Benjamin S. Heath
Labor and Finance Revolution

Part Second.

Chapter i.
The Rights of Man.

Every history and traditionary account of creation agree in establishing the unity of man, that the whole human race is of one degree, or grade;  and consequently that "all men are born free and equal in respect to natural rights, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation."

Paine, in Natural Rights of Man says:

Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence.  Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.  Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.  Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent.  Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.

From this short review it will be easy to distinguish between that class of natural rights which man retains after entering into society and those which he throws into the common stock as a member of society.

The natural rights which he retains are all those in which the Power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself.  Among this class, as is before mentioned, are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind; consequently religion is one of those rights.  The natural rights which are not retained, are all those in which, though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them is defective.  They answer not his purpose.  A man, by natural right, has a right to judge in his own cause; and so far as the right of the mind is concerned, he never surrenders it.  But what availeth it him to judge, if he has not power to redress ?  He therefore deposits this right in the common stock of society, and takes the ann of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own.  Society grants him nothing.  Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right.

From these premises, two or three certain conclusions will follow.

First, That every civil right grows out of a natural right; or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged.

Secondly, That civil power properly considered as such is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but when collected to a focus becomes competent to the Purpose of every one.

Thirdly, That the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to execute is as perfect as the right itself.

Deprived of these rights by the arbitrary powers of unjust law, the subjects of despotism and monarchical governments become slaves, and serfs, to the extent that these rights are denied them.

To escape the slavery of despotism, the early settlers of America left the land of their birth and oppression, traversed the wilderness of waves, and made their homes among the wild men, and the wild beasts of the new world.  But oppression followed them.  Like a beast of prey it smelled their blood afar off, and followed their trail.  They cheerfully bore the trials and hardships of the wilderness, but when in addition to these, their oppressors placed upon their necks the yoke they had made themselves exiles to escape, it was more than nature could endure.

Relying upon their own strength, the justice of cause, and the aid of Divine power, they promulgated to the world the great charter of natural and civil rights upon which our Government is claimed to be established.  They took the ground that all power exercised over a people must have some beginning, or origin.  It must be either delegated or assumed.  There are no other sources.  All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation.  The bill of rights proclaimed by our fathers contained the following:

I.  That men are born and should always continue free in respect to their natural rights.

II.  That the people is essentially the source of all sovereignty, nor can any individual, or any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not especially derived from the people.

III.  That the just powers of Government are derived from the consent of the governed.

IV.  That political liberty consists in the power and right of doing anything that does not injure another.

V.  That law should be an expression of the will of the people.

These glorious principles, these inalienable gifts of God to man, were wrenched from the Lion's jaws by our fathers after seven long years of bloody struggle, and they, soon after, made them over, assigned and bequeathed them to their posterity forever as a joint inheritance, in the following words:

"For the purpose of forming a more perfect Union;  to establish justice;  to insure domestic tranquility, to promote the general welfare, and to transmit to posterity the blessings of liberty, do ordain and establish this Constitution," etc.

Those old patriot heroes believed that men possessed rights, as well as kings.  That all men are created equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights;  that among these rights, are life, liberty and the pursuits of happiness, and that Governments are established among men to secure these rights.  Not for personal aggrandizement, not to oppress the people, not to create and foster grinding and robbing monopolies, not to deprive a portion of humanity of their natural rights that a favored few may enjoy a double portion — not to deprive men of their birthrights and blessings bequeathed to them by a benevolent Creator.

They further declared that whenever any form of Government became destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it !

The aristocracies of the Old World have robbed the masses of every natural right except the right to toil, suffer, and die.

The poor of Ireland and India suffer and starve, not because there are not fertile lands and abundant harvests, but because the ungodly laws of Britain have robbed the people of their right to the soil, and given to an aristocratic few all the sustenance from the bosom of our common mother earth, and being protected in this robbery by the arbitrary power of the Government, the poor, landless tenants are compelled to toil a life time for the crumbs which fall from the table of their lordly robber brothers.

Man inherits from his Creator certain natural rights, among which are:

The control of his own body, labor, skill and genius.  All the powers of his body and mind, and the right to exercise them in any manner he sees fit, provided he does not interfere with the rights of any other individual.  He has an absolute right to his own time, and cannot rightfully be the slave of another.  These are his individual rights, which cannot be justly claimed, controlled or, usurped by another.

Then man inherits in common with his brother man, the means of Life, Liberty and Happiness, and the facilities to fulfill his destiny, and accomplish his mission on earth.

The air to vitalize the life-currents of his body, is his in common with all animated nature, and its monopoly by any man, or set of men, under cover of law, would be legalized murder, and the masses who had not the means to purchase their breath, would be justified in putting to death the monopolizer, or in abolishing the Government creating it;  in self defense.

Light and water are also man's common heritage, and no man has a moral right to deprive another of these life-giving elements.  The day for work, and the night for rest — the seasons as they come and go, are the joint inheritance of humanity.

But the most important item, perhaps, in the inventory of man's natural rights, is his inalienable right to occupy, till and enjoy the fruits of his pro-rata of God's green earth, a right which is more fully discussed in the following chapter.

Chaptor II.
The Land Question.

" I see no reason, or natural right why a deed upon parchment should convey the domain of land." —Blackstone.

One of the most momentous questions of the day, a question that is destined in the near future to shake civilization from center to circumference, is the Land Question.

What this question is, is well defined by that eminent political economist, John G. Drew, in Land Labor and Money in History.

" The term Land Reform as it is now currently used, defines a great and rapidly growing demand that —

"First, No more land shall be occupied by a person or family than he or they can and will properly cultivate;

"Second, That all control of lands shall be vested in the State as trustee for its citizens, thus debarring all and any from proprietorship of land, and confining their ownership to the products thereof and the improvements thereon resulting from their enterprise and industry.

"And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families" --Numbers 33:54 "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family." --Leviticus 25:10 "Woe unto them that join house to house, lay field to field, till no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth !" --Isaiah 5:8

"That such conditions were recognized in the Theocracy of the Jews under the Mosaic dispensation is clearly demonstrated by the Fiats of Jehovah that 'the land should not be sold forever,' and the supplementary legislation fixing every fiftieth year, as a sabbath of sabbaths, a jubilee of years when leases should be renewed or cancelled, the bonds of the oppressed should be broken and the enslaved, whether by debt or other bondage, should go free.  Every reader of the Bible knows that, and every priest and clergymen can explain the same.

"All eminent historians admit the antiquity of the teaching, and no legalist who values his reputation, Blackstone included, dare deny the entire logic of the position.

"Knowing the utter impotency of efforts honestly and logically directed to successfully combat the arguments of those advocating land reform, the predatory classes have recourse to their only remaining weapon, black-guarding and abase;  exactly as the skunk, not endowed by nature with nobler weapons of offense and defense, hurls his execrable filth at his enemy, which is, by sensitive people and animals, more carefully avoided than the more deadly but less dirty weapons of nobler creatures.

" Contrary to the rules which govern other professional gamblers, they play their best or worst card first, and slap the face of their intended victim with the charge that he is an agrarian.

"In a large majority of instances this is enough to silence the audacious iconoclast, who supposes from the self-satisfied and triumphant tone with which the shot was fired, that it is some newly invented and intensely concentrated missive, containing the sublimated essence of every sin possible to imagine.

" It is possibly more deeply penetrative and devastatively explosive projectile than its old fashioned prototype, "you are an abolitionist," which in the past generation knocked down and kept down many a noble fellow, until, when the time arrived, he sprang to his feet to face the more deadly but less detestable missives of the bomb and bullet in defense of his cherished thoughts.

"Let us pick up and examine that dreadful term and see what it means and what it is made of.

" Niebuhr, the eminent German historian of Rome, antagonizing the great theory that farming was not proper for free men, says:

" 'To what more than her system of colonization, a branch of her agrarian scheme, was she [Rome] indebted for the security and extension of her frontier ?  A host of warriors were trained up ready to take the field at the call of their country, yet no less ready to exchange the sword for the plowshare.

" 'It is not, however, in a military point of view that the value of these institutions is evident.  They were of no less domestic importance in providing against the phenomena so frequently met with in great cities of the most squalid indigence by the side of the most profuse extravagance.'

" Or as Victor Hugo would say, monstrous opulence and monstrous poverty.

" Considering that Niebuhr ranks as amongst the most conservative of historians, his testimony is of peculiar value.

" Dr. Thomas Arnold, very pleasantly known to many as the much-loved principal of the Rugby School when Thomas Hughes was a pupil therein, says of the first land reform known in Roman history:

" 'By a strange compensation of fortune the first Roman whose greatness is really historical is the man whose deeds no poet sang and whose memory the early annalists, repeating the language of the party who destroyed him, have branded with the charge of Treason and attempted Tyranny.  This was Spurius Cassius.  He procured, although at the price of his own life [in the fifth century before Christ], the enactment of the first agrarian law.

" Dr. Arnold notes as reigning not long afterward 'the good King Servius Tullius,' and quotes him approvingly as an 'agrarian' who divided among the common people the public lands.

"In or about the year 468 before Christ, new consuls were appointed and they were disposed to execute the Agrarian law of Spurius Cassius and settle the people on the unused lands.  To this they were strenuously opposed by the patrician classes who, as before noted, had assassinated the author of the law.  For two years a violent political conflict raged which was only abated by the ravages of a devastating pestilence perhaps induced and certainly intensified by popular suffering.

" On abatement of the pestilence the Land Question again came up for consideration, and, strange to say, was not supported by the Democratic party.  The most charitable historians account for this sudden lethargy by supposing that the people, educated by the prolonged discussion, deemed that simply freedom of the public lands was but too partial a reform and demanded more or nothing.

" No progress was made for nearly seventy years, when in 399, before Christ, a revival of the agrarian law was proposed by the people's tribunes, which was successfully opposed by the aristocracy.  The people, by advice of the tribunes, then refused to pay taxes, which is, perhaps, the earliest instance of withholding supplies to kill vicious legislation.

" Thirty-one years passed over without progress, but then (before Christ, 368) Licinius was elected Tribune.

" He introduced three laws, which are known as the Licinian code, but although often referred to their texts seem to have been studiously suppressed.

" The first is described as a law to relieve the people from the overwhelming and increasing pressure of debt, and provided that whatever had been paid on a debt in interest, should be deducted from the principal.

" Dr. Arnold, in commenting on this law, says:

" 'If the rate of interest had been high, and if a debt had been long standing, the sum paid in interest would not only have equaled, but must in some cases have actually exceeded the amount of the principal, so that the creditor, far from having anything more to receive, would rather have had something to refund.'

"The Second Law was claimed to be necessary to save the people when once out of debt from all need and apology for getting into debt again, and provided that citizens should be granted lands from the public domain (ager publicus) restricting individual occupancy to 500 Jugera — about 300 acres each.

" The Third Law provided that the commons should be placed politically on a level with the patricians.

" As might have been expected, the mere proposal of these laws raised a terrific row among the patrician classes, who by trying to prevent the reading of them to the people (there were no printing presses then) and otherwise obstructing legislation and retarding intelligence, literally and actually performed the same drama in Rome 2,248 years ago that is now acted by Speaker Randall in the American House of Representatives in ignoring the people's representatives, and the subsidized press co-operate in their Conspiracy of Silence for the repression of current history and stifling proposed legislation.

" For five years this struggle continued.  Government was suspended, and historians have not yet ceased to wonder that society was not extinguished.

" At length, by Patrician influence, Marcus Furius Camillus was made Dictator, and he instantly summoned all citizens capable of bearing arms to rally round his standard;  but his orders were utterly disregarded, and the Senate, to allay the popular fury, called on him to resign his dictatorship which he did and died two years later of the pestilence which the miseries of the people had created.

"The Lician code then became the law of Rome, and in commemoration of so grand an event as the unification of the Roman people, the affirmation of equality and fraternity, a new temple was erected on the Capitoline hill and dedicated to Concord."

For the information of the general reader, as well as to place on the proper page of history a record of the views and arguments of that large and rapidly increasing class who are battling for "Land Reform," or the "emancipation of the soil from the bondage of ownership in man," I append the following:

"The soil is a free gift of God to all His creatures in common;  each individual has as valid a right and title to all the soil that is necessary to the subsistence of himself and family as he has to the air, the water, and the light of day.

" They deny the right of Governments to barter away to land monopolists the patrimony of unborn generations.  If the three or four millions of people who inhabited this country when the Republic was established held sufficient land for their own use, who gave them the right to convey, or the Government to receive as merchandise the soil which is now demanded for 50,000,000 souls ?

"They had the same right to barter away the liberties of posterity as to compel unborn millions to serve landlords ten or fifteen of the best years of their lives to redeem their confiscated patrimony.

" Was the unoccupied soil free as God designed it, all the labor of the individual would be his own.

" How is it now ?  Suppose a young man is compelled to purchase a farm of 100 acres, and to pay some land robber $10 per acre.  This would amount to $1,600, and this sum he must earn by the sweat of his brow.

" It will take him ten years, with close economy, to save up this amount.

" Now, this young man has been the land robbers' slave ten years.  He has been deprived of ten years of his liberty and pursuit of happiness, to purchase the freedom to enjoy his own rightful heritage.  The land robbers might just as well have held him in slavery ten years by a contract with the Government before he was born, and then set him free to go and claim his own, as to make him serve ten years to redeem his own.  It may be said that to deprive the land monopolies of their surplus acres, would be interfering with vested rights.  So the slave owners said when the Government restored to the bondmen their rights to life, liberty and the pursuits of happiness.  So says every man who is called upon to yield up wrongfully-obtained wealth.  There are no rights in wrongs, vested or otherwise.

"The title to stolen goods vests in the real owner, it matters not how many hands they have passed through, or how great a price was paid the thief.  Unborn souls cannot rightfully be deprived of their patrimony by the wrongs of their predecessors.

" Every man should be regarded as equally entitled to all the free gifts of God to His creatures, the soil included.  Each man inherits, in common with the universal brotherhood, these blessings.  Like every other element of nature, the soil was made for humanity.

" It is proper for the Government to hold it in trust for those of the present and future generations who may need to occupy and till it, but as an article of merchandise it was never intended in the economy of nature, nor is it permitted by the statutes of the Divine law.

"The merchandise of men should be limited to the productions of their hands and skill.  The soil should be free.  The improvements a man puts upon land are his own.  Those, he can sell, or dispose of, BUT GOD'S SOIL, NEVER !

