Very correctly, then, gold was not used as currency money. But
we did discover this from our own experience and from the experience
of those who preceded us that it was quite possible for our Government, or for those who had control of the gold, to keep if in a safe
place and issue against it those dollar bills that we carry around to
the extent of two and one half times as many dollar bills as we had
dollars' worth of gold in our Treasury or in our vaults. I am telling
you absolutely nothing new when I am repeating these ancienthistory facts. Currency money at the rate of two and one half
times the amount of gold money would be found to be adequate and
would be found to be reasonable, and we would be on the gold standard. Now, we had this thought in our minds, that the philosophy of
capitalism, as I understand it and interpret it, means that m the
issuance of money, capital provides a means by which we may have
two and one half times as much currency money as we have of gold
money, and by which we may have 12 times the number of debt dollars that we have of gold dollars in our hands for safe-keeping.
We are perfectly conservative when we do that, but what happened?
After the great war, we awoke one morning, with the aid of our
bookkeepers, to discover that we had about $235,000,000,000 payable
in gold. Those 8235,000,000,000 were not all Government dollars.
Some of them represented insurance money owing to policy holders,
and some of it was corporation money owing to stockholders. Some
of them were corporate debts as well as private debts. The $235,000,-
000,000 was simply the sum total of our national, corporate, and
private debts, payable in gold.