By multiplying the number of persons thus shown to be idle, by this
moderate average wage, we arrive at the amount of $4,500,000 as the
daily sum which is lost to the wage earners of the United States by the
non-employment of labor. This is a money loss of $27,000,000 a week,
$117,000,000 a month, or the amazing sum of $1,404,000,000 a year. A
saving of this sum for a year and three months would pay our entire
national debt. This being the loss in a single year, we can imagine
(making due allowance for difference in the numbers of the population)
how stupendous has been the loss to the nation during the past seventeen
years, a loss exceeding incomparably all other losses whatsoever.
If a crop of wheat be lost, it is appropriately noted as a public
misfortune; if a city be burned down, or swept away by flood, it is
properly regarded as a great national calamity, and the sympathies of
all the people go out in unstinted measure to the sufferers. But here is
a loss as real and as deplorable as any ever caused by flood or fire--a
loss whose consequences, while not so apparent, are as destructive to
national prosperity as the burning of ten cities, or the occurrence of
one hundred and forty Johnstown disasters every year, and always to the
people who can least afford it. Yet it passes almost wholly unheeded
except by the sufferers.
A war that would take a million of men from industry and deprive the
country of the production which would result from their labors, would
be regarded as a calamity of unsurpassable magnitude, yet a shrinkage in
the volume of money relatively to population withdraws much more than
that number from productive pursuits, and without the salutary
discipline and restraints of military life, subjects them to conditions
of which the unavoidable results are poverty and crime.
Imagine, Mr. President, the unhappiness, discontent, and even despair
implied in the mere statement that 2,000,000 men are constantly out of
employment; (or, what amounts to the same thing, that three times that
number are idle for four months in the year!) Imagine, what it means to
the working people of this country to be deprived of the enormous sum of
$1,400,000,000 a year.
But, aside from the effect on the individual, what benumbing
consequences are entailed upon the nation by the idleness of so large a
number of its people. The loss of the wealth which the labor of those
men might have created is a loss never to be retrieved. When the money
volume of a country is sufficient to keep prices from falling, and thus
to encourage capital to seek productive enterprises, in which labor is
employed, every willing man is kept at work, and no country can enjoy
any higher degree of prosperity than when all its people are employed,
and the products of their labor equitably distributed.
Much, I believe, of the prejudice against silver money arises from an
idea, conscientiously entertained, by many, that gold money has the
greater "intrinsic value." I shall, therefore, Mr. President, at the
risk of being a little abstruse, discuss that point.