" Man will never be free until the soil from which he derives sustenance is free.

" Thirty millions of people in America are houseless and homeless.  They are trespassers on every sod upon which they place their feet, except in the public highway, while huge monopolies and giant corporations hold by gift from the Government sufficient land to give every family in the nation a farm and the means of subsistence.

"Our homestead law, it is true, gives to every head of a family 160 acres if he will occupy it;  but the huge grants of land to railroad and other corporations have pushed individual homesteads so far into the wilderness, that a family is compelled to exile itself from civilization to avail itself of the Government's generosity(?).  The earth is the Lord's, and He demands it for His children.

" He has never parted with the title to a foot of it, and He commands the millions of wandering, law made, 'trespassers' TO GO AND CLAIM THEIR INHERITANCE !

"Man's rights to occupy, till, and enjoy the products of any unoccupied soil of earth, is as valid, and as inalienable, as his rights to live and breathe, and no man possesses a natural right, nor have Governments the moral right to confirm in man the ownership, or control of more soil than he can till and is necessary for his and his family's subsistence, while there is one landless soul on earth."

These are the arguments of the land reformers.

From an European stand point, especially England and Ireland, where millions of God's poor have been robbed of their soil, where millions of acres are used as sporting and play grounds for the royal robbers, these arguments have much force.

In America, the condition of the landless is not so bad at resent, but no one can deny the fact that the tendency and ultimate results of the specie basis, debt and usury systems which we have adopted is to concentrate landed estates, as well as other capital in the hands of the few.

Pliney says, "The colossal fortunes which ruined Italy and caused the downfall of Rome, were due to the concentration of estates through usury or interest."

Many suppose that the "Land Question," or Land Reform is a blow aimed at the large agricultural interest of the West — a blow aimed at those enterprising and thrifty farmers who hold titles to several hundred acres of soil, and produce a large surplus of farm crops.  This is a mistake.  The movement is to protect this very class of men in the enjoyment of their estates.

The policy which the Land Reformers are fighting against, if allowed to prevail, will rob every farmer in the West of his lands, as surely as the lands of a million English farmers passed into the hands of 30,000 of the nobility through a similar policy.  This, the money power fully understand, and through their organ, the New York Times, have given notice to the farmers of the country to prepare for the event.  They first distressed the farmers by depriving the country of money, which reduced values, depressed prices, and made it impossible far them to pay their taxes and defray current expenses from the proceeds of the farm.

On the 12th day of August, 1877, referring to the farmer's hard lot, the New York Times said:

" Is there a way of deliverance ?  There seems to be but one remedy, and that is a slow one, and not im mediately effective.  To reach it both farmers and capitalists need to be educated to it, but it seems to be inevitable that it must come about in course of time.  It is a change of ownership of the soil, and the creation of a class of land-owners on the one hand, and of tenant farmers on the other, something similar in both cases, to what has long existed and now exists, in the older countries of Europe, and similar, also, to a system that is common in our own State of California.

" Those farmers who are land pour, must sell, and become tenants in place of owners of the soil.  The hoarded, idle capital must be invested in these lands and turned over to the poor farmers, who will at once be set upon their feet — not to go and loaf about towns and villages, spending their money while it may last, but to buy with his money stock, fertilizers, implements and machines, and go to work to cultivate the soil profitably.  Instead of their money being sunk and dead in unproductive acres, it will be invested in cows, sheep, swine of improved breeds;  in guano and fertilizers, by which the crops will be doubled or trebled.  It will then become active and productive, and capable of doubling itself within the year.  The farmer will be relieved of the burden of a bad investment on which he now makes no interest, and his money will be placed where it will do the most good.  He will at once be lifted from poverty to financial ease, and in place of an unsalable farm he will have to show for his money some property that will realize all that it is worth at a public sale at 24 hours' notice.

"Everything seems ripe for the change.  Half the farms in the country are ready to be sold if buyers would only appear, and hundreds that can now be bought for less than their value 20 or 30 years ago, need only some judicious outlay to make them as productive as ever.  Few farmers can hope to provide their sons with farms of their own, and there is no place for these young men in the over-crowded cities.  But to stock a rented farm is not so difficult a matter for a father intent on starting a son in life.  This would be easy to do if the farm could be rented on a long and satisfactory lease.  But before this can be done the owner of the land must hold it as a permanent investment, and not as a property to be offered for sale to the first comer.  When farm land is so held by the owner, there will be some probability, if not certainty, that it will be permanently improved, and then such property will be largely sought for by tenants who will be able and willing to rent it on long leases and cultivate it in a more productive and profitable manner than farms are now worked.  And then will begin a new era in American agriculture, and one that seems to be very desirable."

It is to defeat this deep laid and damnable plot of the money power, and prevent the rich few from gobbling up the soil of America, as it has been gobbled up in England and Ireland — it is to save our farmers from serfdom, and our free soil from the bondage of monopoly, that the Land Reform movement is pushed to the front.

"Owe no man anything," was the injunction of a wiser and better man than ancient or modern Shylock.  Debt is slavery, which the law should not recognize.

If a man voluntarily bind himself to his neighbor, it is his right — his liberty is his own property;  but the right of the neighbor to hold such liberty a moment against the will of the owner, should not be recognized by law.

We would prevent the necessity of debt and usury, by an ample supply of exchange medium to do a cash business.  We would abolish the legal relations of debtor and creditor, by repealing all laws for the collection of debt, made after a certain period.  It will be said that such a volume of money will render the currency worthless.  We deny it, and challenge reasonable proof.  There are two great classes in this country who have use for an exchange medium.  The producers, of which there are millions, who receive for their products the current money of account.  The volume of their products amounts annually to about $6,000,000,000.  There is in circulation to pay for this enormous product but about $600,000,000 of currency, or one dollar of currency for ten of products.  This deficiency of currency compels products to move slowly, and as our lines of transportation are long, causes trade of all kinds to be sluggish, depresses prices, and compels enormous inflation of credits as a substitute for money.  Cities, counties, states, corporations and individuals are obliged to anticipate future incomes, and issue instead, their interest-bearing obligations.

There is another class that handle these $6,000,000,000 of products, or the surplus over the consumption of the producers.

They use a different exchange medium.

They are the bankers, brokers, and great international traders.  Their medium of exchange consists of the producers' interest-bearing obligations — bonds and mortgages.  Every well secured debt goes to inflate the volume of their currency.

They never go in debt or pay interest.

They have no need of it.  The millions upon millions of international transactions are carried on with the use, of less than four per cent. of legal tender.  The debt system is their main dependence, their chief stock in trade.

This furnishes them an inflated medium of exchange, amounting to many thousands of dollars per capita.  The less money the people have, the more they are obliged to go in debt, and the more they go in debt, if debts are well secured, the larger is the interest income of the sharks, and the more their currency is inflated.

Scarcity of money among the people aids the sharks in more ways than one.

It supplies them with a large volume of currency.  It prevents the people from contracting it by payment of debts.  It yields them a large interest income.  It enables them to control the market, and bull and bear prices, to snit their interest.  It keeps the people in, slavery to them, and enables them through the immense wealth they, reap, to control, elections, dictate legislation, and thus perpetuate their devilish system of injustice and robbery.  We would abolish this system of slavery.  We would emancipate humanity from the bondage of debt and usury.  It is the mission of the coming revolution.

" The exaction of interest for the loan of money has been one of the greatest evils of the Roman common-wealth."

The practice of receiving interest on money is detestable, as by it the increase of our fortune arises from the money itself, and not by the employing it to the purpose for which it was intended." —Aristotle, Book II, Chap. I.

Decretal, Gratian 14 — Quest. 14, C. 1 — "If you lend your money to a man from whom you expect more than you gave, not money alone, but any other thing, whether it be wheat, wine, oil, or any other article;  if you expect to receive any more than you gave you are a usurer, and, in that respect, reprehensible, not praiseworthy." —St. Augustine on Psalm xxxvi. An. 405.

" Whatever is received above the principal lent, or that capital that was given, whether it be money or anything else that may be purchased or estimated for money, is usury.  For it is written in Ezekiel xvi:  'Thou shalt not take usury and increase.'  And in Luke vi. 35, our Lord says: 'Lend, hoping for nothing thereby.'  Even among the Gentiles usury was always considered a most grievous and most odious crime."

St. Chrysostom, Hom. 5, on Matt., says:  "Nothing exceeds in barbarity the modern system of usury.  Indeed, these usurers traffic on other people's misfortunes, seeking gain through their adversity;  under the pretence of compassion, they dig for the distressed a pit of misery;  under the pretence of giving aid, they grind the indigent;  extending the hand to receive them into harbor from the storm, they allure him only to be shipwrecked upon shoals and shelves of an unforeseen whirlpool."

"There is nothing, really more monstrous in any recorded savagery or absurdity of mankind than that Governments should be able to get money for any folly they may choose to commit by selling to capitalists the right of taxing future generations to the end of time.  All the cruelest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over.  And yet I am obliged to keep my money in the funds or the bank, because I know of no other mode of keeping it safe;  and if I refuse to take the interest, I should only throw it into the hands of the very people who would use it for these evil purposes, or, at all events, for less good than I can.  Nevertheless, it is daily becoming a more grave question with me what it may presently be right to do.  It may be better to diminish private charities, and much more my own luxury of life, than to comply in any sort with a national sin.  But I am not agitated nor anxious in the matter;  content to know my principle, and to work steadily towards better fulfillment of it." —John Ruskin.

In 1560 Bishop Jewel, an eminent Christian divine, wrote as follows on the crime of usury:  "Usury is a kind of lending of money, or corne, or oyle, or wine, or of any other thing, wherein, upon covenants and bargaine, we receive again the whole principall which we delivered, and somewhat more, for the use and occupying of the same;  as if I lend 100 pound, and for it covenant to receive 105 pound, or any other summe, greater than was the summe which I did lend, this is what we call usury;  such a kind of bargaining as no good man or godly man ever used.  Such a kind of bargaining as all men that ever feared God's judgments have alwaies abhored and condemned.  It is filthy gaines and a worke of darkness, it is a monster in nature, the overthrow of mighty kingdoms, the destruction of flourishing States, the decay of wealthy cities, the plagues of the world, and the misery of the people;  it is theft, it is the emurthering of our brethren, it's the curse of God and the curse of the people.  This is usury.  By these signs and tokens you may know it.  For wheresoever it raigneth all those mischiefs ensue.

"Whence springeth usury ?  Soone shewed.  Even thence whence theft, murder, adultery, the plagues, and destruction of the people doe spring.  All these are the workes of the divell, and the workes of the flesh.  Christ telleth the Pharisees, You are of your father the divell, and the lusts of your father you will doe.  Even so may it truely be sayd to the usurer, Thou art of thy father the divell, and the lusts of thy father thou wilt doe, and therefore thou hast pleasure in his workes.  The divell entered into the heart of Judas, and put in him this greediness, and covetousness of gaine, for which he was content to sell his Master.  Juda's heart was the shop, the divell was the foreman to work in it.  They that will be rich fall into en tentation and snares, and into many foolish and noysome lusts, which drowne men in perdition and destruction.  For the desire of money is the root of all evil.  And St. John saith, Whosoever committeth sinne is of the Divell: I. Joh., 3-8.  Thus we see that the divell is the planter and father of usury.

"A. 1.  It dissolveth the knot and fellowship of mankind.  2. It hardeneth man's heart.  3. It maketh men unnatural, and bereaveth them of charity, and love for their dearest friends.  4. It breedeth misery and provoketh the wrath of God from heaven.  5. It consumeth rich men, it eateth up the poor, it maketh bankrupts and undoeth many householders.  6. The poore occupiers are driven to flee, their wives are left alone, their children are hopeless, and driven to beg their bread, through the unmerciful dealing of the covetous, usurer.

"He that is an usurer, wishes that all others may lacke and come to him and borrow of him; that all others may lose, so that he may have gain.  Therefore our old forefathers so much abhored this trade, that they thought an usurer unworthy to live in the company of Christian men.  They suffered not a usurer to be witnesse in matters of Law.  They suffered him not to make a Testament, and to bestow his goods by will.  When, an usurer dyed, they would not suffer him to be buried in places appointed for the burial of Christians.  So highly did they mislike the unmerciful spoyling and deceiving our brethren.

"But what speak I of the ancient Fathers of the Church ?  There never was, any religion, nor sect, nor state, nor degree, nor profession of men, but they have disliked it.  Philosophers, Greeks, Latins, lawyers, divines, Catholice, heretics;  all tongues and nations have ever thought an usurer as dangerous as a theefe.  The very sense of nature proves it to be so.  If the stones could speak, they would say as much."

"And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen into decay with thee, then shalt thou relieve him;  yea though he be a stranger or a sojourner;  that he may live with thee.  Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase." —Lev. xxv. 35, 36.

"If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor that dvelleth with thee, thou shalt not be hard upon him as an extortioner, nor oppress him with usuries." —Ex. xxii. 25.

"And I rebuked the nobles and magistrates, and said to them:  Do you everyone exact usury of your brethren ?  And I gathered together a great assembly against them."  Nehemiah v. 7.

" Thou shalt not end to thy brother money to usury, nor corn, nor any other thing.  To thy brother thou shalt lend that which he wanteth without usury that the Lord may bless thee in all thy works." —Deut. xxiii: 19, 20.

" Go to now ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.  Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten;  your gold and silver is cankered;  and the rust of them shall be a witness against you;  and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. *** Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud crieth;  and the cries of them which have reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.  Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton;  ye have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter;  ye have condemned and killed the just and he doth not resist you." —James v. 1-6.

" Henry VIII was the first monarch who legalized usury in Christendom, Calvin was the first prominent religious teacher who defended it, and Cromwell endorsed it, which so delighted the Jews that they believed him to be the promised Messiah, to give them the dominion of the world, and instituted worship of him in their synagogues, which worship Cromwell promptly suppressed, but permitted their more devastative practices.

" All through these ages to that time, the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, warred upon usury with the same consistency and persistency that they did upon the other deadly sins, but thereafter churchmen became comparatively lukewarm.  The term usury fell into disuse, and the word interest was substituted therefor.  Hume, the historian, by no means inclined to liberal ideas, refers very quaintly but pointedly to this substitution as 'a lucky accident in language which has great effect upon men's ideas.' " —Drew.

