UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Class Book Volume 
 
 332 4 ,^ 
 
|rHE "FIRST CONCERN OF GOOD GOVERNMENT 
 SHOULD BE THE WELFARE OF THE 
 COMMON PEOPLE 
 
 [The Bond and the Dollar 
 
 (100th Thousand) 
 
 Enlarged and Revised to Date 
 
 'History of the Conspiracy of the Money Power against the Masses 
 
 AND OF THE THREATENED SUBVERSION OF PUBLIC LIBERTY 
 
 (genesis of the bond-monster, 
 
 HOW HE BECAME KING 
 
 AND WHAT HE PURPOSES TO DO 
 
 An Appeal to American Patriots and Freemen 
 
 
 By John Clark Ridpath 
 
 For sale by Booksellers and Newsdealers . By mail 
 Single Copies, io Cents 
 
 THE ARENA PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 Corley Square, Boston, Mass. 
 September, 1896 
 
Tft-'VX 
 
 Rl3L 
 
 Copyright, 1896, 
 
 By John Clark Ridpath. 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Vol. 3, No. 7. September, 1896. 
 
 Copley Square Series. 
 
 (New Series.) 
 
 Published Monthly. 
 
 Entered at Boston Post Office as Second Class Matter. 
 Price, 10 cents. 
 
1+0'lift* 
 
 JOHN CLARK RIDPATH. 
 
 John Clark Ridpath, the historian, is a native of Putnam County, 
 Indiana. His ancestors, on both sides, were old Virginians from before 
 the Revolution. 
 
 His childhood was passed in a frontier home. His education was 
 obtained first in the country schools of the neighborhood and afterward 
 in De Pauw University, from which he was graduated with the highest 
 honors in 1863. 
 
 After six years of teaching he was elected to the professorship of 
 English literature in his Alma Mater, and two years afterward was 
 i transferred to the chair of history and political philosophy. 
 
 In 1879 he was elected vice-president of the university, and while 
 occupying this position was chiefly instrumental in procuring the 
 De Pauw endowment upon which the institution rests. 
 
 Professor Ridpath’s career as an author began in 1876, when he pub¬ 
 lished his Academic History of the United States. 
 
 This was followed by his Grammar School History and soon afterward 
 by his Popular History of the United States. The last-named work has 
 reached a sale of nearly four hundred thousand copies. From the date 
 pf its publication the author devoted himself more and more to the 
 preparation of historical and biographical works. 
 
 In 1885 his History of the World was published iD four volumes. 
 This work has reached a sale of one hundred thousand sets — a most 
 ■remarkable sale for so expensive and solid a work. 
 
 In the intervals of heavier composition Professor Ridpath has written 
 : several standard and popular biographies. The latest of these is The Life 
 i and Times of William E. Gladstone , a work now in press. 
 
 j In 1893 he published his Great Paces of Mankind , which is, perhaps, 
 1 his most important work. “ This work alone,” says an eminent 
 • German professor, “would place its author in the front rank as a 
 /philosophical historian.” 
 
 The publications of John Clark Ridpath now extend to fully twenty- 
 five volumes, all of which have been received with great and solid favor 
 by the public. Since 1885 he has devoted himself altogether to 
 ! authorship. In that year he resigned his professorship and vice¬ 
 presidency in the university and began to be exclusively a literary man. 
 He had already acquired a wide reputation as a public speaker, lecturer, 
 and writer on various subjects of general concern. He is to-day in the 
 very front rank in both scholarship and general culture, and is regarded 
 as a thinker of rare powers. 
 
 He has always been deeply interested in the welfare of the country 
 and the progress of society. His writings are those of a patriot and a 
 publicist. His chief concern has been to contribute something of merit 
 and inspiration to the age in which he lives. His recent appearance in 
 the political field was not of his own choosing, but was the result of a 
 public movement which he could not control. 
 
 The present publication is his appeal to the people. It is directed to 
 the country at large, and only incidentally to the people of his own 
 State and district. 
 
 It is in the light of these considerations that this publication, which has 
 already reached its one hundredth edition and is believed by many to be 
 the most important contribution thus far put forth in the interest of the 
 financial independence of the American people, is to be read and under¬ 
 stood. 
 
 New York, Sept. 18, 1896. 
 
 H. H. G. 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF A WORKINGMAN. 
 
 Jrl3 was my father, and is dead. He was a pioneer, a 
 patriot, a humble farmer. He helped to hew down the 
 forest of my native state — the jewel of the Ohio Valley. 
 He cut away the thickets and joined with his neighbors in 
 casting up a highway and gathering out the stones for the 
 coming day. For companionship he had Her — and the chil¬ 
 dren. I stood beside him when he died; I folded his arms 
 across his honest breast, and made a vow. 
 
 The long and fatal fever had burned up everything but his 
 hands ; they were as big and unconquerable as ever. I said, 
 “He was a toiler — I will take up the task of his hands and 
 the purposes of his heart. He was one of the common people. 
 
 I also will be one of the common people. I will love them, and 
 honor them, and defend them. I will believe in them, as he did , 1 
 and will trust them. If they ever have a cause , that cause 
 shall be mine. If they have a hope or an aspiration I will 
 share it. Whoever attempts to injure them, to take away 
 their rights, to oppress them, to enslave them, shall be my 
 enemy — not because I hate him or would do him hurt, but 
 because he is unjust and cruel! 
 
 New Yoiik, September, 1896. 
 
THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 1. Genests of a Monster. 
 
 Thirty-one years ago the American Republic found itself 
 at the end of a great Civil War. During that conflict con¬ 
 ditions had arisen in the United States out of which the 
 present alarming contest of the people with the money power 
 has sprung. The Civil War was the beginning of what we 
 have now inherited. That war was not indeed the cause but 
 rather the occasion and excuse of the great struggle which has 
 begun in earnest in America for the preservation of popular 
 liberty and the restoration of the rights of man. 
 
 War preys on two things—life and property; but he 
 preys with a partial appetite. Feasting on life, he licks his 
 jaws and says, “ More, by your leave ! ” Devouring prop¬ 
 erty, he says, between grin and glut, “ This is so good that it 
 ought to be paid for?” Into the vacuum of the wasted life 
 rush the moaning winds of grief and desolation; into the 
 vacuum of the wasted property rushes the goblin of debt. 
 The wasted life is transformed at length into a reminiscent 
 glory; the wasted property becomes a hideous nightmare. 
 The heroes fallen rise from their bloody cerements into ever¬ 
 lasting fame ; the property destroyed rises from the red and 
 flame-swept field as a spectral vampire, sucking the still 
 warm blood of the heroic dead and their posthumous babes, 
 to the tenth generation. 
 
 The name of the vampire is Bond. The vampire is a 
 beast that survives and flourishes by sucking the breath and 
 blood of nobler creatures. 
 
 On the 1st of March, 1866, the national debt of the United 
 States, entailed by the Civil War, reached the appalling max¬ 
 imum of nearly three thousand millions of dollars. In exact 
 figures the sum total was $2,827,868,959.46. The American 
 people were inexperienced in such business. They had 
 never known the incubus before. Europe had known it, 
 but not America. For a long time the public debt of the 
 nation had been so small as to be disregarded. Now all of a 
 sudden with the terrible exigences of the war, the debt ex¬ 
 panded and settled over the landscape like a cloud from 
 Vesuvius, darkening from shore to shore. 
 
 So far as the people and the government were concerned, 
 it was an honest debt. The method and intent of Lincoln 
 
 l 
 
2 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 and the great men around him in 1862-63 were as sincere 
 and just as they were humane and patriotic. As for the 
 American people, they were always honest. The nation was 
 in deadly peril, and must be rescued at whatever cost. The 
 war was a devouring demon. With the explosion of every 
 shell, the product of a hundred toiling hands was instantly 
 vaporized; for the bomb is not filled, as many suppose, with 
 only powder and iron and death, but with the potatoes and 
 milk and biscuit of mankind. At intervals the expenditure 
 was more than a million, and sometimes more than two 
 millions of dollars a day. The government had nothing of 
 its own, did not venture to take anything as its own, and 
 must therefore support itself by loans or perish. Con¬ 
 forming to the method of the age, the nation borrowed from 
 the accumulations of the people, and gave them therefor its 
 promises to pay. 
 
 The promises to pay got themselves into a bond. 
 
 It is the order of modern society that he who has may lend 
 to him who has not, and receive his own with usury. This 
 principle was adopted by the American republic in the day of 
 trial. The means necessary for the prosecution of the war 
 were not taken — as the life was taken — but were bor¬ 
 rowed. The quadrennium was an epoch of prodigious 
 borrowing. A great part of the lending was patriotic; but 
 much of it, even at the first, was interested, and was mixed 
 with contrivance and ulterior designs. 
 
 The currency which had to be provided to meet the start¬ 
 ling emergency that had overtaken the American people was, 
 in the nature of the case, made to be a legal tender in the 
 payment of debts. The government must needs have such a 
 money. All metallic money — as is its invariable habit 
 under such circumstances — slunk away and hid itself in 
 dark coffers, mostly beyond the sea. What did the dealeis 
 in gold care for liberty, for the waste of human life, for the 
 republic, for the Union made sacred by the sacrifices and 
 blood of our fathers ? 
 
 u The merit of the country marched and filled the Union ranks, 
 
 The money of the country marched and filled the English banks; 
 
 At last the war was over — the soldiers ceased to roam — 
 
 They came with bugles playing, the specie sneaked back home ! ” 
 
 It was intended by those who first contrived the legal- 
 tender currency that it should be absolute money in the 
 payment of all debts of whatever kind. Thaddeus Stephens, 
 chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, declared 
 
GOVERNMENTS PREFER PROPERTY TO LIFE. 
 
 3 
 
 this to be the purpose and intent of the Legal-tender Act. 
 The Supreme Court of the United States has since decided 
 by a voice of eight to one that Congress possessed — and 
 possesses — the right and power to make such a money, 
 whether in Avar or in peace. The validity of the Legal- 
 tender Act is now as much a part of the constitutional 
 history of the United States as is the abolition of African 
 slavery. But they who were skilful in watching their own 
 interests, even in the throes of our national break-up and 
 impending catastrophe, adroitly contrived that the national 
 currency should have an exception in it in favor of those who 
 should lend their means to the government. They who 
 should make such loan should receive therefor a bond; and 
 the interest on the bond— as also the duties on imports of 
 foreign goods — was exempt from the legal tender of paper 
 and reserved for coin . 
 
 Thus came the bonded debt of the United States. The 
 debt grew with the progress of the war, until it seemed to 
 approach infinity. The nation swayed and struggled through 
 the bloody sea, and came at last to the shore. The process 
 of debt making, however, had acquired so great momentum that 
 it was difficult to get it checked and reversed. In the summer 
 of 1865 the soldiers of the union army were mustered out 
 and remanded to their homes. By August the work was 
 done; the grand army was no more; but such was the con¬ 
 fusion that for fully six months longer the expenditure rolled 
 on without abatement. 
 
 The great question which confronted the nation at the 
 beginning of 1866 was the management of the debt. There 
 Avere bonds galore; a seven-thirty series of two hundred and 
 fifty millions, by Act of July 17, 1861; then five hundred 
 and fifteen millions of five-twenties, by the Act of February 
 25, 1862, becoming more than twelve hundred millions by 
 subsequent issues; then ten-forties in several series — 7.3 per 
 cents, 6 per cents, 5 per cents, 4.5 per cents, 4 per cents; plain 
 bonds at the first, and coin bonds finally — short loans and 
 long loans and longer loans, but always becoming longer , until 
 a measure of calm ensued, and the nation found opportunity 
 to take account of its losses and consider the question of 
 payment. 
 
 2. Governments Prefer Property to Life. 
 
 If governments had the same care for the life of the people 
 as for the property of those who possess property, then 
 
4 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 national debts would not be made, or at least not perpet¬ 
 uated, by the event of war. It had been an act of infinite 
 mercy on the part of the government of the United States in 
 that day to take directly whatever was necessary — as it did 
 take whatever men were necessary — for the suppression of 
 the Rebellion. That course would have ended it. Had that 
 almost unprecedented policy been temperately and success¬ 
 fully pursued, the cost of the war would hardly have been 
 one-fifth of what it has become; the bond would never have 
 existed; the wealth of the people would not have been con¬ 
 centrated in the hands of a few; the present harrowing 
 a:id dangerous conditions of American life would not have 
 supervened, and the victorious defense of the Union would 
 long ere this have become a glorious and unclouded remi¬ 
 niscence. 
 
 Neither shall any one truthfully aver that making war 
 without making a national debt is an absurd vagary. That 
 would be to condemn, as a financial quack, no less a person¬ 
 age than William E. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone is, without 
 a doubt, the greatest statesman in finance that England has 
 produced within the present century. It has been the one 
 ruling and undeviating principle of his policy, alike in peace 
 and in war, to make the annual revenues under all circum¬ 
 stances , meet the annual expenditures of the empire. He 
 began to battle for this principle in 1853, when, as chancellor 
 of the exchequer, he had to provide the means for the prose¬ 
 cution of the Crimean War. On this question, he and 
 Disraeli divided forever. The former proposed to provide 
 the means of war by increasing the annual revenues; the 
 latter proposed to borrow. Mr. Gladstone did adopt the 
 method of paying as he Avent, and held to it until the over¬ 
 throw of the Aberdeen ministry. He stoutly affirmed in 
 presenting his first budget that, war or no war, the national 
 debt of Great Britain should not be increased, but that the! 
 cost of supporting the British army in Asia should be met 
 year by year by an increase in the income taxes and excises.) 
 This policy Avas supported by the Prince Consort, Avhoi 
 declaied it to be “ manly, statesmanlike, and honestthe 
 policy of borrowing, the Prince characterized as “ convenient , 
 cowardly, and perhaps popular .” He ought to have added 
 suicidal. As long as Gladstone remained in office, he forceu 
 the revenues to meet the expenditures Avithin the year. His 
 principle through life has been, in every emergency, not ty> 
 borrow , but to tax — that is, to take . 
 
THE BOND MAKES A POLICY. 
 
