Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/169

9] contract in goods-dollars is safer than a venture in copper dollars, why is it not safer than a venture in gold dollars?

Perhaps an equally important obstacle is ignorance, or rather the lack of the requisite imagination to visualize the outrages now perpetrated by our dollar's perpetual changes and to connect the effect with the cause. If there were such a vivid realization of what is going on, both the conservatives who now deprecate any change of system and the radicals who now advocate irrelevant changes to remedy some of the evils would unite in an immediate demand for a stable dollar.

To see that this is true we only need to think what would happen if the social injustice we have discussed, now so obscure, could only be made to stand out in clear relief. Imagine a society with a stable dollar but yet with the very same injustice we now experience except that it is deliberately administered.

To make this supposition definite suppose the United States had had a stable dollar during the last few decades but had, with some strange malice, used the index number of prices in Canada or Europe (which, it is assumed, held to the old unstable system) to produce extraneously the identical evils we have actually experienced. By the caprice of the index number the debt of $1000 contracted in 1880 would have had to be paid literally by $1200 in 1896 and the debt of $1000 contracted in 1896 would have to be paid literally by only $400 in 1919. The producer would have been deprived by the operation of the supposed law of his profits before 1896 and the bondholder would have been deprived of all of his interest and part of his principal