which they were spent like water. If they were too busy to spend the money themselves, they paid shipbuilders and contractors a 10% bonus for what they could get rid of legally, and they encouraged them to outbid each other for labor and supplies. This, of course, was due to zeal outrunning discretion, a natural phenomenon when democracy goes to war. Nevertheless, before the disturbance was over, it had the effect—of raising prices to a point where the man of very limited means had to part reluctantly with his treasured certificate of loyalty, with its face value of $100.00, for about $41.00 worth of essential commodities in terms of his original dollar.[1] In due time, then, he was separated from the certificate entitling him to gold dollars. Government spending ceased, and later, after the excitement was over, the gospel of deflation was ushered in with all the fervor of a religious revival, despite the general knowledge that this, if acquiesced in, means that those in modest circumstances, through indirect taxation, will have to pay back to the stronger lenders who were not frozen out, and to the later traders, who bought from the weaker at a discount, three or four times as much in goods and services as the weaker obtained for their certificates.
The other detail in the picture is that of the cautious individual who picked up these $100.00 certificates for about $85.00 and now hopes to be able to command the efficient chastened service of the man who sold his bond at $85.00, on a basis of three dollars per day for labor, instead of six dollars per day—a very logical way of making his $85.00 worth $200.00, or more, and, for the beneficiary, a happy fruition of our so-called gold-standard system.
Now all this is not the fault of any individual, nor is it due to the malevolent plotting of any sinister “group” or “money trust.” It arises because of the quaint delusion, which we nearly all share, that we must submit nationally to the measuring of human effort in terms of an unknown number of grains of gold; and the far more dangerous delusion that we can go on multiplying our promises to pay for effort with gold, when the little gold that exists is already held in private
- ↑ See page 228.
