They are obliged, out of sympathy with their
neighbors, to look blue, and probably few of them are entirely
exempt from the general anxiety about the future, but, nevertheless,
they are on the whole rather gratified than otherwise by the thing's
having happened. In the first place, all those persons who give
their attention to the currency question are divided into two great
schools--the paper men and the hard-money men; and every panic
affords each of them what it considers a legitimate ground of
triumph. The paper men say that the crisis is due to failure to
issue more paper at the proper moment, and the hard-money men
ascribe it to the irredeemability of what is already issued; and
each side chuckles over the convulsion as a startling confirmation
of its views, and goes about calling attention to it almost
gleefully. There is a similar division on the banking question.
Indeed the feud between the friends of free banking and restricted
banking is fiercer than that between the two currency schools, and
has raged longer, and every monetary crisis feeds the flame.
Pages:
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111