Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/321

. 1] to discuss the question whether the war level of prices was to continue. Mr. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce, tried in vain to stabilize prices by price fixing. A large number of the members of the Massachusetts legislature petitioned President Wilson to come home from Paris, stating that the problem of the High Cost of Living here needed him more than the peace problems at Paris.

The foregoing are but a few examples of the world's bitter experiences with price movements in the past,—experiences, we may add with confidence, often to be repeated in the future, unless mankind shall find a way to stabilize money units.

It is safe to make the generalization that when prices go up or down fast and far, the public invariably shows a lively curiosity as to the reasons why and an unwonted willingness to consider monetary causes as at least a partial explanation.

Unfortunately, it is also usually true that, only a few years after the price movement giving rise to this dim idea has subsided or reversed itself, the idea is forgotten by most people and the public sink back into the fogs of the money illusion described in Chapter II, which illusion seems, in spite of all the lessons of history, to "fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time."

To-day, for instance, it requires the archaeological grubbing of an economist to bring to light the commodity bonds used in Massachusetts in 1747. Again, the phrase "it isn't worth a Continental" is the only surviving trace in popular memory of the depreciation of the Continental paper money and scarcely any one who uses that phrase to-day knows its original meaning. Few, in this generation, know anything of the greenback days. Even the more recent "16 to 1" excitement, with the remarkable vogue of that seductive book, "Coin's Financial School," and the still more remarkable counter campaign for "sound money," seem dim and distant to-day and have scarcely been