Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/465

Rh 1876 both the great political parties of the country affirmed most solemnly their devotion to this great object. Even most of the very men who advocated inflation as a means of temporary relief loudly protested that the restoration of specie payments was their ultimate aim. And why all this? Whence this almost universal concurrence? Simply because every candid man admitted to himself that this country would have to rest; that there could be no confidence in our economic movements; that there could be no firm and safe foundation for National prosperity until our money system should be based again upon the rock of precious metals; that our foreign commerce would not bear its full fruit until our financial system should be in harmony again with the money of the world.

That was the instinctive feeling of the American people for years after the war. Well, then, if such was the case, why were not more vigorous and consistent measures taken for the speedy resumption of specie payments, and why did the steps that were taken meet with so strong and persistent an opposition? Simply because it is one of the weaknesses of human nature, when you desire the accomplishment of a certain end, yet to recoil from the means necessary for the accomplishment of that end, if those means threaten to be painful. A person suffering from toothache may ever so much desire to be rid of the decayed grinder, yet he will shrink from the dentist's instrument with which it is to be pulled, and involuntarily exclaim, “Wait a little.” And then you resort to chloroform or laughing gas to be unconscious of the pain when the operation is performed. If in 1865, after the war was closed, the Government had possessed some power of sorcery to transform overnight without pain to anybody our irredeemable paper currency into a money system based upon the precious metals, is there a single individual in the United States who would not have clapped