Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/220

166 but to prevent it. In a broad sense, therefore, the substitution of stable dollars for "gold coin of the present weight and fineness" would carry out the spirit if not the letter of that clause under the new conditions. Stabilization would supersede the gold clause as a more perfect way of attaining the same general object — contractual justice.

And not only would complaint over such substitution be unjustified but it would rarely, if ever, be made or thought of for the very simple reason that we would go on in our habit of thinking in terms of dollars.

Under stabilization the debtor for $10,000 would still expect to draw his check for exactly $10,000 and the creditor would expect to receive exactly that sum. In 99 out of 100 cases the question of whether, under the gold clause, the check ought perhaps to be drawn for a larger or smaller sum than the face of the obligation would never enter the head of either party. On the other hand, if exceptional treatment were given to contracts having the gold clause, so that these were not to be fulfilled in stabilized dollars, there would be great complaint. For then the only way to discharge a gold-clause contract to pay $10,000 would be to pay something more or less than $10,000 according as the price of gold had risen or fallen. If, because of a raking up of the gold clause, a debtor owing $10,000 is informed by his creditor that he has to pay, say, $10,842.79 the $842.79 will obtrude itself like a sore thumb and seem to the debtor, as it really would be, the exact measure of an injustice.

On the other hand, if the discrepancy between the stabilized dollar and "gold coin of the present weight and fineness" were in the other direction and a debtor tendered what he owed under a $10,000 debt subject to the gold clause by offering to pay $9,500 (which we shall suppose is the equivalent of ten thousand dollars of 23.22 grains of pure gold each) the creditor would always feel, and justly, that he had been robbed of $500