Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/350

326 them? Would there be any equity, or any shadow, or pretense, or quibble of equity in scaling them down 50 per cent. by a sudden drop from the gold to the silver basis?

Subject the principle itself to a simple test. When I contract a debt I owe what it is mutually understood that I am to pay. Our whole business life and social fabric, all human intercourse, rests upon the binding force of such understandings. Unless it be expressly understood, has the debtor the slightest right or reason to demand that the creditor shall be satisfied with a less amount in payment if wheat or cotton or something else had meanwhile declined in price? If so, would not the creditor also have the right to demand that the debtor should pay more in proportion if wheat or cotton or something else meanwhile had risen in price? If neither of them had thought of proposing or of accepting so adventurous a contract, how can such claims be justified if based upon a mere secret mental reservation or an arbitrary after thought? Is it not monstrous that such an assumption should be taken as a warrant for the reduction at one sweep of all debts by a debasement of the standard of value?

You recognize such a principle and carry it into general practice, and there will be the end of all confidence between man and man, the cessation of all credit and trust, the utter subversion of the moral rules governing human intercourse, an unbridled reign of fraudulent pretense and unscrupulous greed—in one word, the overthrow of civilized life.

And yet he who has watched the free coinage agitation knows that just this appeal to debtors is one of its main allurements. Listen to their speeches, read their literature, and you meet ever recurring, now in soft-spoken circumlocution, now in sly suggestion, now in the language