Part 4

The system of private or corporate banking is an example in point. Why do individuals want a gold basis upon which to issue currency? To get the privilege to levy interest on many times as much currency as they have capital invested. A bank with an actual capital of $100,000 in gold could issue $300,000 in currency, all which it could loan out together with nearly all the deposits that it could secure, which, in some instances, have been known to amount to ten times the capital. Why should not a class of men, if the people are blind enough to let them do it, speculate upon the credulity of the public through the idea that they are rendering a public service? Why should they not desire to “bank,” when by banking they can receive interest on $1,000,000, when otherwise they could collect it upon $100,000 only? The same idea is the inspiration of national banking, and of those who oppose a national currency. The banks bought, say $100,000 of United States bonds from the Government for $60,000. These bonds they deposited with the treasurer, and the people were required to pay $6000 a year interest on them, while the banks received from the Government $100,000 in national bank currency with which they were set afloat. These notes were loaned to the people, who again paid an interest on the same capital of $6000, or 20 per cent. per annum—$12,000 on $60,000; and yet the bank men have made the people think that they are offering them great accommodations. “Oh,” says the National Bank legislator, “we must get rid of these abominable, depreciated, irredeemable greenbacks, and make room for more national banknotes.” Do you know for what that legislation is bidding? He wants, if he has not already got it,—from some national bank man in his district, or else he has an interest in some bank. What is the security of national bank notes? United States bonds deposited in the Treasury. What is the security of the bonds? The public faith of the United States. What is the security of the greenbacks? The public faith of the United States. What difference in this respect, then, is there between national bank notes and greenbacks? None. Then as a currency there is this difference between the bank notes and greenbacks: If greenbacks were to take the place of the bank notes, the bank men would not get 20 per cent. interest on their capital, and the privilege of receiving and loaning the deposits of the people.

But look at it in another light. Suppose the security of the national bank notes were their own capital instead of the bonds, who would not prefer to trust the faith of the United States, rather than that of any individual in these times of Credit Mobilers, Tweed and whiskey rings? Then, again, why should individuals furnish the circulating medium of the people, when the people can furnish it themselves and save the expense? $1,000,000,000 is as small an amount of currency of all kinds as will transact the business of the country properly. Why should not the $60,000,000, which the people would have to pay the banks for interest on this, be paid to the Government for greenbacks? And more! Why should not all the interest that is now paid to individuals and banks for private loans, be paid to the Government? It is estimated that the average amount of private loans for the whole country is not less than $5,000,000,000 upon which, at even 6 per cent. interest, the people are taxed $300,000,000. Is there any valid reason why the Government should not loan this money and receive this interest? Yes, for if it did, the rich could not live in luxurious idleness, while the poor are obliged to labour twice the natural time to subsist the world.

WHY DO THE PEOPLE PAY INTEREST?

Or still again: why should the people pay any interest at all on loans from themselves? Why should not their agent—the Government—when amply secured, freely loan the people all the money that they want for use? Suppose that the farmers and the manufacturers did not have to pay interest on the money that they are compelled to have to produce their crops and goods? Don’t you see that they could compete successfully with the people of any country in the world, in the production of anything? Institute free money and there would be no necessity for a tariff for protection to keep out the cheaper goods of other nations. But on the contrary, this country would shortly be supplying other nations with the very things with which they are now supplying us and thereby crippling our manufactures and productions. Besides, all the people would be constantly employed, prices would be low, every comfort and even luxury abundant and in the reach of all, and thrift would replace stagnation everywhere. Plenty of money, plenty of work and plenty of everything that the ingenuity and strength of man can make, are the most favourable conditions for the masses; while just the reverse is true for the privileged classes. But why, since the former class outnumbers the latter, as five to one, do not the former have all things their own way in this country where the majority rule? Ask the masses this, and they can make no reply. But it is because the superior intelligence and tact of the minority enable them to concoct schemes by which, without seeming to do so, they reduce the majority to actual, though mostly unconscious servitude; making them pay, first, all the interest on the public and private debts; next, all the expenses of the national, state, county and municipal governments; and next, obtain their own support and the increase of their wealth from them. Do you think that I overstate this? I think I can make it so clear that you cannot doubt it; and if I do, will you not think differently of the toiling masses than you have thought of them heretofore? At the beginning of any year take the amount of real wealth in the hands of the non-producers. During the year the governments continue, the taxes are gathered and the expenses are paid: your debts, your expenses and all; the producers have continued to labour as usual, and at the end of the year find themselves just where they were at its beginning; but the property of the wealthy classes has increased about three per cent. for the whole country. And while the latter class has become fewer in numbers and richer individually, the former has increased in numbers and become poorer individually. Now these are the facts, and with them before them who will pretend to say that the class who have not produced anything have added to the aggregate wealth? Whence has come this increase of wealth? From the wealth producers, from the labouring classes and from no other source. Industry being the sole source of wealth, it could have come from no other source. Hence let the non-producer get his increase by whatever strategy, it comes in some channel directly from the producer. This may be done by interest, by speculation, by sharp trades, by profits; but let it be by which it may, the producer has to pay the bill. In other words, every addition that is made to the wealth of non-producers is so made at the expense of the producers, the former having so much more than they had which they did not produce, and the latter having so much less than they did produce. This is self-evident, and all the sophistical argumentation that can ever be made cannot make it otherwise. The minority may attempt to explain it away; to show that this and that are so and so; but here are the facts staring them in the face, and they will no more down than would Banquo’s ghost for the guilty Thane. There they stand, an everlasting condemnation of the rule of the minority and the servitude of the majority. Nothing can be clearer; nothing truer. And is it not a shame that it is true?

