Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/481

Rh interest; for when a policy so insane, as to run away from specie payments, can be adopted, every imaginable nonsense will thenceforth appear possible. Then good-by reviving prosperity—we shall be at sea again, the Lord only knows how long.

It helps our Democratic friends very little to put forth the fantastic promise, “that the amount of paper issues shall be so regulated by legislation, or by organic law, as to give the people assurance of stability in the volume of the currency, as well as the consequent stability of the value.” The idea to establish by Constitutional amendment, to be assented to by three-fourths of the States, that is, by twenty-eight State legislatures, how much money the country is to have—and when the amount so fixed is found too large or too small, that it should not be possible to change it until the assent of twenty-eight State legislatures shall be again obtained for the change, that idea is so childishly preposterous that we must wonder how serious men could ever have entertained it.

The other proposition that Congress, by legislation, is to be the permanent authority to regulate the volume of the currency, and consequently the value, is scarcely less astonishing, coming as it does from Democrats who pretend to be so faithful to their time-honored principles. Have you considered, my Democratic friends, what an awful power you thus propose to perpetuate in the Congress of the United States? You yourselves admit that the value of your irredeemable paper currency will depend upon its volume. Congress is to fix that volume, and by increasing or diminishing it, Congress is therefore to determine what every dollar in the land shall be worth. The value of every piece of property, of every article of merchandise, of every private fortune, of every chance the contractor has in his contract, of every dollar the laboring man has in the savings bank or the merchant on