Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/475

Rh You want a share of the wealth of this country, upon which these fiat dollars are based. Why, these fiat dollars are themselves a part of the wealth of the country. Besides, you have clothes upon your back; your wife and children have the same. If you have no house of your own, you have furniture in your rented dwelling. You have tools in your workshop. All these things are a part of the wealth of the country upon which your fiat money is based. You must levy upon what you have yourself. Of course I cannot give you what belongs to anybody else.”

Now you begin to perceive that the forty or fifty thousand millions' worth of property in the country may be magnificent security to base fiat money upon, but you cannot foreclose the mortgage upon a single blade of grass. That may seem queer to you. But it is the peculiar beauty of fiat money based upon the whole wealth of the country.

There is nothing more ridiculous than to hear these fiat money doctors pretend to have made a great original discovery, and to parade it before us as the most progressive idea of the age. Why, it is a story a thousand years old. They had such money in China in the ninth century of this era. They had it in Persia toward the close of the thirteenth century. They had it in the American colonies in the seventeenth century in the shape of bead and clamshell currency. They had it in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, under the management of the great progressive Scotch financier, John Law. They had it in France during the great revolution in the shape of assignats. They had it in this country again during the war of independence in the shape of the Continental money; always in all essential features virtually the same: a paper money based in some indefinite way upon an indefinite something, in some cases with a promise of