“While the volume of money is decreasing, though very slowly, the value of each unit of money is increasing in a corresponding ratio, and property and wages are decreasing. Those who have contracted to pay money find that it is constantly becoming more difficult to meet their engagements. The margins of securities melt rapidly, and their confiscation by the creditor becomes only a question of time. All productive enterprises are discouraged and stagnate because the cost of producing commodities to-day will not be covered by the price obtainable for them to-morrow. Exchanges become sluggish, because those who have money will not part with it for either property or service, for the obvious reason that money alone is increasing in value while everything else is decreasing in price. This results in the withdrawal of money from the channels of circulation and its deposit in great hordes where it can exert no influence on prices. Money in shrinking volume becomes the paramount object of commerce instead of the beneficent instrument. Instead of mobilizing industry, it poisons and dries up its life currents. It is the fruitful source of political and social disturbance. It foments strife between labor and other forms of capital, while itself, hidden away, gorges on both. It rewards close-fisted lenders and filches from and bankrupts enterprising producers. An increasing value of money and falling prices have been and are more fruitful of human misery than war, pestilence or famine; they have wrought more injustice than all the bad laws ever enacted.”—_Report of United States Monetary Commission, vol. I, p. 10 et seq._ Pointing out how a contraction of the money volume increases the debt obligations of the past, R. H. Patterson, especially commended by Gladstone as one of the ablest of English writers on finance, says: “And what is such a dearth of money and rise in the measure of value but an injustice to the many to the gain of the few—an unfair exaltation of the power of the past over the present, an unfair and undesirable aggravation of the poverty of the poor and the wealth of the rich—a stereotyping of classes according to wealth, until they tend to become permanent? We have seen how powerful and beneficial was the influx of the precious metals from the New World four centuries ago in breaking the social bondage which had settled over Europe during the long night of the Dark Ages, enabling that generation to escape from the heritage of the past and bound forward upon the new career then opening to mankind. Such times come from the hand of Providence, and with an exceeding rarity even in the long career of civilized mankind. But at least let us avoid the opposite and never allow successive generations to be unfairly—nay, most unjustly, though it may not be so meant—handicapped, each in its own race, owing to a growing dearth and dearness of money.”—_The New Golden Age, vol. II, p. 500._ President Grant said: