Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/461

Rh per capita. It is now $1 97-100 per capita. And if our credit remains intact the funding process will go on rapidly, and we shall soon be rid of further tens of millions of our annual burden. Disturb that credit by any act or attempt at weakening the confidence of the world at home and abroad in our ability to pay, or in our honest purposes, and the funding process will cease, and with it the beneficent results flowing from it.

Thus you see, in this as in other things, it is not only most honorable, but it pays best to be honest. The most expensive thing a nation can do is to attempt to get rid of its obligations without honestly discharging them. The next expensive thing is to quibble about them. The ruin from which it is most difficult to rise is the ruin of credit caused by repudiation. The next worst thing for a nation is to render itself suspected of a lurking desire to repudiate. And thus I do hope wherever you hear that most foolish and disgusting cry of the demagogue against the bondholder, you will, as men of honor and as men of business, meet it with all the scorn it deserves. The sense of honor of a nation is the source of its credit, and its credit is one of its best paying investments.

The second prerequisite of a revival of business and prosperity I stated to be a sound currency, a currency of real and stable value. Let me put to any thinking man in this assembly, be he farmer, or laborer, or tradesman, or merchant, or banker, or manufacturer, a plain, simple question, and ask for a candid answer. In what kind of money will you prefer to receive the wages of your labor or the profits of your business—in a kind of money whose value or purchasing power is stable and can be depended upon to remain virtually the same from day to day, and from week to week, or in a kind of money whose value and purchasing power are fluctuating and uncertain, so that you do not know what it will buy from one end of the