Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/550

530 other crashes and collapses; and who will be the man to be ground to powder by them? The poor man, not the rich. What is it that rises last when your paper system drives up prices? The laboring man's wages. What is it that drops first when your bubbles of paper speculation burst? The poor man's earnings. You speak of reviving confidence, and, with confidence, enterprise, by new issues of paper money, and yet that very confidence has been destroyed by the very agency of that paper money; and confidence does not revive to-day for fear of new fluctuations and new uncertainties.

You talk of debtors and creditors, debtors being benefited by inflation, and creditors by the resumption of specie payments. Let me ask you, who are the debtors, and who are the creditors of this country? Let every Senator look into his own household; who are the creditors and who are the debtors there? There is but one man in that household who is able to be a debtor, and that is the Senator himself. Not his servants; for they have not credit enough to contract debts. If they are anything they are creditors, however small the amount may be. Look at the savings-banks of this country, and what do you see there? Seven hundred and sixty million dollars of deposits. Who are the depositors? Not the rich, but the poor man, who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow; the man of small means, who puts there for safe-keeping his small surplus earnings. The same class have in National and State banks, and in trust companies, as has been estimated by good authority, two hundred millions more; and another two hundred and fifty millions are owing to the same class in the shape of unpaid wages and other debts. There are twelve hundred millions, then—twelve hundred millions of debt—owing to the laboring men and the men of small means. And now, I ask you who are advocating the inflation of the currency,