But we are now assured that this fall is not due to any monetary cause, but to the greater efficiency of machinery in the production of commodities.
No advocate of an increased volume of money denies that in a few departments of manufacture there have since 1873 been improvements tending to economize labor and cheapen products; but they emphatically deny and challenge proof that improvements of mere detail in the manufacture of some articles will account for the extraordinary fall of price since that time in almost every product of industry. We are also told that the development of the system of transportation, both by land and sea, have tended to lower the price of commodities to the consumers. I grant it. But we had those improvements before 1873.
The inventions made between 1873 and 1890, the period of falling prices, were no more important or radical in their effect on industry,—tended no more to cheapen commodities, than did those from 1850 to 1873, the period of rising prices. Indeed the inventions which preceded 1873 were as a whole much greater in scope, more far-reaching in result, and more revolutionary in their effects on industry, than those of the later period. All the great basic improvements had been invented, and had been incorporated with the industrial system of all civilized countries long before 1873, if we except the electric light and the telephone. We have had the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the spinning-jenny since the last century; the railroad and the steam-ship since the '30's; the telegraph, the mechanical reaper, steam-plow, and other agricultural labor-saving devices since the '40's; the sewing machine since 1854, and the Bessemer process and steel rail since 1857.
The forced construction into which their position drives the advocates of the gold standard is well illustrated in a recent number of a magazine of high standing in this country, in which I find the following:
But if it be demurred, does not a debt incurred, say, ten years ago require to-day more wheat or iron for its satisfaction than the sum could have bought when first borrowed? Certainly, but the wheat or iron represents no more labor now then it did ten years ago, and its increase in quantity stands for the new efficiency which applied science has bestowed on toil.
Observe how deftly the writer places iron, in the manufacture of which there have admittedly been some improvements, in the same category with wheat, in the production of which the improvements within any recent period have been of the most trifling character. It will be exceedingly difficult to convince the farmers of this country, whose mortgages are eating up the proceeds of their labor, that the enormous decrease in the debt-paying power of their products is made up to them in "the new efficiency which applied science has bestowed on toil."
As well might it be maintained that the rise of prices and the concurrent wave of universal prosperity, experienced after 1849, was not due to the increase of the world's money stock from the mines of California and Australia, but to some sudden, unaccountable, and complete loss of all improvements theretofore attained in the arts and industries of the world.
EFFECT OF CHECKS AND CLEARING-HOUSES.
But it is said that checks, notes, drafts, bills of exchange, and the facilities afforded by clearing-houses effect such economy in the use of money that it goes farther now than formerly, and that therefore so large a volume of money as was formerly needed is not needed at present. It is sought thus to escape the conclusion that the fall of prices is the result of a shrinkage of the volume of money, or at least to imply that if the money volume has been shrinking the agencies mentioned have served to mitigate, if not entirely to counteract, the effects of such shrinkage. This is in substance to claim that however contracted the money volume of a country may become, the system of checks and clearing-houses—on the principle of the compensating balance—will expand in a proportion directly corresponding to the contraction of the currency; that the greater the reduction of the volume of money in the country the greater the increase in the transactions of the clearing-house.
Nothing more absurd could be conceived. If this view were correct, it would make no difference whether the amount of money in circulation were large or small; a million dollars would be as efficacious as $100,000,000, and even one dollar as effective as a million dollars; and if we suppose the last dollar to have disappeared from circulation, then, according to the sweeping and pretentious claims set up for the clearing-house system, we could dispense altogether with the use of money and rely exclusively on checks, drafts, and bills of exchange.