 5 
 
 Strange it is, however, that pur vaunted and vaunting 
 civilization, even to the present day, perfers property to man. 
 It exalts the one and tramples on the other. In this particu¬ 
 lar, we have been even as the rest. Judging by the facts, 
 there is no government on earth to which its mules are not 
 dearer than its men ! Strange, too, that whoever appeals on 
 behalf of the man as against the mule, and urges the protec¬ 
 tion of the one at the expense of the other, is held to be an 
 enemy of society ! Property in this particular having no 
 conscience, or only the conscience of being always in the 
 wrong, fortifies itself with every casuistical and fallacious 
 argument known to the category of self-interest, and puts 
 down both the man and his advocates. The 44 sacred rights 
 of property,” meaning the light of something that belongs to 
 life to seize that life by the throat and strangle it, are pro¬ 
 mulgated aud upheld with constitution and statute and 
 bayonet; while the 44 rights of man,” so much in vogue in 
 the great epoch of regeneration at the close of the eighteenth 
 century, are, at the close of the nineteenth, positively under 
 the ban in every civilized State of the world. According to 
 the plutocratic lexicons of at least two continents, the 44 rights 
 of man ” have come to signify merely anarchy. 
 
 3. The Bond Makes a Policy. 
 
 Our staggering nation arose and stood. The horizon 
 cleared. The government of the republic was preserved for 
 posterity. It found itself, however, in the grip of a python, 
 from which, after thirty-one years of writhing, it is less able to 
 free itself than ever before since the close of the conflict. 
 In the course of the war and just afterward, it was discerned 
 by those who held the national debt, as it had been discerned 
 by some of them from the beginning, that it was a good 
 thing for the possessors. A great interest had been created 
 by the battle of the National Union for its life — the inter¬ 
 est of the bond. 
 
 It were vain to conjecture how many sincere patriots 
 found themselves possessors of the interest-bearing obliga¬ 
 tions of the nation. For all such there is no animadversion, 
 but rather praise. It were equally vain to conjecture how 
 many held those obligations simply for the profit and advan¬ 
 tage and power that were in them, and with no concern 
 about the welfare of the government or of the people of the 
 United States; but the latter class, whether many or few, 
 
6 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 increased, and the former class decreased, until the fund¬ 
 holding interest was consolidated in the hands of a party 
 having its bifurcations in New York and London. 
 
 The party of the bond became skilful and adroit. It 
 began immediately to fortify itself. It took advantage of 
 the inexperience of the American people and of their legis¬ 
 lators. It profited by the mistakes and misplaced confidence 
 of both. They who held the bonds were wise by ages of 
 training in the Old World and the New. They understood 
 the situation perfectly, and adopted as their method a policy 
 embracing two intentions: First, to perpetuate the bond and 
 make it everlasting by the postponement and prevention of 
 payment; second, to increase the value of the currency in 
 which all payments were to be made ; that is, to increase the 
 value of the units of such payments as the payments should 
 become due, so that whatever might be the efforts of the peo¬ 
 ple to discharge the debt, it should increase in value as rap¬ 
 idly as they could reduce it! And the honest people, abused 
 to the soul by the politician and by Shylock, knew not that 
 it was so. 
 
 4. Beginning of the Great Game. 
 
 For thirty-one years this game has been persistently, skil¬ 
 fully and successfully carried out. It has been a play 
 worthy of the greatest gamesters that ever lived! We do 
 not call to mind any other such stake among the nations as 
 that placed upon the issue; and the bondplayers have won 
 on every deal. They have succeeded on both counts of their 
 policy. They have turned over the debt into new forms of 
 bond, and these again into newer, under the name of refund¬ 
 ing, persuading the people that the process was wise and 
 needful, and cajoling them with the belief that the rate of 
 interest was each time reduced for the benefit of the nation. 
 It was done “in the interest of the people!” We, the 
 holders of the bond, being patriots, labor only for the inter¬ 
 est of the people ! 
 
 It is true that each act of refunding and transforming the 
 national debt has lowered somewhat the nominal rate of 
 interest; but at the same time, it has lengthened the period 
 of payment. At the beginning, the date of payment was at 
 the option of the government. Then it was at five years 
 from the making of the bond; then it was at ten years; then 
 at twenty years ; then at thirty years. Now the period of 
 possible payment has been extended until the second decade 
 
THE NATIONAL DEBT IS WORTH MORE THAN EVER. 7 
 
 of the next century cannot witness the end of the game. If 
 the treasury should have to-day, or in the year 1900, a sur¬ 
 plus of six billions of gold, the government could not call 
 and cancel its bonds. They were not made to be called and 
 cancelled, but to be refunded and perpetuated. 
 
 Besides, the reduction of interest has been a reduction 
 only in name. In no case has the reduction been made until 
 the value of the dollar of the payment has been so enlarged 
 as more than to balance the reduction. The same thing is 
 true of the payment of principal as well as the payment of 
 coupon. For thirty years the American people have been 
 pouring into that horrid maelstrom the volume of their great 
 resources. They have paid on their debt, or at least they 
 have paid, in this long period, such a prodigious sum that 
 arithmetic can hardly express it. The imagination cannot 
 embrace it. 
 
 The people have never known — never realized — the 
 incalculable sums which have been paid out of their treasury 
 in the ostensible work of discharging the interest and princi¬ 
 pal of the war debt of the nation. Sometime, perhaps, the 
 final aggregate may be made up and historically recorded. 
 Within the first ten years after the conclusion of the war, 
 that is, at the close of the fiscal year, 1874-75, the govern¬ 
 ment had already paid, in interest only, on the public debt 
 $1,442,057,577. And this was but the beginning. At the 
 close of the year 1895, the interest account has reached the 
 prodigious total of more than two billion six hundred and 
 thirty-five millions of dollars. 
 
 5. The National Debt is Worth More than Ever. 
 
 We thus come to a conclusion that is apalling. It is the 
 truth of the living God that in the year 1896, at the close of 
 summer, the national debt of the United States, in its 
 bonded and unbonded forms, will purchase as its equivalent 
 in value, as much of the average of twenty-five of the lead¬ 
 ing commodities of the American market, including real 
 estate and labor, as the same debt would purchase at its 
 maximum on the first of March, 1866. The people have paid 
 and paid for thirty years, and at the end have paid just this 
 — nothing ! 
 
 We shall not omit the proof. The verification of the 
 astounding truth that the people have paid and paid and 
 paid nothing, is as plain and irrefragable as any otliet 
 arithmetical result. 
 
8 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 On the first of March, 1866, the national debt (being 
 
 then at its maximum) was in exact figures. $2,827,868,959.46 
 
 For the sake of easy computation the same may be 
 
 stated,.. 2,825,000,000.00 
 
 The debt at the end of July, 1896, was. 1,222,312,984.40 
 
 For convenience of counting the same 
 
 may be given in round numbers as $1,222,000,000.00 
 To this add ten per cent (a very low 
 estimate) for the present average 
 premium on the debt (interest-bear¬ 
 ing and non-interest-bearing) above 
 the par of gold. 122,000,000,00 
 
 Total present gold value of the debt. $1,344,000,000.00 
 
 On tlie first of March, 1866, the prices current of nine 
 leading staples of the American market, selected broadly 
 from the whole, were as follows: 
 
 Wheat per bushel, from $1.78 to $2; average,. 
 
 Flour per barrel, $10.50 to $11; average,. 
 
 Cotton per pound,... 
 
 Mess Pork per barrel,. 
 
 Sugar per pound,.. 
 
 Wool per pound, 50 cents to 56 cents; average,. 
 
 Beef per cwt., $12 to $18.50; average,. 
 
 Bar Iron per pound, 6 cents to 7 1-4 cents; average,. 
 
 Superior Farming Lands in Ohio and Mississippi valleys, 
 proximately) per acre,. 
 
 ....$ 1.90 
 .... 10.75 
 
 ..48 
 
 - 28.37 
 
 .1125 
 
 .53 
 
 .... 15.25 
 
 .0675 
 
 (ap- 
 
 - 75.00 
 
 At the close of summer, 1896, (figures for August 20) 
 the prices current for the same staples were as follows: 
 
 Wheat per bushel,.. 
 
 Flour per barrel,. 
 
 Cotton per pound,... 
 
 Mess Pork per barrel,..... 
 
 Sugar per pound,.. 
 
 Wool per pound,. 
 
 Beef per cwt.,...•. 
 
 Bar Iron per pound,. 
 
 Superior Farming Lands, same as above, in Ohio and Mississippi 
 Valleys (approximately) per acre,. 
 
 $ .55 
 
 3.25 
 .075 
 
 6.25 
 .0325 
 .15 
 
 7.50 
 
 .02925 
 
 35.00 
 
 The national debt on the first of March, 1866, would 
 therefore purchase of the above staples as follows : 
 
 Of wheat,. 1,486,842,105 bushels. 
 
 Of flour,. 262,790,697 barrels. 
 
 Of cotton,. 5,885,416,666 pounds. 
 
 Of mess pork,. 99,576,313 barrels. 
 
 Of sugar,.25,393,348,314 pounds. 
 
 Of wool,. 5,330,188,679 pounds. 
 
 Of beef,. 181,967,213 cwt. 
 
 Of bar iron,.41,851,851,851 pounds. 
 
 Of superior farming lands as above (approximate¬ 
 ly) . 
 
 37,666,666 acres. 
 
THE NATIONAL DEBT IS WORTH MORE THAN EVER. 9 
 
 The national debt at the end of August, 1896, will pur¬ 
 chase of the above staples as follows : 
 
 Of wheat,... 
 
 Of flour,. 
 
 Of cotton,. 
 
 Of mess pork,.... 
 
 Of sugar,... 
 
 Of wool,. 
 
 Of beef,. 
 
 Of bar iron,. 
 
 Of superior farming lands as above (approxi¬ 
 mately).. .. 
 
 . 2,443,636,636 bushels. 
 
 413,538,461 barrels. 
 .17,920,000,000 pounds. 
 
 215,040,000 barrels. 
 41,353,846,154 pounds. 
 8,960,000,000 pounds. 
 179,200,000 cwt. 
 45,948,717,417 pounds. 
 
 38,400,000 acres. 
 
 The purchasing power of the national debt at the close of 
 1896 is therefore greater than was that of the national debt 
 on March 1, 1866, as follows : 
 
 In the case of wheat by. 
 
 In the case of flour by. 
 
 In the case of cotton by. 
 
 In the case of mess pork by. 
 
 In the case of sugar by. 
 
 In the case of wool by. 
 
 In the case of bar iron by. 
 
 In the case of farming lands as above by (approx¬ 
 imately) .. 
 
 956,794,231 bushels. 
 150,748,164 barrels. 
 12,034,583,333 pounds. 
 
 115,463,587 barrels. 
 14,960,497,840 pounds. 
 3,629,811,321 pounds. 
 4,096,865,566 pounds. 
 
 733,333 acres. 
 
 « 
 
 The purchasing power of the national debt at the end of 
 summer, 1896, is less than it was on the first of March, 1866, 
 as follows : 
 
 In the case of beef by 
 
 2,767,213 cwt. 
 
 From the calculation it is seen that the purchasing power 
 of the debt at the end of summer, 1896, is far greater 
 than it was on March 1,1866, on eight of the nine great staples 
 enumerated, and that it is less by a comparatively small per 
 cent on only one of the articles enumerated. There is an 
 overwhelming preponderance on the average of the whole 
 list in favor of the debt as it stands at the close of the cur¬ 
 rent summer. That debt, in a word, is worth more to the 
 holders than it was at its nominal maximum more than thirty 
 years ago ! There is no kind of sophistical argument or doc¬ 
 tored statistics in the world that can overcome or seriously 
 modify the conclusions here drawn from premises that are 
 incontrovertible. Let all men know it. Let the world know 
 it. Let the common man ponder this appalling statement of 
 an undeniable truth. Let our.national authorities know it. 
 Let the leaders of every political party have it shouted in 
 their ears. Let every administration that has been in power 
 from the first of Grant to the last of Cleveland be told in 
 
10 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 trumpet voice that the publications put forth from month to 
 month as statements from the treasury about the reduction 
 of the national debt by the payment of three millions or seven 
 millions or ten millions have been essentially and utterly 
 false. True it is that the debt has been nominally reduced 
 according to the publications; but it has never been so 
 reduced until, by the contrivance of those who possess it, the 
 purchasing power of the currency in which the debt was to 
 be paid has been augmented fully as much as the equivalent 
 of the payment! 
 
 Thus from month to month and from year to year the 
 astounding process has gone on. And thus from year to 
 year the judgment of the American people has been abused 
 with the iteration and belief that they were paying their debt, 
 when in truth all the multiplied millions on millions and 
 thousands of millions (literally more than jive thousand mill¬ 
 ions') which they have paid have been simply contributed to 
 * the fundholding class, whose claim, after a lifetime, is worth 
 as much as it was at the beginning. The resources of a great 
 people have been poured like a roaring river into a sinkhole 
 that has swallowed all; and the golden streams of the contribu¬ 
 tion have issued silently through a thousand unseen spouts 
 into the private reservoirs of the holders of the debt. 
 
 6 . Far-reaching Scheme of the Fund-Holding 
 Interest. 
 
 The policy of the fundholding interest has thus simplified 
 itself into (1) the indefinite extension of the bond, and (2) 
 the manipulation of the dollar. To the extent that the first 
 part of this policy has prevailed, the United States has been 
 remanded to the same category with the nations of Western 
 Europe having their perpetual bonded debts. To the extent 
 that the second part of the policy has prevailed, the people 
 of the United States have been continuously robbed of their 
 resources for nearly the full period of a human life. In the 
 meantime the people have been familiarized with the propo¬ 
 sition — put forth timidly at first — that a national debt is a 
 national blessing. It furnishes the cement — so runs the 
 patriot song — whereby the moneyed classes are bound in 
 devotion to the government and become a part of it, as in 
 England ; thus the government is made strong and enduring. 
 
 Meanwhile the various refundings have been celebrated in 
 political paean as marvels of finance. By the organs of the 
 party in power one-half of the people have been led to believe 
 
TO CHANGE THE CONTRACT IS A CRIME. 
 
 11 
 
 th it the national honor is preserved, the national faith made 
 good, and great economy manifested in those manipulations 
 of the bonds by which, series after series, the longer have 
 been substituted for the shorter. The other half of the 
 people, who would have discovered the bottom intent in the 
 process and thwarted the scheme at the next election, have 
 been prevented from doing so by the fact that their organs 
 and leaders have had a common interest with them of the 
 dominant faction. Several secretaries of the treasury have 
 been made into great financiers by becoming the willing 
 clerks of the fundholding class in these delicate and beauti¬ 
 ful processes by which the national debt is to be made ever¬ 
 lasting, with the accompaniment of popular applause. 
 
