224 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTmeet a fixed schedule? His answer, no doubt, would have been
that his central regulatory body would wrestle with such prob
lems; but it is difficult to see how a satisfactory, workable solution
could have been found, for in the end, the Tauschbank merely
"destroyed money through new money" and substituted one form
of currency for another.
Weitling's criticism of the existing monetary and banking sys
tem of the United States was picturesque and eloquent in its reve
lation of abuses. In one issue of Die Republik der Arbeiter, he
actually alleged that banks kept the deposits of all who died in
testate. Though his diatribes recognized many of the short
comings of modern capitalism, they revealed little scientific
knowledge of its intricate operations. While Weitling indicted
the economic system, he failed to see that money was not the sole
cause of its evils but only a natural and necessary by-product of
the system. It must be remembered, however, that he wrote at a
time when banking and currency in the United States still were in
a very unstable condition and the losses to the public very large.^2
Every new proposal has some devoted supporters and Weitling's Tauschbank was no exception, though the plan never got
further than the printing of a few sheets of new currency with
funds from the Arbeiterbund. Franz Arnold in 1850 carried the
new gospel to a number of American cities and debated furiously
in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with those who opposed the plan.
Indeed, Arnold may have begun the agitation even before Weitling became its leading champion. A correspondent from Stuttgart
writing about the coming proletarian revolution maintained that
"there will be no golden age until money has been eliminated." A
St. Louis paper endorsed both land reform and Weitling's bank of
exchange and deplored the rivalry between the advocates of these
two panaceas. The Cincinnati Volksblatt, edited in 1850 by
Stefan Molitor and K. Resch, repeatedly supported the proposal(^2) See also F. P. Schiller, "Georg Weber, ein Mitarbeiter des Pariser Vorwärts,"
Marx-Engels Archiv, II (1927), 469. Weitling preserved among his effects a
copy of Thompson's Bank Note Reporter which had to be consulted to follow
the fluctuations in the value of bank notes.