384 
DUTTON. 
of the community is outraged, but not its pocket. If by 
subtle art one man has been able to gain possession of a 
railroad system at the expense of the stockholders, he may 
be an object of moral aversion, but bis ill-gotten railroads 
remain and must carry the public and its goods just the 
same or he will lose what he has wrongfully gotten. He 
may have broken the moral law and evaded the statutes, 
but the economic law still holds him with unshaken grip. 
If offenses of this kind occur it is an excellent reason for 
striving to make the statute law as strong and inevitable as 
the economic; but it is a very bad reason for seeking to 
make the economic law as weak and as full of holes as the 
statute. 
It is to the latter effort that money fallacies invariably 
lead. Under the influence of these fallacies the effort is 
first directed to making money cheap and lowering the 
value of its unit. Its effect on credit capital is immediate 
and destructive. Credit capital is the life-blood of industry, 
the subtle fluid which penetrates and nurtures every part of 
the economic organism. A lowering of the standard of 
value does not ^destroy, at least for a time, the fixed capital 
of the country. It does not contract the length of a railway 
nor the size of a machine shop, nor the number, size, or power 
of the machines that are in it; but it contracts credit capi¬ 
tal directly in proportion as the unit of value is contracted. 
But that is not the worst of it. Not only is a part of the 
blood drawn from the veins and spilled, but the arrow wil¬ 
fully shot from the bow of the law always leaves a poisoned 
wound. A creditor may lose by the honest insolvency of 
his debtor, and many a creditor will do what he justly can 
to put the debtor on his feet again. A creditor may be de¬ 
frauded, but without losing confidence in other men; but 
when laws are passed whose ultimate effect must be to im¬ 
pair the obligations of contracts, then, indeed, the very 
ground on which the structure of modern credit stands is 
undermined. 