A hundred years before Hume's time, Shakespeare's keen eye had detected the change of terms, and he made Shylock say of Antonio:

How like a fawning publican he looks !
I hate him, for he is a Christian:
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
He rails, where merchants most do congregate,
On me, my bargains and my well won thrift,
Which he calls interest.

National Conventions for the nomination of candidates for President and Vice President are of comparatively recent origin.  In the earlier political history of the United States, under the Federal Constitution, candidate for President and Vice President were nominated by congressional and legislative caucuses.  Washington was elected as first President under the Constitution, and re-elected for a second term by a unanimous, or nearly unanimous, concurrence of the American people;  but an opposition party gradually grew up in Congress, which became formidable during its second term, and which ultimately crystallized into what was then called the Republican Party.  John Adams, of Massachusetts, was prominent among the leading Federalists, while Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, was pre-eminently the author and oracle of the Republican Party, and, by common consent, they were the opposing candidates for the Presidency, on Washington's retirement in 1796-7.

1800. — The first Congressional Caucus to nominate candidates for President and Vice President is said to have been held in Philadelphia, in the year 1800, and to have nominated Mr. Jefferson for the first office, and Aaron Burr for the second.  These candidates were elected after a desperate struggle, beating John Adams and Charles C. Pinckney, of South Carolina.

1804. — In 1804 Mr. Jefferson was re-elected President, with George Clinton, of New York, for Vice, encountering but slight opposition;  Messrs. Charles C. Pinckney and Rufus King, the opposing candidates, receiving only 14 out of 176 electoral votes.  We have been unable to find any record as to the manner of their nomination.

1808. — In January, 1808, when Mr. Jefferson's second term was about to close, a Republican Congressional Caucus was held at Washington, to decide as to the relative claims of Madison and Monroe for the succession, the Legislature of Virginia, which had been said to exert a potent influence over such questions, being, on this occasion, unable to agree as to which of her favored sons should have the preference.  Ninety-four out of the 136 Republican members of Congress attended this caucus, and declared their preference of Mr. Madison, who received 83 votes, the remaining 11 being divided between Mr. Monroe and George Clinton.  The opposition then supported Mr. Pine Pinckney, but Mr. Madison was elected by a large majority.

1812. — Toward the close of Mr. Madison's earlier term he was nominated for re-election by a Congressional Caucus, held at Washington in May, 1812.  In September, of the same year, a convention of the opposition representing eleven States, was held in the City of New York, which nominated DeWitt Clinton, of New York, for President.  He was also put in nomination by the Republican Legislature of New York.  The ensuing canvass resulted in the re-election of Mr. Madison, who received 128 electoral votes to 89 for DeWitt Clinton.

1816. — In 1816 the Republican Congressional Caucus nominated James Monroe, who received in the caucus 65 votes, to 54 for Wm. H. Crawford, of Georgia.  The opposition, or Federalists, named Rufus King, of New York, who received only 34 electoral votes out of 217.

1820. — There was no opposition to the re-election of Mr. Monroe in 1820, a single (Republican) vote being cast against him, and for John Quincy Adams.

1824. — In 1824. — In 1824 the Republican Party could not be induced to abide by the decision of a Congressional Caucus.  A large majority of the Republican members formally refused to participate in such a gathering, or be governed by its decision;  still, a caucus was called, and attended by the friends of Mr. Crawford alone.  Of the 261 Members of Congress at this time, 216 were Democrats or Republicans;  yet only 66 responded to their names at roll-call, 64 of whom voted for Mr. Crawford, as the Republican nominee for President.  This nomination was very extensively repudiated throughout the country, and three competing Republican candidates were brought into the field through legislative and other machinery, viz.: Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams.  The result of this famous "scrub-race" for the Presidency was, that no one was elected by the people, Gen. Jackson receiving 99 electoral votes, Mr. Adams 84, Mr. Crawford 41, and Mr. Clay 37.  The election then devolved on the House of Representatives, when Mr. Adams was chosen, receiving the votes of 13 States, against 7 for Gen. Jackson and 4 for Mr. Craw.  This was the end of "King Caucus."

1828. — Gen. Jackson was immediately thereafter put in nomination for the ensuing term by the Legislature of Tennessee, having only Mr. Adams for an opponent in 1828, when he was elected by a decided majority, receiving 178 electoral votes, to 83 for Mr. Adams.

The first political National Convention in this country of which we have any record was held at Philadelphia in September, 1830, styled the United States Anti-Masonic Convention.  It was composed of 98 delegates.  Francis Granger, of New York, presided, but no business was transacted.

In compliance with its call, a National Anti-Masonic Convention was held at Baltimore in September, 1831, which nominated William Wirt of Maryland, for President, and Amos Ellmaker, of Pennsylvania, for Vice President.

The candidates accepted the nomination, and received the electoral vote of Vermont only.

1832. — There was no open opposition in the Democratic Party to the nomination of Gen. Jackson for a second term in 1832, but the party was not so well satisfied with Mr. Calhoun, the Vice-President, so a convention was called to meet at Baltimore, in May, 1832, to nominate a candidate for the second office.

Mr. Van Buren received more than two-thirds of all the votes east, and was declared nominated.

The National Republicans met in convention at Baltimore, December 12, 1831.  Seventeen States and the District of Columbia were represented by 157 delegates, who cast an unanimous vote for Henry Clay, of Kentucky, for President.

1836. — In May, 1835, a Democratic National Convention, representing twenty-one States, assembled at Baltimore.  A rule was adopted, that two-thirds of the whole number of votes should be necessary to make a nomination, or to decide any question connected therewith.  On the first ballot for President, Mr. Van Buren was nominated unanimously, receiving 265 votes.

In 1835, Gen. William H. Harrison, of Ohio, was nominated for President, with Francis Granger for Vice-President, by a Whig State Convention at Harrisburg, Pa. Gen. Harrison also received nominations in Maryland, New York, Ohio, and other States.

1840. — A Whig National Convention, representing twenty-one States, met at Harrisburg, Pa., December 4, 1839. James Barbour, of Virginia, presided, and the result of the first ballot was the nomination of Gen. William H. Harrison, of Ohio, who received 148 votes, to 90 for Henry Clay, and 16 for Gen. Winfield Scott.  John Tyler, of Virginia, was unanimously nominated as the Whig candidate for Vice-President.

A Convention of Abolitionists was held at Warsaw, N.Y., on the 13th of November, 1839, and nominated for President James G. Birney, of New York, and for Vice-President, Francis J. Lemoyne, of Pennsylvania.  These gentlemen declined the nomination.  Nevertheless, they received a total of 7,609 votes, in various Free States.

A Democratic National Convention met at Baltimore, May 5, 1840, to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President.  The Convention then unanimously nominated Mr. Van Buren for re-election as President.

1844. — A Whig National Convention assembled in Baltimore on s the 1st of May, 1844, in which every State in the Union was represented, and Mr. Clay was nominated for President by acclamation.

A Democratic National Convention assembled at Baltimore on the 27th of May, 1844, adopted the two-thirds rule, and, after a stormy session of three days, James S. Polk, of Tennessee, was nominated for President, and Silas Wright, of New York, for Vice-President.  Mr. Wright declined the nomination, and George M. Dallas, of Pennsylvania, was selected.

The Liberty Party National Convention met at Buffalo on the 30th of August, 1843.  James G, Birney, of Michigan, was unanimously nominated for President, with Thomas Morris, of Ohio, for Vice-President.

1848. — A Whig National Convention met at Philadelphia on the 7th of June, 1848: After a rather stormy session of three days, Gen. Zachary Taylor, of Louisiana, was nominated for President, and Millard Fillmore, of New York, for Vice-President.

The Democratic National Convention for 1848 assembled in Baltimore on the 22d of May.  The two-thirds rule was adopted, and Gen. Lewis Cass was nominated for President on the fourth ballot.  On the 9th of August 1845, a Free Democratic or Free Soil Convention was held at Buffalo, which was attended by delegates from seventeen States.  Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, presided, and the Convention nominated Messrs. Van Buren and Adams as candidates for President and Vice-President.

1852 — The Whig National Convention of 1852 assembled at Baltimore on the 18th of June, and after an exciting session of six days, nominated Gen. Winfield Scott as President, on the fifty-third ballot.

The Democratic Convention of 1852 assembled at Baltimore on the 1st of June, and the two-thirds rule was adopted.  Gen. Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, was nominated for President, on the forty-ninth ballot.

The Free Soil Democracy held a National Convention at Pittsburg, on the 11th of August, 1852, Henry Wilson of Mass., presiding.  All the Free States were represented, with Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland.  John P. Hale, of New Hampshire, was nominated for President, with Geo. W. Julian, of Indiana, for Vice-President.

1856. — The Republican National Convention of 1856 met at Philadelphia on the 17th of June. Col. John C. Fremont was unanimously nominated, having received 359 votes on the first ballot against 196 for John McLean.

On February 22, 1856, the American National Nominating Convention organized at Philadelphia, with 227 delegates in attendance.  Millard Fillmore was declared to be the nominee, with Andrew Jackson Donelson, of Tennessee, for Vice-President.

The Democratic National Convention of 1856 met at Cincinnati on The Democratic National Convention on the 2d of June, and nominated James Buchanan on the seventeenth ballot.  John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, was unanimously nominated for Vice-President.

A Republican National Convention assembled at Chicago on May 16, 1860, delegates being in attendance from all the Free States, as also from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri.  Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the Presidency on the third ballot, receiving 354 out of 466 votes;  his principal competitors being William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates.

1860. — A Democratic National Convention assembled at Charleston, S.C., on the 28d of April, 1860, with full delegations present from every State.  Dissensions arising, chiefly out of the question of slavery in the Territories, too great to be reconciled, the delegations from seven Southern States withdrew, and the convention adjourned, after fifty-seven ineffectual ballots for a candidate, to meet at Baltimore, June 18.  Here Stephen A. Douglas was nominated for President, and, B. Fitzpatrick for Vice-President.  The latter declined, and H.V. Johnson was substituted by the National Committee.  The Convention of Seceders nominated John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane.

A "Constitutional Union" Convention from twenty States met at Baltimore, May 9, 1860, and nominated John Bell and Edward Everett for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency.

1864. — The Republican National Convention met at Baltimore, June 7.  The re-nomination, for President, of Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, was made unanimous, he having received the votes of all the States except Missouri, cast for Gen. Grant.  For Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, was nominated on the second ballot, his principal competitors being D.S. Dickinson and H. Hamlin.

The Democratic National Convention met at Chicago, Ill., August 29.  Nominations-President, George B. McClellan, of New Jersey;  Vice-President, George H. Pendleton, of Ohio.

1868. — The National Republican Convention met at Chicago, Ill., May 20. Nominations-President, Ulysses S. Grant, of Illinois;  Vice-President, Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana.

The Democratic National Convention met at New York, July 4.  Nominations-President, Horatio Seymour, of New York;  Vice-President, Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri.

1872. — The Liberal Republican Convention met at Cincinnati, Ohio, May 1.  Nominations-President, Horace Greeley, of New York, on the sixth ballot, by 482 votes, against 187 for David Davis, of Illinois;  Vice-President, B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, on the second ballot.

The Republican National Convention met at Philadelphia, Pa., June 5.  Nominations-President, Ulysses S. Grant, on the first ballot, unanimously;  Vice-President, Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, receiving 364½ votes against 321½ for Schuyler Colfax.

The Democratic National Convention met at Baltimore, Md., July 9.  Nominations-President, Horace Greeley, on the first ballot, receiving 686 votes to 38 scattering;  Vice-President, B. Gratz Brown, who received 713 votes.

The Democratic ("Straight Out") Convention met at Louisville, Ky., September 3.  Nominations—President, Charles O'Conor, of New York;  Vice-President, John Q. Adams, of Massachusetts.  The nominations were declined.

1876. — The Republican National Convention met at Cincinnati, Ohio, June 14.  Nominations-President, Rutherford B. Hayes, of Ohio, on the seventh ballot, receiving 384 votes, to 351 for J.G. Blaine, and 21 for B.H. Bristow;  Vice-President, William A. Wheeler, of New York.

The Democratic National Convention met at St. Louis, Mo., June 27. Nominations-President, Samuel J. Tilden, of New York, on the second ballot, receiving 535 votes, against 85 for Hendricks, 54 for Wm. Allen, 58 for W.S. Hancock, and six scattering;  Vice-President, Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana.

A "National Greenback Convention," composed of men opposed to specie resumption and in favor of national paper money to take the place of bank issues, met at Indianapolis, May 17, with nineteen States represented.  Peter Cooper, of New York, and Samuel, F. Cary, of Ohio, were nominated for President and Vice-President.

A "Prohibition Reform Party" Convention met at Cleveland, May 17, and nominated Green Clay Smith, of Kentucky, and R.T. Stewart, of Ohio.

1880. — The Republican National Convention met at Chicago, June 2, and on the sixth day of the convention nominated James A. Garfield for President, and C.A. Arthur for Vice-President.

The Greenback Labor National Convention met in Chicago, June 9, and nominated Gen. J.B. Weaver for President, and B.J. Chambers, of Texas, for Vice-President.

The Democratic National Convention met in Cincinnati, June 23, and nominated Gen. W.S. Hancock for President, and W.H. English for Vice-President.

Civil Government should guarantee the divine right of every laborer to the results of his toil, thus enabling the producers of wealth to provide themselves with the means for physical comfort, and the facilities for mental, social and moral culture;  and we condemn as unworthy of our civilization the barbarism which imposes upon the wealth producers a state of perpetual drudgery as the price of bare animal existence.

Notwithstanding the enormous increase of productive power, the universal introduction of labor-saving machinery, and the discovery of new agents for the increase of wealth, the task of the laborer is scarcely lightened, the hours of toil are but little shortened, and few producers are lifted from poverty into comfort and pecuniary independence.

The associated monopolies, the international syndicates and other income classes demand dear money and cheap labor, a "strong Government," and hence a weak people.

Corporate control of the volume of money has been the means of dividing society into hostile classes;  of the unjust distribution of the products of labor, and of building up monopolies of associated capital, endowed with power to confiscate private property.  It has kept money scarce, and scarcity of money enforces debt-trade, and public and corporate loans — debt engenders usury, and usury ends in the bankruptcy of the borrower.