 But the extension of the bonded debt and the hope of its 
 eternal life were not the principal concern of those who 
 obtained possession of it. Their imaginations were not indeed 
 much dazzled with the prospect of having the bond merely 
 perpetuated ; because men who are engaged in such schemes 
 rarely look be}umd the limits of their own lives. It sufficed, 
 therefore, that the bonded debt should be lifelong , with the 
 hope of another avatar. That secured, the undivided energy 
 of those who had secured it might be directed to the manip¬ 
 ulation of the dollar; and it is safe to assert that the skill 
 developed in this part of the bondholding policy has never 
 been elsewhere shown by men. The complete history of the 
 processes by which, with contraction and substitution, the 
 dollar to be employed as the standard of payment in the dis¬ 
 charge of the private and public debts of the people of the 
 United States has been gradually and adroitly lifted from 
 one valuation to another, until within thirty-one years (1865- 
 1896) its purchasing power has been increased to the 
 ratio of more than three to one, could never be written or 
 recited. It surpasses human credulity. It goes beyond the 
 average range of mortal invention and fixes itself in the cate¬ 
 gory of the diabolical. 
 
 7. To Change the Contract is a Crime. 
 
 To change a contract has always been regarded as a crime. 
 The nations of antiquity legislated strongly against the prin¬ 
 ciple and practice of altering the existing agreements of men. 
 Even savages perceive the utter immorality of tampering 
 with a pledge or promise. To change a contract is perfidious. 
 To do so is a gross violation of the bottom condition on which 
 human society exists, or can exist. What is left when good 
 
12 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 faith disappears from the conduct and purposes of men? 
 When the individual alters a note and writes in more or less 
 the law calls it forgery, and the forger is sent to prison. 
 This is true even in the small personal violations of contract 
 between man and man. 
 
 The contract is sacred and must be fulfilled, else there is 
 an end of the social compact. What, therefore, shall we say 
 of the fraudulent and covert alteration of all contracts by 
 changing the units in which such contracts are to be fulfilled, 
 substituting, by national authority , a new unit or counter, worth 
 more than three times the unit or counter agreed upon and 
 promised ? Such a process is, as Lincoln declared it to be, 
 “ a heinous crime against the people,” a sin against mankind. 
 
 For a long time the subtle work of extending and trans¬ 
 forming the bond and at the same time of raising the value of 
 the dollar of payment was so easily and noiselessly effected 
 that the people did not awake to the realization of the thing 
 done until it was done. The class in whose interest the 
 various changes have been made have been enabled to coddle 
 some, to hoodwink others, to corrupt many, and to terrorize 
 a multitude. We have seen those who have been aroused to 
 the pitch of denouncing and exposing the giant fraud of the 
 century, turn about and decry as repudiators, enemies of the 
 national credit, and disturbers of “ the business interests ” of 
 the nation, the true friends of public honesty and good faith 
 among men. At least two secretaries of the treasury have 
 exhibited to mankind that species of tergiversation which, in 
 the administration of a high office, can hardly be distinguished 
 from treason to the human race. 
 
 Let us then for a moment trace the principal changes that 
 have been effected in the dollar of account and payment 
 under the dictation and management of the money power, 
 and with the cheerful acquiescence of several conniving 
 administrations. In the first place, the great body of the 
 bonded debt of the nation was purchased in the time of the 
 war with the legal-tender paper money to which the govern¬ 
 ment had been obliged to resort. It was not purchased with 
 gold, for gold had fled to covert. There has been no other 
 traitor to the American Union and to the liberties of the 
 people comparable in his perfidy with gold. 
 
 8 . Cowardice and Perfidy of Gold. 
 
 With the rising portent of war specie fled like a coward 
 before the first blast of battle. Within ten days after the 
 
COWARDICE AND PERFIDY OF GOLD. 
 
 IB 
 
 secession of South Carolina and ten days before the “ Star of 
 the West” was fired on in the harbor of Charleston, every 
 bank in New York suspended specie payments, leaving both 
 people and nation to their fate. If we had been obliged in 
 that day to rely upon metallic money of any kind to carry 
 forward the tremendous work of saving the Union, then of a 
 certainty the American Republic would have been blown to 
 fragments and the residue of our liberties would have been 
 cast out on the ash-heap of history. 
 
 This undeniable truth was recognized then as it is undis¬ 
 puted now. The efficiency of the greenback currency in 
 the suppression of the Rebellion has never been, can never 
 be, denied or overestimated. Twelve years after the war, 
 Hon. William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania, addressing an 
 assemblage of ex-Confederate officers at Macon, Georgia, said: 
 “ Your leaders were mistaken in their financial theory. They 
 believed that the United States could use nothing but gold 
 and silver as money, and that as we had none of these 
 metals we could not put armies in the field to overwhelm 
 you or fleets upon the ocean to blockade your coasts. Your 
 leaders had not studied the constitution to see that the gov¬ 
 ernment has control of the question of what shall be money. 
 We discovered that it had, and when we could not get gold 
 or silver we made the greenback, and it was that that whipped 
 you.” “Yes,” said one of the officers with enthusiasm, 
 u Judge Kelley, you are right; it was the greenback that 
 whipped us.” This is the currency that Shylock is now try¬ 
 ing to have cancelled because it is so great a menace to the 
 interests of the people. He desires to have the legal-tender 
 currency destroyed in order that money sharks may be pre¬ 
 vented from using that currency to deplete the national 
 treasury of its gold and in order that his own patriotic hands 
 may be restrained from further robbery. Shylock is excited 
 and wants to be held. The hypocrisy of such a pretence is 
 beyond the reach of satire. 
 
 It is literally true that the great Rebellion was suppressed 
 and the Union upheld by the expedient of the non-interest- 
 bearing paper money devised in the presence of the over¬ 
 whelming exigency of war and dismemberment. The 
 precious metals dived out of sight. The world knows the 
 story. The United States went upon a basis of paper. For 
 four years of war and fourteen years of peace the finances of 
 the nation and of the people in their private capacities were 
 conducted on a legal tender of paper. Metallic money and 
 
14 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 the money metals rose rapidly in value, or at least in price. 
 Now gold was at a premium of thirty per cent; now fifty 
 per cent; now one hundred per cent; and finally one hun¬ 
 dred and eighty-five per cent above par. Gold and silver 
 money became a tradition and a myth. The people neither 
 knew nor cared what had become of them. 
 
 Owing to the nefarious exception in the legal-tender cur¬ 
 rency in favor of the interest on the public debt and duties 
 on imports, a Gold Exchange was organized in New York, 
 and gold was bought with which to pay the semi-annual 
 coupons of the bonds and the duties on imported goods. 
 Trading in gold and in the speculative margins of gold 
 became a business, in some sense the greatest of all the busi¬ 
 nesses ; certainly it was the most picturesque. 
 
 9. The War Debt Made on a Basis of Legal 
 Tender. 
 
 It was under these conditions that the great bulk of the 
 national debt was put into the form of bonds. The bonds 
 were purchased with the legal money of the country. They 
 were purchased at par according to the standard of the 
 greenback currency. The advantage in purchasing them was 
 generally given by the government to the purchasers. 
 Already the bondholder was a lord and the government a 
 serf and beggar. Inducements were freely offered to stimu¬ 
 late the sale of the bonds. Payments were made easy; 
 slight discounts were not unusual; interest was sometimes 
 advanced to purchasers; aud many other methods were 
 adopted to make the sale of the national securities free and 
 copious. Finally, the purchaser of bonds to the value of 
 fifty thousand dollars might, receive as a gratuity forty-five 
 thousand dollars in paper money, and with that establish a 
 bank of issue, discount and loan. 
 
 In this manner the national debt became a bond, and out 
 of the bond sprouted a thousand banks. 
 
 From that day to the present the bond industry has been 
 the one ever-flourishing, permanent, and deep-down industry, 
 not indeed of the American people, but of the class who hold 
 the national securities and live by them. This industry has 
 combined with the leading political parties, and until recently 
 has made and kept them a unit for more than twenty years. 
 This industry has insinuated itself into the government and 
 has become the energizing and controlling force in the public 
 life of the nation; and before it all other industries have 
 
WHAT THE BONDS COST. 
 
 15 
 
 been compelled to stagger and bend and break until the bond 
 not only rules but reigns. 
 
 10. What the Bonds Cost. 
 
 No one has ever calculated with certainty the average cost 
 of the government bonds to the original purchasers. To do 
 so is a complicated problem. They were of many series, 
 extending over a span of years, and were bought at different 
 crises when the premium on gold was rising or falling. The 
 higher that premium rose the cheaper the bonds were, as 
 tested by the'measurement of gold. 
 
 The debt-making epoch of the Civil War covered a period 
 of four years, ten months, and nineteen days. The middle 
 date of this period was September 9, 1863; but by far the 
 greater part of the debt was incurred after that date. The 
 premium on gold reached fifty per cent on December 14, 
 1863, and remained above that figure for one year, three 
 months, and twenty-seven days, covering the period of great¬ 
 est debt making. Gold reached two hundred on the 21st 
 of June, 1864, and remained above two hundred until Febru¬ 
 ary 22, 1865. It reached the topmost figure of two hundred 
 and eighty-five on the 12th of July, 1864. The dealers in 
 bonds called it a “flurry in gold.” This was the period of 
 the maximum debt making. The legal-tender currency, with 
 which the bonds at* that crisis were purchased, was worth 
 thirty-five cents by the gold standard. It was the very hey¬ 
 day when the bond-nest was feathered for the laying of the 
 golden egg. 
 
 By the measurement of gold it is probable that the aver¬ 
 age cost of the “five-twenties” to the purchasers was not 
 more than fifty-five, or certainly not more than sixty-five 
 cents to the gold dollar. Nearly all the other series were pur¬ 
 chased at a like enormous discount, as tested by the standard 
 of coin. In the sale of the bonds, before the debt reached 
 its maximum in March of 1866, the standard of the legal- 
 tender paper was uniformly observed. It was by the com¬ 
 mon measure of the money of the country that the whole 
 original debt was sold, and mostly by that measure that it 
 was funded and refunded for at least fourteen years after 
 Appomattox. But the mythical gold barometer kept in the 
 safe in Lombard Street in London showed that the pur¬ 
 chases of the bonds were actually made at prices ranging 
 from about forty-six to seventy cents to the coin dollar. 
 
16 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 11. Profound Intrigue of the Bondholders. 
 
 By the close of the war the seven-thirty bonds were 
 already falling due. The “ five-twenties ” would be due in 
 a short time. That is, in a short time the government would 
 would have the option , but not the necessity , of redeeming 
 them. And now it was that the fundholding interest put 
 itself in antagonism to the national welfare, and conceived 
 the project of doubling its investment at one stroke by com¬ 
 pelling the payment of all the bonds in coin. They had been 
 purchased on the basis of one currency. That currency was 
 worth only about half as much, unit for unit, as the mythical 
 metallic currency which had now become only a reminis¬ 
 cence. Or, to put it the other way, the phantom metallic 
 currency was worth at least two for one of the currency of 
 all business, of all manufacture, of all production, of all 
 accounting; that is, two for one of the currency of the 
 people and the nation. The holders of the bonds perceived 
 that if, under these conditions, they could secure a statutory 
 declaration of the payment of both principal and interest of 
 the five-twenty bonds in coin, then they would have gained, 
 at the expense of the overburdened nation, not only the prin¬ 
 cipal and the legitimate interest to which they were entitled 
 and which ought to have satisfied, but also about two for one 
 on their whole investment! 
 
 The stake was worthy of the trial. The game might well 
 be played with all the skill and intrigue and specious formal¬ 
 ity of which human nature is capable. On one side of the 
 table sat the representatives of the bond; on the other side sat 
 the American people: and the bond won ! By the Act of March 
 18, 1869, entitled “An Act to Strengthen the Public 
 Credit,” etc., but which ought to have been entitled “ An 
 Act to Transfer the Resources of the American People to 
 the Hands of a Few under Sanction of Law,” it was decreed 
 that the bondholder should have his two for one ; that the 
 five-twenties and all like obligations of the government, 
 whether they were or were not by their own terms payable in 
 coin, should now be made so payable ; that the national 
 credit required that a bond which had been purchased in one 
 currency should be paid in another currency worth twice as 
 much; that the property loaned to the republic for the sup¬ 
 pression of the Rebellion should be returned twofold beside 
 the interest; that the holder of the national obligation, in 
 addition to being preserved whole and harmless, should be 
 
FIRST LEAGUE OF THE GOVERNMENT, ETC. 17 
 
 enriched by law at the expense of the people; but that the 
 widow who had given her four sons to her country and had 
 followed them one by one to their last resting-places under 
 the apple trees in the orchard, should receive back nothing 
 but weeds and that celestial sorrow which transfigured her 
 face evermore into the face of an angel! 
 
 At the time when the 44 Act to Strengthen the Public 
 Credit ” was passed, many leading statesmen knew what it 
 was calculated and designed to accomplish. Among these 
 was Senator John Sherman of Ohio. Addressing the Senate 
 on the 27th of January, 1869, just before the passage of 
 the Act and speaking of the prospective legislation, he said : 
 44 Sir, it is not possible to take this voyage without sore dis¬ 
 tress. To every person except the capitalist out of debt or 
 the salaried officer or annuitant, it is a period of loss, danger, 
 prostration of trade, fall of wages, suspension of enterprise, 
 bankruptcy, and disaster. ... It means the ruin of all 
 dealers whose debts are twice their capital, though one third 
 less than their property. It means the fall of all agricul¬ 
 tural productions, without any very great reduction of 
 taxes.” Even so. The senator was right. This cold-blooded 
 proposition of Sherman means, when reduced to an example, 
 simply this : Every young and aspiring man in the United 
 States, just beginning life with wife and child and home, 
 having five hundred dollars in money (his pay for service in 
 the army), a home worth fifteen hundred dollars, and a debt 
 of a thousand dollars, will be inevitably bankrupted! The 
 calculation of the senator was correct. 
 
 12. First League of the Government with the 
 Money Power. 
 
 Thus it was that on the 18th of March, 1869, the gov¬ 
 ernment of the United States made its first league and cove¬ 
 nant with the fundholding interests against the people. By 
 the terms of that league the millionnaire who had given a 
 hundred thousand dollars for a bond of the same denomina¬ 
 tion should receive back, true enough, a hundred thousand 
 dollars, but should receive it in units of another kind worth 
 about two for one. 
 
