Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/469

Rh sighing for years, appears assured, a portion of the people are growing wild with preposterous schemes and propositions to undo it all and to return to chaos again; a set of physicians, when the patient is on the point of recovery and requires only repose and quiet working of natural forces, prescribing medicine to throw him into fits once more. It is the most curious spectacle a people ever presented. It would seem only laughable did it not threaten serious consequences.

What are those schemes and propositions? Let us examine them. We find, first, the proposition to replace the money system based upon the precious metals by the so-called absolute or fiat money. During the five years of depression and distress since 1873 many people groped frantically about for means of relief, not inquiring into the true causes of their difficulty or not understanding them. They thought there must be some artificial remedy to cure it within the reach of human ingenuity. That the results of the unproductive consumption, the improvident wasting of wealth, can be cured only by the production of real wealth in a slow and steady way, did not strike them as promising in their case. They wanted some quicker and more ingenious method of getting rich again. Like the alchemists of the middle ages, they thought there must be some way to make gold out of dross. The first thing that struck them as promising was an inflation of our greenback currency. But when, from 1873 to 1874 the volume of the greenbacks was expanded from $356,000,000 to $382,000,000, it had not the desired effect. The increase stayed in the Eastern banks. Then an expansion of the national-bank currency was thought of, and new facilities for the emission of bank notes given. But this did not work. In spite of the new facilities the bank currency actually reduced itself. It became evident that the business of the country would not take and circulate any