Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/121

III, not only are the evils of the redistribution of wealth and of the fluctuations, booms, crises, recessions, and depressions, which have been described, very real, but the fact that people do not understand them is itself an evil. For when people are hurt but do not know what hurts them, they become suspicious of almost everything and everybody.

This suspicion some years ago led to what has been known as "muckraking." Though many big criminals were thus exposed, their machinations were scarcely enough to explain a fraction of one per cent of the evil which our shifting dollar has done, and probably are not more than could have been uncovered at almost any time in our history if the same detective work were undertaken.

This muckraking, itself bred of discontent and suspicion, has intensified that suspicion and discontent; for it has exhibited in the limelight of the public press the enormous profits made by big business and high finance, in contrast with the pitiful pay of common labor. As the late Dean Carleton Parker of the Univversity of Washington has said, this sort of public muckraking has created a fixed idea of grievance in the minds of observant and reflecting workingmen, and has much to do with the growth and bitterness of the "I. W. W."

Every rise in the cost of living brings new recruits to these malcontents who feel victimized by society and have come to hate society. They cite, in their indictment, the high prices of necessities and the high profits of certain great corporations, both of which they attribute to deliberate plundering by "profiteers" or a social system of "exploitation."