Our present Comptroller of the Currency reports $31 per capita in the various kinds of money and substitutes for money now in circulation. This is altogether too small an amount for the production and exchanges required in this broad land of ours. The result is debts are being made and credits are expanding at a fearful rate, preparing the way for our next great panic.
As stated above, we have never yet passed beyond twenty years without having a panic, and a moment’s thought will present to the mind the fact that we are now on the last half of the twenty years since 1893.
It is coming, for we all know that “like causes always produce like results;” and the cause is an inadequate volume of the debt-paying instrument—money—to do the business with. The result is that deferred payments—debts—must be made, and, as we have seen, a panic is a prevailing inability to pay debts. So look out for breakers in the near future.
Our present situation is no time to advocate commodity money, for the defenders of hard money ought to know that hard money and hard times always go hand in hand.
Demand for use is the natural law of money supply; and, as the demand now is far in excess of the supply, it is safe to say, that unless more money is put into the channels of trade, there will be a severe money stringency; if not a genuine old-fashioned panic.
I have often wondered why $100,000,000 in gold is kept penned up in the Treasury Building in Washington. So far as doing the people any good it might as well be in the bottom of the ocean.
Money performs precisely the same function in the social organism that blood does in the animal organism. Blood is the vitalizing force in the human body, and money is the vitalizing force in the body politic. Everybody knows that the loss of blood causes weakness in a human person, and just so the loss of money—a contraction of the money volume—causes weakness in a government; hence no “Power” should be permitted to control our volume of money.
Every voter in this Republic has a head above his shoulders supposed to contain a think-shop; and, if the “Power” now controlling our money volume, and as a result our “commerce and industries,” is to be removed and better times secured, every think-shop must get down to business, with a full determination to see that our “commerce and industries” shall not be interfered with, that the volume of money be increased enough to effect rapid exchange of products and the payment of debts.
The difficulty in accomplishing this lies in the fact that so many think-shops are never used, and again, some never read any newspaper except “my party paper,” containing nothing for think-shops to work at, and the result is—ignorance.
Thought is the mother of ideas, and ideas move the world. The reading man will naturally be an observing man, a thinking man, always looking for the cause of results which are transpiring around him, either in politics or science.