Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/539

Rh the currency at the rate of $100,000,000 or $200,000,000 more, he will have to pay $1.25 or $1.30 in currency for a dollar in gold. In other words, while a dollar in currency may be worth eighty-eight cents in gold, if we inflate the currency it may be worth then seventy-five or seventy or sixty cents; and, old and successful financier as the Senator is, he is too world-wise not to understand that when I invest eighty cents and get only sixty cents back, I shall be a loser by twenty cents. [Manifestations of applause in the galleries.]

The. If there is any more disorder in the galleries the Chair will order them to be cleared.

Mr. . Mr. President, I am too old and too wise to allow the Senator from Missouri to get me off the subject I started upon. I shall not contend in words with him. He can beat me there a thousand to one. But I bring him down to his assertion that he could not afford to allow his foreign friends to come here and invest money upon mortgage. I say he was wrong in that; he was depreciating the credit of the country and doing a wrong to the country which has adopted him and honored him.

Mr. . There are other persons, I fear, who are depreciating the credit of the country. They are those who want to continue a money system which introduces into all transactions of business the element of chance and deception; a money system which by that deception injures not only the foreigner who may invest his funds here, but our own people; a system of irredeemable paper money which has time and again fallen under the contempt of civilized mankind. Those, I say, are depreciating the credit of the country who in the very midst of the nineteenth century, with all the lights of universal experience around them, still strive to maintain, to confirm and to perpetuate a disgrace like that. I tell the Senator from Pennsylvania I can think of nothing that would be better