A PLEA FOR JUSTICE.

You must not mistake me. I would not take a single comfort; nay, not a single luxury from those who have the most. I would not deprive anybody of anything they have or want; but I would so distribute the proceeds of labour that those who produce the comforts and luxuries should have their share of them; that they should have everything that the most favoured now enjoy. In this land of fruitfulness and plenty, if all the labour there is were constantly employed every man’s home might be a palace, and want and sorrow be banished from the country. Am I asking too much for those who have endured long years of toil and suffering to bring this beautiful country to its present condition? Am I asking what you are not willing that they shall have? Am I asking anything more than justice? If you grant them less than justice God Almighty will come some day, visit you and set the matter right, as he visited the South and liberated the downtrodden blacks. So if you do not heed my warning, remember that there is One whom you cannot ignore.

But there is still another way by which the industries are taxed in favour of the non-producers. The railroads, which ought to be, and which, managed properly, would be, a great advantage to the industries, are now at once their blessing and their curse. There are now 75,000 miles of railways in the country, built at a cost of $4,658,208,630: their earnings are $404,000,000 annually. But here is where the people are hoodwinked. This sum does not begin to represent the actual amount paid by the people for fare and freights. Almost the whole of the freighting is done by “lines”—the Red Line, the Blue Line, the White Star Line, and a hundred others, all which have special contracts with the railroads to carry freights at just a living rate, while the lines charge the people all that they can stand to pay, the difference in these two sums going into the pockets of the owners of the lines. And who are they? The owners, managers and officers of the railroads who resort to this to blind the people’s eyes about the profits of railroading, which they could not otherwise conceal, because they are obliged to make annual exhibits. But the lines carry off the profits, while the operating expenses of the roads, their interests and dividends are left for the exhibits. If the companies made 20, 30 or 50 per cent. dividends, the people would not stand it: but the managers play upon them with their lines and blind their eyes while they pocket the profits.

THE RAILROAD SYSTEM.

Then again, there is the system by which the railroads are built, which is little less than a gigantic swindle. Shrewd persons discover places where railroads may be built. They obtain charters and the rights of way, and get the towns along the lines either to issue or endorse bonds and give them stock in the roads for this. They sell the bonds to themselves at tremendous discounts and build the roads, themselves taking the contracts at extravagant prices, and when done begin to operate them. Of course the earnings are not sufficient to pay the operating expenses and the interest, to say nothing about dividends to the stockholders. They were never intended to be. So after a few defalcations of the interest on the bonds, they come in and foreclose under the mortgages and sell out the stockholders and buy in the roads and thus come into their possession built free of cost to themselves. Can such processes be rightly called anything less than swindles? They may be called by some other name, but they still have the odour of a swindle about them. And yet our best men engage in such schemes and call them honourable. To speak vulgarly, this is one of Uncle Sammy Tilden’s best holds. Is it any wonder that there is so much knavery and trickery among the common classes upon a small scale, when they have such examples set them by the upper classes on gigantic scales? or is it any wonder that the public morals are at so low an ebb? So, examine where we may into the schemes for the accommodation of the public, we find them to be vampires sucking its life.

