We need more money per capita: say some more would-be leaders, who have
found the only way out of the land of bondage. Increase the currency to
$50 per capita, and business and prosperity will once more fill the
land. Money has become scarcer, they continue, and therefore dearer.
Those who contracted monetary obligations last week find that they are
now paying more for the use of that money than it was worth when the
debt was made.
This is a hardship on the borrower, and can be prevented by increasing
the amount of money in circulation.
This is the very essence of what is claimed by those who are for
increasing the volume of money in circulation. Money has changed in
value, and those who are mortgaged, or otherwise under interest-paying
obligations, have found that money is scarcer, in this instance through
contraction of the currency, and therefore harder to get.
There should certainly be enough money issued for the smooth carrying on
of the country's business, and when they determine the amount necessary,
it should be put in circulation at once. But stopping money from
fluctuating value is another thing.
The man who buys a barrel of flour one day for $4.00 may find that it is
worth only $3.50 the day after. The man who borrows money at 7 per cent.
one day may find it worth only 6 1/2 the day after.
To prevent these fluctuations in the value of either money or
commodities is a legislative feat beyond the power of mortal man. And
when we see our Legislator trying to regulate the value of anything that
one man has to sell to another, are no longer surprised at his trying to
regulate the weather by exploding powder in the air. Our Mark Twains and
Bill Nyes are flat indeed, when compared to that straight-faced clown,
the American legislator, who would give an unchangable value to either
the shoes we wear or the money we use.
This whole question of currency has as little to do with the prevailing
misery as the missing button off your vest would have to do with your
being frozen to death. England not only has enough money to carry on her
own business, but also has $15,000,000,000 to lend to outsiders. It is
not the wealth of a country, but how it is distributed that tells the
story.
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The single taxers of whom Henry George is the great apostle, are also
claiming the floor, but a patient hearing finds the distressed turning
away for relief that the single taxer can not give. They are cultivating
a century plant, and while we are waiting for it to bloom three
generations of human beings will have met their millionaire masters and
taken their place in the line that leads to the soup house and the
pauper's grave.
The masterly logic of these reformers is the work of serene-tempered and
well-fed men, whose cosy library with windows facing to the south, and
the open fire-place with its soothing and cheerful glow, is conducive to
the developing of a red-tape reform that must be an inspiring subject
for discussion at an afternoon tea. Because they are well fed is the
reason why they can play a waiting game, but the despairing and maddened
people, for whose benefit this single tax contract, with its long
deferred payment, is being drawn up, will have as little use for it as
they will have for the plate-glass window when their bread riots begin.
The land owner alone is the one these one-horse-chaise reformers would
start their Dobbin after. The large landowner should be cut down in his
holdings, and their plan is just the one to fix him and make him let go.
They will tax him in such a way that he cannot pay, and then they have
got him, they tell us, as they leisurely jog along over their pleasant
highway.
Now, why this dilly-dallying with the large land-owner, or any one else,
that has something that he should surrender for the general good?
When the owning of 50,000 acres of land by one man is wrong, then it is
wrong to let him own it, and if there was one drop of the John Brown
blood in this crew of house-gown and plush-slipper reformers, they would
go into the enemy's camp, and never let up on their open warfare until
what belonged to the people was returned to them.
Taxing an enemy to make him give up his plunder!
When hunger and plenty is found side by side what solution can there be
but to set a limit to what the overendowed can tag with his name, and to
put his forfeited surplus where the underfed can, with reasonable labor,
get possession of it.
If the single taxer is given plenty of time, he will accomplish
something, undoubtedly, but the whole thing will be over long before
poor old Dobbin gets on to the scene.
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The millionaire land-owner and the millionaire capitalist are as much
out of place in a republic as is the man with a title; and the laws
which permitted the growth of the first two are the primary cause of the
disgraceful conditions that exist in this Republic to-day. When we know
that people in actual want are to be found in every section of the
United States, we ought to be able to say that it is Nature that has
failed us for the time being; but it is not Nature, but the wretched
laws of man's own making that are at fault. Had we the economic laws
that belong to a republic, instead of those that belong to a despotism,
the foreign markets could be entirely closed to us, and all our people
would still have enough of all things that are necessary to life. And
those able men who have gone into the domain of natural philosophy, to
see what they could find to advance and benefit the human race, have
found so much, and brought about such a change in the industrial world,
that they have completely bewildered our political philosophers, who
have been utterly unable to make room for the labor-saving inventions
and discoveries of those men, until the confusion and distress resulting
from the incompetence of our political philosophers to adjust the laws
to meet the changed conditions are beginning to make us look upon the
inventors as our enemies, instead of our benefactors.
The work of the world consists principally in raising food and
manufacturing the things we wear, and the forwarding of both to the
consumer. And the great inventions of the McCormicks, Howes, Fultons,
Stephensons, and rest have made this work so easy that the labor done in
two months now is equivalent to the labor done in twelve months a few
years ago. That is why they are great inventions. Yet our law-makers are
still legislating for conditions that disappeared with the ox-goad,
hand loom, lapstone, and sickle, and are continually trying to devise
ways and means by which the labor of the country can be kept employed
the year round. What doing? When they find out how to make you wear
twenty pairs of shoes at a time, they will have found out how to keep
the shoe factories running the year round, not before.
The natural philosopher can overcome physical difficulties; the
political philosopher cannot overcome economic ones.
We would reside on a certain hill were it not for the climb. A Hallidie
lays his cable, and puts us at the top without further trouble. We find
Egypt cutting into our cotton market, Argentine into our wheat market,
France and Germany have shut their doors against our meats, and
England will not approve of silver. Many throughout this country find
their very bread falling short through these conditions abroad, and the
sufferers call in our political economists to help them to at least keep
the
necessaries of life within their reach.
Of the various nostrums prescribed by these political quacks, two have
been thoroughly tried, but the aggravating results have only cut the
eye-teeth of the humbugged; and when they take the field themselves as
political economists they will have a preparation of their own that will
be bitter enough to the taste of those to whom they will apply it.