Our silver friends may say that this will not trouble them, and that the more the money-changers of Wall Street come to grief the better. Indeed if it were only the money-changers of Wall Street that suffered we might easily console ourselves. But the bonds of the United States, and of states and municipalities, and the bonds and stocks of our railroads, of street railways and of industrial corporations, are also held largely in this country, not merely by big capitalists, but by people of small means, farmers, wage-earners, who have invested their savings in them; and by savings banks, life insurance companies and trust funds, in which many millions of poor people are interested. Is their loss also a matter of indifference?
Again, our silver friends may say that if Europeans do not “trust silver,” and in their fright throw away our securities at a heavy sacrifice, we can pick up those securities at a splendid bargain; that some of them will, after all, become good, and rise to high figures again, and that thus we shall make a heavy profit on them. This is true. But who will make that profit? Not the farmer, not the laborer in the workshop, not the toiling masses. No, it will be he whom our silver friends love to denounce as the great gold-bug, the rich operator, the very incarnation of the “money power.” That class of men will make those profits and be more powerful than before. The catastrophe in Wall Street, caused by the election of Mr. Bryan, and the ruining of some Wall Street men, would not mean the destruction of what the Populist understands by Wall Street; it would mean some big fish swallowing some little fish, the big fish growing still bigger by the operation. It would not weaken, but more strongly concentrate the so-called “money power.”
How can I foretell these things with so much assurance? Because they have already cast their shadows before. Do
