Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/228

202 more into the fever of wild speculation, so that they may have an opportunity to palm off their elephants upon other people, and then, when they themselves have secured their prize, let “the devil take the hindmost.” And men of this class are the most vociferous apostles of “the people's money.”

Suppose they succeed in their scheme; suppose by inflation, the speculating fever be revived, and they not only get rid of their liabilities, but make millions of profit on their gambling enterprises, who will lose the millions they gain? Who will pay the cost? Not the victims alone who are foolish enough to take the speculating enterprises off their hands, and then are caught by the final crash inevitably to come. Such victims would, perhaps, deserve their fate. No, the cost would be paid by the laboring men of the country, whom the depreciation of the currency would plunder of the difference between the rise of the prices of necessaries and the rise of wages. The cost would be paid by the industrious and frugal, whose deposited savings would be robbed of their value; by the pensioners, the disabled soldiers, the widows and orphans of the slain, whose slender incomes would be despoiled of their power to buy bread; by every honest man in the land, who would suffer in the game of overreaching which the inflated currency would bring with it. It is the “people's money” they call it.

But I tell the speculators they will not succeed in their scheme. They are making a very serious mistake in their calculation. They believe if we now inflate the currency things will go on as swimmingly as they did when, during the war, the legal-tenders were first issued and gradually augmented. They will soon perceive a very essential difference. When the legal-tenders were first issued our people had to gain their first experiences with an irredeemable Government currency since the Revolutionary War.