The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 09 (of 12): Dresden Edition—PoliticalIngersoll, Robert Green
History
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 09 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Political
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
The people have to support the Government; the Government cannot support
the people. The Government has no money but what it received from the
people. It had therefore to borrow money to carry on the war. Every
greenback that it issued was a forced loan. My notes are not a legal
tender, though if I had the power I might possibly make them so. We
borrowed money and we have to pay the debt. That debt represents the
expenses of war. The horses and the gunpowder and the rifles and the
artillery are represented in that debt--it represents all the munitions
of war. Until we pay that debt we can never be a solvent nation. Until
our net profits amount to as much as we lost during the war we can never
be a solvent people. If a man cannot understand that, there is no use in
talking to him on the subject. The alchemists in olden times who fancied
that they could make gold out of nothing were not more absurd than the
American advocates of soft money. They resemble the early explorers of
our continent who lost years in searching for the fountain of eternal
youth, but the ear of age never caught the gurgle of that spring. We
all have heard of men who spent years of labor in endeavoring to produce
perpetual motion. They produced machines of the most ingenious character
with cogs and wheels, and pulleys without number, but these ingenious
machines had one fault, they would not go. You will never find a way to
make money out of nothing. It is as great nonsense as the fountain of
perpetual youth. You cannot do it.
Gold is the best material which labor has yet found as a measure of
value. That measure of value must be as valuable as the object it
measures.
The value of gold arises from the amount of labor expended in producing
it. A gold dollar will buy as much labor as produced that dollar.
[Here the speaker opened a telegram from Maine, which he
read to the audience amid a perfect tempest of applause. It
contained the following words:] "We have triumphed by an
immense majority, something we have not achieved since
1868." [The speaker resumed.] And this despatch is signed by
the man who clutched the throats of the Democrats and held
them until they grew black in the face, James G. Blaine. ***
Now, gentlemen, to pass from the financial part of this, and I will say
one word before I do it. The Republican party intends to pay its debts
in coin on the 1st of January, 1879. Paper money means probably the
payment of the Confederate debt; a metallic currency, the discharge of
honest obligations. We have touched hard-pan prices in this country, and
we want to do a hard-pan business with hard money.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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