The silver interest asserts that we will never stop our headlong rush to
the devil if we do not get free coinage of silver. Silver, like pork or
potatoes, is something for sale, and its owners have given up their
whole attention to finding it a market. Whoever heard of J. P. Jones
interesting himself in anything except silver. Never in all of his
twenty years of public life did he show that he was anything more than
"a man from one of the Silver States." Ever and always whenever he fills
the air with his noise, you have only to look and there you will find
him still knocking at the public treasury for a customer that already
has had enough of him.
He has become a monomaniac on silver, and, although one of the principal
owners of the Mariposa land grant, will not open it up because it is
silver he wants and the grant only shows gold. It is this dementia that
secures him a life-lease of the Senatorship from Nevada. For Nevada has
only one interest, and that is silver. Silver is her wool, her cotton,
her wheat, her coal, her iron, her lumber, her manufactures. It made her
a State. It made her first representative to Congress and her last. It
made Jones - Jones the drummer whose one sample is silver, who talks of
silver, who sings of silver, who dreams of silver, and who gets his
inspirations of the past, present, and future as he looks down the shaft
of his silver mine in Nevada.
Never did the tail of the dog work harder than does this little
bob-tailed thing called silver, that we find moving around among our
legs, trying to trip us up every time the political procession makes a
move.
There is distress because there is not money enough in circulation, say
these peddlers of silver. It is a well understood fact that every sound
bank in the country has idle money in its vaults looking for investment.
Money is precisely like the laborer - it, too, is on the lookout for
work. Show money where it can make interest, and it will come out of
those vaults as quick as the hungry laborer will answer the knock at his
door.
Whatever distress the laborer is suffering, however, be sure that the
millionaire owner of that idle money feels it not. His belly is well
filled and his back well covered, and he knows nothing of the jolt of
the box-car as he listens to the rhythm of the wheels of his Pullman
sleeper. And it matters little to this millionaire, this flower of a
foreign clime, when his increase sets in again. He has millions, a word
we little comprehend the meaning of, and he will never know distress,
any more than the laborer will know plenty again while this vampire of
progress is permitted to survive. But the time must come when labor will
get to work again for a few months each year, the usual thing now, to
produce the needed stock of necessaries for the country, and then he
will see the man of millions step off and collect his usual toll, and
enough besides to make good any shrinkage in the principal. This owner
of immense capital, this traveler in the Pullman, who makes his regular
rounds through the country collecting toll off every laborer in every
section, preparatory to his flight to Europe, is twin brother to the
great land owner, and there is no hope for our country until both are
legally or otherwise exterminated.
-
We could undo the capitalist by making interest illegal, as this would
force him. to draw on his principal. We do not object, however, to the
interest capital receives. Banks have no enemy in this proposed change,
and we suspect either the motives or the judgment of those whose stock
in trade is a howl against banks, and what they call usury. Money has
its place in civilization, and the bank where it is dealt in is a shop
just as much as is the dry goods store or grocery, and is entitled to
its profits just the same. If a man earns $5,000 he should be allowed to
charge something for its use the same as for the wagon be made or the
house he built. Neither the wagon nor house is any more the result of
his labor than is this money, and no one will question his right to
charge something for the use of the first two. It is here where the
banks are of service - the man with money takes it to a place - the bank
- where the man who wishes to hire it knows where to look for it. Good
sense will not deny a market to a man with potatoes; neither will it
deny him a market for any other product of his labor, be it capital or
what not. Interest is wrong only when it is being drawn by a
millionaire, who, of course, did not earn the principal. Those millions
is where the danger lies, when found with an individual owner, whether
they are in bank vaults or on the shelves of the millionaire merchant.
Besides, it is a slow process, this breaking up the millionaire owner of
some thing by stopping his interest. This earth should be ours while we
are alive to enjoy it, and there is no hope of getting it by applying
the graduated tax idea to either land or capital. When a curse like
poverty can be removed the quicker it is done the better.
Interest is wrong (we are not justifying extortion) when it is drawn by
the millionaire, not only because his labor did not earn the principal,
but because he has the power to take it out of the country where it was
earned. And he does take it out thereby impoverishing the country of the
capital that is needed to carry on developments that should never be
allowed to stop.
There is, as has been said, idle money now, but the millionaire owners
care nothing for the general welfare, and the people cannot get this
idle money because they find it impossible to pay interest for its use,
and carry at the same time the fearful burdens they are now loaded with.
An individual can be forced to submit to any kind of terms when his
necessities are driving him. When those necessities are satisfied he
must stop and let development go, for he cannot stand the terms. He is
willing to go ahead, but he simply finds his physical being unequal to
the task. As it is with one individual so it is with a nation of
individuals. They also can be forced to submit to any kind of terms when
their necessities are driving them, and when their necessities are
supplied they too must stop and let development go, for they cannot
stand the terms. In other words, the capacity of people, singly or
collectively, is limited, and if they are compelled to exhaust that
capacity in supporting millionaire parasites at home, and paying for
their extravagance abroad, they cannot improve themselves or develop
their country.
Complicity, then, and negligence on the part of our law makers has made
a few men the absolute owners of the financial or money branch of our
economics, and the people find it impossible to move except when these
masters find it to their interests to let them.
Progress under such conditions will never be more than a dream.
We could find use for all the capital that is now in the country, and
all that has been and is being taken out of it, but we should first
loosen the grip of these legalized despoilers and see how far what we
have got would go before we talk of issuing more, which would soon turn
up missing like the rest.