How long do the railroad men imagine that the people will endure their exactions? Should they not know that their scheming will have to come to an end soon? Then why do they not act the part of wise men, and anticipate its coming in time to save themselves? If they do not, the people will sooner or later take the roads from them. It may be said that there is no constitutional or legal way in which this can be done, and they may rest upon this as secure protection. But I would recall the words of Charles Sumner, “Anything that is for the public good is constitutional,” and warn them not to rely upon so slim protection. This was the argument of King George and of slavery; but it failed them both, as it will fail every wrong that relies upon it. The people and the public welfare always triumph in the end; and the longer the triumph is delayed, the more fearful is the recompense for those who stand in its way.

THE FEAR OF COMMUNISM.

But it may be objected that all this tends towards communism. Only bigots and the unthinking are frightened by a name or a shadow from an examination into anything. Perhaps at first it will create surprise when I tell you that the only really good institutions that we have are purely communistic. The public highways are a perfect illustration of communism. They are constructed and maintained at the public expense for the public benefit. All grades of people meet upon them on an equality, and yet no one either loses his identity in the mass or is deprived of any of his private rights, or of any of his personalities. But the principles upon which the industries are conducted and that govern their relations to wealth, the poor man who owns no property, would have no right to use the highways. The same is true of the public schools. The children of the rich, who, it is falsely pretended, pay the taxes to support the schools, and the children of the poor there meet upon an equality. The schools are not a public necessity, they are only a public good. Who will pretend to say that they are not an improvement on the old system, of every family conducting its own education, or of a few families combining to do so? Everybody recognises the public advantage of a communal basis for the education of all the children; recognises that the public good demands that the community shall not only provide school privileges, but shall insist on every child having the benefit of them, not for the good of the child so much, as for the community’s own good. Now this is communism. Why are you not frightened at the communistic tendencies of the public schools? Because, without thinking them to be communistic, you have adopted them and found them to be good.

Next is the post-office—a still better illustration in an industrial sense. Here the Government conducts the business of the people. If the system were maintained wholly instead of partially from the public treasury, it would be purely communistic. Is there anyone who is prepared to say that the postal system is not an improvement on the transmission of letters by private enterprise? And yet nobody is affrighted at the communistic character of the modern post-office. Suppose that this system were extended to the transportation of everything that is interchanged among the people, have we not a right to assume that the same beneficent results that have followed the development of the public mails would also follow there? We have not only the right to assume, but we have the reason to know that it would, and that the railroad question and railroad wars would be for ever settled by such an advance towards communism, and an immense stride be made towards the organization of the industries as a whole; and this is what we have done industrially.

THE ELEMENTS OF OUR POPULATION.

It is an instructive lesson to analyse the population of the country, to resolve it into the several classes. First, from the 44,000,000, there are to be taken the classes that count for nothing—the Indians, the Chinese, and the women, for though they are permitted to live in the country, they form no part of the sovereignty. “They are,” as Justice Carter asserted when endeavouring to prove that women are not entitled to the ballot, “citizens in whom citizenship is dormant.” In round numbers these classes are 23,000,000. Of the remaining 21,000,000, 11,000,000 are adults, who are the sovereignty, and who conduct the Government. Of these 3,000,000 are farmers; 2,000,000 are manufacturers, mechanics, miners, and lumbermen; 1,000,000 are unskilled labourers; 1,000,000 are merchants of all kinds, including dispensers of leaf and liquid damnation; 1,000,000 are gentlemen of ease who live by their wits—their sharpness and shrewdness—bond-holders, money-lenders, landlords, gamblers, confidence men, etc., etc.; 500,000 are clerks; 250,000 are permanent invalids; 200,000, criminals; 100,000, paupers; 100,000, insane; 100,000, weakminded; 100,000, professional teachers; 100,000, employes of the national Government; 100,000, of the State, county and municipal Governments; 90,000, physicians; 60,000, ministers; 50,000, lawyers, and 50,000, editors and professional writers and actors. A large part of the property of the farmers is mortgaged to the money-lenders, and the same is true of the manufacturers, while the liabilities of the merchants exceed their assets. So, really, the 5th class—the gentlemen of ease—either own or else hold mortgages on the whole property of the country. It is said that the curse of England is that 3 4ths of its property is owned by forty families. How much less is true of this country? Can such a state of injustice as this continue? And if it cannot, what shall take its place? It is time that those who hold the wealth, should, for their own sake, be asking this question seriously, unless they would incur the risk of having it answered for them, as the same was answered in France in ’93. Public injustice, unless remedied peaceably, always has terminated in revolution; and it will continue so to terminate as long as it is not remedied in a wiser way by those who have the power to do it.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

