Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/500

474 fixed, until through the slow and cumbersome machinery of legislation, the law is changed again by politicians. And of all human agencies to determine the volume of currency needed by business, business itself is the most reliable and best, and a set of politicians is the unsafest and worst. The Government is a bad banker, but if well administered it may be a good bank comptroller, as it proved in this instance. In a very important respect, then, national-bank currency, being equally safe as to the value, is vastly superior to greenbacks, and every thinking business man knows that it is so.

What other objections are there to the national banks? That, as Democrats say, the national-bank currency being based upon United States bonds, the maintenance of that circulation will tend to perpetuate the National debt. Well, the debt outstanding is about eighteen hundred millions. I would respectfully ask our Democratic friends whether they are in such a hurry to put their hands in their pockets to pay off those eighteen hundred millions this year or next? Will it not, even under favorable circumstances, take at least twenty-five or thirty years to accomplish that task? But while we have the National debt will it not be well to put it to the best use we can? When at last, after twenty-five or thirty years, we have paid it off until we come down to the last four hundred millions, will it not then be time enough to discuss whether it may be best to pay off that little amount too, or to keep it as a basis for bank circulation? Suppose we adjourn this debate until that period. Let me suggest that it is useless to borrow trouble about eggs to be laid a quarter of a century hence. Indeed, this objection shows the extreme poverty of argument to which the opponents of the national-bank question are reduced.

Their last point is that the national banks are a monopoly and the embodiment of the money-power. Now, I