Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/174

166 The plain fact, therefore, to be faced without any disguise, is that we are invited to debase the coinage and lower the standard of value, now and for the future, as a free act of political choice, to be deliberately adopted in a time of profound peace, and that this is to be done with the intention and hope that it will perpetrate a bankruptcy at fifty cents on the dollar for all existing debtors. Can this project be executed? It cannot. The scheme and plan of it for a nation of seventy million people is silly and wicked at the same time, and is both, beyond the power of words to express. The projectors of it deal with the economic phenomena of a great nation as if they were talking about a game at cards, and they plan to do this with prices and that with debts, this with exports and that with banks, as if they were planning a program for building a barn. If we try to realize the operation proposed we shall see how childish and absurd it is.

We must distinguish between three classes of debtors: great financial institutions, small mortgagors, and partners in collapsed booms.

Financial Institutions as Debtors.

The great financial institutions are intermediaries between debtors and creditors. They have received capital from some people and lent it to others. They have to recover it and pay it back. If they only recover it at fifty cents on the dollar, they can only repay it in the same way. What this would mean is that the creditors of those institutions would be paid "dollars," but that when they tried to re-invest them they would find that prices had risen to a greater or less degree in those dollars for the things which they wanted to buy. To this the Populists answer, triumphantly, that now the debtors find that the prices of their products have fallen, so that when they try to sell