Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/219

Rh fullest opportunity and all the facilities which wealth furnishes, amidst the fluctuations of the currency and of prices, to lend out or to draw in money, to give up one investment and to make another, to buy or to sell, to speculate upon a rise or a fall—in one word, to take advantage of every chance, not only for his safety, but for his profit, as his good judgment may suggest; and in the end he will, if he was a shrewd calculator, have grown richer than ever before, by those very fluctuations. And if you had your eyes open, you could not fail to observe that the time when an irredeemable currency, with its ever fluctuating changes of values, prevailed in this country was just the time when the rich men grew rapidly richer, and enormous accumulations of wealth fell into single hands.

But now look at the other side of the picture. Here is a laboring man who works for wages. He is honestly toiling to support himself and his family, and may be has succeeded in saving a few hundred dollars, and deposited them in a savings-bank. Now Congress resolves to issue more money in abundance, and inflation commences in good earnest. The laboring man, who has listened to Governor Allen or General Gary, thinks the millennium is coming. The “people's money” will be plenty. The gold premium rises, and the prices of commodities also. The worthy laborer does not, like the rich man, read the financial articles and the market reports in the metropolitan journals, and if he did it would be of no benefit to him. The rise of the gold premium troubles his mind very little, for the “people's money” is to be cheap and plenty. But some day he goes to the store, to buy things for his household and his family. To his surprise he finds that the prices of groceries and shoes and clothing and so on, have become much higher than before. “How is this?” he asks. “Well,” says the dealer, “gold has gone up, I