Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/131

16] Furthermore, the crisis which follows the "boom" period is of itself a day of reckoning, at which the profit-taker pays dearly for his prosperity.

Similarly, during a period of falling prices, when the vampire is not the profit-taker but the creditor, the winner is also apt to lose his winnings when, as was shown in §10 above, the stipulated interest he exacts grows into an intolerable burden and bankrupts the debtor. A special injury to business comes when the creditor forecloses his mortgage on industry and undertakes to run it himself. The creditor—especially the ordinary bondholder—is, usually and normally, the simple investor of capital, the "silent partner" in business. He lacks the temperament and training to be a captain of industry. Nevertheless, after years of falling prices during which he has been draining, unobserved, the life blood of the enterprise whose bonds he holds, until there is no profit left for the captain of industry who has been managing it, the mortgage is foreclosed and the captain, held responsible for the shipwreck, is forced out, discredited, and humiliated, and wholly unable to articulate or even to understand that it was not wholly his fault, if at all, but the fault of his instrument of reckoning, the dollar. Thereupon the bondholder is forced to take control. Thus the management drifts into wrong hands, turns into mismanagement, and the bondholder is hoist with his own petard. Like Shylock, though unconsciously, he has been exacting his pound of flesh until he has overreached himself. As David Harum wisely said, "It ain't a bad idee to be willin' to let the other feller make a dollar once 'n a while."

The wage earner also is involved in the catastrophe.