Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/294

240 to take so "radical" a step should be that its so-called radicalism would save us from the real and dangerous radicalism with which the world is now threatened! Some time, sooner or later, the idea will cease to be new. We shall get as used to it as we have to Daylight Saving or the League of Nations, which were new ideas a short time ago; for the index number, more and more utilized, will continue to remind us of our present instability. Already in spite of the distinguished character of some opponents or semi-opponents, the weight of real authority is on the side of the plan and not of its opponents.

But the number of those who have as yet studied the plan or even considered its basic idea is very limited. Before any control of the price level can be actually undertaken, a larger public, especially in the business world, must learn to realize its necessity. So long as the mass of business men fail to realize that they are daily gambling in changes in the value of money, a fact of which they are blissfully unaware, no great demand for preventing those changes is likely to be felt; and the business man is the party whose interests are chiefly involved.

A. Debtor and Creditor. One of the supposed obstacles to the stabilization of the dollar is the opposition of interest between debtor and creditor.

This supposed obstacle takes two forms, one the fear that there would be a struggle for advantage at the outset over the par to be adopted for the price level and the other the fear that the subsequent operation of the system would give rise to disputes between these two general classes. The first supposition represents, it is true, what may prove a real difficulty. The settlement of this