Other results are, deranged markets, uncertainty of manufacturing enterprise and agriculture, precarious and intermittent employment for the laborer, industrial war, increasing pauperism and crime and the consequent intimidation and disfranchisement of the producer, and a rapid declension into corporate feudalism.

Therefore we declare—

1. That the right to make and issue money is a sovereign power to be maintained by the people for the common benefit.  The delegation of this right to corporations is a surrender of the central attribute of sovereignty, void of constitutional sanction, conferring upon a subordinate irresponsible power, and absolute dominion over industry and commerce.  All money, whether metallic or paper, should be issued and its volume controlled by the Government and not by or through banking corporations, and when so issued should be a full legal tender for all debts, public and private.

2.  That the bonds of the United States should not be refunded, but paid as rapidly as it is practicable, according to contract.  To enable the Government to meet these obligations, legal tender currency should be substituted for the notes of the national banks, the national banking system abolished, and the unlimited coinage of silver as well as gold established by law.

3.  That labor should be so protected by national and state authority as to equalize its burdens and insure a just distribution of its results;  the eight-hour law of Congress should be enforced;  the sanitary condition of industrial establishments placed under rigid control;  the competition of contract convict labor abolished;  a bureau of labor statistics established;  factories, mines and workshops inspected;  the employment of children under fourteen years of age forbidden, and wages paid in cash.

4.  Slavery being simply cheap labor, and cheap labor being simply slavery, the importation and presence of Chinese serfs necessarily tends to brutalize and degrade American labor;  therefore immediate steps should be taken to abrogate the Burlingame treaty.

5.  Railroad land grants forfeited by reason of non-fulfillment of contract should be immediately reclaimed by the Government;  and henceforth the public domain reserved exclusively as homes for actual settlers.

6.  It is the duty of Congress to regulate inter-state commerce.  All lines of communication and transportation should be brought under such legislative control as shall secure moderate, fair and uniform rates for passenger and freight traffic.

7.  We denounce, as destructive to prosperity and dangerous to liberty, the action of the old parties in fostering and sustaining gigantic laud, railroad and money corporations and monopolies, invested with, and exercising, powers belonging to the Government, and yet not responsible to it for the manner of their use.

8.  That the constitution, in giving Congress the power to borrow money, to declare war, to raise and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy, never intended that the men who loaned their money for an interest consideration should be preferred to the soldier and sailor who periled their lives and shed their blood on land and sea in defense of their country, and we condemn the cruel class legislation of the Republican party which, while professing great gratitude to the soldier, has most unjustly discriminated against him, and in favor of the bondholder.

9.  All property should bear its just proportion of taxation, and we demand a graduated income tax.

10.  We denounce as most dangerous the efforts everywhere manifest to restrict the right of suffrage.

11.  We are opposed to an increase of the standing army in time of peace, and the insidious scheme to establish an enormous military power under the guise of militia laws.

13.  We demand absolute democratic rules for the Government of Congress, placing all representatives of the people upon an equal footing, and taking away from committees a veto power greater than that of the President.

13.  We demand a Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, instead of a Government of the bondholder, by the bondholder, and for the bondholder, and we denounce every attempt to stir up sectional strife as an effort to conceal monstrous crimes against the people.

14.  In the furtherance of these ends we ask the co-operation of all fair-minded people.  We have no quarrel with individuals, we wage no war upon classes, but only against vicious institutions.  We are not content to endure further discipline from our present actual rulers, who, having dominion over money, over transportation, over land and labor, over the machinery of Government, and largely over the press, wield unwarrantable power over our institutions, and over life and property.

1.  Legal equality of human beings.

2.  The people the only source of legitimate power.

3.  Absolute and lasting severance of Church and State.

4.  Freedom, sovereignty and independence of the respective States.

5.  The Union a compact — neither consolidation nor a centralization.

6.  Constitution of the Union a special written grant of powers, limited and definite.

7.  No hereditary offices, nor order, nor title.

8.  No taxation beyond the public want.

9.  No National debts if possible.

10.  No costly splendor of administration.

11.  No proscription of opinion nor of public discussion.

12.  No unnecessary interference with individual property or speech.

13.  The civil paramount to the military authority.

14.  The representative to obey the instructions of his constituents.

15.  No favored classes, no monopolies.

16.  Elections free, and suffrage universal.

17.  No pubic moneys expended except by warrant of specific appropriation.

18.  No mysteries in Government inaccessible to the public eye.

19.  Public compensation for public services, moderate salaries, and pervading economy and accountability.

In a speech delivered in Congress May 10, 1880, contrasting the Government's generosity toward the money kings with its niggardly treatment of the soldiers, Gen. J.B. Weaver said:

" Now, Mr. Chairman, how has the Government dealt with other classes of public creditors — the bond holding, money-lending classes ?  Behold the contrast !  Soldiers, read, and then avenge yourselves and families at the ballot-box.

" 1.  When the soldier was absent in the field, when he could not be present in Congress to protect himself and family, the money interest, bankers, and brokers, were permitted to put the sting of death in the back of every greenback bill issued, for the very purpose of depreciating it and rendering it less valuable than gold, and on purpose to make a market for their gold coin.

" 2.  They were then permitted to buy in the greenbacks at an enormous discount, and in turn to convert them into 5.20 bonds, drawing six per cent, interest in coin.

" 3.  They procured their bond investments to be exempted from every species of taxation, national, state, and municipal.

" 4.  Congress then passed an act whereby the bond-holder had his interests paid quarterly.

" 5.  He was allowed by joint resolution of Congress, approved March 17, 1864, to draw his coin interest in advance for a period not to exceed one year, with or without rebate, at the discretion of the secretary of the treasury, and from 1864 to 1869, when gold was at its highest premium, he was permitted by that law to draw his gold interest in advance without rebate, as appears from an official letter now in my possession signed by H.F. French, acting secretary of the treasury, and dated April, 1880.  Under this law the owner of a Government bond for $1,000,000 could draw $60,000 in gold interest in advance;  he could then turn around and buy with his $60,000 $150,000 in greenbacks, and then again invest his greenbacks at their face value in 5.20 bonds.

"6.  After the money-changer had invested his last dollar in bonds and drawn all the interest possible in advance, and invested that also in Government bonds, he was generously permitted by the national bank act to deposit his securities with the treasury and draw ninety per cent, of their value in national bank notes, which he could use as money, charging him therefor but one per cent, to cover cost of printing.

" 7.  The 5.20 bonds were payable in the same kind of money that bought them, namely, greenbacks.  To prevent this, as will be seen by the following, John Sherman's report to the Senate in 1867, the "credit-strengthening act" of 1869 and the refunding bill of 1870 were passed.  After showing by an unanswerable argument that the 5.20 bonds would be paid in currency, Mr. Sherman, in his report, says:

" 'It has been proposed that Congress, by resolution, declare that the 5.20 bonds are redeemable only in gold.  This, instead of settling the question, will only create divisions and parties, and the resolution when passed will be subject to agitation and repeal.  This consideration induces your committee, without deciding the question, to propose the substitution of new bonds, clear and explicit in their terms, for the old bonds, as they become redeemable.'

" This added at least as a mere gift, six hundred millions to the value of the bondholder's investment.

"8.  By a clause in the funding bill of 1870, the interest on bonds was also exempted from every species of tax — national, state, or municipal.

" 9.  In 1873, when the country was suffering from the blight of panic, when the farms of this country went under mortgage, and the bankrupt courts were filled with suitors, the money-changers, to prevent their investments from being interfered with by payment, procured the demonetization of silver, thus, making their bonds payable in gold only.

" 10.  In furtherance of their scheme, through their pliant tool, the present secretary of the treasury, they now, in defiance of law, refuse to pay out the silver coined under the act of 1878, and keep it hoarded in the treasury, and are constantly belaboring Congress for new appropriations to build vaults in which to store it.

" 11.  They passed the resumption act in 1875, whereby it was provided that every greenback in existence should be taken out of circulation and converted into interest-bearing bonds.  They were only prevented from the consummation of this diabolical purpose by the force of public sentiment, which compelled Congress to pass the act of May 30, 1878, forbidding further destruction of the legal tenders.

"12.  Notwithstanding the passage of the act last referred to, the National Bankers' association, the capitalists in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Chicago, have petitioned Congress to destroy the legal tenders.

" In obedience to their behest, and utterly regardless of the interests of the industrial classes of the country, the President of the United States, the secretary of the treasury, and the comptroller of the currency have all sent in to Congress their official communication recommending that the greenback shall be taken out of circulation.  Mr. Bayard in the Senate and Mr. Lounsberry and Mr. Ballon in the House have introduced bills and joint resolutions to carry out these recommendations.

" 13.  They now propose by Mr. Fernando Wood's and Garfield's bills, pending before Congress, to refund seven hundred million of these non-taxable bonds and to make them irredeemable for the twenty years.

" 14.  Since their return from the war, the soldiers, being among the most active and industrious members of society, have been working through sunshine and storm to pay their own and the bondholder's taxes and the interest on the public debt.  Wherever a discretion has been lodged with the secretary of the treasury or any other department, it has invariably been exercised in the interest of the bondholder and against the soldier and the common people.

___________________
note to page 245.
THE SOLDIER AND THE BONDHOLDER.
We give below, in tabulated form, the statement from Secretary Sherman of the expenses of the Government on account of the late civil war, from July 1, 1861, to June 30, 1879, inclusive:
Ordinary expenditures ...... $609,549,124
Expenditures growing out of the war .... $6,187,243,385
Total $6,796,792,509

The principal items of the war expenses are the following, the last six being given in round numbers:
Interest on the public debt .... $1,764,256,198
Pay of two and three years volunteers .... 1,040,102,702
Subsistence of the army ..... 381,417,548
Clothing of the army .... 345,543,880
Army transportation .... 336,793,885
Purchase of horses ..... 126,672,423
Other quartermaster expenditures .... 320,000,000
Army pensions ...... 407,429,193
Bounties (including additional bounties under the act of 1866) ... 140,281,178
Refunding to states for war expenses .... 41,000,000
Purchase of arms for volunteers and regulars .... 76,000,000
Ordnance supplies .... 56,000,000
Expenses of assessing and collecting internal revenue .... 113,000,000
Expenses of national loans and currency .... 51,523,000
Premiums ...... 59,738,000

According to this statement, the pay, cost of food and clothing of the volunteers amounted to $1,767,064,130, while the bondholders' interest to the date of June 30, 1879, was $1,764,256,198, and another year's interest must be added to find the amount paid to the present date.

Thus we find that the bondholders have been paid over fifty millions more for their services than the soldiers were paid for theirs.

Not only this, but the bondholders are to receive back double their principal invested -- a principal which was loaned in depreciated currency to be paid back in gold or its equivalent. The soldiers' principal of health, of strength, of vigorous constitution is gone forever, and can never be repaid. --Chicago Express.

There is a tribe of Indians called "Flat-heads" whose name is derived from having their heads flattened in infancy, while the skull bones are soft and pliable.  They are a very low and ignorant people, from the fact that the compressed and distorted skull does not permit a healthy and natural development of the brain;  but their mental poverty is in part compensated by their ignorance and lack of appreciation of any higher intelligence.

The female Chinese foot is encased in a shoe prison and there made to mature without being permitted to expand beyond the dimensions of infancy.  Both the head of the Indian and the foot of the Celestial adapt themselves to circumstances, while the body physical seems to suffer little or no inconvenience from the distortion of the extremities.  Like a potato grown between two roots, the whole body grows to maturity adapting itself to its conditions, the process being so gradual that no violence is experienced.  But suppose the Flat-Heads should capture a prisoner, and should say, "Look here, sir, your head is 'inflated,' it is altogether out of proportion, it is unlike any head in our tribe, it must be 'contracted,' and brought down to the tribal standard."

How long after the process of contraction commenced before suffering would follow ?  Then the Flat-Head would say, "Grin and bear it;  don't suspend the vice-grip, or allow any re-inflation.  This comes of our own folly.  You have permitted a great over-production of skull;  and if we let up now to give you rest, or allow the pain to ease, you will have to travel the terrible road all over again."  So by inches the life is squeezed out of the man.  The Chinese might cultivate small feet for his daughter, if taken in infancy, without much inconvenience to the child, but if he took a full grown American girl, and should attempt to contract her feet to the standard of a Chinese belle, he would have a cripple for life on his hands.

So it is, we have a nation of financial fiat-heads.

The business of a country always corresponds to its money volume.  The financiers of Europe and America have cramped the business and enterprise of civilization to the moulds of gold and silver money.  For a hundred years the infant brain of American industry was cramped and confined to the narrow walls of this metallic mould.  But when the war came, when the life of the Government demanded great power, and a more rapid development of wealth and national life-forces than could be generated in the traditional flat-head system, the pressure was removed.  Natural freedom was allowed, labor, skill and enterprise were untrameled, and permitted to come in direct contact with God's bountiful resources, as the leaden anchor of specie was raised, and the light wings of legal tender were spread to the breezes of commerce.

During one decade, untrammeled and unoppressed by the vices of specie basis, our business grew into giant proportions.  The wealth of the nation doubled, and a degree of prosperity prevailed never before experienced.  But after the war closed, when the Government was no longer in danger, when it was safe to hamper and cripple industry, when suicides, privation, idleness, business prostration and general bankruptcy might safely be indulged in for the gratification of the financial flat-head idolators, we were required to enter again upon a life of industrial torture and financial distortion.  Our business capacity enlarged to the dimensions of $2,000,000,000 of circulating medium, with an abundance of labor, skill, machinery, and resources to keep it growing for all time to come, was legislated into the flat-head press in 1866, with a view of compressing it to ante-helium dimensions.

It is related that in the canton of Berne, in Switzerland, it had been customary from time immemorial, to keep a bear at public expense, and the people had been taught to believe that if they had not a bear on hand, they would be undone, and the country would go to wreck and ruin.  So they endured the bear, notwithstanding the expense, and the fatal injury that he inflicted upon pigs and children that happened to step over the line of his jurisdiction.  It happened one day that bruin sickened and died too suddenly to have his place immediately supplied with another.

During the interim the people were amazed and delighted to see that the sun continued to shine, the corn to grow and the vintage to flourish, and everything went on the same as before, saving the danger and expense of the bear.  So they came to the sensible conclusion not to keep any more bears.

With no more sense, and at much greater expense, the civilized world has been harboring and keeping a bear for the last two thousand years.  Every civilized nation has had its bear.

