The addition of $2,400,000,000 to the currency of the country will unquestionably largely increase all values. It will at the same time encourage—nay, almost compel—capital to seek investment in active industries rather than in dormant funds. For the present it will supply those who can use money to advantage with a sure and convenient method of obtaining it at a cheap rate of interest, while its ultimate tendency must be to eliminate interest on money from the world’s transactions, and bring money to what I conceive to be its true function—a measurer of values only.
When no interest can be obtained for the use of money, then money will cease to be the most valuable and become the least valuable form of property, and the investor will be required to share the risk, if not the labor, of producing values, instead of leaving this to others, while he absorbs the profits to himself.
I believe that civilization is ready for this forward step. The discovery of gold enough to compel it may have precipitated the movement, but the movement would have come all the same if the Morning mine had never been discovered.
There is not a single benefit which the donation of twenty-four hundred millions of gold will confer upon the people of the United States that might not equally be conferred by an act of Congress providing for the issuance and loaning of the same number of paper dollars, not based upon gold at all.
The credit of this great government used for the purpose of accommodating the business, increasing the resources, and stimulating the industrial activity of this great people, and, supported by the indestructible and undepreciable security of land, would be quite as solid a basis for twenty hundred millions of paper dollars as five thousand tons of yellow metal.
I am, Mr. President, your obedient servant,
David Morning.
CHAPTER XXII.
“The product of ill-mated marriages.”
From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton.
Berlin, November 1, 1895.