Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
423 
ture of things always must be, a failure.” But you will let me say 
that, in view of its constant and habitual failure, at all times and 
under all circumstances, I should think the friends of this theory 
would, like Cicero’s soothsayers, laugh when they look each other 
in the face. We may at least be pardoned for doubting until its 
advocates can show us some nation which has tried it and not been 
obliged to suspend specie payment, or to save specie payment by 
breaking its own laws at least three times in every fifty years. 
After we have established gold as money, it still continues of 
course, to fluctuate as a commodity, and further, it fluctuates, be¬ 
sides and especially, as money. As Bagehot reminds us (Lombard 
St. 120) u the fluctuations in the value of money are greater than 
those in the value of most other commodities. At times there is 
an excessive pressure to borrow it and at times an excessive 
pressure to lend it and so the price is forced up and down.” 
During our late rebellion, gold fluctuated more than any 
other commodity except cotton, and yet we insist on making 
gold our standard, and tying ourselves to this floating mass as our 
sheet anchor, like Sinbad, who anchored on a whale. Our govern¬ 
ment committed a great folly, one that deranged the prices of all 
our products, when it compelled the payment of all debts due to it 
in gold. That act raised the price of gold—gave it an artificial 
stimulus, and of course raised the real price of every article in the 
country. If government should order twenty millions worth of 
iron, that demand would stimulate every trade in the country and 
raise prices in all of them. Coal, corn, boots, hats, meat, would all go 
up, and even newspapers would make money advertising for the 
crowds of new laborers needed. But that would be a healthy and 
useful stimulus. At the end of the year government would have 
twenty million dollars’ worth of iron, for rails or ironclads. So if 
government should order every man to put a pound of butter on 
the top of his house, and when it grew rancid, or melted, replace it 
with a fresh one, that order would stimulate and raise prices in ev¬ 
ery branch of business, but it would be a useless and wasteful 
stimulus. The nation at the end of the year would have, in return 
for this great expense, only a lot of comparatively worthless grease. 
In making the useless arrangement of demanding its debts in gold, 
government gave a useless and harmful stimulus to gold, and con¬ 
sequently to all other products. Only evil and waste have resulted. 
