The Portland daily press., 1878-03-26
Two Common DeIusiOns,


The most effective argument which the
Greenback men advance in behalf of the
imitation of the currency and of irredeema-
BILE money is that contraction is weighing
down heavily upon all industries and par
alyzing all branches of trade, and that much
paper money means much wealth. The ar
gument i effective only because it confounds
cause and consequence, and because it is
| based upon an error in statement The
truth OF the matter is at the time of the
panic Of 1873 our currency was at nearly its
highest point of initiation. The panic came
when we had plenty of paper money, and
! its cause is to be found in imitation not in
contraction. This ought to be known to
| every man, bat judging from the fire.
quency with which the Greenback orators
reiterate the contrary statement, many
| men have yet to learn it. Nor since 1878
has there been enough contraction of the
currency to interfere with the processes of
exchange which go to make up trade. There
| is large amount of paper-money in the
the country to-day which is lying idle instead
of passing from hand to hand. This is be-
| cause there is no legitimate use for it. The
rates of interest on well-secured loans
are extraordinarily low, and for the rea-
| son that there is little demand for bor-
| rowed capital to invest in safe and steadily
remunerative enterprises. Of course there
are many men anxious to borrow, but these
| Tor the most part are men who already owe
| and want to borrow in order to pay their
debts which are already due. The number
of people so situated is unusually large, for
| the great falling off of the demand for goods
of almost every kind has stopped the sales
| upon which they relied for the money to
meet their liabilities. They in turn have had
to reduce their business and discharge many
OF their workmen, and thus the burden of
hard-times is in part passed on to others.
But no one has yet succeeded in showing.
because there is no such fact to show, that
contraction of the currency is in any way
responsible for this state of affairs. 1t would
just as surely have come had we doubled our
| currency. 1t began before contraction.
Another mistake which seems to be COM
mon with the greenbackers is that the coun-
try has been impoverished by contraction. A
little reflection ought to convince any man
that this is not true. We have to-day, at
least as much land, as many houses, as many
horses and cattle and sheep, as many bushels
OF grain and bales OF cotton, and as much of
everything which constitutes real wealth as
we had in 1873. With the exception of what
may have been lost by fire or tempest or 9TH
er calamities we have all that we had then,
and more than we had at the close of the
war. We have not added as much as in pre-
vious times to our wealth THAT is owing in
great degree to the enormous surplus of
manufactured articles we had accumulated, a
sarplus in excess of our needs then and one
which we have been engaged in consuming
ever slnce,i but we have certainly retained
what we then had. The property Of the
country is as intrnsically valuable as it was in
1873. We simply measure it by different
standard; ;.but it is all here. If one of our
dry-goods dealers should choose to break his
yard-stick in two and call eighteen inches a
yard, he could measure more "yards" but
would have no more cloth in stock; and if
the next day he returned TO the old standard
of measure, he would measure less s.yards"
but have no less cloth in stock. Whether he
lengthens or shortens the yard.stick the ex-
changeable value of the cloth is the same.
30 with our wealth. We may change the
standard of value, but the value itself is there
just the same. We may take our "dollar"
| and break it in two and call each piece
dollar and thus the farm reckoned at
$4,000 before the breakage is reckoned at
$1,000 after; but its true worth is the same.
Then we may take the fragments and melt
them into one piece again, and so reckon our
farm at $4,000 but its true worth is 40 less.
1t will exchange for just so many horses or
sheep or SO much food and clothing in one
case as in the other. 1t is far
better, however, whether currency or
the yard-stick be in question, to reckon
as the rest of the world does. We shall be no
richer by calling our roll of cloth a hundred
yards instead of fifty, but shall only put our
selves to much trouble and inconvenience in
exchanging it for other commodities; our
customer will insist that the ten cents he
was to pay for the yard shall be called
twenty.
Upon these two errors, that much paper
money means much wealth and that COM
traction is impoverishing the country all the
greenback reasoning rests. That reasoning
only finds acceptance because men are in dis
tress and ready to take the pretended reme-
l dies which nd
quacks offer. II is true that contraction
works much distress. A man who borrows
beyond his means is always distressed when
pay day comes. But the distress has its
origin in the borrowing. The paying is
merely consequence, and the difficulty of
paying in this case is aggravated by the fuc-
tuating character of our currency. In the
case of the cloth, should man contract,
alter breaking his yardstick, to deliver a
thousand yards, he would, if the old measure
Z ment was restored before delivery day
be compelled to give twice as much
cloth for the same price. But that
trouble would have been escaped if the
| yardstick had not been tampered WITH.
So the man that borrowed when a "dollar"
meant but sixty or seventy cents and must
| pay in dollars worth hundred cents suffers
loss. But no such difficulty could have hap
| pened had not the measure of value been
| tampered with. This fuctuation Of values
and consequent hardship is the result of a
| fuctuating currency. The object of resump-
| tionists is to get back to the old stable stan
dard of values, so that distress like that we
are now enduring shall not be possible. The
object of Greenbackers is to continue fuctuat-
ing values and make the consequent hard.
ships possible again and again. Somebody
must necessarily be cheated as long as the
value of the dollar is continually changing
At first it was the creditor; now it is the debt
| or. Under the operation OF stable monetary
standard neither will suffer. If man. ther
borrows or lends money he will know that si1
months or year or two years hence he will
not be compelled to pay more or receive les
than the sum borrowed or lent.