Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/533

Rh of lenders to put out money otherwise than on call; they are the following: a lack of confidence in the stability of business; and, secondly, the growing depreciation of our paper money increasing the gambling risk. But if we inflate the currency still more, the premium on gold will rise still higher; and the evil complained of as to loans will not only not be remedied, but will be vastly aggravated.

The fact that at the present moment loans are comparatively easy in the money market has been referred to as contradicting this view. It does not contradict it at all. The crisis has crippled enterprise generally, and especially speculative enterprise. Speculation has had no time to recover and to produce its effects. Money is plenty in proportion to the present limited requirements of business, and although we have had an addition to the currency of twenty-five or twenty-six million dollars, yet much of the money that makes up that addition, and more besides, is at the present moment lying idle. The addition has not exercised its influence yet, but it will without doubt exercise that influence and produce its effect soon. Speculation is already reviving; we observe it in the very Western markets in the grain trade. It is reviving in New York, as everybody sees. It is reviving rapidly. If we inflate the currency we shall have much more speculation than we had before; and with it, and with a further depreciation of our paper money, all the effects upon the rate of interest which I have stated will rapidly appear with all their oppressive consequences; and then those who clamor for inflation in order to give cheap money at low rates of interest to the people of the West and South will learn to their sorrow that an irredeemable currency is indeed not the people's money but the speculator's money, and that by extending and strengthening that pernicious system they have