the market. He will have the same ability to get other men in your places, if you quit work, and thus the disproportion between your wages and the cost of living continues, and with it the loss you suffer. ”

“ The wanton rejection of a sound-money system, based upon the precious metals, and the adoption of wild schemes of irredeemable paper money as a permanent system, without any imperative public necessity, is so enormous a thing, so utterly unprecedented in the history of nations, so unintelligible and startling to the common sense of mankind, that it will be apt to shake the confidence of the world even in the integrity of our government and in the intelligence and good faith of our people. ”

“ What would have become of you had the counsels of those prevailed, who pretended that they could cure all the ills of the social body, and give you prosperity and wealth by flooding the country once more with that cruel deception, an irredeemable paper money? In the hour of need and distress you would not only have been without remunerative employment, but even the earnings of former years of hard toil would have shrunk to a miserable pittance. ”

“ Every well-informed man knows that it has. And now to say that the value of irredeemable paper money depends, not upon the quantity issued, but upon the credit of the government, is it not like saying that the intoxicating power of whiskey does not depend upon the quantity of alcohol in it, but upon the quantity you can safely carry, and upon the credit you have at the bar? Pardon me for using that alcoholic illustration again. The human mind, when trying to illustrate the workings of in inflated paper currency, resorts instinctively to the analogy of intoxicating drinks. ”

“ I do not say that there are not among the democrats many men who heartily agree with us in sentiment. Honor to them! But I do say that their party, in many of its local organizations, has betrayed its old good hard-money faith; has formed alliance with the promoters of the most mischievous doctrines, and throws for them a vast preponderance of its influence and power. Between the two the workingmen of America should at this decisive moment be, of all men, the very last to hesitate in their election. ”

“ There is no millionaire who is sure whether one of his children may not, before this waning century is out, have to black the boots of the poor man's son for a living. And in a country like this, with its resources and opportunities, where the survival of the fittest is the order of the day, where a measureless field of labor and enterprise never ceases to encourage every honorable ambition, — in such a country, we must hear appeals to the hatred of the poor against the rich? ”

“ What specie payments mean, what a gold dollar and notes convertible into gold dollars are, every sensible man understands. The gold dollar is real, tangible, and forms a reliable basis for calculation. But the abandonment of specie payments, the rejection of the gold dollar, mean that the conduct of our financial affairs is to be delivered into the hands of a class of financiers whose theories and schemes move in the realm of imagination, and point, not to stability, but to the uncertainty of change as their real object and inevitable consequence. ”

“ But I cannot refrain from warning you against an insidious attempt made by some to further the cause of paper-money inflation by exciting the hatred of the poor against the rich. To excite the hatred of the poor against the rich has, in all ages and in all countries, been the favorite resort of desperate demagogery. ”

“ The experience they have gathered during the disastrous crisis through which we have just passed will inevitably rise up before their minds. They will remember that the artificial stimulus given to business by the expansion of an irredeemable paper money produced, indeed, fictions of wealth and prosperity, but ended in disaster, embarrassment and ruin. They will not give themselves up again to those illusions of success, which, when the first greenback expansion took place, they embraced with inexperienced confidence. A burnt child shuns the fire. ”

“ No prudent man will question this possibility, for credit is a sensitive thing, and the timidity of capital, frightened by threatening dishonesty, and once impressed with the idea that a people, capable of running away from specie payments now, will thereafter be capable of any folly, may resort to any extreme promptly to save as much as possible of the investments felt to be in jeopardy. And what will be the effect of all this? Can there be anybody so crazy as to believe that this is the way to restore and foster that confidence which is so indispensable to the revival of business? ”

“ When preparatory steps for the resumption of specie payments were to be taken, it was the apprehension of adverse currents of popular sentiment which staggered the resolution of not a few of our public men. From you whose vital interests are at stake, should now proceed an inspiration to their courage and firmness to complete the great work and to secure its success. Let the legislators of the country know that the workingmen of America insist upon an honest dollar for honest work, and that, desiring that end, they desire the employment of all the means necessary for its accomplishment. ”

“ Whenever human rights needed an advocate, the voice of Massachusetts resounded through the land. Whenever the cause education, enlightment, progress and virtue wanted a champion, Massachusetts pressed to the front. Everywhere within the vast bounderies of this great republic Massachusetts has planted colonies of her intelligence and learning. Whatever there can be in the past achievements to inspire a noble ambition, your State possesses it all. No people can have better reason to respect themselves than the people of this Commonwealth. ”

“ This, then, is the way in which our paper agitators expect to make business lively, and to give general prosperity a new start — revive business, restore prosperity, by bringing about a condition of things in which everything will be in a cloud of uncertainty and distrust; in which confidence and credit will be shaken to their very foundation by the existence of a money system which, with the experiences before our eyes, will in every business transaction make everybody afraid of everybody else. ”

