Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/207

Rh you, money will be no object; on the contrary, it must be spent, and the more spent the better, for the greenbacks must be got out, in obedience to the mandate, “to make and keep the volume of the currency equal to the wants of trade.”

No, fellow-citizens, this is no jest. This is no exaggeration. You adopt a financial policy making it the duty of the National Government to put out new issues of currency in any way that will serve the object quickest, and unlimited extravagance will be the necessary, the inevitable consequence. There never was a state ever so well administered, there never was a people ever so frugal, there never was a government ever so careful, which did not, by the emission of large quantities of irredeemable paper money, run in the vortex of profligacy and corruption. It has never been, it will never be, otherwise. It is in the very nature of things. When you manufacture this so-called money by merely printing a few words on a slip of paper, it apparently costs nothing. You are deluding yourselves with the idea that you are creating wealth, without stopping to think of the ultimate day of reckoning which demands the settlement of accounts. When you spend such money for the very purpose of getting it out, the wildest extravagance is unavoidable, and the extravagance of a government always is the very hot-bed of peculation and corruption. The rings will thrive, and the honest men will pay the cost. But not only the Government and its officers does it corrupt; still more grievously will it demoralize the people. When, by the fluctuations of so vicious a monetary system, the possessions of everybody become uncertain from day to day, every man of business will, by the very force of circumstances, be made a gambler. What is worth some thing to-day and may be worth nothing to-morrow is lightly made the football of chance, and when everybody,