A shifting measure of value is the nigger in our industrial woodpile. We have got to have a measure of value that's as immutable as our measure of quantity; a dollar as reliable as an official pound; a dollar that's the same yesterday, and to-day and forever, before we see the last of these panics and periods of business depression. We have got to have a currency that will adapt itself automatically and infallibly to the requirements of commerce— that will constitute an ever-effective exchange medium— before we can obtain a smooth working industrial machine and the maximum employment of labor.
We know from experience that gold will not supply us with such a currency, that silver will not do it, that bi- metallism will not do it—that greenbackism, as we understand the term, will not come within a mile of it. Then what will do it? That's the problem. Solve it, and you forever put an end to commercial panics in a land of plenty; you deprive capital of its power to oppress labor; you assure industry a constant friend where it has so often found an insidious foe. Solve it and Columbia can furnish happy homes for half the world—homes unhaunted by the wolf of want, but crowned with sweet content and gilded with freedom's glory.
For a century economists have been seeking the solution of this all-important problem. Even conservative old Adam Smith dreamed of the emancipation of the world from the multifarious ills of metallic money; but we still cling with slavish servility to the silver of Abraham and the gold of Solomon.
I do not claim to have found the philosopher's stone, for which so many wiser men have sought in vain; but the currency plan I proposed in 1891—and which was again outlined in the ICONOCLAST for May of this year—has been carefully examined by the ablest financiers of Europe and America, and they have been unable to point out a fundamental fault. It is known as the interconvertible bond-currency plan, by which our circulating media would be bottomed on the entire wealth of the nation instead of upon fragments of metal of fluctuating value; by which the volume of the currency would depend, not upon the fecundity of the mines, the fiat of Congress or the greed of Wall street, but upon the needs of commerce itself. By this plan the proportion between the money-work to be done and the money available to do it is always the same; hence it would afford an immutable measure of value. In studying the plan it is well to bear in mind that our foreign trade—that bogy man of the metallists—has no more to do with our currency than with our pint cups and bushel- baskets—no more than with our language and religion; that we can pay our foreign debts and collect our foreign credits only in commodities; that the prattle indulged in by the metallists anent "money that is good the world over" is mere goose-speech—that there is no such money. We buy and sell with England and France to the extent of tens of millions annually; yet I haven't seen a British guinea or a French franc in fifteen years. And if you had a foreign coin and should go around to a resort, and call for a glass of—er—of buttermilk, and plank the little stranger down on the counter, the party in the white apron and Alaska dazzler would say:
"Wot yer givin' us?"
You'd reply: "I'm givin you gold—money good the world over."
"Wot is it—watch charm? Dis ain't no pawn shop."
"But that's money."
"Eh?"
"Money—gold coin that maketh the heart glad."