 From that day, distant from the present by more than 
 twenty-seven years, there has been no deviation or shadow of 
 turning on the part of intrenched intrigue to carry out the 
 compact. Year by year the bolts and bars have been driven 
 ever further and deeper with blow on blow of the sledge of 
 
18 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 the money power, until the national fraud has been glorified 
 under the name of honor, and the wholesome truth nailed in 
 the coffin of contempt. Each succeeding administration has 
 been even as its predecessor, but more so in its devotion to 
 the bondholding interest at the expense of all besides. 
 
 The fact that the interest on the five-twenty bonds was, by 
 specification payable in coin, shows conclusively that the body 
 of the bond was payable in the lawful money of the country. 
 Else why the specification as to how the interest should be 
 paid? If the body of the bonds were payable in coin, it had 
 been the sublimated absurdity of the century to specify that 
 the coupons should be paid in com also. What kind of bond 
 would that have been the principal of which was payable in 
 coin and the coupons in legal tender? And beside the rea¬ 
 son and very nature of the thing, authority abounds to show 
 that the five-twenties were by the sense and intent of the 
 contract payable in the lawful money of the country. John 
 Sherman himself is one of the witnesses of the general 
 understanding, which was the only understanding consistent 
 with truth and common sense. In a letter to Hon. A. Mann 
 of Brooklyn, New York, written on the 20th of March, 1868, 
 Senator Sherman said: 
 
 44 Dear Sir : I was pleased to receive your letter. My per¬ 
 sonal interests are the same as yours, but, like you, I do not 
 intend to be influenced by them. My construction of the 
 law is the result of careful examination, and I feel quite sure 
 that an impartial court would confirm it if the case could be 
 tried before a court. I send you my views as fully stated in 
 a speech. Your idea is that we propose to repudiate or vio¬ 
 late a promise Avhen we offer to redeem the principal in legal 
 tender. 
 
 44 1 think the bondholder violates his promise when he re¬ 
 fuses to take the same kind of money he pays for the bonds. 
 If the case is to be tested by law, I am right. If it is to be 
 tested by Jay Cooke’s advertisement, I am wrong. I hate 
 repudiation or anything like it; but we ought not to be de¬ 
 terred from doing what is right by the fear of undeserved 
 epithets. If under the law as it stands the holders of the 
 five-twenties can only be paid in gold, then we are repudiators 
 if we propose to pay otherwise. If the bondholder can 
 legally demand only the kind of money he paid, then he is a 
 repudiator and extortioner to demand money more valuable 
 than he gave. Yours truly, 
 
 “John Sherman.” 
 
THE} BUSINESS OF REFUNDING BEGINS. 
 
 19 
 
 Haying by the Act of 1869 secured the declaration of the 
 payment of the national debt in a currency different from the 
 currency of the contract, the next step was that of lengthen¬ 
 ing and perpetuating the bonds. If the bonds, now payable 
 in coin, were good for ten years or twenty years, then they 
 would be better for thirty years or forty years to run. Nor 
 will the government now be so eager to pay when payment in 
 coin is impossible. The people can now be made to believe, 
 what is true, that the government cannot for the present pay 
 our bonds. They must therefore be extended. Great finan¬ 
 ciers will they be who can sell us a five per cent bond with 
 an extension of ten years, and take up a six per cent bond 
 which is falling due. That is the process of refunding in a 
 nutshell, and that requires the gigantic intellect of some 
 great secretary to do it! We, the beneficiaries, may hold out 
 to him the impossible prospect of being president—if he will 
 do the work well. 
 
 18. The Business of Refunding Begins. 
 
 The history of the various refunding operations by which 
 the short, high-rate bonds of the government sold during the’ 
 war period were translated into long, lower-rate bonds, is but 
 the record of a scheme which was contrived by the bond¬ 
 holders themselves, ratified by an undiscerning Congress, and 
 carried into execution by the treasury department of the 
 United States, with the ulterior design of preventing pay¬ 
 ment by lengthening the time to run, and with the still fur¬ 
 ther hope of making a perpetual interest-bearing fund in the 
 European manner. 
 
 The first measure passed by Congress with this intent was 
 the Act of July 14,1870, entitled “An Act to Authorize the 
 Refunding of the National Debt.” This act reaffirmed the 
 proposition that all the bonds of the United States were re¬ 
 deemable, both principal and interest, in coin and authorized 
 the secretary of the treasury, as such bonds, series after 
 series, should fall due — that is, reach the date at which the 
 government had the option of redeeming them — to prepare 
 and sell new bonds, extending the time to run and lowering 
 the nominal rate of interest. Under this act the process of 
 refunding was carried on by those interested in it as actively 
 and earnestly as though it were a manufacturing industry, 
 until all the bonds were extended and most were made as 
 long as the current lives of men. Then the work abated, 
 partly because of the weakness of all posthumous induce- 
 
20 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 ments, and partly because by this time certain symptoms of 
 alarm and jealousy were noted among the people. 
 
 As much as two years before the passage of this Refund¬ 
 ing Act, the people began to show signs of distrust at the 
 manoeuvres of the fundholding classes. The popular suspi¬ 
 cion was manifested in the declarations of the political plat¬ 
 forms of both parties, in 1868, in the greater part of the 
 country. The sentiment of the people, always true, even 
 when overborne by their masters, was overwhelmingly in favor 
 of the honest payment of the five-twenty bonds; that is, in 
 favor of paying them in the same currency with which they 
 were purchased. That currency had already appreciated in 
 its purchasing power about thirty per cent. In the central 
 United States the Republican platforms in the year just 
 named were generally unequivocal in indorsement of the 
 proposition to pay the five-twenties in the legal-tender money 
 of the country. In the writer’s own State in that year, the 
 platform written and reported by the veteran Republican 
 platform maker, Hon. Richard W. Thompson, afterward 
 Secretary of the Navy in the cabinet of President Hayes, 
 was as follows: “ The public debt made necessary by the 
 Rebellion should be honestly paid; and all bonds issued there¬ 
 for should be paid in legal tenders, commonly called green¬ 
 backs, except where, by their express terms, they provide 
 otherwise.” On this platform Senator Oliver P. Morton, of 
 great fame and equal honesty, carried the State by a heavy 
 majority for himself and General Grant, in the fall of 1868. 
 Within six months from that time, however, he yielded or 
 was conquered — and in yielding lost the ambition of his 
 life. The titanic knees of that great and resolute man, little 
 acquainted with the common use of pregnant hinges, were 
 broken, not, as the people supposed, by paralysis, but by the 
 bludgeon of the money power. 
 
 The national bonds had by this time become the most 
 profitable of all investments. Of all the forms of property, 
 they were the most exempt from hazard, most convenient, 
 and most strongly fortified by law. They offered them¬ 
 selves, however, only to the surplus accumulations of capital. 
 The man of moderate means must needs employ his whole 
 resources in the business to which he devotes his energies. 
 When capital accumulates in large amounts, and there is no 
 such thing as a national bond in which it may ensconce 
 itself and begin to grow, such capital must of necessity offer 
 itself for the promotion of legitimate, productive, manufac- 
 
CONCEPTION AND EVOLUTION OF THE GREAT CRIME. 21 
 
 turing and commercial enterprises. It must under such con¬ 
 ditions do something useful for mankind ; but where the bond 
 exists, surplus capital takes the form of the bond by prefer¬ 
 ence of all other enterprises, and to that extent, all other 
 enterprises languish and weaken for their wonted stimulus. 
 
 14. Conception and Evolution of the Great Crime. 
 
 By the beginning of the eighth decade thus much had 
 been accomplished: The fundholding interest had confirmed 
 itself to the extent of getting a long bond for a short one, 
 with the guarantee of payment of both principal and interest 
 in coin. The next point attained by the bondholding power 
 — for it had now become a power — can hardly be touched 
 upon with equanimity. The coin of the United States 
 existed in two kinds , silver and gold. Should the govern¬ 
 ment ever again reach the basis of specie pa}^ments, the 
 debtor would have the option of paying in the one coin or 
 the other, according to his convenience and the plentifulness 
 of the given kind. This option constitutes the essential ele¬ 
 ment of bimetallism. That it could be taken away from the 
 debtor seems in the retrospect a thing so monstrous as to be 
 incredible. It was a valuable option which the debtor in the 
 United States had held unchallenged from the foundation of 
 the government. No creditor had ever tried to take it from 
 him. It had never been denied or questioned by any. It 
 had always been cheerfully conceded down to the time of 
 the Civil War, when an unforeseen condition removed all coin 
 and put the country, as we have seen, on the basis of a legal- 
 tender paper money. 
 
 Now that coin was again in sight, or was supposed to be 
 coming in sight; now that the government had declared its 
 purpose to pay the national debt in coin, though that debt 
 had been contracted on a basis of paper, it might reasonably 
 have been supposed that the bondholding interest would be 
 contented with that enormous concession, and being thus 
 glutted to repletion, would seek no further extortion from 
 the American people. But, on the contrary, the monstrous 
 scheme was conceived of destroying the option of the debtor 
 to pay in silver, by destroying the coin unit of that metal, 
 thus reducing the debtor — all debtors, including the 
 government of the United States — to the necessity of pay¬ 
 ing in gold only. 
 
 This scheme was not only conceived, but was contemplated 
 with equanimity, not indeed b}^ the people, but by those 
 
22 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 whose interests were so profoundly concerned. In the last 
 session of the Forty-second Congress, the question was insin¬ 
 uated into legislation, but was housed from the public with 
 a skill worthy of the noblest cause. It was already the plan 
 of the conspirators to -have an act passed by Congress as 
 soon as possible, declaring a date at which specie payments 
 should be resumed in the United States. But preliminary 
 to such declaration and as an antecedent thereof, it was 
 seen to be advantageous to tamper the coin dollar in which 
 payment was to be resumed. 
 
 For the time being and for some years to come — so ran 
 the bondholders’ dream in 1873—the government of the 
 United States and the people alike must continue to prose¬ 
 cute their business on the basis of the paper legal tender; 
 but in the future, as we, the financiers, clearly perceive, 
 another dollar, that is, a metallic dollar, is to be substituted 
 for this legal tender of paper; and it is to our interest to 
 have that other dollar as valuable as possible. We will not 
 only go to the length of substituting a metallic dollar still 
 worth a premium of from thirty to fifty per cent for the cur¬ 
 rent dollar of the country, but we will go further than that, 
 and tamper with the metallic dollar itself, so that that also 
 may ultimately, in some twenty years, be worth two for one ! 
 We will take away, if we can, by some process, the optional 
 dollar now constitutional for eighty-one years in the United 
 States, and will place in its stead a dollar in one metal only 
 — a metal that we know, from its scarcity and from our 
 ability to corner it in the markets of the world, must rapidly, 
 under such conditions, appreciate in its purchasing power, all 
 the time hiding its own fallacy, while at the same time the 
 discarded metal, being disparaged and abolished, must lose 
 its quality as primary money, and be driven gradually into 
 the relation of subsidiary coin and mere merchandise. 
 
 Words are inadequate to describe the profundity and 
 criminality of this scheme. It Avas carried into effect by the 
 Act of Feb. 12, 1873. It was done by a turn of Shy- 
 lock’s Avrist, so adroit and one might say devilish, as to be 
 indescribable in the phraseology of this Avorld. It was an 
 act on which no king of the seventeenth century Avould have 
 ventured Avithout incurring the risk of revolution. It was 
 an act Avhich, instead of being misrepresented by those Avho 
 have found it out and nailed it to the gibbet of public con¬ 
 tempt, has neAer been adequately denounced. It Avas an act 
 Avhich has posithely blackened the honor of the American 
 
 % 
 
WHAT DTD THEY DO IT FOR ? 
 
 23 
 
 republic. It was an act which though subsequently 
 defended, even to the present day, by the ingenuity of great 
 men and by all the purchasable ability of the world, is never¬ 
 theless condemned by the conscience and common sense of 
 mankind as the most cold-blooded, unjust, uncalled-for, 
 unmitigated, and damnable outrage ever done in this century 
 to the rights and interests of a great people. 
 
 Already in Europe the nefarious work had been begun. 
 The bimetallic system of currency in use in the states of the 
 Latin Union had been sapped and mined and the free coin¬ 
 age of silver in those states suspended before the like result 
 was reached in America. But the intrigue involving both 
 Europe and America was on, and the managers in the United 
 States went carefully forward to success. 
 
 15. What did They Do It For? 
 
 What did they do it for? that is the question. The men 
 who engineered the Act of February 12, 1873, from which 
 such disastrous consequences have floAved, had some motive 
 in view. What was it? The scheme did not engender 
 itself, but was contrived with some end in view. Nobody 
 demanded or expected or imagined the possibility of the pas¬ 
 sage of such a measure as the demonetization of silver. To 
 say that the managers had no end in view is to say what the 
 American people do not believe and what history — being 
 rational — will not record. 
 
 As to the bottom motive, then, of this Act of 1873, let it 
 be written in black. The promoters of the iniquitous meas¬ 
 ure have seen fit to complain of the estimate in which their 
 work is held by the American people. They complain that 
 they themselves are harshly and unjustly judged. They 
 complain that millions of men who have lost their homes and 
 had their prospects in life blasted by the Act of 1873 persist 
 in calling it a crime. They try to laugh it away by repeat¬ 
 ing in mockery the words with which the infamous measure 
 is stigmatized by the roused-up nation. 
 
 But why do they complain and wince ? It is because the 
 act of which they are the authors cannot be explained away 
 by any reasonable or even plausible hypothesis of honesty 
 and good faith on the part of its inventors. There is no 
 interpretation of the thing done that Avill satisfy the common 
 sense of the American people. What reason or motive or 
 explanation can the authors of that act ever make as an 
 apology to the world ? They have had twenty-three years 
 
24 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 in which to find or invent an answer; but no studied reflec¬ 
 tion or ingenious afterthought has been able to suggest a 
 plausible, to say nothing of an honest, motive for the act of 
 1873. What did they do it for? That is the question 
 which they must answer. 
 
 Here lies the world weltering in industrial and commer¬ 
 cial ruin. Here are the sorrows of a great nation unas¬ 
 suaged. Here is tremendous America prostrate under the 
 invented and purposed curse of men. What have the 
 authors and inventors of the curse to say in justification of 
 their deed ? Virtually nothing. They say that the demone¬ 
 tization of silver was not a crime. They say it was innocent. 
 They say it was not demonetization at all, but only a little 
 amendment of the coinage. They say that the act was only 
 incidental — a sort of half-playful circumstance of patriotic 
 legislation, harmless in its conception and pure in delivery. 
 They say that the measure was understood, that it was 
 debated, that it was sent back to committee and born again, 
 that some men voted for it and others against it. They say 
 every irrelevant and inconsequential thing imaginable about 
 the Act of 1873, but they avoid the one essential question, 
 and that is, What was the bottom reason or motive for such leg- 
 islaftion? What did they do it for? They say,*not for this 
 and not for that. Well, then, what for? 
 