Our revolutionary fathers repulsed the British lion, but accepted the embrace of the English bear, specie basis.  It has been an expensive and dangerous beast to keep.  In 1809 its depredations occasioned great public distress, and in several instances involved the entire country in bankruptcy and ruin, from which it took years to recover.

In 1814, 1819, 1825, and at other periods, the beast got on his periodical rampage, producing the most terrible and disastrous results.

But the bear must be kept or we, like the peasants of Berne, would be undone.

He was the idol of civilization.

To him society offered up its sacrifices with the same devotion that Hindoo mothers yield up their babes to the crocodiles of the Ganges.

One day he sickened and died.  It was on the 25th day of February, 1862.

Devout worshipers from Boston, New York and Philadelphia flocked to Washington to weep and howl over his untimely death.

They were frantic and unconsolable.  They feared the sun would cease to shine, the crops to grow, or the tide to ebb and flow.

But time passed on.

The sun kept its course.

The seasons came and went just as of old.

People prospered as they never had before.

Men grew rich.

Labor was fully employed, well paid, and not molested.

Success crowned every effort.

Civilization extended, and the wilderness disappeared.

The rose blossomed where the tangle brush grew.

Railroads spanned the unknown waste.

The march of improvement kept time to the music of machinery and the hum of industry.

There was no bear to molest or make afraid.

Still idolatry, like the old man of the sea, clung to the public mind.  Men could not believe that posterity without gold could be real.  They prayed for the return of their idol, and warned society that for all its seeming prosperity and delusive dreams of wealth, corresponding sacrifices must be made to their idol or the country would be a howling bedlam of madmen and fanatics.  So on the 12th day of April, 1866, Keeper McCulloch was ordered to commence negotiations for a bear.  Immense sacrifices of men and property followed.  The first year 2,000 men fell, and over $80,000,000 were lost.

Each succeeding year the number of human sacrifices increased, and the amount of pecuniary loss augmented, until the reinstatement of the beast in 1879, 10,000 men and firms having fallen, and $300,000,000 wealth being sacrificed in the previous year.

Now we have our blood-thirsty god re-installed, and John Sherman as high priest.

Over and above his depredations on society, past and prospective, which is beyond computation, he has cost our treasury direct $230,000,000, for which our bonds are out drawing interest from labor.

Yes, we have on our hands a two hundred and thirty million dollar bear, of no use to society but to eat annually ten or fifteen million dollars' worth of food which society has to furnish, and to be in fashion with the idolatrous nations of Europe, every one of which to-day is a bleeding sacrifice to this brutish god.  There he stands watched over and adored by John Sherman, devouring the substance of the people, jeopardizing commerce and trade and menacing labor and enterprise at every step.

These be thy gods, oh, Shylock !

It is officially announced that William H. Vanderbilt has sold 250,000 shares of the New York Central stock to a syndicate of New York capitalists, representing the heaviest banking houses of London, and thus parted with his control over that thoroughfare.  This colossal railroad syndicate includes most, or all, of John Sherman's famous bond syndicate, notably August Belmont & Co., Bliss, Morton & Co., J. & W. Seligman & Co., Drexel, Morgan & Co., and J.S. Morgan & Co., of London.  Every one of these firms are branches, or agents, of London bankers.  To the casual reader, or observer, this huge transaction may look legitimate and innocent enough on its face, as an ordinary business operation, with no more significance than the daily transactions of the stock board.  But when viewed in the light of that policy which has governed England for two hundred years, by which she has accumulated a larger amount of capital in proportion to her area and population than was ever before or since scraped together, it looks like an important step in the progress of events long since planned to recover through capital and diplomacy, what she lost a century ago through bullets and American patriotism.

It is England's boast that the sun never sets on her dominions.  If she has not conquered all the world, she has at least conquered parts of all the world, and from conquests comes the wealth which she is accumulating.  She subdues weak nations not to enlighten, Christianize, and protect, but to enslave and rob.  She is to-day the world's great nationalized pirate, with her commercial privateers infesting every sea and navigable stream on the globe.  She has picked the bones of poor Ireland dry, and for years the air of India has been fetid with the dead carcasses of the victims of her greed and rapacity.  Her policy has been "to buy hides of her dependencies for sixpence and sell back to them the tails for a shilling."  She conquers to open a market for her, manufactured products, to obtain a supply of cheap raw material, and to afford traffic for her means of transportation.

A hundred and fifty years ago one Andrew Gee published in England a work on trade, in which, among other things, he said:

"Manufactures in our American colonies should be discouraged — prohibited.  We ought always to keep a watchful eye over our colonies to restrain them from setting up any of the manufactures which are carried on in England, and any such attempt should be crushed out at the beginning.

"As they have the providing of rough materials to themselves, so should we have the manufacturing of them.  This will turn their industry all to promoting and raising raw material.  If we examine into the facts, it will appear that not one-fourth of their product redounds to their own profit, for, out of all that comes here, they only carry back clothing and other necessaries for their families."

During the eighteenth century the American colonies became comparatively independent of the mother country.  They had gone somewhat extensively into manufacturing what they needed.  By this means they found a ready home market for their surplus raw material, and to supply their monetary wants every colony issued its own paper legal tenders, which, not only made them comparatively independent of England, but contributed vastly to their growth and prosperity.  In 1710 a law was enacted in parliament which declared that manufacturing in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence on Great Britain.

In 1750 iron manufacturing in the colonies was prohibited.

In 1765 the emigration of iron artisans to America was prohibited by law.

In 1780 utensils required for the manufacture of wool or silk we prohibited.

In 1781 the exportation of hats from one colony to another was prohibited, was and the number of apprentices was limited.

In 1782 no artificer in printing calico, muslins or linens was permitted to emigrate to America.

In 1785 the prohibition was extended to tools used in iron or steel manufacture and to workmen employed.

In 1763 the issue and use of colonial money was suppressed by act of parliament.

Their object was to secure as extensive a market as possible for their manufactured products.

To obtain this, manufacturing in other parts of the world must be discouraged or prohibited.

They also desired cheap raw material and an abundance of it.  To obtain this, manufacturing must not only be prevented in other countries, so as to force all labor into the production of raw material, but the money of all nations must be so limited and restricted that prices would remain low, hence the specie standard was established, and gold deified as the God-ordained money of the world.  It was only when we discarded this standard, and adopted the legal tender money of the United States, that we were really free and prosperous ?  But England has again forced us to bow to her idol.  Our industries are again in the coils of her deadly embrace.  The New York Tribune boasts that resumption has driven hundreds of thousands of artisans from unproductive manufacturing into the cultivation of the soil and the raising of a surplus for a foreign market.  How did it happen that our manufacturing became unprofitable, and sent 600,000 artisans into the fields to compete with already unprofitable agriculture ?  A commission appointed by parliament to inquire into the causes of distress and disaffection among English workingmen, reported as follows:

"We believe the laboring classes are very little aware of the extent to which they are often indebted for their being employed at all, to the immense losses which their employers voluntarily incur in order to destroy foreign competition, and to gain and keep possession of foreign markets.

"The large capitalists of this country are the great instruments of warfare against the competing capitalists of foreign countries, and are the most essential instruments now remaining by which British manufactures can maintain the supremacy.  The elements, cheap labor, cheap and abundant raw material, and means of transportation, are rapidly in process of being realized."

This report says that English manufacturers have sold their goods at an annual aggregate loss of $100,000,000, in order to undersell and break down foreign competition.  This is why manufacturing has become unprofitable in America, and 600,000 artisans were driven into the western lands to raise cheap raw material for English factories.  Foreign capital already controls our banking institutions, regulates our monetary affairs, dictates our financial legislation, and successfully opposes all measures inimical to its interests.  It has come to pass that but few men can be elected to our national legislature, and none to the position of chief executive, who are not identified with, or pledged to the support of the banking interest.  This was the most important step in the plot.  The control over our financial affairs, so as to depress industry and discourage enterprise, with the cutting of prices in England, was the step necessary to kill competition.  This they have well-nigh accomplished.

They have regained their manufacturing supremacy.  They have procured cheap labor and an abundance of cheap raw material in America.  They have already a monopoly of transportation by sea;  the great carrying trade between the two continents being borne under the British flag.

Her next step will be to get possession and control of our trunk railroad lines from the seaboard to the centers of production;  nor will she cease until she succeeds in monopolizing our inland, as well as our ocean commerce.  This monopoly of our transportation lines, can not only make their own terms with producers, but control the votes of the nation as the Pennsylvania railroad has for years commanded the vote and dictated the legislation of that State.  It may be possible that our inland transportation, as well as our medium of exchange, will yet require the protecting arm of the Government.

Powers as great and dangerous as those wielded by banking and railroad monopolies, should not be exercised by individuals or corporations, much less by foreigners and aliens.  These have already become too formidable for legislatures and officials to contend with, and unless the people put forth a united effort to save themselves, their boasted independence will become a phantom, and their temple will fall when grappled by these giant pirates of the land and sea.

There are many honest and patriotic Republicans who sincerely believe that their party is as loyal to popular liberty, and to the great industrial interests of the country, to-day as it was fifteen or twenty years ago when it was struggling to wrest liberty and labor from the despotism of slavery.  They refuse to believe that the machinery of the Republican party, like The Tribune of Horace Greeley, has been usurped by despots, and seized upon by the enemies of justice, equality and popular liberty, who are using it for baser purposes than ever the Democratic party was made to serve after it prostituted itself at the feet of the Slave Power.  When it is charged by the advocates of the people's rights that the tendency and aims of the Republican party are to destroy constitutional liberty and to build up and protect a plutocracy of organized capital, to grind the poor, and to oppress and rob the producing classes, it is not believed by the Republican masses who are being led blindly to their own slaughter.  But if they will not believe Moses and the prophets, will they believe one of their own chosen oracles ?  The following from the pen of Senator Sharon, published in his own organ, The Nevada Chronicle, is testimony that no Republican can impeach or deny.  He says:

"We need a stronger Government.  The wealth of the country demands it.  Without capital and the capitalists, our Government would not be worth a fig.  The capital of the country demands protection;  its rights are as sacred as the rights of the paupers, who are continually prating about the encroachment of capital and against centralization.  We have tried Grant and we know him to be the man for the place above all others.  He has nerve.  As President he would be Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, and when the communistic tramps of the country raised mobs to tear up railroad tracks and to sack cities on the sham cry of 'bread or blood,' he would not hesitate to turn loose upon them canister and grape.  The wealth of the country has to bear the burdens of the Government, and it shall control it.  The people are becoming educated up to this theory rapidly, and the sooner this theory is recognized in the constitution and laws the better it will be for the people.

"Without bloodshed, and rivers of it, there will be no political change of administration.  The monied interests of the country for self-preservation must sustain the Republican party.  The railroads, the banks, the manufacturers, the heavy importers, and all classes of business in which millions are invested, will maintain the supremacy of the Republican party.  Democratic success would be bankruptcy to them.  To avert fearful bloodshed a strong central Government should be established as soon as possible."

A little more frank than his co-conspirators, Senator Sharon, no doubt, reflects the sentiments of the leaders of his party.

The wealth of the nation demands a stronger Government, for the capital of the country requires protection.  What is this Republican idea of a "stronger Government," and what capital of the country is in danger, that it cannot be protected by our present form of popular Government ?

Is there a crime against person or property known to society that is not amply guarded against by statutes and penalties ?  Have we not an ample judiciary and constabulary in every city, town, and hamlet to protect the innocent and to punish the guilty ?  Does not capital collect its interest, its rents, and its exorbitant rates of transportation ?  Does it not foreclose its mortgages and confiscate its collaterals ?

Where, and what, is the danger that threatens the money kings, demanding a Government stronger than that which has served us for a century and proved itself the "strongest" on the globe ?

On the frontiers, in the mining districts, where the prospects of immediate gain attract large numbers of the worst desperadoes in the country, extraordinary measures are sometimes resorted to.  The law may be deemed too tardy to meet the demands of justice, and the vigilance committee is substituted as a necessity of the emergency.  But does the Republican party propose to transform the Government into a great national vigilance committee to arrest and execute, without the form of law, all such restless spirits as squirm under the iron heel of capital, or rebel at the robbery and extortion of oppressive monopolies ?

No, it is not the fear that the masses will violate law that demands a stronger Government, but that they will repeal unjust statutes, and restrain by wholesome legislation over-reaching and oppressive combinations of capital from robbing the industrial masses, and enact those more in accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the rights of man.

Fifteen thousand million dollars of interest-bearing obligations have been filched and forced from the people through the Republican legislation of the last eighteen years.  This is the capital that demands protection at the hands of a stronger, centralized power.  Resumption of specie payment has doubled its value, and the object and aim of its owners are to perpetuate it, and to add still more to its value by the establishment of the single gold standard.

After the Saxon brigands and freebooters had robbed the Britons of their soil and their subsistence, they levied annual pensions and annuities upon their victims in amount sufficient to subsist the robbers and their posterity for all time to come in affluence and royal splendor, and in order to perpetuate this scheme of rapine and plunder, they saw that it was necessary to debar their victims for all time to come from any voice in the political affairs of the nation, and to centralize and perpetuate the sovereign power of the realm in the hands of the beneficiaries of their scheme of spoliation, and their hereditary representatives.

A few thousand men in this republic have combined, and through the aid of deception and false pretences, secured legislation which has put them in a position to levy contributions upon American industry as unjust and burdensome as those laid by the Norman robbers upon the labor of Britain.  This combination of men consists of the bankers and railroad companies.  They have consolidated their interests and are now prepared to enter upon their gigantic work of pillage.

The former, controlling the medium of exchange, and holding interest-bearing obligations against the people which draw annually $1,000,000,000 of their substance, can control prices, while the latter, by monopolizing the routes and medium of transportation, together form a combination with ample power, if unmolested, to reap the harvest of every field of industry, and every department of enterprise and production in the country.  But to do this they need protection — they need a stronger Government.  Power must be taken from the working people to defend themselves.  Those who are robbed must be denied the means of defense and self-protection.  Power in America, as in Europe, must be centralized in the hands of the robbers.

