Alternate Ruin to Debtors and Creditors.
The inflation of the Civil War had a direful effect upon all creditors on contracts outstanding in 1862. The resumption of specie payments had a similar effect on debtors under contracts made between 1868 and 1878. Greenbackism and silver debasement were produced by resistance to this operation. The debtors of to-day are not those of that period. The debts of that period are paid off. The pain and strain have been borne. The credit of the United States has been established, the currency restored, and the whole business of the country for seventeen years has been completely established on the gold dollar as the dollar of account for all transactions whatsoever. The population of the country is now two and a half times what it was in the war time, and its wealth is probably a much greater multiple. The debts now outstanding have, with unimportant exceptions, been contracted since the resumption of specie payments. What is now proposed is to enter upon a new period of these alternations of wrong and injustice, first to creditors, then to debtors, and so on, and to do this in a time of peace, not from any political necessity, but on the ground of some economic interpretations of the facts of the market, which are incapable of verification and proof, when they are not obviously erroneous and partisan. The effect of the various compromises with silver is that the currency is once more intricate and complicated, excessive and confused, so that few can understand it, and it offers all sorts of chances for perverse and mischievous interpretations.