It has been and will continue to be my purpose to use the gold
produced at the Morning mine, either in the purchase of existing
loans, or the making of new loans, so that whatever of loss may come
from diminution of the purchasing power of a dollar may fall not
altogether upon those who have loaned money, but in part upon those
who have deliberately or accidentally caused such increase. I suggest
that if such increase in the currency be caused by the government, a
similar moral obligation would rest upon it.
The addition of $2,400,000,000 to the currency of the country will
unquestionably largely increase all values. It will at the same time
encourage—nay, almost compel—capital to seek investment in active
industries rather than in dormant funds. For the present it will
supply those who can use money to advantage with a sure and convenient
method of obtaining it at a cheap rate of interest, while its ultimate
tendency must be to eliminate interest on money from the world’s
transactions, and bring money to what I conceive to be its true
function—a measurer of values only.
When no interest can be obtained for the use of money, then money will
cease to be the most valuable and become the least valuable form of
property, and the investor will be required to share the risk, if not
the labor, of producing values, instead of leaving this to others,
while he absorbs the profits to himself.
I believe that civilization is ready for this forward step. The
discovery of gold enough to compel it may have precipitated the
movement, but the movement would have come all the same if the Morning
mine had never been discovered.
There is not a single benefit which the donation of twenty-four
hundred millions of gold will confer upon the people of the United
States that might not equally be conferred by an act of Congress
providing for the issuance and loaning of the same number of paper
dollars, not based upon gold at all.
The credit of this great government used for the purpose of
accommodating the business, increasing the resources, and stimulating
the industrial activity of this great people, and, supported by the
indestructible and undepreciable security of land, would be quite as
solid a basis for twenty hundred millions of paper dollars as five
thousand tons of yellow metal.
I am, Mr. President, your obedient servant,
DAVID MORNING.
CHAPTER XXII.
“The product of ill-mated marriages.”
_From the Baroness Von Eulaw to Mrs. Perces Thornton._
BERLIN, November 1, 1895.