It is not the vandalism of the pauper and the tramp that calls for a stronger Government, but the freedom of the press and the suffrages of the outraged millions need to be suppressed;  for when the millions of freemen become aroused to the dangers which threaten their liberty and their prosperity, they will repeal statutes which sustain robbing monopolies.  The "rights of capital," in the sense in which it is used by Senator Sharon, are not as sacred as the rights of the pauper.  Every fortune of a million dollars possessed by one man, is made up of the substance wrongfully filched from other men, forcing them into pauperism.  The pauper is the inevitable result of the millionaire.  To be a millionaire necessitates the existence of a thousand paupers.  If 30,000 men in America were millionaires they would possess all the wealth of the nation, leaving 45,000,000 paupers.  The tendency of monopoly and consolidated capital is to bring about this result.

It can be averted only by the immediate and determined action of the people restraining this tendency, and limiting and controlling monopoly by such legislation as will permit a more just and equitable distribution of the products of wealth, and give to every producer the full earnings of his labor.

The people need not be deceived.

The edict has gone forth.

Capital has declared war upon labor and threatens to shed rivers of blood if the latter does not consent to be robbed and enslaved by the former.

A stronger Government means a weaker people.  To centralize power, means to strip the people of their liberties, their franchises, and their sovereignty, to confer them upon a despot.

Are the people ready for their chains ?

Their clank may be heard in the halls of Congress.  Don't mistake it for the jingle of resumption.

The last report of the commissioner of agriculture estimates the number of males of all occupations in the United States at 15,000,000, and that more than half of this number, to-wit, 7,600,000, are engaged in agricultural pursuits.

That the total value of farms, farm animals and farm implements is $13,461,200,433, or two-thirds of the total productive wealth of the nation.

That the value of farm products and animals for 1878 was $3,000,000,000, against $2,800,000,000 of mining and manufacturing products.

Thus it appears that not only a majority of the people of the United States are engaged in agriculture, but a majority of the wealth is invested in it, and a majority of the products of the nation is derived from that source.  So far, the farmers are the predominating class in society.  They can have things pretty much their own way, if they act in harmony.  There are also 2,900,000 men engaged in mining and manufacturing, whose interests are identical with the interests of the farmer.  These two classes constitute two-thirds of the voting population of the country.  These two classes produce all the wealth and pay all the taxes, but exercise little or no influence in shaping the policies of the Government, or in disbursing the vast sums they annually contribute.  These privileges have been usurped, and are exercised by a class of non-taxed and non-producers, who make politics a profession, and office an occupation to be exercised in the interest of clients who will pay the largest fees.

Nearly every lawyer who chooses that profession for a livelihood, regards it as the only path to political promotion.  Men enter the legal profession as a stepping stone to official position.  The first lesson that a lawyer is taught is to ignore right and justice, and labor with all his zeal and powers for a client, regardless of the merits or justice of his case.  If a murderer is brought into court with his hands red with the blood of innocence, the lawyer, who for a fee undertakes his defense, labors as zealously for his acquittal as though he were as innocent as a babe.

The Congress of the United States, and the legislatures of the several States, have become political bars, supported at the expense of the people, to engineer and pettifog measures through to final legislative judgment in the interest of capitalistic stock jobbers and financial gamblers.  If a clan of Wall Street gold gamblers desire the money of the country to be depreciated so they may gamble and wrench from society vast sums by gold speculations, they have simply to employ the ablest attorneys in Congress, have a bill passed to make all duties on imports and interest on the bonds payable in gold, and then take from the greenback the legal tender quality of money so as to depreciate it and furnish a market for their gold.  The people are thus defrauded because they have no representation in that body.  It is composed of an army of lawyers.  If one or a dozen get a big job from Vanderbilt, Scott, Belmont, the Rothschilds or the national banks, it goes through by courtesy, those not directly employed and paid not knowing how soon they may have a paying case, and need a similar courtesy.

Look at the legislation for the past sixteen years.  It has been a series of jobs for the benefit of capitalistic monopolies, and not one act for the benefit of the farmer and the manufacturers.

On the other hand, the legislation of the past few years, made in the interest of banks, bondholders, capital and railroad monopolies, has had the intended effect of adding billions to the wealth of these congressional clients, every dollar of which has been filched from the tax-paying, producing, misrepresented farmers and manufacturers.

Congress and legislatures have ceased to represent the people;  the lobby alone constitutes their clientage.  This is not to be wondered at.  They are not only encouraged in it by re-elections, but are paid for it by the beneficiaries of their venality.

The producing classes have the power of protection and redress in their own hands, but notwithstanding they have been robbed, stripped and flayed by inferior numbers, they march to the polls like lambs to the slaughter, and under the lash of party discipline vote for the same men and measures which have ruined them, and thus license them to continue their nefarious schemes of plunder.

During the years of our greatest industrial and commercial prosperity, eleven millions of laborers, artisans, agriculturists, mechanics and manufacturers, wrought annually from the raw material, the earth and its resources, the following products and values (as gathered from reliable statistics), for use and general distribution, to add to the already accumulated wealth of the nation:

Products of artisans, machinists, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons and the like .... $1,000,000,000
Leather manufactures .......... 226,000,000
Iron and steel manufactures ...... 120,000,000
Cotton manufactures ............... 71,500,000
Woolen manufacturing .............. 66,000,000
Unskilled labor and distributors ... 1,600,000,000
Fisheries ................... 100,000,000
Railway service ............... 360,000,000
Agriculture ................... 3,300,000,000
Making the gross product of the country .... $7,000,000,000

This wealth was produced by the heads of families and other persons representing 98 per cent. of the entire population of the United States.

It was at a time when gold and silver were entirely out of use as a medium of exchange, and a large and generous supply of greenbacks constituted the money of the realm.  The volume of the circulating medium approximated $2,000,000,000.  The only real uses the country had for this money was to purchase the raw material, pay for the labor, and to distribute the above products.  The eleven millions of wealth-producers were alone interested in the quality and quantity of this important tool of trade.

No man or set of men, who were not engaged in actual production, had a right to a voice in determining what kind or quantity of tools the producers should be supplied with.  For the first time in the history of the nation, the wealth-producers were accidentally, through the emergencies of the war, provided with anything like an adequate supply of money.  Even this supply was met with bitter and powerful opposition by parties both in this and foreign countries, not by producers of wealth, but by gamblers in the product of others' toil.  Not one of the ninety-eight per cent. of the people objected to the increase of the money volume, or complained that greenbacks had been substituted for gold.  After the war, when the nation's existence, and the perpetuity of the union were no longer in jeopardy, a system of contraction was inaugurated, to squeeze out of use and circulation the excess of money which the war had forced into the channels of trade and production.  So in his report of December 4, 1865, Hugh McCulloch said to Congress:

"The issue of United States notes as lawful money was a measure of expediency, doubtless, and necessary in the great emergency in which it was adopted, but this emergency no longer exists, and however satisfactory these notes may be as a circulating medium, and however desirable may be the saving of interest, these considerations will not satisfy a departure from that construction of the constitution which is essential to the equal and harmonious working of our peculiar institutions."

The "peculiar institutions" which Mr. McCulloch referred to as being unbalanced by the excess of war money, were not those of labor, enterprise and production, for which alone money is required, but the banking institutions, the gambling dens of the Money Power, whose nefarious occupation was gone, and whose sources of robbery were cut off, while the Government stood between them and the producer, and supplied the latter with ample means of production.  These were the "peculiar institutions," from one of which in Indiana Mr. McCulloch was called to Washington to place in "equal and harmonious working order again."  He adds:

"The rapidity with which the Government notes can be withdrawn will depend upon the ability of the secretaries to dispose of securities.  The secretary therefore respectfully but most earnestly recommends,

"First, That Congress declare that the compound interest notes shall cease to be a legal tender.  Second, That the secretary be authorized to sell bonds of the United States bearing interest at a rate not exceeding 6 per cent. for the purpose of retiring not only compound interest notes, but the United States notes.

"The first thing to be done is to establish a policy of contraction."

This, Congress established by resolution on the 18th of December, 1865.

How many of the eleven millions of producers, toiling in their shops and factories, delving in the subterranean store houses of the earth, or bending their backs to the harvest sun, petitioned Mr. McCulloch to make these suggestions to Congress on its meeting ?

How many of these millions asked that the thing for which they were all toiling might be made more scarce and difficult to obtain ?

How many of them prayed that instead of receiving greenbacks for their products, they might be made to pay a semi-annual gold bonus to have them destroyed ?

How many of them voluntarily consented to have the value of their property depreciated one-half and the value of their products reduced ?  How many of them consented to be turned into the streets, their families into the poor house, a hundred thousand bankrupted — and the most fortunate among them to be taxed beyond their ability to pay — simply to conform to a system of contraction, for the benefit of whom ?

Reader, do you believe a single laborer or producer, or manufacturer or a miner, a merchant or a transporter of merchandise, a farmer or a mechanic, would have voted for this measure if he had been called upon, and had known the result ?  Not one.  Not one of the eleven millions asked for it or was even consulted in regard to it.

Outside of the eleven millions of producers is a class — two per cent. of the population — who live off of labor, controlling and gambling in its necessities.  A class who "weave not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." [Matt 6:28-29]

A class who never added one farthing to the wealth of the world, who are not entitled to handle a dollar of money, never having produced its equivalent, as exempt from taxation as infants, and having to bear no more risks, burdens, or responsibilities in the affairs of the Government than the inmates of the poor house, arrogate to themselves not only the governing and lawmaking power, but the right to control and monopolize the most important instrument of production, with which they may gamble and win the product.  During all the dark days of contraction, while the wealth products of labor were shrinking in a direct ratio with the shrinkage of the money volume, the usurer's lamps burned brighter and brighter as the purchasing capacity of his interest dollars expanded to absorb the shrinking value of labor products.  As men of enterprise and production fell, the gambler rose higher and higher on the prostrate forms of his victims.

As the wrecks of productive enterprises increased, the foundations of banking institutions multiplied.  As the wages of labor and prices of products diminished, the value of interest and interest obligations augmented.

As the garments of the laborer and his wife and little ones faded and fringed, those of the gambler and his household changed to purple and fine linen.

As the wolves of want and starvation gathered at the doors of enforced idleness, pomp and luxury abounded in the temples of Mammon.

Here is the proof.  A prominent Iowa farmer, Hon. Samuel Sinnett, wrote, in 1878:

"The prices of some articles are eighteen per cent. lower than they were before the war.  Corn has not been so low since 1845, except in 1861.  Cotton not so low in twenty-three years, and mess pork, not since 1844.  These prices render the farmer hopeless, destroy his energy, and dwarf his manhood until he only seeks to struggle along from year to year without trying to keep up his improvements, from the fact that all the enterprising of this class are becoming bankrupts, and his real estate is shrinking in value while he finds himself actually burdened with products that will not net him the price of production.  At Des Moines the average price of pork (live hogs) is two dollars per hundred, corn from twelve to fifteen cents, hay from two to four dollars per ton, and other products in proportion.

"Now, I assert that none of these articles can be produced for less than fifty per cent. in advance of these prices.  No farmer in the West expects to receive any interest on the capital he has invested in his farm under present prices, and as many of them are in debt, and their farms mortgaged, it is easy to perceive that ultimate ruin must soon come."

The New York Journal of Commerce, January 1, makes a comparison of prices in that city for a decade, with the following showing:

PRODUCTS. .... 1868 ...... 1878
Flour $8.75 to $9.50 | $3.10 to $3.50
Oats $1.40 | .34 cts.
Cotton, per lb, .16 cts. | .07cts.
Hay, per ton $24.00 | $9.00
Mess Pork $21.00 | $7.05
Mess Beef $32.00 | $14.50
Butter .45cts. | .10cts.
Cheese .19cts | .8.3-7cts

The Boston Advertiser published a table of prices in that city on January 1, 1879, as compared with those of 1860, as follows:

Products. ...... 1860 ...... 1879
Mess Pork ...... $17 to $18 | $8.50 to $9
Mess Beef ...... $11.05 | $10.00
Lard ........... .13cts. | .7½cts.
Hams ........... .70cts. | .35 to .48 cts.

While these products have declined in value nearly one-half since the specie payment period of 1860, and their producers are the bearers of the great bulk of the tax burden, the national tax has increased from $56,054,599 in 1860, to $237,446,776 in 1878, while state, county, town and municipal taxation has at least doubled.

Under the finance system which has produced this condition of things, and which both the old political parties are pledged to perpetuate and aggravate by still more stringent legislation, what hope is there for the farmer ?  As low as prices are and daily shrinking, the policy of the Money Power is forcing upon the farmer competition more destructive to his interests than Chinese immigration is to the labor of the Pacific coast.

But England's policy is "cheap labor, cheap bread," and she is carrying it out in the United States through the agency of her capital in the hands of leading politicians, with as much ease as she does in India and Ireland.  The policy of contraction as expressed by that eminent member and representative of the English Cobden Club, David A. Wells, in the following words, has done the work:

"Discarding all indirect methods, I would adopt what may be called the 'cremation' process, or I would have it enjoined on the secretary of the treasury to destroy by burning on a given day of every week, commencing at the earliest practicable moment, a certain amount of legal tender notes, fixing the minimum at not less than $500,000 per week."

Having portrayed the present and prospective condition of the American farmer under the Demo-Republican finance policy, and the cause's which have produced, and must inevitably perpetuate if not aggravate it, let us see what effect this same policy has had upon the prosperity of that other class who reap not, neither do they spin.

During the long tedious years of ruin and bankruptcy among farmers and producers, from 1866 to 1878, William H. English, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, was President of the First National Bank of Indianapolis.  Upon retiring from that trust, in 1877, he made a report to the stockholders, from which the following is an extract:

"I congratulate the officers and stockholders of our enterprise.  The bank has been in operation fourteen years under my control, with a capital stock of $500,000.  In the meantime, it has voluntarily returned $500,000 of capital stock back to its stockholders, besides paying them in dividends $1,496,250, part of which was in gold;  and I now turn it over to you with a capital unimpaired and $327,000 of the undivided earnings on hand.  To this may be added the premiums of United States bonds at present prices, amounting to $36,000, besides quite a large amount for lost or destroyed bills."