 The truth is that the authors and promoters of the act of 
 demonetization can offer no explanation or reason for it 
 except an explanation that does not explain or a reason which 
 admits the crime. The real motive of that act was the 
 ulterior purpose, the covert design, of destroying one half of 
 the primary money of the world. It was a project filmed 
 over with intrigue to reduce silver, the old-time money of 
 mankind, from its place as a precious metal to common mer¬ 
 chandise. The gold-producing nations were in the scheme, 
 and America was hoodwinked. The authors of the measure 
 planned to destroy one half of the money resource of the 
 world, and thus to double the purchasing power of the other 
 half. The intrigue was to put upon gold the entire monetary 
 office; to change every contract in the United States; to make 
 every debt worth twice its face, and to divide by two the 
 resources and strength of every workingman under the circle of 
 the sun. It was a far-reaching and profound scheme to halve 
 the price of every gift of nature and every product of 
 human industry in the world and to compel the payment of 
 every debt with a measure of two for one. 
 
THE CRIME WAS KNOWN, ETC. 
 
 25 
 
 The real authors of this scheme understood it perfectly 
 well. They knew what they were about with their 44 harm¬ 
 less accident of legislation ! ” But Congress as a body did 
 not know the thing intended; the country, the nation, knew 
 it not; and the President who signed the act did not know 
 that he was signing a warrant for the bankruptcy of the 
 nation. Nor were the plan and motive of the thing done ever 
 revealed until it began to declare itself in the industrial and 
 commercial ruin of the nation. 
 
 16. The Crime was Known only to the Perpetra¬ 
 tors. 
 
 The secret history of the act of demonetization has never 
 been — and perhaps never will be — fully exposed to the 
 light of day. Thus much is certain, that when the bill for 
 the revision of the coinage was brought into the House by 
 the Hon. William D. Kelley, chairman of the Committee on 
 Coinage, Weights and Measures, it contained a provision for 
 the standard silver dollar as well as for the other coins of our 
 system. Thus much is certain also, namely, that in some 
 manner and by some hand that provision was stricken out; 
 and then the emasculated bill was in some way worked 
 through both House and Senate without the knowledge of 
 either body, or any considerable number of the members, as 
 to the nature and intended effect of the measure that was 
 passed. The President’s signature was obtained to the bill 
 without his knowledge that thereby silver was demonetized. 
 Nearly eight months afterwards, namely, on the 6th of Octo¬ 
 ber, 1873, General Grant wrote a letter to his friend, Mr. 
 Cowdrey, a bank president of Brooklyn, in which he expressed 
 his surprise that silver money was not making its appearance 
 as a means of aiding in the resumption of specie payments. 
 The general did not know that his own signature had made it 
 impossible that a single silver dollar should be coined for 
 purposes of resumption or for any other purpose whatsoever. 
 In the letter to Cow'drey he said: 
 
 44 The panic has brought greenbacks about to a par with 
 silver. I wonder that silver is not already coming into the 
 market to supply the deficiency in the circulating medium. 
 When it does come — and I predict it will soon — we will 
 have made a rapid stride towards specie payments. Currency 
 will never go below silver after that. . . . The circulation of 
 silver will have other beneficial effects. . . . Silver will 
 become the standard of value and will be hoarded in a small 
 
26 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 way. ... I confess a desire to see a limited hoarding of 
 money.” 
 
 On the 10th of May, 1879, William D. Kelley, Father of 
 the House of Representatives, speaking indignantly and in 
 retrospect of the Act of 1878, said: 
 
 “The Committee of Coinage, Weights and Measures, who 
 reported the original bill [Act of 1873], were faithful and 
 able, and scanned its provisions closely. As their organ I 
 reported it. It contained provision for both the standard 
 dollar and the trade dollar. Never having heard until long 
 after its enactment of the substitution in the Senate of the 
 section which dropped the standard dollar, I profess to know 
 nothing of its history; but I am prepared to say that in all 
 the legislation of this country there is no mystery equal to 
 the demonetization of the standard silver dollar of the United 
 States. I have never found a man who could tell just how 
 it came about, or why.” 
 
 If William D. Kelley after more than six years of mingling 
 with the foremost men of the nation had never found one who 
 could tell him how or why silver was demonetized, what shall 
 we say of those who, twenty-three years after date, are trying , 
 under pressure of public condemnation, to explain it — and 
 cannot ? 
 
 Testimony to prove the ignorance of Congress with respect 
 to the nature and intent of the act of demonetization can be 
 adduced to the extent of a volume. On the 15th of Febru¬ 
 ary, 1878, Senator Allison of Iowa said in the Senate: 
 
 “ When the secret history [mark the secret history!] of 
 this bill of 1873 comes to be told it will disclose the fact that 
 the House of Representatives intended to coin both gold and 
 silver and to place both metals upon the French ratio (15£ 
 to 1) instead of our own, . . . but that the bill afterwards 
 was doctored.” 
 
 On the same day when this was uttered Senator D. W. 
 Voorhees of Indiana, challenged Senator James G. Blaine, 
 who had been Speaker of the House when the act of demon¬ 
 etization was passed, as follows : 
 
 “ I want to ask my friend from Maine [Mr. Blaine] 
 
 . . . whether I may call him as one more witness to the fact 
 that it was not generally known whether silver was demon¬ 
 etized. Did he know, as Speaker of the House presiding at 
 that time, that the silver dollar was demonetized in the bill ? ” 
 
 To this Senator Blaine replied : 
 
 “ I did not know anything that was in the bill . . . And 
 
THE CRIME WAS KNOWN, ETC. 
 
 27 
 
 now I should like to exchange questions with the Senator 
 from Indiana who was then on the floor [of the House], and 
 whose business it was far more than mine to know . . . Did 
 lie know ? ” 
 
 Senator Voorhees replied: “I very frankly say that I did 
 not.” 
 
 General Garfield, afterwards President of the United 
 States, speaking at Springfield, Ohio, in the fall of 1877, said : 
 
 44 Perhaps I ought to be ashamed to say so, but it is the 
 truth to say that I, at that time being chairman of the Com¬ 
 mittee on Appropriations, and having my hands over-full 
 during all that time with work, never read the bill [Act of 
 1873]. It was put through, as dozens of bills are ... in 
 Congress, on the faith of the report of the chairman of the 
 committee ; therefore I tell you, because it is the truth, that 
 I have no knowledge about it.” 
 
 This extract seems to raise a question between the dead 
 Garfield and the living Sherman. 
 
 On the 10th of January, 1878, Senator Beck of Kentucky, 
 speaking to the proposed measure of remonetizing silver, 
 said: 
 
 44 What I complain of is . . . that the House never knew 
 what was in that bill. . . . Will any sane man believe that they 
 [Senators] deliberately consented to strike down silver coin¬ 
 age ? Mr. Sherman says they all did. I do not believe him.” 
 
 This is a question between the dead Beck and the living 
 Sherman. 
 
 In this same debate Senator William M. Stewart, of 
 Nevada, now charged with inconsistency and false motives 
 by orators great and little, said in a colloquy with Senator 
 Sherman: 
 
 44 Whatever may be your construction of their meaning 
 now, the words you used then induced me to vote with you, 
 because you made me believe that you were sending out a 
 bona fide dollar, as good as any in the world.” 
 
 The Hon. Wm. S. Holman of Indiana, at that time Father 
 of the House of Representatives, speaking from his desk, July 
 13, 1876, said: 
 
 44 1 have before me the record of the proceedings of this 
 House on the passage of that measure, a record which no 
 man can read without being convinced that the measure and 
 the method of its passage through the House was a 4 colossal 
 swindle.’ I assert that the measure never had the sanction 
 of the House, and does not possess the moral force of law. 
 
28 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 ... I myself asked the question of Mr. Hooper, who stood 
 near where I am now standing, whether it changed the law in 
 regard to coinage. And the answer of Mr. Hooper certainly 
 left the impression upon the whole House that the subject of 
 the coinage was not affected by that bill.” 
 
 On the 15th of February, 1878, Senator Thurman of Ohio 
 said: 
 
 “ I cannot say what took place in the House, but know 
 when the hill was pending in the Senate we thought it Avas 
 simply a hill to reform the mint, regulate coinage, and fix up 
 one thing and another, and there is not a single man in the 
 Senate, I think, unless a member of the committee from 
 which the bill came, who had the slightest idea that it was 
 . even a squint toward demonetization.” 
 
 Finally, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, speaking 
 on the subject on the 30th of March, 1876, said in indignant 
 inquiry: 
 
 “Will the Senator allow me to ask him or some other 
 Senator a question ? Is it true that there is now by laAv 
 no American dollar? And if so, is it true that the effect of 
 this bill is to be to make half dollars and quarter dollars the 
 only silver coin which can be used as a legal tender ? ” 
 
 Here the question is between the dead Conkling and the 
 living Sherman. 
 
 The authors of the Act of 1873 can well afford to be con¬ 
 tent. If they are condemned by the judgment and Avhipped 
 by the scorn of the American people they can still afford to 
 smile ; for they made their game and won it! For twenty- 
 three years they have Avatched the wreck as disinterested 
 spectators. Their oavii strong ships are filled with the treas¬ 
 ure-trove of land and sea. Surely they have little occasion 
 to worry ! True, the floods are filled with the wrecks of poor 
 men’s earnings and the broken symbols of hope. The for¬ 
 tunes of the humble millions are in the sea. The lifeless 
 bodies of young husbands are floating there. Wives and 
 mothers Avith despairing faces are clinging to masts and spars. 
 I saw a Avooden cradle Avith two babies in it going doAvn the 
 flood, and the Avhite fin of a shark Avas flung up where it 
 sank! O, be sure the authors of the Act of 1873 have 
 nothing to answer ! Why should they ? Their only reply to 
 the indignant question of mankind is a good-natured guffaAV 
 and some pleasant levity about the terrors of the Mexican 
 dollar! 
 
TRUE HISTORY OF OUR COINAGE. 
 
 29 
 
 17. True History of our Coinage. 
 
 The Act of 1873 abolished the standard unit of money and 
 account in the United States. Until that time all other coins 
 in use under our constitution and statute had been made to 
 do obeisance to the silver dollar as the unit of money and 
 account. That dollar had never been altered by the fraction 
 of one grain in the quantity of pure metal composing it, 
 from the time when it was ordained in 1792 to the time when 
 it was abolished from the list of coins to be henceforth struck 
 at the mints of the United States. Every other coin whether 
 of gold or silver had been altered and altered again; the sil¬ 
 ver unit never. To that unit all the rest, both gold and 
 silver, had from the first been conformed. The eagle of the 
 original statute and of all subsequent statutes was not made 
 to be ten dollars, but to be of the value of ten dollars. The 
 half eagle was not made to be five dollars, but to be of the 
 value of five dollars. The quarter eagle was of the value of 
 two and a half dollars, and the subsequent double eagle was 
 of the value of twenty dollars. Even the gold dollar of 1849, 
 marvellous to say, was not a dollar, but was made to be of 
 the value of a dollar. The subsidiary coins were all fractions 
 of the dollar, and the dollar was of silver only. 
 
 In a recently published book called “ A Coin Catechism,” 
 by J. K. Upton, three times assistant secretary of the treasury 
 and financial statistician of the Eleventh Census, the follow¬ 
 ing remarkable interpretation of the Coinage Act of April 2, 
 1792, is given: “The first Congress of the United States 
 provided for the coinage of 4 silver dollars or units, each to be 
 of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now 
 current, and to contain 371.25 grains of pure silver,’ and 
 fractional pieces of the same fineness and proportional weight, 
 and gold pieces to contain 24-75 grains of pure gold, to a dol¬ 
 lar etc. 
 
 The last clause of this exposition by Mr. Upton is so 
 cunningly false as to be amusing. It is a logical and liter¬ 
 ary curiosity that ought to be remanded to the text-books as 
 the finest existing example of sophism. Why did not the 
 author go on with his quotation from the statute of 1792 and 
 give the clause relative to the coinage of gold? He knew 
 that to do so would be ruinous to the special plea which he 
 was making. The first Congress of the United States did 
 not provide for any such coinage of gold as that described by 
 Mr. Upton. Mr. Upton either knows it or else he does not 
 
30 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 know it. The 44 gold pieces ” to which he refers in his care¬ 
 fully covered expression were precisely as given in the text 
 above ; namely, an eagle, a half eagle, and a quarter eagle, 
 and afterwards a double eagle, and the coins each and several 
 are defined in the statute as being of the value of so many 
 dollars, or units, and the dollar, or unit, is defined as being 
 371.25 grains of pure silver. 
 
 The conformity of gold to silver by the same statute at 15 
 to 1 made the gold coins to be multiples of 24.75 grains of 
 gold, a proportion which was afterwards twice altered to pre¬ 
 serve the conformity. This simply showed the amount of 
 gold which at the time should be, not a dollar, but of the 
 value of a dollar. Senator Sherman says in a published note 
 relative to Upton’s book : 44 His statements on financial mat¬ 
 ters may he implicitly relied on” Of course. As a matter 
 of fact, Mr. Upton’s whole book is tainted with the same 
 species of false interpretation shown in the quotation given 
 above. From one example judge the whole. Thus from the 
 beginning of our national history was the American silver 
 dollar the sole statutory and constitutional unit of money 
 and account. 
 
 Not a single dictionary or cyclopaedia in the English lan¬ 
 guage before the year 1878 ever, to our knowledge, defined 
 44 dollar ” in any terms other than of silver. In that year 
 the administrators of the estate of Noah Webster, deceased, 
 cut the plates of our standard lexicon and inserted a new defi¬ 
 nition that had become necessary in order to make the bond 
 intrigue, in Congress and out of it, consist. 
 
 True it is that by the statute of 1792 the dollar was made 
 to exist in the gold coin also; but that dollar was a dollar 
 only by its conformity in value to the silver coin which was 
 the one standard unit of money and account. Our metal 
 money existed in both kinds, and the system was bimetallic 
 to this extent, that the debtor might pay in either; but the 
 unit existed in silver only. To abolish that unit, to strike it 
 down, to cancel it, and to substitute another therefor, ivas a 
 crime. It has been rightly so branded by the American peo¬ 
 ple, and it will be so written in history. It makes no differ¬ 
 ence whether it was done secretly or openly, whether in the 
 day or in the night; whether by a committee or by the House 
 in full debate; whether Congress understood it or did not 
 understand it. It was a crime all the same against the 
 rights and interests of the American people; aye, against the 
 American people themselves and against all the people of 
 
RESUMPTION OF SPECIE PAYMENTS. 
 
