Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/297

4, A] adopted, there would be very little attention paid to it. The business world would be as unconscious of the operation of stabilization as a healthy man is of his stomach or liver. Only the changes in the price of gold would register the operation of the system and few persons besides the gold exporter, importer, jeweler, and miner would ever notice what the price of gold was. The ordinary man would, just as to-day, buy and sell with yellowbacks or other money or checks, blissfully unaware that these have any relation to gold.

The case would be quite different if the proposal were to adopt the "tabular standard" by correcting money payments through the addition to, or subtraction from, a debt of a certain number of dollars. Under these circumstances the extra dollars paid or withheld would stand out definitely like direct taxes as contrasted with indirect taxes. There might then be some disputes over the correctness of these extraneous adjustments of contracts. But, even in such cases, disputes would probably be rare. At any rate there seems no evidence of extensive disputes where the tabular standard has actually been used as it has, for instance, in Scotch Fiars prices, in the Massachusetts law of 1780 described in Appendix V, § 1, and in the recent adjustments of wages by various official bodies and private firms in the United States and elsewhere. This being the case, surely when the tabular standard is, as it were, incorporated in the actual money of the country, the ordinary debtor and creditor would be even less aware of how his interests had been safeguarded than he is now aware of how his interests are jeopardized under our present gold standard. He would simply note,—after a decade or two,—that prices had kept stable.

It is still more difficult to imagine a quarrel between debtor and creditor over technical details, over whether iodine ought or ought not to be included in the index number, or whether wheat ought to be given a "weight" of three per cent or four per cent of the