Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/328

304 hand, and the promise of higher prices owing to a less valuable silver dollar on the other hand, do not go together. The one or the other is a fraud. Of course the fraud is the promise of bimetallism. The rise of prices owing to the debasement of the dollar will begin at once as soon as gold departs, and we slip on the silver basis. Bread will be dearer; milk, coffee, sugar, tea, meat and vegetables will be dearer; clothes, shoes and hats will be dearer; rents, furniture, coal, kerosene—in short, every article the price of which can be raised by the seller.

High prices are a two-edged sword—handy to the seller but unpleasant to the buyer. They press, of course, hardest upon those who are compelled to buy most in proportion to their income or their earnings. And who are they? The poor people. What a rich family spends upon the actual necessaries of life, the indispensable food, clothing and shelter, is very little compared with its income. Most of its expenditures are for things that are not necessaries, and may be classed as luxuries, the purchasing of which may be suspended or postponed without hardship. But the poor family, the wage-earner's family, is obliged to spend a very large part of its income from day to day upon food, clothing, shelter, heat and light, that cannot be temporarily dispensed with without hardship. From a rise in the prices of necessaries of life the poor people, therefore, suffer by far the most.

Here I touch one of the most insidious deceptions with which our free-coinage apostles seek to hoodwink the people. They speak of a class of “consumers” as if they were only a lot of rich people sitting in their fine houses and doing nothing but consume; and of a class of “producers,” consisting of all the people engaged in work, especially manual work, doing nothing but produce. And they speak of high prices as if their effect were mainly to make those lazy, rich consumers pay more for