Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/300

246 corner or control a hundred commodities is unthinkable. Moreover, supposing such control of commodities possible, we are now far more exposed to the danger of a corner in gold than we could be to a corner in hundreds of other commodities!

The same argument applies to any supposed danger of misquoting of prices. Any gross misquotation such as doubling the true figure would be, of course, out of the question, while anything less would be of no use to the would-be rascal. And if there should be an effort to stretch some price quotations as far as this could be done without detection (which would be only a single per cent or two), the result would not affect the average more than a small fraction of one per cent, which likewise would not be enough to be worth while.

Furthermore, experience shows that the manipulation of weights and measures and moneys has not occurred where they were entrusted to official technical scientific bureaus but only where either private or political control was permitted.

One may still see in the museum of the old Hanseatic League at Bergen, Norway, two sets of weights. The heavier was used for buying and the lighter for selling! The modern official sealer of weights and measures has reduced such fraud to a minimum.

Similarly under the old private right of coinage there was confusion and fraud. But no modern official mint has been accused of making light-weight or counterfeit coins.

We conclude, then, that the fear of contests or manipulations arising from the operation of a stabilized dollar is quite groundless. We may go further and say that, on the contrary, such a dollar would remove the danger of contests and manipulations, which danger is not only now present, but is clearly due to our unstabilized dollar, ever affording grievances to the debtor against the creditor, or vice versa. In 1896 the "free silver" campaign derived its strongest support from the debtor class, which sought to "get even" for the losses