 31 
 
 the world; for it was done against justice, against truth, 
 against the law of both man and God. Nevertheless it 
 was done. 
 
 18. Conditions of the Resumption of Specie Pay¬ 
 ments. 
 
 Again the bondholding interest had played a great game 
 with the American people, and had won as before. The next 
 event of the programme was already rising above the hori¬ 
 zon. That was the formal declaration of a date when the 
 gold dollar instead of the alternative bimetallic dollar of the 
 contract made by the Ameiican people with the bondholders 
 should begin to be paid in discharge of the debts of the 
 nation. The act fixing that date was passed on the 14th of 
 January, 1875, and the 1st of January, 1879, was named as 
 the day when specie payments should be resumed at the 
 treasury of the United States, and if there, then everywhere. 
 
 In the interim, about the year 1877, the American people 
 made a discovery — not a pleasing discovery. They found 
 that they were ginned in a trap which had been set for them 
 without their knowledge four years previously. The date 
 for the resumption of specie payments was near at hand. The 
 means for such resumption had to be provided. The national 
 treasury could not resume on nothing, but must be supplied 
 in advance with the coin necessary for such an enormous 
 transaction and for keeping up the work when it should be 
 once begun. The people had been supposing that both gold 
 and silver would be gathered without discrimination for the 
 discharge of the debts of the government. To their amaze¬ 
 ment they found that they had been beaten by a game. Not 
 a silver dollar was coining or could be legally coined at the 
 mints to meet the coming emergency. 
 
 Only a few years before the enormous treasures of the 
 Rocky Mountains had been laid bare. The discovery of new 
 deposits of silver and gold at this juncture seemed providen¬ 
 tial. The patriot Lincoln heard of it with delight. On the 
 afternoon before the assassination, when Vice-President 
 Schuyler Colfax was on the eve of departing for the West to 
 examine into the conditions and prospects of the proposed 
 Pacific Railway, the President said to him, measuring his 
 words : “ Mr. Colfax, I want you to take a message from me 
 to the miners whom you visit. I have very large ideas of the 
 mineral wealth of our nation. . . . Now that the Rebellion is 
 overthrown, and we know pretty nearly the amount of our 
 
32 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 national debt, the more gold and silver we mine makes the 
 payment of that debt so much the easier. Now I am going to 
 encourage that in every possible way. [Even so, O Lincoln.] 
 We shall have hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers, 
 and many have feared that their return home in such great 
 numbers might paralyze industry by furnishing suddenly a 
 greater supply of labor than there will be a demand for. I 
 am going to try and attract them to the hidden wealth of our 
 mountain ranges where there is room enough for all. Immi¬ 
 gration, which even the war has not stopped, will land upon 
 our shores hundreds of thousands more per year from over¬ 
 crowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and 
 silver that waits for them in the West. Tell the miners from 
 me that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my 
 ability, because their prosperity is the prosperity of the nation; 
 and we shall prove in a very few years that we are the treas¬ 
 ury of the world” These are the last glorious words of Lin¬ 
 coln. O thou immortal! In thy stanch and capacious 
 heart there was a place even for the miners and the mining 
 interests of our country. Thy last thoughts of public con¬ 
 cern in this world were how the war debt was about to be 
 paid with the gold and silver of the mountains. 
 
 It were hard to say whether there was greater cause of 
 amazement or rage when the people found that the very 
 resource to which Lincoln had pointed in his last public 
 utterance as the means of paying the war debt had been 
 purposely cut off. When the reason of this was inquired, 
 Shylock pointed his benevolent finger to the Act of 1873. It 
 was unlawful to coin silver dollars. The debt must be paid 
 in gold. When the inquiry was pressed as to whether the 
 silver dollar had not always been the dollar of the constitu¬ 
 tion and the statute, whether it had not been in particular 
 the dollar of primary money when the bonded debt was 
 incurred, Shylock shuffled and lied and made an affidavit 
 that he was an honest man. 
 
 19. The Act for Remonetizing Silver. 
 
 Hereupon a clamor — first of many — arose in the country. 
 The people broke into insurrection against the money power. 
 There was a wrestle between them and their oppressors. 
 For the time being their representatives in Congress, less 
 swayed than afterward by the tremendous influences around 
 them, stood fast for truth and right. A battle was fought in 
 the second session of the Forty-fifth Congress, and on the 21st 
 
THE ACT FOR REMONETIZING SILVER. 
 
 83 
 
 of February, 1878, the act was triumphantly passed for the 
 restoration of the silver dollar and for the compulsory coinage 
 of that unit at the minimum rate of two millions of dollars a 
 month. 
 
 We need not here recount how the act of remonetization 
 was sent to the President of the United States to meet at his 
 hands the puny rebuff of a veto. Nor need we refer to the 
 other fact that the veto itself was buried, without a word of 
 debate, under a majority of 46 to 19 in the Senate, and of 
 196 to 73 in the House of Representatives. So perish all 
 similar documents evermore! 
 
 It was by means of the Act of 1878 that the government 
 of the United States was enabled to make good its declaration 
 of specie payments at the appointed time. Within eleven 
 months the ordeal came and was passed. The premium on 
 gold was obliterated. Both money metals stood side by side 
 in the accomplishment of this work. The first metallic 
 money that reappeared in the channels of ordinary trade was 
 the old silver dollar, restored, not indeed to its unlimited and 
 equal rank, but to a measure of efficiency. 
 
 The act of remonetization was in force for twelve years 
 and five months. In this period at the mints of the United 
 States were coined more than four hundred million silver 
 dollars. These were added to the volume of the currency, in 
 spite of the grimaces and gripings of Shylock. It was the 
 people’s primary money. 
 
 The law of 1878 was very far short of perfection. It left sil¬ 
 ver exposed to the intrigues of the enemy, and placed gold 
 in such a situation that the price of it might be gradually 
 advanced at the option of the holders. It made silver to be 
 merchandise, coinable into dollars that were to be buoyed up 
 by coinage from the bullion value which the Goldites might 
 measure in terms of gold, and depress as much as they 
 pleased. This actually occurred. Gold began steadily to 
 appreciate. Its purchasing power, as measured by the aver¬ 
 age of all other commodities, rose higher and higher. The 
 supposition that the average of all other commodities declined 
 in value is absurd. They only declined in price — price as 
 measured by gold. Gold as measured by silver advanced in 
 price and purchasing power. The price of silver bullion 
 declined, or was forced down by the standard of gold; but 
 the value of silver—raw silver—did NOT decline more 
 rapidly than the average of the great products of America 
 and Europe ; that is, it did not decline at all. 
 
34 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 The whole situation was so contrived as to produce a diver¬ 
 gency, a disparity, in the bullion values of silver and gold; 
 but gold was able to conceal its fallacy, just as any other 
 metal, from iron to iridium, would conceal its fallacy if it 
 were the sole standard of values. So much gold, namely, 
 23.22 grains, was stamped as the standard dollar, and if the 
 treacherous metal had risen until its purchasing power was 
 five hundred per cent of what it had been previously, until 
 one unit of it would purchase a thousand bushels of wheat 
 or fifty acres of farming land, it would not have revealed the 
 lie that was in it! It would still have been “ the honest 
 dollar! ” As matter of fact, gold bullion rose higher and 
 higher, and all things else, including silver bullion, were 
 correspondingly depressed in price. 
 
 20. Silver Has Not Depreciated. 
 
 The effects of partisan degeneration are nowhere more 
 strikingly seen than in the unscrupulous or ignorant asser¬ 
 tions of the Goldites about the “ depreciation of silver.” 
 They continue to speak and to write of the “ fall of silver ” 
 just as though the purchasing power of that metal had really 
 declined. Not once, or a hundred times, but a thousand 
 times the friends of truth in this controversy have demon¬ 
 strated the falsity of the assertion and common belief that 
 silver has greatly declined in value. It seems necessary to 
 iterate and reiterate the undeniable truth, that, except as 
 measured by gold , the value of silver has not in the last twenty 
 years declined at all. I therefore append, once for all, a 
 simple demonstration, which ought to suffice, of the real facts 
 about the purchasing power of silver. 
 
 At the end of August, 1875, gold and silver were prac¬ 
 tically at a commercial parity of values. Silver had been at 
 a premium, but gold had risen after the act of demoneti¬ 
 zation, in 1873, and in 1875 the two metals stood on a level 
 of 16 to 1. That was twenty-one yearn ago. At that time 
 a gold eagle or its equivalent, 3,712J ounces of silver — 
 gold being still at a premium of 14 per cent above legal-tender 
 paper—would purchase as follows: 
 
 Of wheat — at $1.24 per bushel-.9.2 bushels. 
 
 Of flour — at $6.75 per barrel. 1-6 barrels. 
 
 Of cotton — at 15 cents per pound. 76 pounds. 
 
 Of mess pork — at $20.90 per barrel.53 barrels. 
 
 Of sugar — at 10 cents per pound.114 pounds. 
 
 Of wool — at 45 cents per pound.25.3 pounds. 
 
 Of beef — at 141^ cents per pound. SO pounds. 
 
 Of bar iron — at 2.9*4 cents per pound. 390 pounds. 
 
85 
 
 “GOLD NEVER FLUCTUATES.” 
 
 At the present time (calculating for August 20, 1896) a 
 gold eagle will buy of the above staples as follows : 
 
 Of wheat — at 55 cents per bushel.18.2 bushels. 
 
 Of flour — at $3.25 per barrel. 3.1 barrels. 
 
 Of cotton — at 7J4 cents per pound.133 pounds. 
 
 Of mess pork—at $6.25 per barrel. 1.6 barrels. 
 
 Of sugar — at 3 % cents per pound. 320 pounds. 
 
 Of wool — at 15 cents per pound.66.6 pounds. 
 
 Of beef — at 7 cents per pound. 143 pounds. 
 
 Of bar iron — at 1.3 cents per pound. 769 pounds. 
 
 A comparison of these two tables will show exactly the 
 appreciation in the purchasing power of gold since the time 
 (1875) when that metal and silver were at a commercial 
 parity — an appreciation which is the direct result of the 
 insidious influences of demonetization. 
 
 At the present time (August 20, 1896) the raw silver in 
 ten silver dollars, that is, 8,712 \ grains of uncoined silver , 
 will purchase of the above staples as follows: 
 
 Of wheat — at 55 cents per bushel. 9.8 bushels. 
 
 Of flour — at $3.25 per barrel. 1.7 barrels. 
 
 Of cotton — at 1 % cents per pound.71.8 pounds. 
 
 Of mess pork — at $6.25 per barrel.86 barrels. 
 
 Of sugar — at 334 cents per pound.173 pounds. 
 
 Of wool — at 15 cents per pound.35.9 pounds. 
 
 Of beef — at 7 cents per pound. 77 pounds. 
 
 Of bar iron — at 1.3 cents per pound.415 pounds. 
 
 A comparison of tables one and three will show beyond 
 controversy that in the case of the eight staples examined the 
 raw silver in ten silver dollars will now buy more of all but 
 two (cotton and beef) than a gold eagle would buy in 1875. 
 In the case of cotton there has been the loss of a fraction, and 
 in the case of beef of three pounds in a hundred weight. 
 Therefore the purchasing power of uncoined silver as meas¬ 
 ured by the average of the great staples of the American 
 market has not depreciated but actually appreciated since 
 that date when silver and gold were last at a commercial 
 parity. The demonstration is as certain as any other mathe¬ 
 matical result. 
 
 21. “Gold Never Fluctuates.” 
 
 Incidentally, also, it is demonstrated that gold is not , as the 
 Goldites say, an undeviating measure of values. On the con¬ 
 trary, it is a deviating measure. Nothing is more certain than 
 that silver is the steadier and more honest measure of the two. 
 It keeps pace more truly in its movements with the market 
 values of the world; and these market values, derived from 
 the labor that produces them, are the real criterion of measure- 
 
36 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR, 
 
 ment always and everywhere. On the other hand, gold 
 climbs up the column higher and higher under conditions 
 to which it is more sensitive than silver. 
 
 If any one economic truth is demonstrable it is the sensi¬ 
 tiveness of gold in the market. The comparative steadiness 
 of gold in its production is admitted : that is, the supply of 
 gold is comparatively an undeviating element of value; but 
 the demand for gold is one of the most variable forces in the 
 markets of the world. The effects of this varying demand are 
 intensified by the relatively small quantity of existing gold — 
 to the degree that the resulting fluctuations in the price are 
 among the most striking phenomena ever witnessed in the 
 marts of commerce. 
 
 Time was when under the conspiracy of two men com¬ 
 mercial gold in the United States was cornered more com¬ 
 pletely than ever wheat was cornered in the Chicago pit. In 
 September of 1869, Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., with the 
 aid of their brokers and a few other subordinates, drove gold 
 into a corner, and in the course of a fortnight forced the 
 price of 44 the undeviating standard ” from 130 to 165 cents 
 to the dollar. On the 24th of the month (memorable as 
 Black Friday) the corner was broken by the action of the 
 government of the United States ; the treasury was opened, 
 and a stream of government gold was poured on the heads of 
 the conspirators until they fled from the scene of their glory. 
 As they went out of the Gold Room the index hand on the 
 gold clock went backwards, and 44 the undeviating standard ” 
 fell thirty per cent in twenty-five minutes ! No other such 
 memorable collapse in the price of a great commodity was 
 ever witnessed under the sun. 
 
 The advantages which the anti-silver legislation of the 
 eighth decade, carefully contrived by the money power with 
 machinations and intrigues extending back to the close of the 
 war,— would give, and did give, to the owners of gold and 
 those to whom gold had been promised in payment, cannot well 
 be described. It was incalculable. The spectral nightmare 
 of debt built him a throne on the ruins of a million homes — 
 just as Sherman had said he would — and plumed himself all 
 summer. The Goldites became by the possession of aug¬ 
 mented power the autocrats of the world. Strange indeed to 
 see the prices of all the products and industries of men sink¬ 
 ing, sinking, under the pressure of so small and diabolical an 
 instrument as a gold dollar. The thing has seemed to be 
 possessed of a veritable devil. Its action has been like that 
 
STORY OF THE SHERMAN ACT. 
 
