Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/224

198 and the other apostles of “the people's money” to stay away from the streets where their robbed and outraged victims congregate. I apprehend the vengeance of the poor, which Mr. Kelley, of Pennsylvania, in this campaign so loudly threatened against the advocates of resumption, might turn the other way.

Have I exaggerated? Who that has ever studied the history of countries where an irredeemable paper currency prevailed, will deny that every word I have said is borne out by the universal experience of mankind? Who will deny that, when the depreciation of such a currency drives up prices, the laboring man's wages rise last and least? Who will deny that, when the bubbles of paper speculation burst, the laboring man's earnings are cut down first and lowest? Is our country an exception to the rule? The statistics compiled by the Labor Bureau of Massachusetts, corresponding with those of the United States census, show that the cost of living had risen sixty-one per cent. between 1860 and 1870-72, while the average increase in wages was but thirty. The greater the inflation, the greater the distance between prices and wages. And who does not know, when the crisis in 1873 came, that work stopped and wages went down a good while before the cost of living did? And who had to lose the difference? The laboring man. What follows? Of all agencies which human ingenuity can invent, there is none that so insidiously robs human labor of its earnings and makes the fortunes of the poor man the football of the rich, as a currency of fluctuating value. To call it the people's money is as cruel a mockery as to call loaded dice the honest man's chance against a sharper. It is the most insidious agency to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

We are told that an expansion of the currency and its consequent depreciation will benefit the poor, inasmuch as