“You fail to understand how that can be possible. You know that you threshed out and measured into that bin 1,500 bushels of wheat. You go to the granary and find that it is true. No wheat is there, but there appears to be an enormous lot of wheat upon those wagons for 500 bushels, and you ask the note-holder, ‘Who measured this wheat? and let me see how you measured it.’ You see something in the form of a measure about as large as a washtub, and you ask him what that is. He tells you that is the half-bushel measure which he measured your wheat; but you reply, ‘My dear sir, that holds more than half a bushel; that measure will hold 6 pecks.’ He answers, ‘Correct, it does hold six pecks, but it now takes 12 pecks to make a bushel, instead of four pecks. Together with other friends who had wheat coming to us we went before the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures and secured the passage of a legislative enactment, that it should require 12 pecks instead of 4 pecks to make a bushel. We have secured this legislation for the proper protection of the holders of wheat obligations, for our own security, and for fear that we should become timid and lose confidence in your ability to pay unless we changed the standard of measure.’ But you reply, ‘Sir, we who have obligations maturing, contracts long standing, have never asked or consented to the enactment of such legislation. Our representatives in Congress never permitted us to understand that any such legislation was pending,’ He replies, ‘Sir, you might have known it had you desired to do so, or had you kept yourself as well posted in legislative affairs as do the holders of obligations calling for products of the soil for payment. We have our representatives in Congress. We reward them for their fidelity to our interests; we punish them for fidelity to yours.’ “This, in my judgment, is not a far-fetched illustration, but depicts the exact condition against which production to-day protests. The debtor’s obligation, true, does not call for wheat in specific terms. It calls for dollars, but by legislation we have made the dollar three times as large in purchasing power or in measuring values as it was before. We talk about gold being the only money of intrinsic value, and attempt to befog and mystify the masses by telling them that it has intrinsic value, when its value is merely the artificial product of legislation.