 37 
 
 of a manikin three miles out at sea, submerged to his chin, 
 but by some infernal self-pressure able to lift himself out of 
 the water to the horizon of his waist. Looking around over 
 the vast deep, he cries in glee, 44 Great heavens, how the 
 ocean has sunk away ! ” 
 
 22. Weakness of the Bland-Allison Law. 
 
 The act of remonetization was weak in this — that it 
 permitted a fatal discrimination against silver. It limited 
 the coinage and theoretically reduced silver to the rank of 
 merchandise. At length the people came to understand the 
 flaw in the Bland-Allison law, and by the year 1890 they 
 determined to renew the struggle for the complete restoration 
 of silver money. By the same date Shylock concluded that 
 a favorable crisis had arrived for him to get undone in toto 
 the legislation of 1878. He had succeeded in the interim, 
 by means of the discrimination against silver as primary 
 money, and by availing himself of the results of the stoppage 
 of free coinage in the Latin Union, in raising the price of gold 
 about thirty per cent. This fact, taken the other way, gave 
 opportunity to Shylock to deplore the existence of a seventy- 
 cent silver dollar. He was grieved beyond measure at the 
 dishonesty of such a dollar — not on his own account, but 
 for the credit of his country! 
 
 The purchasing power of raw silver had not, according to 
 the average prices of the other great commodities of the 
 world’s market, declined at all in the twelve intervening 
 years; but the fundholding interests had contrived a con¬ 
 dition of values and prices that enabled them, by jugglery 
 and falsehood, to denounce the silver dollar as a depreciated 
 and dishonest coin, and thus to force a disparity in the bull¬ 
 ion values of the two metals. 
 
 23. Story of the Sherman Act. 
 
 The people and their representatives, however, smiled at 
 the ravings of the Goldites, and went forward to complete 
 the legislation of 1878. At this time, namely in 1890, there 
 was a firm majority in both houses of Congress in favor of 
 the free coinage of silver. The nation as such was in favor 
 of that measure. The administration was against it. The 
 question was introduced into Congress in several forms. 
 Motions and bills were multiplied. At length on the seven¬ 
 teenth of June, 1890, the Senate, which body has never 
 appeared to a better advantage in our history, boldly took the 
 
38 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 initiative, without giving the enemy a chance to adopt his 
 usual tactics, and suddenly prepared and passed an act for 
 the absolute restoration of silver to its old-time constitutional 
 place in the currency system of the United States. 
 
 The Senate at this date was strongly Republican, and the 
 majority in favor of the Free-Coinage Bill was seventeen. In 
 the House of Representatives there was an unequivocal 
 majority in favor of the measure; hut before this majority 
 could declare itself and force upon the President the (to 
 him) dangerous alternative of either accepting the will of the 
 country or of obeying the behest of the money power with a 
 veto, the bill was arrested by the Speaker, Thomas B. Reed, 
 and then, under the dictation of the administration and Sen¬ 
 ator John Sherman, a new bill was prepared, which took the 
 name of its author and is known as the Sherman Law. 
 
 This measure, a shuffling and ingenious compromise, was 
 injected into the monetary legislation of the country merely 
 to prevent the adoption of free coinage by Congress and to 
 gain time for the conspirators. It was conceived in intrigue 
 and stigmatized by its own inventors from the day of its 
 inception. The bill was insinuated into the House in place 
 of the Free-Coinage Bill of the Senate, and was forced upon 
 that body, whose members could not bear the whip of party 
 and the loss of patronage. The act thus adopted by the 
 House was taken back to the Senate, and that body was 
 thrown upon its haunches by the same power that had pre¬ 
 vailed in the House. The majority of seventeen yielded, and 
 the Sherman Law, so-called, became a fact with the signature 
 of the President. 
 
 This law pretended to be a bill in the interest of silver 
 money and for the preservation of bimetallism in the United 
 States. To a certain extent it was so ; but at the same time 
 it was a cunningly devised expedient of the Goldites, by 
 which they ultimately gained in the contest with the majority 
 ten times more than they lost. 
 
 For a short time after the passage of the law there seemed 
 to be a distinct gain for the cause of silver. Notwithstanding 
 the fact that the Sherman Law was not a genuine silver law, 
 the first effect of it — energized by the popular misapprehen¬ 
 sion on the subject — was a marked decline in the premium 
 on gold. This was shown in a corresponding rise in the 
 bullion price of silver. The silver rate was advanced from 
 day to day, according to the London quotations, through a 
 period of eight or ten weeks. Then the advance was checked. 
 
STORY OF THE SHERMAN ACT. 
 
 39 
 
 The quotations stood for a brief period at the crest, and then 
 began that steady and long-continued decline which reached 
 the depths in 1893-94. 
 
 This phenomenon was caused in a large part by the shrewd 
 action of Great Britain. That power was alarmed at the 
 results which seemed to follow the Sherman Law. For 
 many years Great Britain had been purchasing American and 
 Mexican silver at the rate of about fifty millions annually. 
 These purchases she made at bullion rates, and the bullion 
 she coined and sent out at coin rates to her more than three 
 hundred millions of East Indian subjects. It was a harvest 
 bountiful and easy. The United States and Mexico paid the 
 reapers, and Great Britain gathered the sheaves. 
 
 Seeing the advance in the price of silver in the latter part 
 of 1890, Great Britain boldly and unscrupulously during the 
 remainder of that year and the first half of 1891 cut down 
 her purchases of American silver by fully ten millions of 
 ounces, with a view to glutting the market, reducing the price, 
 and influencing American legislation. She suceeded on all 
 three points. That she nearly ruined her industries in India 
 and brought millions of her subjects to beggary was nothing ; 
 she was playing for a larger stake ! 
 
 By the Act of 1890 the gold monometallists succeeded 
 once more in preparing a situation of which they could avail 
 themselves in the future. The law was so framed that when 
 through the abuse of it by the secretary of the treasury it 
 should prove a failure — as from the first it was intended by 
 its makers to be — the only thing required on the part of the 
 money power was to raise a clamor against a single clause of 
 the law and secure the repeal of that clause. By so doing 
 the whole fabric of the silver legislation of the country, 
 extending at broken intervals from the foundation of the 
 republic to the year 1890, would be dissolved like a fiction, 
 and gold monometallism would reign supreme. 
 
 The United States now entered upon the era of silver 
 purchasing. The metal which the men of the constitutional 
 era had chosen whereby to measure all other values (gold 
 included) was degraded to merchandise. The Sherman Bill 
 provided for the coinage of silver dollars “ at the discretion 
 of the secretary of the treasury.” It might as well have pro¬ 
 vided that the directors of the Bank of England should, at 
 their discretion, hold their sittings in Mozambique ! It was 
 never intended to coin the purchased silver, but to treat it as 
 merchandise. It was intended to accumulate it, and then to 
 raise an alarm about the accumulation. 
 
40 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 The law continued in force for three years and four months. 
 During that period the secretary of the treasury purchased 
 monthly four million five hundred thousand ounces of silver, 
 and issued therefor legal-tender treasury notes redeemable in 
 either silver or gold at the option of the secretary. In this 
 instance the option was cunningly restored to the payer , with 
 the full knowledge that the payer would use that option in a 
 manner further to depress the relative price of silver bullion 
 and to make gold the dearer coin. This provision of the law 
 was said to be an expedient for preserving the parity of the 
 two metals, but in reality it was an expedient to exaggerate 
 their disparity by enabling the holders of the treasury notes, 
 with the connivance of the secretary, to draw therefor the 
 gold of the treasury, leaving the silver to accumulate. 
 
 We need not here enter at length into the beauties of the 
 Sherman Law. The people of the United States now under¬ 
 stand it. They now know what it was intended for, and 
 what it was made to accomplish. They perceive clearly 
 enough — all intelligent men perceive — that the Act of 
 1890 was, in the purpose of its inventors, but another adroit 
 step in the processes by which silver was to be ultimately 
 discarded as primary money, and the United States placed in 
 firm monetary league with Great Britain on the single basis of 
 gold. In the short space of three years, matters had gone so 
 far that the gold party, then in firm possession of the admin¬ 
 istration which it had created in 1892 for its own purposes, 
 alarmed lest the country should actually reach free coinage 
 by means of the Sherman Law, and triumphant by its power 
 over the House of Representatives, felt sufficiently embold¬ 
 ened to attack the purchasing clause of the law and, by 
 annulling that, destroy the whole. 
 
 24. The Melee and Mockery of 1898. 
 
 It is scarcely worth while to recite the story of the contest 
 of 1893. The miserable mel6e is still fresh in the minds of 
 men. It may be that the Sherman Law ought to have been 
 abrogated, but not without the condition of free coinage. 
 It was not intended to be a silver law, but a law in the inter¬ 
 est of gold. Certain it is that nothing could have been 
 devised more suitable to the ultimate interests of the gold 
 party. That power, then in active control of the leading 
 political parties, was able to work its will. The repeal of 
 the purchasing clause of the Act of 1890 was effected with¬ 
 out conditions; and with the passage of that repeal, on the 
 
SPINAL CORD OF OUR FINANCIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 41 
 
 first of November, 1893, the legislation against silver, which 
 was begun in silence in 1873 against the interests of honest 
 money in the United States, and in favor of substituting a 
 long dollar worth fully a hundred and ninety cents for the 
 dollar of the law and the contract, was boisterously and tri¬ 
 umphantly completed. By that act, the will of the people of 
 the United States was prostrated. The people themselves 
 were gagged and manacled. Both houses of Congress were 
 thrown down, and Juggernaut was pulled over them by the 
 minions of a power having its head-centre in Lombard 
 Street, London. 
 
 25. The Bond is the Spinal Cord of our Finan¬ 
 cial System. 
 
 Around the bonded debt of the United States all the 
 other bonds and debts of the American people have clus¬ 
 tered. The national bond has been the spinal cord of the 
 whole financial life. The bond has set the pace for the 
 whole business movement of the United States. To the 
 government bond all the other bonds have conformed; by it 
 all manner of indebtedness has been shaped and measured and 
 controlled. The manipulation of the national bond and of 
 the dollar of payment has been the manipulation of every 
 other bond and every other dollar of the American people. 
 The stupendous frauds by which the obligation of the nation 
 has been doubled and trebled and almost quadrupled in 
 value, have been but the sign and index to the like process 
 going on in every branch of business and every form of obli¬ 
 gation in the United States. The criminal forces which 
 have played upon the bonded debt of the nation in its aggre¬ 
 gate capacity, have played in like manner and with equally 
 disastrous results upon every obligation between man and 
 man under the canopy of the American sky. 
 
 Thus, beginning with the bonded debt of the United 
 States, all forms of debt have been infected. As the bonded 
 debt has increased in its purchasing power, so every other 
 form of debt has increased in magnitude and burden, until 
 not only has the nation groaned under the ever-increasing 
 load, but each individual man who has purchased anything 
 with deferred payment, from a basket of potatoes in the 
 market to a transcontinental railway, has staggered away 
 under the ever-growing burden of his debt, until his limbs 
 have broken under him, and he himself has been crushed to 
 the earth. 
 
42 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 26. Ruin of Industries by the Gold Intrigue. 
 
 Under the ruinous regime of the International Gold 
 League — begun in 1878 and completed in 1898 —the 
 prices of all the products of human industry and enterprise 
 have shrivelled and shrunk away until the American people 
 have found the near approach to pauperism. When the 
 products of labor become worthless, the laborer becomes first 
 a peasant and then a pauper. One has only to note the 
 prices now current, and to compare them with the prices 
 which prevailed a quarter of a century ago, to see at a 
 glance how far down the slope we have slipped, and how 
 near we are to the precipice and the plunge. In many parts 
 of the great and abundant West—a glorious country 
 favored of God and redeemed by man — the people are 
 burning corn for fuel! The coal barons have cornered the 
 coal, and the Goldites have cornered the farmers ! That 
 great army of noble, cool-headed men, whose weapons are 
 plough and spade and reaper, whose treasure-houses are barns, 
 and whose sole wealth is taken from the holy ground — that 
 mighty army of toilers is driven down into a straight place 
 between the devil and the sea; and unless they break 
 through the surrounding camps of myrmidons, they will all 
 be taken, subjugated, and reduced to serfdom. Now, if 
 ever, is the farmer’s time to rise and recover his liberties and 
 his rights ! 
 
 27. This is the Farmers’ War. 
 
 In fact the present contest in America is, first of all, 
 the farmers’ war. Being the ultimate producers of what¬ 
 ever is and not the intermediate producers of whatever may 
 be, they, more than any others, are oppressed and shaken 
 over the brink of ruin. The pressure of plutocracy is 
 heaviest at the bottom and the bottom is the ground. The 
 bottom is the pasture, the field, the orchard, the garden. It 
 is the river valley and the prairie where the people dwell. 
 It is the meadow-land and the rich bottom, the upland and 
 the field of cotton that lie under the curse. The money 
 power has cursed the people’s homes; and as the shingles 
 decay and the gates begin to swing on broken hinges the 
 minions of that power set up, not a cry of sympathy, but a 
 shout of derision. 
 
 28. What Caused the “Decline in Silver.” 
 
 For the money-jobbers of the world the year 1893 was a 
 memorable epoch. They were busy in the Old World and 
 
THE PANIC AND THE CARLISLE BONDS. 
 
 43 
 
 the New. In Great Britain, Shylock lifted his hand and the 
 mints of India were shut against silver. For ages that metal 
 had been the money metal of the people. Before Great 
 Britain had emerged from savagery the teeming millions of 
 the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges had made their do¬ 
 mestic exchanges and carried on their foreign trade by the 
 measure of silver money. From the days of the Buddha, 
 aye, from the days when the old poets of Brahma first 
 chanted the hymns of the Veda, silver had been the known 
 and honored coin and standard of the historic kingdoms and 
 empires of opulent India. But the conqueror put his foot 
 on the Hindu nations, and in the fulness of cupidity and 
 the recklessness of unbridled power the British mandate 
 was sent across ten thousand miles of land and sea, 44 No 
 more coinage of your time-honored money. Shut up your 
 mints and accept commercial degradation. Starve if you 
 will, but shut them up.” 
 