The items of profits are as follows:

Returned to stockholders, capital ..... $500,000
Dividends to stockholders ............ 1,496,250
Undivided earn earnings .............. 327,000
Premiums on bonds ............... 36,000
Lost or destroyed bills ......... 24,000
Total .................... $2,383,250

The New York Commercial Advertiser gives the accumulation of ten men and firms of that city for the year of 1879, as follows:

The Vanderbilt estate ..... $30,000,000
Jay Gould ........... 16,000,000
Russel Sage ......... 10,000,000
Sidney Dillon ........ 10,000,000
James R. Keene ........ 8,000,000
The First National Bank .......... 2,000,000
Dexter, Morgan & Co. ........ 2,000,000
Three or four others, each ......... 3,000,000
Total .............. $80,000,000

Not a dollar of this vast sum was produced or created by the men who accumulated it, but every penny was taken from wealth producers without a farthing's consideration.  It required the labor of 400,000 men daily, for a year, to earn this amount over and above the means of their daily subsistence.  Without any increase in the aggregate wealth of the country, these ten men and firms were able to rake into their coffers eighty million dollars that was produced by, and justly belonged to, other men.  Through cunningly contrived schemes and systems, backed up and sustained by special legislation, a few hundred of these vampires absorb annually from production $1,000,000,000, and with each year their powers of absorption increase in a compound ratio.  It is only a question of time, if their machinery is not broken up and their schemes of plunder checked, when they will possess the entire wealth of the nation, with a mortgage on society for all future increase, save a bare subsistence for the millions of toilers.  The condition of Ireland and the laboring masses of England is sufficient to stimulate American toilers to throw off the yoke that is oppressing them, to break the fetters that are being riveted upon them, while they have strength to emancipate and save themselves, and before they find themselves in the helpless condition of their fellows across the sea.

All this from the neglect of farmers to see that they are honestly represented in Congress and State Legislatures.

They alone are responsible for filling Congress with lawyers and bankers.

The Congress which inaugurated the present financial policy of the Government, was made up of 250 bankers and lawyers and 22 farmers.

The Congress previous to the present, was made up of 189 bankers, 99 lawyers, 14 merchants, 13 manufacturers, 7 doctors, 1 mechanic.  Farmers, not one! the money majority over all others.

Who wonders that the people's interests are neglected ?

What can one mechanic do for 40,000,000 laborers against two hundred non-producers whose interests are to rob industry ?

The Government to-day represents a Money Power which occupies the Executive chair, fills all important positions in subordinate departments, and enacts all the laws.

It laughs at our boasted sovereignty, and snaps its fingers at our ballot-boxes.

It selects and puts in nomination its own tools, and deceives the people with the idea that an election is an expression of their will.

It has protected itself against the possibility of taxation by a contract with the Government before it became its creditor.

It has obligated the Government to contribute to it all the surplus increase of wealth and then destroyed the currency of the country to prevent the people from liquidating the obligations.

It has added millions of dollars to its own strength and in a corresponding ratio weakened the people and deprived them of the means of defense.

Partisan follies have gone to seed, and labor and enterprise are reaping the harvest.

The people have loaned to their enemy the weapons of their defense.  They have unlocked their doors and set thieves to guard their treasures, and now as soon as the nominations of 1880 are flashed across the continent, every cringing partisan slave rushes to lick the hand still raised to shed the remaining blood in labor's veins.

And this in a land where the majority inherit absolute sovereignty, but basely submits to be led or driven as beasts of burden under the Democratic or Republican lash in the hands of gamblers and political slave masters.

Rome rose to the zenith of her glory on the wings of two thousand million dollars of fiat money, possessing little or no intrinsic value, and remained there so long as she maintained this tool of exchange, based on a per capita ratio.

It was only after her rulers, coming in possession of gold and silver, plundered from the victims of conquest;  established the system of intrinsic value money on a volume of the precious metals less than $200,000,000, did her glory wane, and finally disappear in the night of the Dark Ages.

Why did she make this change ?  Because the owners of the precious metals saw that by limiting the money to gold and silver, they could convert their stolen trophies into an engine to rob their own people.  The process of contraction was set in motion.  A day was set when the public revenues were to be collected in gold and silver.  The money which had made Rome what she was, was degraded by the very hand it had made strong.  It began to depreciate in value.  As gold and silver were scarce, prices declined.  Labor was thrown out of employment.  The land was filled with bankrupts, and soon became overrun with tramps and bandits.  The historian says of the times:

"The people gave themselves up in despair in the fields, as beasts of burden lie down beneath their load and refuse to rise.  The disintegration of society was almost complete.  All public spirit, all generous emotions, all noble aspirations of man shriveled and disappeared as the volume of money shrunk, and prices fell.  As men decayed, wealth accumulated in the hands of the few.  Not only did whole provinces become the property of one man, but usury existed in so frightful a form that even the virtuous Brutus received sixty per cent. for the use of money."

Pliney says:  "These colossal fortunes which ruined Italy, were due to the concentration of estates through USURY, so scarce was money."

But Italy revived, and by what means ?  She discarded her gold and silver basis and expanded her paper currency.  She arose from her sleep of a thousand years, and on the wings of her fiat credit tokens, has well nigh regained her lost glory.

She has multiplied her commerce four fold, and her railways seven fold, tunneling the Alps and the Appenines and building hundreds of miles through and over the adamantine rock of her mountains.  She has set her millions of beggars and tramps to work in productive enterprise, and added hundreds of millions to the wealth of the kingdom, which is as real and permanent as though it had been produced by the aid of gold, instead of paper.

In 1797, the wars in which England was engaged, forced her to haul in her gold and silver anchors, and spread her fiat sails to the breeze.  The result was her revenues rose from $115,000,000 in 1797 to $360,000,000 in 1815.  At the time England suspended, her currency volume all told, including coin and paper, aggregated about $45,000,000.  Under suspension, it gradually increased to $127,000,000.  The effects of this expansion is expressed by Sir Archibald Allison in the following words:

"Ushered in by a combination of circumstances the most calamitous, both with reference to external security and internal industry, it terminated in A BLAZE OF GLORY and flood of prosperity which have never, since the beginning of the world, descended upon any nation."

A writer in the North American Review, speaking of this period, says:

"The conquests in arts and arms during the eighteen years of expansion of pure fiat credit, were without example in the history of England, and her progress in wealth and power was without a parallel in the history of the world.  She won the sovereignty of the seas at Trafalgar, and the first military place in history at Waterloo.  She became, during this period, matchless in the possession of every incident of greatness, wealth and power."

During this period of fiat paper money, England conquered the world of commerce and expanded four fold her diversified industries.  But her dangers having passed, she relapsed again into the death-damps of specie basis, cast her gold anchor, and furled her fiat sails which had wafted her to glory.

A day of resumption was set.

Contraction commenced in 1815, and wrecked fortunes marked its pathway.  Money became scarce, enterprises became crippled, credits were drawn upon, debts multiplied, factories were compelled to suspend operation, men were thrown out of employment, starvation overtook the poor, bread riots ensued, and the army was increased to shoot down the famishing thousands who sought bread at the risk of their lives and liberties.  Allison says:

" In hundreds of cases, from the tremendous reduction which now took place, landed estates barely sold for as much as would pay off the mortgages, and hence the owners were stripped of all, and left beggars.

"In August, 1820, sixty thousand starving 'rioters' assembled in Manchester, demanding bread, when they were dispersed by the troops, many of whom were shot dead."

Why did England abandon the policy which had wrought such wonderful prosperity, for the old, which brought ruin and desolation ?

Because she was ruled by a fixed income class, whose annuities would bring them but half as much when prices were high, as they would when prices were low.  To double the value of their incomes, they had to depress the values of everything else, and to do this, the volume of money must be diminished, and to secure such diminution, and make it permanent, the single gold standard was established in 1816, and now 30,000 men who fatten upon usury have come into possession of the soil which was then owned by 1,750,000 farmers.

After the Franco-German War, France in order to pay her $1,000,000,000 indemnity to Germany, abandoned her coin basis, and expanded her irredeemable paper to the extent of $640,000,000, which was kept at par by being honored and received by a prostrate nation, which is to-day the most prosperous in Europe.

Germany on the other hand, free from debt, and having received her indemnity from France, adopted the English system of gold basis, and is as thoroughly conquered and subjugated thereby, as was France by the victorious arms of the Prussians.

The United States presents the next lesson to the thoughtful student.  From a height of prosperity, in 1866, under the same system that raised Rome and England to their most exalted positions, and that which to day places France and Italy foremost in the rank of European prosperity, this country has fallen, and is gradually sinking to the level of those that have gone before her from the same cause.  Our mines neglected, and filling with water and damps.  Our shipyards silent.  Our furnace fires smouldering.  Our land covered with tramps, burglars and mortgages.  Our prisons and alms houses filled to overflowing.

Our tax burdens increasing as values shrink and fade away.

As we had more than doubled the accumulations of two centuries during the decade from 1865 to 1875, we required double the currency the latter year that we did the former, but, instead of receiving it, we were deprived of the larger proportion of what we had in 1865.

We contracted our currency at the very time when an opposite policy was necessary to retain the equilibrium of prices, with the increasing demand for labor and products.  Why did we abandon a policy that had proved so beneficial, without an evil result to detract from its merits ?  For the same reason that Rome, England and Germany adopted the gold basis, viz.: to depress general prices and values, that the value and purchasing power of the usurer's harvest might be enhanced and augmented so as to rob the people of the accumulations of fifteen years of unparalleled production and prosperity, and to reap the annual harvest of labor for all time to come.

Why this universal wailing,
Over all this land prevailing,
This entreaty unavailing ? Why this gloom and dark despair ?
See the sun of hope is setting !
Man his brother is forgetting.
And a curse is slowly falling
On this land of promise rare;
And the faces are appalling,
That were once so briglit and fair --
Want and misery everywhere !

Mark the toiler, sowing, reaping,
And the golden sheaves upheaping.
What a hidden monster, sweeping for his own insatiate maw.
Gathers fast and faster, faster.
Though privations and disaster
Smite the weary, sweating toiler
Till the pangs of hunger gnaw;
Never does the fierce despoiler
His rapacious grasp withdraw;
Greed so cruel knows no law.

Hear the workshop's ceaseless clatter,
Hear the workmen's footsteps putter.
When they join or quickly scatter, when to each a task is shown;
Each a burden carries, double,
Load of toil, and load of trouble;
For an iron master watches
From a secret door unknown;
From each mouth he quickly snatches
Every word and meaning tone--
He is master, here, alone.

How the pistons heave and tumble.
How the wheels do drum and rumble ?
How obedient--not a grumble when those brawny arms control.
Strange, that while such puny muscle
Rules so surely all this bustle,
A more potent power, uncanny.
Rules still surer brain and soul ;
Strange, indeed, the brawny many
Let a baleful power control
Wealth of brawn and brain and soul.

In the gloomy mine descending,
Where the flickering lights are blending ;
Note liow close is death impending--foul his breath upon the air.
Careless is the warning spoken,
Scarce the delvers heed the token,

For a monster, darker, grimmer,
Makes them madly, rashly dare.
And, through lamplight's glare and glimmer,
Holds them fiercely, surely, there,
With the bravery of despair.

Go to yonder lonely garret.
If your heart is strong to bear it,
Mark the half-bent shadow where it darks the black wall scarcely more ;

There a famished woman sitting,
Works. with patience unremitting.
With her weary, ceaseless stitching,
Keeps the wolf just out the door;
While a demon still enriching
Self with stealing from her store,
Robs her pittance lower and lower.

Is this the land where hands of labor
Clasp the hands of toiling neighbor,
And the plowshare--not the saber--is the scepter held supreme ?
Is it here where honest toilers
Need not fear of strong despoilers,
Since all men are free and equal ?
Ah ! If things are what they seem,
This is but the bitter sequel,
Waking of a century's dream,--
A turning back of progress' stream.

Shall this demon reign eternal
O'er this blessed land fraternal ?
Shall enchantment so internal hold us ever 'neath its spell ?

No ! By all the powers of heaven
From this land he shall be driven.
Usury be hurled, unshriven.
To the lowest depths of hell ;
Then a mighty shout be given.
Hear the hosts their voices swell,
" Labor conquers--all is well !"

During the preparation of this volume the following questions have been asked, which I insert with their appropriate answers:

1. What is the difference between the old United States bank and its branches, and the National banks and branches ?

2. Is the Government bound for the redemption of national bank currency ?

3. How old are our national banks ?

4. Were the bonds by express terms of the law payable in coin prior to the credit strengthening act ?

5. What amount of gold and silver is there in the United States available ibr redemption ?

6. Did the credit strengthening act specially bind the Government to pay the bonds in coin ?

7. What proportion of the bonds are held by foreigners ?

8. What is the sum of the bonded debt ?

9. What are the Government's resources, or available means, to pay the bonds ?

10. What is the amount of coin and bullion in the world available for money ?

11. Can the bonded debt be paid before maturity ?

12. If the bonds remain unpaid, how long will it take for the interest to absorb the wealth of the nation ?

1. The old United States bank and twenty-six branches had a capital of but $35,000,000, and its notes were redeemable in coin. President Jackson vetoed the bill to re-charter it on the grounds that it was a dangerous money power, controlling both Congress and the executive, and even local elections and State legislatures. Not only this, Jackson held to the greenback doctrine that the paper money of the country, as well as coin, should be issued by the Government, and instead of being based on coin, "the paper money should be based upon the faith and revenues of the nation."

The national banks have an aggregate capital of about $500,000,000, and there are 2,060 of them. Their power for evil is as much greater than the old banks as are their numbers and combined capital. "We have no one Jackson able to crush the monster, but we have a Greenback army of Jacksons who will try to do it.

2. The Government holds United States bonds to indemnify holders of national currency against loss. If these bonds sell for enough to redeem the notes of broken national banks, the Government will redeem them, and not otherwise.

3. The first national bank chartered was Jay Cooke & Co.'s in the City of Washington, about the beginning of 1864.

4. No war bonds except about $270,000,000 of 10-40s were by the terms of the law expressly payable in coin -- the balance in lawful money except the interest, which was payable in coin.

5. Not to exceed $150,000,000 of coin is held by the banks and United States treasury for redemption purposes.

6. The credit strens:theninw act declared all the bonds payable "in coin or its equivalent."

7. The bonds are used as an international currency by the large American and European traders. Most of them, however, are held by John Sherman's syndicate, who are New York partners of London and German bankers and capitalists.

8. The sum of the bonded debt, August 1, was $1,901,716,110.

9. The Government's only resources or means to pay the public debt, are its revenues from taxation, and the issue of its own legal tenders. Heretofore it has paid one debt by making another. It paid off the 5.20 bonds in 4 per cents., worth a trifle more than gold.

