results. Let gold gain three per cent in value this year, one
per cent next year, and four per cent in the year following, and
injurious things will happen; but let it gain even as much as three
per cent each year for a century, and at the test points in business
life there will ensue the essential effects that would have followed
if it had not gained at all.

This means that with a steadily appreciating currency the things will
happen that make for prosperity. The debtor will get justice,
enterprise will be safe, and wages will gain while industry gains. The
_entrepreneur_, in whose behalf bad counsel has lately been given,
will best do his strategic work, not with that currency which varies
in value the least, but with that which varies most uniformly. If it
appears that gold is likely to appreciate more than silver, and to
appreciate more steadily, it is decidedly the better metal. It is not
inflation on which the _entrepreneur_ permanently thrives, nor is it
contraction through which, in the long run, he suffers; it is changes
in the rate of inflation or of contraction that produce marked and
damaging effects at the critical points of business life.

_Loan Interest as related to the Increase of Real Capital._--How does
a slow and steady appreciation of any metallic currency affect the
relations of business classes? Does it rob borrowers and enrich
lenders? Does it favor the consumers by giving falling prices, and
hurt producers in the same degree? Does it tax enterprise and paralyze
the nerves of business? The answer is an emphatic _No_. Steadiness in
the rate of appreciation of money is the salvation of business. Not by
one iota can such a slow and steady movement, in itself alone, rob the
borrowing class. This is a sweeping claim; let us examine it.

It has been shown that true interest is governed by the marginal
productivity of capital. As the utility of the final increment of a
commodity fixes the price that a seller can get for his whole supply,
so the productive power of the final unit of capital expresses what
the owner of capital can get by lending his entire supply. This
earning capacity expresses itself in a percentage of the capital
itself. If the final unit can create a twentieth of itself in a year,
any unit can get for its owner about that amount.

In assuming that capital earns a twentieth of itself in a year, we may
use a commodity standard of measurement. A grocer's capital of twenty
barrels of