or melted down. Once money, always money, and he who alters
its money status we lock up as a felon. There is no legal reason and no
moral reason and no market reason to militate against what I have
outlined as a policy. Finance as a science is simpler than the science
of soap-boiling, although the money-changers in the temple for their own
selfish advantage prefer you to think otherwise."

"Your wholesale consumption of gold," interrupted Senator Coot, "would
raise the price of gold beyond measure."

"Wherein would lie the harm? So that it did not disturb the comparative
prices of soap and pork and sugar and flour and lumber and on through
the list of a world's commodities--and it would not--no one would
experience either jolt or squeeze. With wheat at a dollar a bushel, a
reduction to ten cents a bushel would work no injury if at the same time
every other commodity in its price fell ninety per cent. To merely
multiply the 'price' of gold, a metal which when it isn't money is
jewelry, would cut no more important figure in the economy of life than
would the making of one thousand marks upon a thermometer where now we
make one hundred. Suppose, instead of one hundred degrees, we scratched
off one thousand degrees on a thermometer in the same space: would it
make the weather any hotter? I grant you a cautious business manager
would not walk in among the gold-sellers and purchase ten billion
dollars' worth of gold in a day; and for the same reason that a cautious
cowboy wouldn't ride in among a bunch of cattle and flap a blanket. Not
because there lurks inherent peril in so doing, but for that in the
timid ignorance of the herd it would produce a stampede."

"But don't you see," objected Senator Coot, who was learned in the cant
of currency and believed it, "don't you see that what you propose, by
putting up the price of gold and putting down the price of everything
else, would multiply riches in the hands of the creditor class? Wouldn't
it work injustice to the debtors of the land?"

"Without pausing to guess," said Mr. Bayard, "for that is all one might
do, whether the extravagant coinage of gold would promote its 'price,' I
will submit that such contention should be disregarded. It is too
general, and too incessant. If such were permitted the rank of argument,
it would trip up every tariff, every appropriation, every governmental
thing.

"Also, one must not put a too narrow limit upon the term 'creditor
class.' Eve