10. The amount of coin and bullion in the world is estimated by Fawcett, as follows:
Gold .......... $1,970,050,000
Silver ......... 1,800,000,000
Total ......... $3,775,550,000

11. It can be paid any time the Government has the legal tender to liquidate it, and if such legal tender is refused, interest mav leo^allv cease.

12. The wealth of the nation is estimated at $27,000,000,000. Calling the public debt $2,000,000,000 at 4 per cent, compounded according to bank custom and calculation, it would amount in forty-eight years to $27,800,000,000, or $800,000,000 more than the entire wealth of the nation.

1. When did the destruction of greenbacks (by burning) commence ?

2. When did it cease; from wliat cause, and how much was destroyed ?

3. Were bonds ever bought from the Government for greenbaclis other than giving dollar for dollar ? Hard money men tell us that when gold was 2.85 it took $2.85 of greenbacks to buy $1 of bonds.

4. Could the bonds be called in immediately and paid off without breaking faith with the holders as to the time they were to run ?

5. Were the 10.40 bonds sold for greenbacks, or exchanged for other bonds ?

6. How much gold has been paid out of the treasury for redemption purposes ?

1. The Law authorizing the contraction and destruction of the greenbacks was passed April 12, 1866, and the process commenced immediately thereafter.

2. The act of contraction, as far as greenbacks were concerned, was repealed in January, 1868, after $70,736,630 of legal tenders had been destroyed. It was brought about by the force of public sentiment. Aside from the legal tenders, over $1,500,000,000 of treasury notes used as currency were destroyed.

3. When gold was 2.85 and greenbacks worth less than 40 cents in gold on the dollar, greenbacks were convertible into bonds at par.

4. If the public good required the immediate payment of the bonds in greenbacks, or any other kind of money at the disposal of the Government, it would not be so great a breach of faith as it was for the Government to unconditionally abolish slavery, without consideration to the owners, after the institution had been supported for years by the laws and the constitution of the country. That institution became a public evil, threatening the life of the nation and the liberties of the people. But the slaves were the private property of individnals, acquired according to the laws of the land.  Should our public debt, the bonds and bondholders, become a source of danger to American liberty, and sorely oppressive to American industry, the Government has the same right even to repudiate the debt, absolutely, that it had to confiscate the slaves and repudiate the institution of slavery.

5.  The 10.40 bonds were authorized to be, and were sold for lawful money (greenbacks) of the United States, or for any of the certificates of indebtedness or treasury notes outstanding.

6.  A little more than $5,000,000 of gold has been paid out for the redemption of greenbacks, according to the last treasury report, since January, 1879, while the interest we are paying on the borrowed gold held for redemption purposes, costs about $5,200,000 a year.

Congressman Van H. Manning, of Mississippi, in a recent speech, stated that the credit strengthening act, changing the currency bonds to coin bonds, was a contract between the Government on the one hand, and the bondholders on the other;  that the bondholders agreed to make a reduction of 2 per cent. in the interest if the Government would change their currency bonds to coin bonds, and make them payable thirty years after date;  that the 2 per cent. reduction was the consideration given by the bondholders in the transaction, and that this consideration made the act binding in law, and that there was no alternative by which we could relieve ourselves of the bonds under thirty years without amending the constitution, and no power in this Government that could force the payment of the bonds sooner, not even in gold, without changing the constitution.  Will you give an opinion on this subject ?

The credit strengthening act was passed in March, 1869.  An attempt was made to pass it during the session of 1867-8, but failed.  During its pending, a presidential nomination and election took place.  The Democratic party nominated Horatio Seymour on a platform that opposed the payment of currency obligations in coin.  The Republican party nominated U.S. Grant, on the urgent solicitation and petition of forty capitalists of New York City, who represented in the aggregate about $500,000,000.  In regard to the political fugling at this time, and the "contract" which Mr. Van H. Manning claims was entered into between the Government and the bondholders, a contemporaneous writer says:

The Rothschilds were in possession of several hundred millions of 5.20 bonds, purchased at about 60 cents on the dollar, or less, and were particularly interested.  Their agent, August Belmont, who secured the position of chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was instructed by Baron James Rothschilds as early as March 13, 1868, that unless the Democratic party went in for paying the 5.20 bonds in gold, it must be defeated.  The first step was to have the National Convention held in New York City.  It accordingly convened there on the 4th of July, 1868.  Belmont and his satellites were unable to control the convention, at least in the matter of the platform, and it declared that all obligations against the Government not expressly payable in coin should be paid in lawful money of the United States.  Belmont owned a large interest in The New York World, the leading Democratic paper of the country, which, on the 15th of October, came out in a double-leaded editorial denouncing Seymour as unavailable and unfit, and advised his withdrawal.  This so demoralized the Democracy that Grant had an easy walk over the course.

Before this time, John Sherman, O.P. Morton, and other leading Republican Senators had opposed coin payment of the bonds.  After Grant's election they advocated it, or were silent on the subject.  In his inaugural speech Grant warned his party that no repudiator of one farthing of the public debt would be trusted in public place.  He immediately called an extra session of Congress.  The first bill presented, the first bill passed, and the first act approved, was the credit strengthening act.  Not a word was uttered in Congress or out, about a reduction of interest and refunding of the 6 per cent. bonds into 4 per cents. for nearly two years afterwards.  If there was such a contract there must be a record of it.  It was never made public, never acted up on in Congress, never made known to the people.  The only contract ever made with the bondholders was that political contract of 1868, between Grant and the Republican leaders on the one side, and Belmont and other Democratic bondholders on the other, that if the former would pledge themselves to pass and carry out the credit strengthening act if elected, the other would defeat their own party and secure the election of the former.  That was the only contract.  Grant's two terms, and John Sherman's continuation at the head of the finance department, was the Republican consideration, and gold payment of the 5.20 bonds was the consideration on the part of the bondholding Democracy.  The contract was a fraud in its conception, its execution a violation of the constitution, and constitutes one of the most damnable acts of political corruption, and the most villainous betrayal of public trust, ever practiced upon an unsuspecting and confiding constituency;  and, when fully understood, it will brand with eternal infamy every name in connection with the disreputable transaction.

Will you give an opinion on the following Chicago Tribune editorial ?

" Under our constitution the power to make paper money in time of peace a legal tender does not exist.  A majority of the Supreme Court sanctioned the issue of such paper during the war as an act of imperious national necessity.  It was also decided that the necessity having passed, the amount of such paper was limited to the sum originally designated, $400,000,000.

"There is no constitutional power on the part of the Government to increase the legal tender paper beyond this limit, and, if this 'war-money' be withdrawn, there is no power to make a new issue of paper of that kind.  Herein is the wide difference between our Government and all others.  In France, England and Germany, and all other nations, the power to make paper a legal tender is ample, and can be exercised at any time, as it is now in England."

The Tribune's assumption that no power exists under our constitution to make paper money, in time of peace, a legal tender is without warrant in law, logic or common sense.  It admits that all other nations possess this power, and that herein is the wide difference between our Government and all others.  If all other nations possess this power, where did they get it ?  Did the monarchies of the old world absorb all of this power, leaving none for the republics of the new ?

The monetary prerogative is a sovereign attribute.  In this country the power to make anything legal tender rested with the people at large, in common with all other powers of sovereignty.  By the constitution the people delegated to Congress all the power they possessed over the money question.  The Supreme Court decided that if Congress had not the power to decide what should be legal tender in this country, the power was annihilated.  The court further decided that Congress was not only authorized, but required to issue paper legal tenders when any emergency should require it, whether that emergency be war, famine, financial depression, or any exportation, or destruction of the money volume, and that Congress, and not the court was the proper judge of the necessity or emergency.  The court also decided that Congress had a clear right to adopt any measure necessary to carry out any of the objects of the Government, and not specifically denied or forbidden by the constitution.

The limit of $400,000,000 was not passed upon by the court.  It made no reference to the volume.  The first legal tender act limited the volume to $150,000.000.  The second extended it to $300,000,000.  The volume as afterwards increased to $432,000,000 greenbacks proper, and over $1,000,000,000 interest-bearing legal tender treasury notes.

The $400,000,000 limit was an act of Congress passed June 30, 1864, near the close of the war.  It provided for the issue of $400,000,000 legal tender 7.30 treasury notes to be redeemed in three years, and also provided that the permanent volume of United States notes should never exceed $400,000,000.  Congress had the same authority to limit the volume to four thousand millions, that it had to fix the sum at four hundred millions.  And it has the same authority to change or enlarge the volume that it has to contract or extinguish it.  The Constitution confers upon Congress all the power over the money question that exists in sovereignty.  The people yielded up to that body all the power they possessed over that element in regard to legal tender.  Whatever any power below heaven can do, in regard to legal tender, Congress can perform under the constitution.  It is false, and a national libel, to say that our Government does not possess as much power to protect its citizens as the monarchies of the old world.  It is absurd to claim that Congress has power to issue paper legal tender to protect itself, while it is denied the right to make such issues to protect the people.  "Congress shall have power to coin money" — it matters not whether it is demanded for war or for commerce.  The constitution does not specify the emergencies which shall warrant the making of paper legal tenders.  Congress is the sole judge of the necessity.  The court has so decided;  if the emergency should come in time of peace, the Government has the same right to issue them as if the emergency was war.  If Congress can make paper legal tender for war, it can for peace.  If it can make $400,000,000, it can make $4,000,000,000.  If it has any power over the quantity or quality of legal tender, it has all power, and it is its own judge of the necessity and extent of its exercise.

"What constitutes the value of the greenback ?"

Its value consists in the service it is capable of performing.

"Suppose a man receives a hundred dollar greenback from the Government for a mule, the Government has received a hundred dollars of intrinsic value, but where does the man get his value ?"

By doing as the Government did, give it in exchange for a hundred dollars' worth of other property that he may need, that some other man has to spare.

"Where will No. 2 get his value ?"

By repeating the operation with some other man.

"In the end, will not the last man who receives it be short a hundred dollars ?"

No;  for the last man who receives it is the Government's tax-gatherer.  It returns to the party who first issued it, and received full value of it.  It has made the financial circuit, and every man who received it in exchange for a hundred dollars of intrinsic value he did not need, has received for it a hundred dollars of intrinsic value he did need.  Every hand it has passed through has been accommodated, no loss has been sustained, no expense has been incurred by the Government or the people in interest to detract from the value of the property exchanged, in short it has performed all the service without cost that ten gold eagles could have performed at an expense of a hundred dollars and interest.

"I see that so long as it can be made to keep up the circuit, it is superior to coin, or money of intrinsic value, but may not loss of confidence stop it in its course, and prevent it from making the circuit, and thereby subject the man who last receives it to loss ?"

Its legal tender qualities will perpetuate confidence and keep it moving on its course homeward.

"What constitutes that quality called legal tender ?"

It is a solemn compact by all the people of the nation;  expressed by their chosen representatives, and approved by their executive, that to enable it to keep in motion on its circuit, so as not to stop on the hands of any member of society, each shall receive of the other for all debts dues and taxes of every nature and description, at its full face value, and unless a law be passed invalidating this contract, confidence is perpetuated by thus perpetuating its services and offices.

"What are the advantages of this currency over bank notes ?"

1.  It is within the control of our own people, while bank currency may be entirely in the control of aliens, foreigners and enemies.

2.  It costs nothing but the printing of it, while bank currency costs its face at the start, and from 4 to 6 per cent. per annum to maintain it.

3.  It is legal tender between man and man, which bank notes are not.

4.  Its redemption is always sure under the compact of legal tender, both between the members of society and between them and their Government, while bank note, redemption may be only in greenbacks, and even for this the banks are not required to keep on hand a dollar of reserve for that purpose.

Should they fail, the Government has promised to redeem them in time, which might cause much delay, in convenience, and even a heavy loss if the money were necessary to make legal tender payment.

"Has coin any advantages over greenbacks as a domestic currency ?"

Not any, but many disadvantages.

In fact it should never be used as a medium of exchange except in the form of bullion to pay foreign balances.

It is both expensive and inconvenient, and performs the service of money no better than greenbacks, and is liable to be exported in large quantities, at a time our own industries need it most, thereby endangering money amines, panics and ruinous financial disturbances.

" Have the vast debts of the world more than doubled during the last twenty-five years in consequence of extravagance and over-production of the laboring class, as is charged ?"

The increase of debt has grown out of the extravagance of despots, and the over-production of fools to submit to it.

As men are but children of a larger growth, so kings and rulers are but men of larger powers.  Each class has its sports.  The child chases the butterfly and robs the bird's nest.  The man delights in the fox and rabbit chase, the horse race and cock fight, while kings and rulers stake their realms on games and ten pins in which the balls used are made of cast iron, and pins of men.

In these sports, those pins that are knocked down are buried, while those that remain are compelled to pay the expenses and foot the bills on both sides.

Let us for a moment consider the costs of these extravagant sports for the last twenty-five years.

From carefully compiled official statistics of the various nations, we gather the following facts which include in addition to troops slain in battle, a portion of the deaths occasioned by the ravages of war:

1.  Lives lost:
Crimean war (1852 to 1857) ...... 750,000
Italian war (1859) ............... 45,000
Schleswig-Holstein ................ 3,000
American civil war .............. 500,000
Prussia, Austria and Italy (1866) .... 45,000
Mexico, China, Morocco, Paraguay ..... 65,000
Franco-German (1870-75) ............. 215,000
Bulgaria and Armenia (1876-77) ....... 25,004
Total ............................ 1,648,000

2.  Cost:
Crimean war .............. £340,000,000
Italian war (1859) ............... 60,000,000
American civil war (north) ...... 940,000,000
American civil war (south) ...... 460,000,000
Schleswig-Holstein ................ 7,000,000
Austria and Prussia (1866) ....... 66,000,000
Mexico, Morocco and Paraguay ..... 40,000,000
Franco-German ................... 500,000,000
Total ........................ £3,813,000,000

This reduced to dollars is $19,065,000,000.

This vast sum of over nineteen thousand million dollars added to the people's burdens within the last twenty-five years is enough to stagger the enterprise of the world for the next century.  To bear it, and to meet its annual interest, requires the co-operation of every hand of labor and resource of wealth.

To pay off these enormous debts and to meet the annual interest with no other medium of exchange but that based upon the limited and diminishing quantity of gold and silver in the world, will enslave and impoverish every soul on earth except the holders of these debts, who, through them, will be made the owners of the globe and the perpetual rulers of men.