Hush money

“ What a glorious time for enterprising contractors, what a seductive season for Congressmen to help a friend for a little share in the profits, what a carnival of fraud, what a flying about of stray millions! For, mind you, money will be no object; on the contrary, it must be spent, and the more spent the better, for the greenbacks must be got out, in obedience to the mandate, "to make and keep the volume of the currency equal to the wants of trade." ”

“ So, once more, with redoubled energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. ”

“ You could be quite some banker yourself, you could orate and strut and preen and propagandize, you could swell out your pouter pigeon breast at stage-managed banquets and be a prince of high finance with a limitless expense account and with an altitudinous salary—if you could commandeer your neighbor's money at 6 per cent and then sandbag out from 211 to 83 per cent profit on it, couldn't you? ”

“ If the gifts were made and consumed, and if there was no production by means of the gifts to replace the consumption, then the workmen and society would be worse off than if the gifts had not been made and the money had been left invested in industry, paying wages and producing wealth.
When workmen see that a big sum is to be spent in anything but industry, their attitude, in their own interest, ought to be one of inquiry. Will such sum be spent for a justifiable purpose? If the sum remains in industry, it is theirs, the workmen's, though the legal title be in the investor. ”

“ Under the operation of the present system, by which prices are constantly falling and money is constantly increasing in value, the surplus earnings of the people are flowing in a steady stream into the vaults of money-lending institutions, and into the pockets of creditors. ”

“ Whoever attempts, under whatever popular cry, to shake the stability of the public currency, bring on distress in money matters, and drive the country into the use of paper money, stabs your interest and your happiness to the heart."
The herd of hungry wolves who live on other men's earnings will rejoice in such a state of things. A system which absorbs into their pockets the fruits of other men's industry is the very system for them. ”

“ You are destroying your greenbacks for all purposes of money and currency! You are throwing them into the bottom of the Pacific Ocean." And he sagely proceeds to stow his away in an old stocking or an earthen pot under the bed, for circulation; for, if he lends his money to anybody, or pays it out in a business transaction, the man who gets it, if it is a considerable quantity, will forthwith deposit it in a bank, and even if paid out in small sums, it will eventually get there. ”

“ Does the value of your savings lie so heavily upon your hands that you want to get rid of it? If so, then, and only then, by all means follow the lead of your greenback and fiat-money apostles, who promise to relieve you of your cares by a kind of money which in fact will relieve you of the value of your saved earnings. But, if you are the sensible men I take you to be, you will not forget that the first rule of wisdom teaches you to make sure of that which you have before grasping at shadows beyond. Do you want your savings to be worth dollar for dollar? ”

“ The capitalist who lends out money must take that contingency into consideration. He has to run what I have already called the gambling risk. Now, suppose the Senator from Indiana had $100,000 to lend out. If he were asked to lend it out, say on three months, he would have to consider whether at the time when the loan will be returned to him his $100,000 will be worth as much as it was when he lent it out. The currency being inflated and depreciation being the consequence, he will ask himself whether the paper dollar, which is, say, at 10 per cent. discount to-day, will not be at 16 per cent. ”

“ Moreover, although the philosophers did not exactly say so, the inference was also legitimate, that in a community using merely “token” or “remembrance” money, the surest way to get rich would be to get in debt, and the best way of carrying on an enlightened system of trade and commerce, to exchange commodities, the results of time and labor, for evidences of debt without interest. ”

“ Wages and prices, rising together, call perpetually for more money, or at least more tokens and symbols, more paper credit in the form of checks and deposits, with a value that is no longer based on the rock-bottom of redemption into hard coin, but that floats upon the mere atmosphere of expectation. ”

“ Every body felt poor and swindled. Every body who thought he had money in savings-banks woke up all at once to the realization that his money was nothing but a lot of old shells. Every body had his bags, his tills, and his money-boxes filled with shells, which he had taken in exchange for commodities which had cost him valuable time and labor. ”

“ You’ve no idea of the money engaged in productive industry, money earned by hard years of labor and economy, money held in trust for widows and orphans, money stolen from banks and corporations, money abstracted by clerks and office boys, is carried into Wall Street, in the vain hope of acquiring a sudden fortune, and there remains. ”

“ A financier's capital circulates inside his pockets, not outside of them except on certain occasions on 'Change. The art of spending money does not go hand-in-hand with the art of making it,--few things in this world delight me more than the spectacle of a millionaire who, having ostentatiously retired from business, contemplates his money-bags in positive despair, not knowing what to do with them and bored to death because the only occupation in which he takes any delight, money-getting, is debarred him by his position. ”

