Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/122

68 It never occurs to them that an impersonal cause could injure them and help others, and the idea of too much money they would hail as a grim joke.

To resentment and class hatred are also to be attributed, in part, overt acts of violence and sabotage in which sometimes the employer's factory is destroyed; and food riots in which sometimes the retailer's shop is wrecked.

12. Falling as well as Rising Prices Cause Discontent

Resentment and suspicion are equally rife in periods of falling prices. Some of us have not forgotten the resentment of the western farmers against Wall Street in the nineties, and the suspicion that the farmers' woes and the woes of poor debtors, as well as the depression of trade, unemployment, and even the panic of 1893, were due to the machinations of Wall Street. Bryan's famous speech before the Democratic convention of 1896, which made him the Democratic presidential nominee, was based on the idea that the laborer and the farmer were being crucified on a "Cross of gold," supposedly due to sinister influences. The political campaign of that year was full of allusions to the alleged "Crime of '73," meaning the demonetization of silver. Populism at that time took its cue from the intolerable burden of interest, just as socialism to-day takes its cue from the intolerable burden of the high cost of living. Recently a visitor in Kansas could find no populist. The reason given was that "there is too much money now for populism." This is an unconscious recognition of the fact that the farmers' interests now, instead of being injured as they once were by falling prices and