Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/113

. 6] During the war, it proceeded at about eight times that rate.

It was during falling prices that such money-lenders as Hetty Green and Russell Sage made their fortunes. After 1896 and up to the present, this would have been impossible. For even had they saved every penny of interest and compounded it, they would have had only their labor for their pains and less actual purchasing power in the end than when they began! Because of our shrinking dollar no one could have accumulated fortunes by simple saving and investment at interest since 1896.

Hence it is that a new class of rich now inhabit the palaces on Fifth Avenue. The "bloated bondholders" could not keep up the old magnificence under the growing strain of high prices. They have given place to the "profiteers." In these two phrases the great untutored public shows a curious intuitive sense for the truth which it cannot quite comprehend. It knows at least "who got the money."

Shakespeare stated an economic truth when he said "there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." This tide between 1873 and 1896 carried the bondholders on to fortune and made them "bloated," while between 1896 and to-day it carried the stockholders on to fortune and made them "profiteers."

It will do no good, of course, to rail at the lucky winners in the lottery. The public was greatly mistaken in attributing low prices to the "strangle-hold" of wicked bondholders and is equally mistaken to-day in