“ I’d get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success. ”

“ If we have dollars of differing values, only the poorest will circulate. The farmer and the laborer, who are not in hourly touch with the ticker of the telegraph, will require, above all other classes of our community, a dollar of full value. Fluctuations and depreciations are always at the first cost of these classes of our community. The banker and the speculator anticipate, discount, and often profit by such fluctuations. It is very easy, under the impulse of excitement of the stress of money stringency, to fall into the slough of a depreciated or irredeemable currency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Neither, by destroying money, do I mean burning notes, or throwing gold away. If I burn a five-pound note, or throw five sovereigns into the sea, I hurt no one but myself; nay, I benefit others, for everybody with a pound in his pocket is richer by the withdrawal of my competition in the market. But what I want you to make your readers discover is how the true money is made that will get them houses and dinners; and on the other hand how money is truly lost, or so diminished in value that all they can get in a year will not buy them comfortable houses, nor satisfactory dinners. ”

“ But to-day what do we see? Entirely the reverse. Money, floating capital, unused funds, are more abundant than ever; the cash-boxes overflow; the large banks literally sweat with gold; and this excess, this plethora of unemployed capital causes the public funds to advance and the price of money to decrease. It is business that is wanting; it is the employment of capital that is in default. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It scarcely occurs to any of them that he needs a knowledge as to gold; yet every bargain into which he enters depends for one of its two terms on gold. I cannot but believe that the diffusion among business men of the fuller knowledge of the equation of exchange, of the relation of money to deposits, of credit cycles and of interest, which the future is sure to bring, will pay rich returns in mitigating the evils of crises and depressions which now take them so often unawares. ”

“ Another man unable to see below the surface of things and distinguish association from causation! The friends of cheap money do not claim that low interest insures high wages. What they claim is that free competition in currency-issuing and the consequent activity of capital insure both low interest and high wages. ”

“ Not the rich, but the laboring people and persons of small means, who put their surplus earnings there for safe keeping. It is estimated that the same class has, in national and private banks and in trust companies, another $200,000,000 and that nearly $130,000,000 is owing them in other kinds of debts. There is, then, a sum of about $1,200,000,000 owing to the laboring people and men of small means, constituting their savings. To that amount that class are creditors. And you pretend that for their benefit you will expand the currency. ”

“ But, unfortunately for the orator, he hadn’t got far enough along in his financial primer to appreciate the difference between capital and currency; and in the simplicity of his heart imagined that it was [111] all the same, whether we had pictures of horses, hogs, and money, or real horses, hogs, and money, which represent and are accumulated by labor. So the things which he thus settled in opposition to theory and experience wouldn’t stay settled ”

“ I told you that John Perrin, of California, arose and suggested that we could take away from the people two billions of their money, money that measures the sweat of the brow of man, money that measures the remuneration of labor and the products of labor, according to its own abundance, by comparison. I told you why they wanted to make money scarce, as thereby they could increase the purchasing power of interest, so it would crowd down the price level of labor and the products of labor, and so that interest could buy more, as it was a fixed charge. ”

“ But I do say that the restoration of sound money will revive that confidence which is necessary to set all the industrial forces of the country in motion again to give you remunerative employment; that it will protect you against that insidious robbery with which a currency of fluctuating value strips your earnings and savings of their purchasing power; that it will open to you a fair chance again in the struggle of life by securing to you an honest dollar as wages for honest work. That is what the restoration of sound money will accomplish for ourselves and our children. ”

“ And now, sir, when I have demonstrated by fact and reason, so that every child might understand them, propositions like these, that capital and currency are two very different things; that the wealth of a country is not augmented by printing more paper money; that when popular confidence in the issuer of irredeemable paper money is unimpaired, the constant depreciation of that paper money demonstrates its excess in quantity over and above the real requirements of legitimate business ”

“ The promises to pay for the commodities destroyed had all been preserved. They were regarded by almost every body as money; and if money, then, of course, as every body knew, they were wealth, and wealth so great and superabundant that the one thing especially necessary to do was to devise plans for using it. Every body, therefore, devised plans; those who had no money more especially devising plans for those who had. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At first the laboring man submits quietly, but while he submits his loss accumulates. But presently, as paper money is made “more plenty,” — only the laboring man does not get any more of it — the premium on gold goes up and up, the paper money depreciates further, and the prices of the things you buy rise still higher, say 25 to 30 per cent. ”