If it were to be asked what should be done at once to remedy the present exigencies of suffering labour, I will answer what I would do had I the power. I would first abolish legal interest and make it a crime as the Bible does to take usury in any form. I would stop the payment of interest of the public debt and use the money to set the unemployed and starving labourers at work on internal improvements, and should be justified by the people for doing so; because it would be right to prevent widespread suffering and revolution at the expense of such a step; I would build the Pacific railroads north and south for the people and not give them to individuals, as was the case with those already built; I would construct immense workshops in every State in which the skilled labour of both sexes might be utilised when otherwise unemployed, because every day that any labourer is idle is a loss to the prospective wealth of the country; which fact is the condemnation of the policy of throwing men out of employment whenever business is depressed. Every labourer thus made idle adds to the general distress, because from being a producer he becomes a consumer; I would abolish pauperism and crime by giving everybody a chance to work at his chosen occupation; but if he preferred to starve rather than to work I would let him starve; I would purge the country of rascals by removing the inducements to rascality; I would make it impossible for a dishonourable person to live in a community, by placing everybody upon his honour, and in this way abolish jails and penitentiaries, criminals and courts and lawyers; I would remove the protection of the law from debts, and leave them to stand or fall upon the honour or want of it in the contracting parties, the result of which would be that a failure to pay once would discredit one for all future time, and compel honesty as a necessity for existence, making it to the interests of the people to be honourable in all things; and this, in turn, would abolish all civil courts and lawyers with all their _attachés_ and expenses. I would restore to the public the gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, coal, oil and salt lands and mines and work them for its benefit, and I would send everybody who should be found tampering with the public funds to the Dry Tortugus for life. Yes; had I the power, I would make both compulsory and voluntary idleness impossible, and wipe out the stain of millions starving idle in a land of plenty, capable of sustaining a thousand million people; and hush the wail of suffering that floats upon the winds from every section of this God-favoured land, but now reeling under the effects of vicious legislation; I would snatch the people from being pushed headlong into revolution, and restore to them the equal use of God’s free gifts to all His children.

A LAW-GIVER NEEDED.

This country having fallen into the errors to which I have referred; into the hands of mediocre and incompetent legislators, without even a single statesman among them all; into the times of small minds and smaller measures that do not look beyond the day in which they are proposed; into industrial, financial and commercial ruin, with one half the wealth-producing power starving in idleness and no one seeming even to think what the end of this must be; having fallen into all these ills, this country needs that a giant mind shall spring into its councils, or else among its legislators, a captain which shall be able to grasp the helm of the ship of state now floundering hopelessly in the trough of the industrial sea, and put her before the wind again; a mind that shall have the wisdom and the courage to show the puerility of those who occupy the posts of honour, and, by the mere force of will, lift them into the right path; show them that beneath the surface of that which they seem to think is peaceable enough, there is a raging, seething volcano ready at the slightest occasion to burst forth and overwhelm everything in its path; a master mind which shall compel Congress by active measures to guide its powers rather than by inaction to provoke an eruption. This country needs that God shall send a law-giver; one who shall understand what has led to the present situation; what the exigencies of the people demand, and who shall have the ability to propose and the power to enforce the needed remedies—a Lycurgus to give a new code of laws that shall be the incarnation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which alone of all principles have any influence to mould the people, and from which they draw the characteristics which distinguish them from the other nations of the earth; and a Bonaparte to sweep out of the way the accumulating _débris_ of years of vicious legislation and in its place inaugurate that code; needs a Lycurgus with his code of laws; a Bonaparte with his genius to command, and, combined with these, the vehement power of a Demosthenes to rouse the people to a sense of the danger in which they stand and, whether they will or not, lead them through a peaceable, rather than permit them to plunge into a bloody, revolution. Let this be done, no matter in what form this power may come, and a change of greater magnitude for good to this people than that proposed by Lycurgus for the Spartans, or that instituted in France by Bonaparte, will be inaugurated here.

But what has been done socially? Much of which I have not the time to speak, but this, as to what I would have for the social condition:—

WORDS TO WOMEN.