Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/226

200 a sum of about $1,200,000,000 owing to the laboring people and men of small means, constituting their savings. To that amount that class are creditors. And you pretend that for their benefit you will expand the currency. Gold being at fifteen per cent, premium, those savings have a value of $1,020,000,000 in gold. Expand the currency until the gold premium is thirty, and you have robbed those people of $180,000,000 of their savings; expand it until the gold premium is fifty, and you have stripped them of $420,000,000 of hard-earned money. There are the pensioners of the United States, the disabled soldiers of the war, and the widows and orphans of those who died for all of us. They receive thirty millions a year, at present representing a gold value of $25,500,000. Expand the currency until the gold premium is thirty, and you have filched away $4,500,000 a year from what the Republic considers a debt of honor, and robbed the wounded and the widows and orphans of so much of their sustenance. Precious friends of the people those are who, under pretense of protecting the debtor against the creditor, rob the laborers of hundreds of millions of their hard-earned savings and despoil even those who have suffered for their country.

But is not a large portion of the middle class, small business men and farmers, in debt, and would they not be relieved by an expansion and depreciation of the currency? No doubt there are many of that class burdened with liabilities, although the number of mortgaged farms is much smaller than generally supposed. I find that here in Ohio scarcely one farm out of ten has any incumbrance. But however that may be, would that expansion of the currency benefit those debtors? I say, No! for a very simple reason. No sooner will expansion become the declared policy of the Government than capitalists, money lenders and business men having money due them will be