Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/177

14] no relation to the dollar, there would still be excellent reasons for standardizing it—on the same general principle on which we have standardized all other units. Accordingly, a friend suggests that the plan be presented independently of the "cost of living" discussion, purely as a problem of weights and measures.

But the indictment will stand. The more the evidence in the case is studied, the deeper will grow the public conviction that our shifting dollar is responsible for colossal social wrongs and is all the more at fault because these wrongs are usually attributed to other causes. When the intelligent public who can apply the remedy realize that our dollar is the great pickpocket, robbing first one set of people and then another,—robbing them of billions of dollars a year, confounding business calculations, convulsing trade, stirring up discontent, fanning the flames of class hatred, perverting politics and, withal, keeping its sinister operations out of sight and unsuspected,—when, I say, the public and legislators realize this, action will one day follow; and we shall have secured a boon for all future generations, a stable yardstick of contracts, a stabilized dollar.