Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/463

Rh “I want to be able to figure out beforehand how much money will buy the material, the lumber and the bricks and stone I shall need at a future time, and that the money I get after the performance of the contract will be worth as much as the money I contracted for.” And so on through the list.

This, I say, is your natural instinct. This is what you really need and desire, all of you, except, perhaps, the gamblers who rely upon tricks that are dark to fleece their innocent neighbors. Yes, even those of you do desire this, who, although honest men, have permitted yourselves to be affected by the fiat money disease or kindred ailments. You necessarily want a money of stable value especially in difficult times like these, when careful and safe business calculations are more than ever required. If you are sincere with yourselves you will all admit that you really think so.

Now what is that money of stable value, and how can we get it? Let me put another question to you. Many of us remember the time—it was eighteen years ago, before the war—when gold and silver were current in this country, and bank notes convertible into gold and silver. The gold and silver coin of the United States was then the only legal-tender in the payment of debts. Did you then think, or can you remember anybody who then thought, that it would be best for the people of this country to do away with gold and silver and to substitute for them an irredeemable paper money, worth so much to-day and so much to-morrow? Am I right or not in saying that a man making such a proposition in times of peace would have been unanimously voted fit for a place in a lunatic asylum? The only thing you complained of, and justly so, was the existence of wildcat bank-paper under a bad banking system, because it could not be converted into gold and silver, contrary to the promise on its face. And is it