Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/129

15] The fact is that among the worst consequences of price convulsions are the vicious remedies proposed. Like the remedies of primitive medicine, they are often not only futile, but harmful. Yet the patient will always demand medicine. The let-alone policy will not do for him. He knows that the present condition of things is bad and needs changing. His attitude of mind is a frantic "I don't know exactly what's the matter or what needs to be done, but for Heaven's sake let's do something." It is clear, then, that unless a scientific remedy is found and applied there is always great danger of quack remedies.

In the nineties, after a prolonged fall of prices, which had begun in the seventies, when so much was said of the so-called "Crime of '73," several unscientific remedies were on the market. A book that went by the name of "Coin's Financial School" proposed the coining of all silver brought to the mint into silver dollars, each sixteen times as heavy as the gold dollar, although at that time a gold dollar would buy in the market not sixteen times, but about thirty-two times, its weight in silver. This book had a phenomenal circulation and influence; and the "16 to 1" remedy, which would have been worse than the disease, came very near being adopted. The movement for it was based on a consciousness of the true cause of the falling prices—inadequate gold; but, instead of regarding this impersonally and seeking merely to prevent further fluctuation, the "free silver" advocates put the blame on the "gold bugs of Wall Street" and sought to "get even" by a sudden debasement of the dollar equal to fifty per cent.

Since then, of course, we have witnessed, in gold itself, more than this amount of depreciation,—a gold