But if Brent had escaped thus far the commoner penalties of wealth, the exemption was more than overbalanced by his peculiar responsibilities. His misgivings about the effects of an enormous addition to the world’s supply of monetary metal were growing stronger daily. He began weeks before to realize the practical wisdom of the financial maxim that the essential value of gold as a monetary standard is its stability--its steady and almost unfluctuating supply. Before he left America signs were multiplying of a radical disturbance at the foundations of the financial system. High and advancing prices with cheap money was a combination so paradoxical and rare, that all calculations were upset by it. Already the tendency was to accumulate and hoard visible property, rather than the golden or other monetary tokens of it. Who wanted his possessions turned into gold or other form of cash, when the purchasing power of money was declining daily? The prices of food, of manufactures, of land, of everything except labor, were rising at an unprecedented rate. There was a scramble for things of intrinsic value--a property panic, it might be called. Wheat, for instance, was climbing toward famine prices. Why should an owner of grain sell, unless to invest in some commodity enhancing in value at a still more rapid rate? Stocks and bonds or money itself would yield only the most trifling returns on the capital represented. The prudent investor was forced to cling to those forms of property the demands for which were unceasing and inevitable. And the effect of this sudden limitation of the channels of investment? Obvious enough, and ominous too, to the dullest comprehension. When everybody wants to buy and nobody is willing to sell, prices quoted have small relation to the intrinsic value of the commodity in question. There was almost a corner in the markets of America. It was no artificial squeeze, manipulated by scheming traders. It was the inexorable working of one of the great laws of demand and supply, which no man or set of men could completely control. It presaged something worse. Already the mutterings of a rapidly gathering storm were heard throughout the land. Wage-earners, and all men with fixed incomes, were at the mercy of a far worse demon than “hard times.” Reduce the pay of every laborer and salary-earner in the United States forty per cent within six short months, and what would be the effect? The very foundations of constitutional government would hardly bear the strain. And yet that was just what had happened. The artisan who earned $20 a week in September was able to buy no more with his money than the laborer’s $12 a week had purchased the previous March. To restore to the artisan the same equivalent in purchasing power that he had received in March, would require raising his wages to $33 a week. In other words, $20 would buy in March precisely the same quantities of food and clothing and fuel which it needed $33 to procure in September.