Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/334

310 true value, that does not lie to him, and who should curse and spurn as his worst enemy the demagogue seeking to beguile him with deceitful currency juggles, it is the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow. This is emphatically the wage-earner's battle. Alas for him if he should desert his own cause!

The free-coinage men profess especial solicitude for those whom they call “the debtor class.” Who are the debtor class? Our silver friends speak as if as a rule the rich people were creditors and the poor were debtors. Is this correct? In my household I am the debtor to the cook and the chambermaid and the washerwoman two or three weeks in the month, and they are my creditors. Nor are they likely to be debtors to anybody else, while I may be, for they have little if any credit, while I, perhaps, have some. I am, therefore, the only debtor in my house. The relations between the large employer of labor and the employees are substantially the same. Ordinarily the employer, the rich man, is apt to be the only debtor among them. The employees are, as a rule, only creditors, and as they lay up savings, they are apt to become creditors in a larger sense. They deposit their money in savings banks or invest it in building associations, in mutual benefit societies, in loan companies or in life insurance policies, and become capitalists in a small way. The amount deposited by the people of small means in the savings banks of the United States is at present something over $1,800,000,000, that invested in building associations about $800,000,000, in mutual benefit societies $365,000,000, and in life insurance many hundred millions more.

The number of such creditors belonging to what our silver friends often call “the toiling masses” is therefore very large. Together with their dependents it may, for aught we know, amount to fifteen or twenty millions. Who are the debtors of these creditors? The savings