Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/176

168 Small Mortgagors.

The small mortgagors are either wages-men or farmers. As to the wages-men, their wages would undoubtedly go up in time as prices went up, but in the paralysis of industry which would be the first distinct effect of the plan, as soon as it was known that the experiment was to be made, immense numbers of wages-men would be thrown out of employment, and all wages would fall on account of this condition of the labor market. Later, when things began to adjust themselves to the new basis, wages would be low with prices high, both in silver. Advance of wages would come, but it would have to be won through strikes and a prolonged industrial war. In the state of things supposed it would be every man for himself. The wages class would be weakest of all under the circumstances, as they are in every case of "hard times." How would mortgagors of this class traverse such a time and keep up their interest? As to the principal, which is to be halved, it cannot be halved unless it is paid, and the mortgagor has nothing to pay it with except the surplus which he can save from his wages over the cost of living. The project promises woe and ruin to the wages class, with industrial war and class hatred as moral consequences of the most far-reaching importance.

Farmer-Mortgagors.

The farmers expect to double the price of their products, and so get silver to pay off their mortgages. It has been shown elsewhere how illusory this expectation is as regards prices. Prices would rise, indeed, in silver, but irregularly and unequally. They would rise for all things which a farmer buys as well as for all that he sells. If, as the silver theorists generally say, all prices were to rise