The Reform of the Currency Volume 1, No. 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1911 Excerpt: ... THE NEED OF AN EXPANSION JOINT IN OUR MONETARY SYSTEM' ROBERT D. KENT President of the Merchants' National Bank of Passaic, N. J. THE expansion joint is a well-known device in mechanics. If you should walk over the Brooklyn bridge you would see a place where steel plates slide over each other in the roadway, and if you should ask the purpose they serve you will be informed that it is an "expansion joint," to allow for the effect of heat and cold in expanding and contracting the metal of which the bridge is built. Your watch has in it a device known as the " balance wheel " which is an expansion joint to enable it to do its work correctly, regardless of the expansion by heat or the contraction by cold. Note that while the name is "expansion joint" the thing really is an expansion and contraction joint. We experience numerous ill effects because we have no expansion joint in connection with our currency or because our currency lacks elasticity. Last year the value of our principal crops amounted to 4,652 million dollars. Practically all of this is harvested and marketed in the fall; hence we require great amounts of money to " move the crops." We hear that term very frequently but I do not think many of us realize what is implied by it. Several years ago I was in Nebraska, and with some other men was starting to drive out into the country from a town on the railroad. One of our party who lived in the town called our attention to a man driving into the place with several hogs in his wagon. He said, " That man will sell his hogs and get twenty-five or thirty dollars for them, and will spend five or six dollars for groceries and supplies, and take the balance of the money back into the country to his home ten or fifteen miles from the railroad. The next week he ...