The Chicago Tribune (1878): “Straight along for four and a half years the dollar has grown dearer and larger, the debts heavier and harder to pay, and the value of property has withered; business has been done at a continual loss. Real estate—lands, lots and improvements, the foundation of all wealth—has gone down year after year in value, while the mortgages have devoured it, wiping out equities and all that had been paid thereon, and annihilating multitudes of fortunes.”
President Grant (message, 1870): “Immediate resumption, if practicable, is not desirable. It would compel the debtor class to pay beyond their contracts the premium on gold at the date of their purchase and would bring bankruptcy and ruin to thousands.”
Message of 1873: “The experience of the present panic has proven that the currency of the country, based as it is upon its credit, is the best that has ever been devised.
“To increase our exports, sufficient currency is required to keep all the industries of the country employed. Without this, national as well as individual bankruptcy must ensue....
“Prices keep pace with the volume of money.”
John Sherman (1869): “The contraction of the currency is a far more distressing thing than Senators suppose. Our own and other nations have gone through that process before. It is not possible to take that voyage without the sorest distress. To every person except a capitalist out of debt it is a period of loss, of danger, lassitude of trade, fall of wages, suspension of enterprise, bankruptcy and disaster.”
William D. Kelley (House of Representatives, Jan. 3, 1867): “The experiment [on contracting the currency], if attempted as a means of hastening specie payments, will prove a failure, but not a harmless one. It will be fatal to the prospects of a majority of the business men of this generation, and strip the frugal laboring people of the country of the small but hard-earned sums they have deposited in savings banks. It will make money scarce and employment uncertain. It will increase the purchasing power of money, and by thus unsettling values will paralyze trade, suspend production and deprive industry of employment. It will make the money of the rich man more valuable and deprive the poor man of his entire capital, the value of his labor, by depriving him of employment. Its final effect will be widespread bankruptcy.”
Toledo Blade (May 17, 1877): “In financial crises the thing men want is money; that which everybody must receive in payment of debt or forever thereafter forego all claim of interest thereon. What men want in such seasons of panic and distress is that which will pay a note in a bank, will meet the exactions of government, will avert the sacrifice of homestead, warehouse or other property by sheriff’s or marshal’s sale; which, being money, will, when tendered in payment, arrest such proceedings.... The existence and inflexibility of the law are indisputable. If the volume of money is increased creditors complain that the prices of commodities are further enhanced.”
George William Curtis (Harper’s Weekly, July, 1877): “There can be no doubt that as the volume of money decreases the purchasing power increases.... It is unquestionably true that it is a maxim of money that the increase of its volume decreases and the decrease increases the purchasing power of the unit.... It may be a fair question whether the demonetization of silver did not increase the value of gold.”
Thomas Ewing (November 22, 1877): “No greater wrong can be inflicted on the people by government than a contraction of the volume of the currency. The prices of commodities, whether land, product or labor, are determined absolutely by the effective volume of the currency. An increase of the volume raises the price of commodities.”