September 3, 1889: “People know that the expansion of the currency means life, and equally well that contraction means death.”
Henry Carey Baird (“Money and Bank Credit,” page 14): “The first and greatest need of a man is that of association and combination with his fellow men, and the daily life of a civilized people involves such countless myriads of acts of association or commerce that a medium having the quality of universal acceptability is absolutely necessary to that life. That medium is money.... In its absence in sufficient volume in Great Britain and Ireland, thousands of millions of dollars of labor power annually in those islands perish. While the Trenholms, the Russell Sages, the Pearsalls, the Fahnenstocks and the Seligmans wrangle over the efforts of the people to secure a sufficient supply of ‘current money,’ more labor power will go to waste than will represent the value of the capital of all the banks in the city of New York many times over.”
Peter Cooper: “Contraction in finance is not the same as economy in private life. Contraction in the finances of a country means a stoppage of a certain amount of the industry and exchanges, by reason of the contraction of the credit by which these are sustained. Nothing can be more certain than that a contraction of the currency by our government has been followed by a reduction of all values, so that a wrong has been inflicted upon all the enterprising business men of this nation, whose property has been virtually confiscated by this process of contraction.”
B. F. Butler (August, 1875): “I am informed that Mr. Duncan, of Duncan, Sherman & Co., went to Washington when the currency bill was before the President to advise him to veto it because it was necessary to depreciate values. The President did veto the bills. Values have been depreciated, I trust, to an amount entirely satisfactory to Messrs. Duncan, Sherman & Co.” [The firm of which John Sherman was a member was bankrupted by the depreciation.]
Solon Chase: “I bought a yoke of steers a year ago for $60; fed them all summer and winter, and in the spring was offered but $60 for them in the market. Who got the hay? So long as the owners of funded wealth control the volume of money they control the price of a day’s work down east and the price of a bale of cotton down south. The higher the price of hogs and corn, the easier the people can pay the debt. The farmer cannot pay off his debt on a falling market. The fight of the men who deal in money is not for the metal, but to control the volume.”
James D. Holden (President National Citizens’ Alliance): “So magical is the operation of this wonderful device known as money that by simply restricting its issue wealth is transferred from the hands that created it to the possession of those not in the remotest degree responsible for its production. Let the reader who does not indorse this view give himself, if possible, a reason why a people who by their laws create the supply of money should limit the issue.”
A Georgia editor (speaking of the effects of contraction) says: “In 1868 there was about $40 per capita of money in circulation; cotton was about 30 cents a pound. The farmer then put a 500-pound bale of cotton on his wagon, took it to town and sold it. Then he paid $40 taxes, bought a cooking stove for $30, a suit of clothes for $15, his wife a dress for $5, 100 pounds of meat for $18, one barrel of flour for $12, and went home with $30 in his pocket. In 1887 there was about $5 per capita of money in circulation; this same farmer put a 500-pound bale of cotton on his wagon, went to town and sold it, paid $40 taxes, got discouraged, went to the saloon, spent his remaining $2.30 and went home dead broke and drunk.”
Arthur Kitson (“Scientific Solution of the Money Question,” 1894, page 284): “A restricted currency means restricted commerce; restricted commerce means restricted production, and restricted production means poverty, misery, disease and death.” Page 396: “The gold standard is a device of the bankers for the measuring of everybody else’s corn with their bushel.”
Sealy (“Coins and Currency,” 1853): “The commerce of the country is now in the power of the Bank of England as it was before in the legislature.”
Doubleday (“Financial History of England”): “We have already seen the fall of prices produced by this universal narrowing of the paper circulation. Distress, ruin and bankruptcy which took place were universally among the landholders whose estates were burdened by mortgages. The effects were most marked. Owners were stripped of all and made beggars.”