“ If the government is not mischievously interfered with in maintaining specie payments they will remain so. And now I ask you in all candor — and you would do well to ponder the question — to whom do you owe it that, when after the great business collapse of 1873 many of you were thrown out of work and many others compelled to work at reduced wages, and you had to fall back upon your savings, — to whom do you owe it that those savings became more valuable from day to day and from month to month, until now, at last, they are is good is the best money in the world? ”

“ Anything that impairs the credit of the government, anything calculated to create the impression that the American people cannot be depended upon faithfully to discharge their pledges and obligations, will, at the same time, affect the credit of our States, our municipalities, our business corporations, aye, of individual citizens. ”

“ Under no circumstances would anybody receive money from the government as a gift. The merchant will have to sell merchandise for it; the farmer will have to raise crops and stock for it; the manufacturer will have produce goods for it; the laboring man will have to work for it and earn it as wages. For a dollar in greenbacks or in fiat money, as long as it is worth anything, he will have to work just as hard as for a dollar in gold. To-day the greenback dollar or a national bank note he receives in the shape of wages is, in point of value of purchasing power, as good as a dollar in gold. ”

“ If you want confidence and a revival of business you must not begin by overthrowing a safe banking system which serves as a universally trusted depository for business funds and a machinery of business exchanges. If you desire the resumption of specie payments you must not substitute greenbacks for the national bank currency, and thus put upon the government a load of paper money beyond its capacity of redemption. ”

“ No sensible man in America objects to the wealth acquired by righteous means. But human ingenuity can scarcely devise a contrivance which gives such enormous advantages, not to the honest business man, but to the unscrupulous speculator and gambler in the accumulation of wealth at the expense of legitimate business and labor, as a paper money with its fluctuations of value. ”

“ An effort to prove by argument that the maintenance of our national credit, by a conscientious discharge of our national obligations, is demanded by every consideration of honor as well as interest, and that a money of intrinsic and stable value is preferable to an irredeemable paper money whose value is the football of political agitation, and changes from day to day, — such an effort should be as little necessary as it would be to explain to a virtuous man the merits of the ten commandments, or to demonstrate to an intelligent man the veracity of the multiplication table. ”

“ The pensions paid to wounded and disabled soldiers amount to nearly $30,000,000 annually. It is a debt the American people honestly owes them, and it ought to be honestly paid. It is emphatically a debt of honor. These $30,000,000 annually as pensions are now as good as gold, and no patriotic man will deny that the crippled pensioner of the republic deserves a dollar as good as gold now and for all time. But if the schemes of these greenback or fiat-money patriots prevail, and paper money is made plenty and depreciates, a depreciation of ten per cent. ”

“ An inflation of our paper money, producing an inflation of prices, would inevitably injure the interests of the laborer for wages more than those of any other class of society; for, in the very nature of things, and as universal experience shows, it would increase the cost of living far more than the rate of wages. ”

“ The second thing the workingman must desire is that the fruit of his labor be realized, that his wages be paid him in a kind of money on the value of which he can depend — a money that will not cheat him; and I shall endeavor to show that a gold dollar, or a paper dollar convertible into gold, is, and that, even under the most favorable circumstances, an irredeemable paper currency, such as advocated by the greenback or fiat dollar apostles, is not that kind of money. ”

“ And thus the men who, in favor of such a money system, excite the hatred of the poor against the rich, only play into the hands of those who strive to rob and oppress the honest and the poor in order to accumulate riches by over-reaching tricks with the money that cheats. ”

“ By the mere expansion of paper money the amount of your savings in dollars is not increased one cent. But by the depreciation of the paper money following that expansion, the purchasing power of your savings is decreased to the amount of that depreciation. It is as plain as daylight. And do not your greenbackers and fiat-money doctors tell you that irredeemable paper money must be made plenty, to raise prices and to make business lively? ”

“ I have no doubt that, after calmly thinking out the problem to be solved, every intelligent workingman will be on the side of the honest dollar. The time is near when those of you who are not so now, will be ashamed of their folly. ”

“ It will, then, not be surprising, indeed, to have the bonds of our states and municipalities, of railroad and other companies, flung in enormous quantities on the market; and although, owing to favorable conjunctures of trade, we have been able to absorb large amounts of our national bonds returning from abroad, without trouble, yet a shock to the credit of the American people may bring upon us masses of our indebtedness in a variety of forms, so unmanageable as to produce another panic still more destructive, and a paralysis more deadly than any we have suffered. ”

“ To benefit you, wages must, therefore, rise at a higher rate than the prices of other things. But has anybody ever told you that wages in any country, at any time, under the influence of currency inflation, have risen quicker and higher in proportion than general prices? If any man ever told you that set him down as a man too ignorant to be listened to or too unscrupulous to be trusted. ”