Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/516

496 you have sold your crops, and when you have to buy your supplies, that is not what you bargained for. If the farmer or planter could inflate the currency and run up the premium on gold when he sells his crops, and then so manipulate the currency as to raise the value of paper money and depress the premium on gold when he buys his supplies, of course that would be a winning trick. But those who buy from and who sell to him would try to play the same game; and in this tricky game the honest farmer would be sure to come to grief, as he has come to grief already.

No; if the farmer or planter wants to prosper he will, above all things, use every effort within his power to rid the country of a system of currency which obliges him to sell at low and to buy at high prices. He may for a moment think that inflation will aid him in paying off his debts, if he has any; but upon consideration he will discover that debts are paid out of surplus earnings, and that his earnings will be depressed when the price of what he buys is high in proportion to the price of what he sells; that his surplus earnings will grow larger as soon as the price of what he sells is put upon an equal footing with the price of what he buys. He will discover that the trick of depreciating the legal-tender by inflation, in order to pay what he owes in a currency less valuable, will not redound to his advantage in the end, and that in this, as in all other things, honesty is, after all, the best policy. He will discover that an honest currency, which permits him to buy and sell on the same basis of value, is for him the safest basis of prosperity, and I trust the time is not far distant when the farmers, whatever artifices of demagogism may be used at present upon them, will, as one man, stand up honestly and intelligently for the earliest possible return to specie payments.

Another scheme by which more currency is to be