Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/308

284 many commodities, agricultural staples included, continued in their declining tendency.

Now analyze this case. Upon what ground do the silver advocates assert that the so-called demonetization of silver depressed prices? According to their own reasoning, because there has not been sufficient money to sustain prices. Sustain what prices? Those prevailing before 1873. But there is now three times as much money as there was in 1873, and a much higher per capita circulation. Well, what becomes of their argument? Some of the silver philosophers have invented a more mysterious phrase—that prices have gone down because by the act of 1873 the “money of ultimate redemption” had been curtailed—only gold being available for this purpose. But according to the treasury statistics we had in 1873 only $25,000,000 of coin, including subsidiary silver, in the country, and now we have much over $600,000,000 of gold alone, or more than twenty-four times as much “money of ultimate redemption” as in 1873. And yet prices are low. The man whom such facts do not convince that the decline of prices cannot have been caused by any effect produced upon our currency by the act of 1873 must have a skull so thick that a trip hammer would not drive a sound conclusion through it.

But what is it, then, that has caused the decline of prices? I appeal to your common-sense. Do you think that when one man, aided by machinery, does as much productive work as formerly ten or more did, and when our modern means of transportation carry the product from the producer to the consumer with five times the speed, at one-fifth the cost, and when in the transmission of intelligence time is quite and cost almost annihilated, do you think that then the product of human labor should not in due proportion become cheaper? If it did not, then modern civilization would, in one of its most important