Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/538

518 It is one of the results springing from our irredeemable paper money. It is so, and it cannot be otherwise. If the Senator is answered, and I think he is——

Mr. . I do not think I am answered at all; but I shall not interfere for the present with the Senator.

Mr. . If the Senator wants to put another question to me I shall be very glad to answer it.

Mr. . I am ready to say that the Senator has not answered my question at all. The special proposition was that these people expected to put their money in mortgages on real estate. I say that no one who has ever invested upon a first mortgage on property at current rates in this country has ever lost by the investment.

Mr. . The Senator cannot have so completely misunderstood me as to think that I expressed the least doubt of the safety of mortgages in the United States. If I were worth $10,000,000 and had it all to invest in loans, I would ask for no better security than mortgages on real estate in the United States. The question is this: Whether a man investing a certain sum in mortgages, when he retires his capital two or three years hence, will not by the depreciation of the currency lose 20 or 30 or 40 per cent. of the value of his capital; whether the dollar that he invests now will be worth just as much when that dollar will be returned to him? That is the question.

Mr. . I say yes; and I ask the Senator this question: Does he believe that any man who invested $300,000 in St. Louis for three years could have lost by it, or has lost by it, under any circumstances?

Mr. . The Senator from Pennsylvania is an old financier and a very successful one. He certainly knows that when an irredeemable currency is inflated, the effect will be its depreciation; that when he to-day can buy a dollar in gold for $1.12 in currency, if we expand