THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
actually carried on by barter—the exchange of products and other things of value. It was a favorite jest with us that we might have to ask our butcher to accept as payment a table and to return our change in the shape of chairs. Many of the business men of our little city became unable to meet their obligations and had to make assignments. Indeed, the making of assignments was so much the order of the day that men familiarly asked one another on the street whether they had already made, or when they were going to make theirs. Gradually all feeling of bashful embarassment, all shamefacedness about such things vanished, and bankruptcy appeared to be the natural condition of business men who owed any money. Nor was there any atmosphere of gloom about it in our community. As nobody had—or was permitted—to suffer as to his breakfast and dinner, the whole affair seemed rather to be taken as a freak of fortune, a huge joke for which nobody was responsible. To be sure, in the larger cities, and especially the great business-centers, the effects of the collapse were very serious. There was not only much commercial embarrassment of a disastrous nature and many sudden lapses from wealth to poverty, but among the laboring people, real distress and suffering. With us, too, many business men found themselves entangled in difficulties which in other surroundings would have gravely troubled them and made them put on long faces, but if any of our neighbors felt anxiety in secret, they did not express it in public. The general humor of the situation made everybody laugh, and whatever there may have been of concealed depression of spirits did not spread. Moreover the crisis did not last long. The relations between debtor and creditor in our community were presently adjusted, generally in an amicable manner, and after a little while the “time without money,” as we called it, was remembered as an amusing episode.
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