 This enabled the money conspirators of western Europe 
 and America to point prophetically to 44 the rapid decline of 
 silver.” It was at this juncture that the called session of 
 Congress under the dictation of government was pretend- 
 edly striving to avert the panic. The panic was about to 
 come, said the money-jobbers, as though the production of the 
 panic was not the very task at which they were laboring. 
 If the President in issuing his call for the special session 
 had said: 44 The chief executive is anxious to produce a 
 panic, to wreck the remaining business of the United States, 
 to prostrate trade, and to bring an added curse and blight on 
 American industry,” he would have been strictly within the 
 historical verities. The repeal of the Sherman Law was not 
 an act to avert a panic, but to produce one. It was not to 
 strengthen the national treasury and to buttress the finances 
 of the LTnited States, but to scuttle the treasury as literally 
 as ever a ship was scuttled by pirates bold, and to disorder 
 the finances until even the atrocity of selling bonds to the 
 extent of hundreds of millions should be declared to be 
 necessary 44 in order to preserve the national honor.” 
 
 29. The Panic and the Carlisle Bonds. 
 
 Thus came the panic with devastation and ruin in its 
 train. The panic was but an incident of the programme. 
 Down went the business of the nation. The repeal of the 
 Sherman Law instead of producing confidence brought only 
 distrust and disaster. The mortgage of Shylock on the 
 
44 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 American people was foreclosed, and he had himself ap¬ 
 pointed receiver. For more than three years he has been 
 engaged in settling up the estate and in watching the interests 
 of the preferred creditors! The business is not yet completed, 
 and many years will he consumed before it is completed unless 
 in the pending trial of the People versus Plutocracy the 
 receiver shall be discharged and his cause thrown out of court. 
 
 Two hundred and sixty-two millions of added debt! In¬ 
 terest on the same, for thirty years, more than $275,000,000! 
 Total of added debt more than $537,000,000! In a time of 
 peace more than a half billion laid upon the people for 
 nothing ! This prodigious sum is to be sucked up by the vam¬ 
 pire of bonded power out of the breath and blood of the 
 toiling masses. The leech-mouth of that vampire is fastened 
 for thirty years on the right arm of every laborer who drives 
 a plane or wields a sledge or guides a plow! For thirty 
 years that leech,-mouth is fastened on the bosom of every 
 mother and sister and bride in America whose son or brother 
 or husband is not a capitalist. For thirty yearn that leech- 
 mouth, red with cherry blood, is fastened on the rosy cheek 
 of every workingman’s baby in America. And this is what 
 comes of refusing to use and pay out, without discrimination, 
 the legal and honest silver money heaped up in the treasury 
 vaults of the United States. Shylock preferred gold, and 
 the treasurer bowed himself down and said, “ Yea, my 
 Lord ! ” 
 
 Congress in 1893, floundering through muck and ooze, 
 striving to do much but doing little, did one thing in the 
 cause of truth and right. It passed a law for the taxation of 
 incomes. This measure, however, was suggested by expedi¬ 
 ency rather than by a sense of justice. The passage of the 
 Wilson Bill made certain a great reduction in the revenues 
 of the United States. The removal of the high-protective 
 duties on imports must, in the nature of the case, lessen the 
 resources of the treasury by an enormous aggregate, and this 
 at a time when the treasury had already, by the policy of 
 the preceding administration, been brought to the crumbling 
 edge of bankruptcy. The tariffs removed must be counter¬ 
 balanced in some way, and an income tax suggested itself as 
 a just and rational part of the remedy. 
 
 30. The Income Tax and the Supreme Court. 
 
 A bill was accordingly passed, laying a tax of two per cent 
 on the excess of all incomes above four thousand dollars a year. 
 
THE INCOME TAX AND THE SUPREME COURT. 45 
 
 The measure rested on the simple principle that the opulent 
 ought to be taxed as well as the poor — that the rich and 
 great, whose revenues are derived from investments, ought 
 to pay to the government a percentage on their incomes as 
 well as the humble producers — farmers, mechanics, trades¬ 
 men, artisans, laborers — whose wages and modest profits are 
 derived from daily toil. But against this principle the 
 money power arrayed itself in solid phalanx. Plutocracy 
 filled all the trenches with its mercenaries for the defence of its 
 citadel. In Congress and out of Congress, it shouted its 
 epithets and vented its sophistries. They who favored the 
 income tax were communists, robbers, anarchists! It was 
 class legislation directed against the honest accumulations of 
 industrious men. It was robbery of the rich, because they 
 were rich, to fill the ragged pockets of the poor because they 
 were poor. It was everything odious, and its promoters were 
 everything dishonest and rapacious. 
 
 But the law was passed, and the war had to be carried to 
 another part of the field. There stood the Supreme Court. 
 Against that fortress the money power threw itself with 
 the greatest violence — and the fortress went down ! We 
 do not say—and do not believe—that the Supreme Court 
 in annulling the tax on incomes, in pronouncing the law 
 unconstitutional, was corrupted. It was not. But the mem¬ 
 bers of the court are men; they breathe the air of the age 
 and they become saturated with the spirit and influences that 
 are around them. Washington city is near the great seats of 
 the money power. It is remote from the nation, from the 
 people. The Supreme Court is the most remote of all of our 
 institutions from democratic sympathies. It was so in 1859. 
 It was so in 1893. The decision rendered in the former 
 year became memorable in American history as an example 
 of what the Supreme Court could do in shoring up and 
 fortifying the system of human bondage. The decision ren¬ 
 dered in the latter year was, of the two, less meritorious in 
 law and on the whole more hurtful to civilization. Judge 
 Taney’s decision was a judgment against the negro; Judge 
 Fuller’s decision was a verdict against mankind ! The latter 
 was also less respectable ; for it was rendered in a way to 
 make the judgment of the Court at once distrusted and 
 odious. The decision did not come forth in clear tones. 
 The Court was almost equally divided. Part of the law was 
 at first upheld and part of it condemned. Then a Justice 
 reversed his own decision, and it was only in this way that 
 
46 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 the law was declared unconstitutional. It may have been 
 unconstitutional , but it was right ; and as surely as the Amer¬ 
 ican people retain their liberties and patriotism — as surely 
 as the Republic stands for what its name implies and what 
 it was created for by the fathers — so surely will an income 
 tax be made that will be both constitutional and right! The 
 people will have justice sooner or later; it is only a ques¬ 
 tion of time. 
 
 Let it be remembered, too, that the stand of the money 
 power against the income tax, and the successful assault 
 of that power on the law, before the Supreme Court, were only 
 a manifestation and incident in the long-existing purpose of 
 plutocracy not to be taxed at all. Nothing short of absolute 
 exemption from the necessaiy burdens of government, will 
 ever satisfy the soulless rapacity of those who have gathered 
 the wealth produced by the laborers of America. Here again 
 it is the millionaires on one side and the millions on the other. 
 If the millionaires had ever shown a reasonable disposition to 
 bear even a respectable fraction of the public load, that fact 
 would go far toward allaying the distrust of the honest many 
 against the intolerable selfishness of the dishonest few. On 
 the contrary, the plutocracy considers one question only, and 
 that is how to evade everything. The evasion of taxation, by 
 the money lords, is perhaps the most shameless manifestation 
 of greed ever witnessed among men, and the shamelessness 
 of the evasion is only equalled by its success. It is literally 
 true that the upper one-half of American wealth refuses to be 
 taxed and that it almost wholly escapes, either by unjust law 
 or by dishonesty, craft and perjury, the burden of the nation, 
 rolling it over by intrigue and pressure on the courts, upon 
 the bent and breaking shoulders of the poor. The tax admin¬ 
 istration in the United States has'thus come to this : A sys¬ 
 tem of discrimination by which the general burdens of society 
 are laid Avithout mercy or compunction on the toiling many 
 to the end that Avealth and its progeny may go unburdened 
 on summer cruises around the Avorld. 
 
 31. Seeming Success of the Gold Conspiracy. 
 
 The conspiracy of the International Gold Trust thus 
 seemed to triumph in 1893. The indignation of the people 
 against it appeared to be of no avail. That poAver which 
 became organic as a bondholding interest in America just after 
 the close of the Civil War had now, by its league Avith the 
 financial system of Great Britain, succeeded in trampling 
 
THE GOLD PROPAGANDA AND ITS AGENTS. 
 
 47 
 
 down truth and justice, in choking the protests of a mighty 
 people, in destroying their industries, in reducing them from 
 proprietors to tenants, in taking away the rewards of labor 
 and enterprise, and in establishing a condition which tends 
 inevitably to the early and permanent institution in the United 
 States of a peasantry subordinated to the will and purpose of 
 their masters. It remains to be seen whether the people will 
 bear it! 
 
 The visible gold in the world amounts to about three 
 hundred and ninety-three cubic yards. The greater part of 
 this, nearly all of it indeed, is owned by private parties. The 
 Rothschilds, alone, own more than sixteen hundred millions of 
 the whole. The gold supply of the world is controlled 
 finally by a few men who hate free institutions and care nothing 
 for the rights of man or the interests of civilization. 
 
 On the basis of these three hundred and ninety-three cubic 
 yards of gold it is proposed to conduct the business of all the 
 world! It is the most monstrous scheme ever known in 
 history. The public and private debts of the American peo¬ 
 ple amount to about forty-five billions of dollars. Of this 
 debt less than ten per cent is held abroad. Most of the for¬ 
 eign holding is in Great Britain. Yet, by the bond of this 
 ten per cent, the United States has become an appanage of 
 Great Britain. The independence which we thought we had 
 achieved a hundred and twenty years ago, and which we 
 supposed we had confirmed fourscore years ago, has been 
 reconverted into a miserable dependency which might suggest 
 to a pessimist that it would have been better never to break 
 with our good mother at all! 
 
 32. The Gold Propaganda and its Agents. 
 
 This crushing indebtedness of the people has alarmed the 
 money power, and its emissaries are trying to explain it away. 
 In the spring of 1895 the gold propaganda sent out from 
 New York a number of distinguished advocates to teach the 
 people how business is reviving; how the financial question 
 is solved ; how silver is dead, and in particular how easy and 
 admirable has been the change from the bimetallic basis of 
 currency to gold monometallism. In this interest one emi¬ 
 nent orator appeared at Detroit and delivered an oration in 
 which it were hard to say whether the wit were more stale or 
 the facts more false. He showed that it was easy for the 
 American people to extricate themselves from debt by the 
 standard of gold, for the reason that the public and private 
 
48 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 indebtedness of the people is only fourteen billions of dollars. 
 One might regard this statement as being interested and 
 excogitated from the prejudice of the orator, but for the sus¬ 
 picion that he may have obtained his figures from Upton s 
 financial statistics in the Census of 1890. 
 
 The present aspect of the world is that of one centralized 
 power, having its seat in London, with outlying dependencies. 
 India, with nearly four hundred millions, is one dependency ; 
 Australia, Avith four millions, is another dependency; Canada, 
 Avith six millions, is a third; the United States, Avitli seventy 
 millions, is a fourth; the States of the Latin Union are the 
 fifth. Germany and Russia are flattered Avith the belief that 
 they are members of the league ; but as matter of fact they 
 are only Cambacer£s and Lebrun in the consulate. The 
 First Consul — and the only one of any importance — has 
 his headquarters in the bank of England. 
 
 83. Fancies and Fallacies of the Goldites. 
 
 It is noAV only a question how the robbers avIio have 
 despoiled mankind in the tAvo civilized continents, by means 
 of the gold conspiracy, are going to get off Avith their booty. 
 They must have a little time and opportunity. In order to 
 secure these, they cajole the nations Avith pleasing delusions 
 and fancies. One of these fancies is impending universal 
 Avar. War is an exciting circumstance, and the prospect of 
 Avar serves to distract the attention of peoples from the 
 Avrongs Avhich they have suffered. The rumor of Avorld-Avide 
 Avar is the substance of the daily neAvs. People read it and 
 believe it; Shylock is in ecstasies over the success of his 
 ruse, and if he thought he could sell more bonds he would 
 plunge all nations into a bloody and exterminating conflict. 
 
 Another one of the current delusions is the factitious dis¬ 
 covery of gold. The propaganda having its headquarters in 
 London and its American branch in William Street, New 
 York, has been engaged during the years 1895-96 in the dis¬ 
 semination of the news of gold discoveries in all parts of the 
 Avorld. South Africa is teeming with gold; the mountains of 
 South America are founded on gold, and the out-croppings of 
 it are seen in many parts; the Australian hills are made of 
 gold; California is nothing but gold; the Alaskan mines are 
 also rich in gold; the very sea-bottom on several coasts reach¬ 
 ing out for leagues is a mire of gold; neAv discoveries are 
 made in Colorado and Arizona and NeAv Mexico and Georgia. 
 Added finds are heralded Avith every mail. Soon it Avill be 
 
THE GOLD PROPAGANDA AND ITS AGENTS. 
 
 49 
 
 that gold shall be a drug in the streets ; it shall be heaped in 
 crates, from which the passer-by may help himself and his 
 friends. The price of gold will thus be brought down, and 
 We, the Managers of the Enterprise, will have to adopt stren¬ 
 uous measures to prevent the over-coinage of gold as money. 
 
 Of the gold propaganda the London Bankers’ Magazine is 
 the principal organ. One of the last articles in this maga¬ 
 zine, on the subject of gold production, is entitled “ A Flood 
 of Gold Coming.” According to this disinterested organ the 
 danger at present is not a scarcity of gold, but the peril that 
 the commercial and industrial world will soon be over¬ 
 whelmed with an avalanche of that metal. All the mines of 
 the world are spouting streams of it! It is doubtful whether 
 coinage can absorb the output; there is cause for alarm lest 
 the fall in the precious stuff shall make it necessary for “ the 
 business interests of the world ” to place rigorous limits on 
 its coinage. u To-day,” says the magazine, “ it is not a 
 scramble for gold, but a coming glut of gold, that gives cause 
 for anxiety. . . . The golden stream has but just started to 
 flow in on us, and the full force of its rising tide is yet far 
 off. Year by year it will swell in volume, as the mining 
 mania, which is being let loose in every part of the world, 
 becomes more and more prolific. The world’s production of 
 gold has almost doubled itself within the short period of 
 seven years. . . . Recent progress is nothing compared with 
 what has been predicted for the next few years.” 
 
 Strangely enough, the article then goes on to show that a 
 large part of u the golden flood ” is derived from tailings! 
 u In some cases,” says the article, u as much as a fourth of 
 the gross income is derived from tailings.” Miraculous it is 
 that while the out-pouring flood of gold from all the world is 
 about to deluge the commerce and industries of mankind and 
 entail a depreciated gold dollar, the miners of South Africa, 
 even in the Randt, are represented as toiling with cyanide 
 among the tailings to get “a fourth of the gross income.” 
 As matter of fact, this article in the Bankers ’ Magazine was 
 written for American consumption. It was intended to be 
 copied, as it has been copied, by the metropolitan press, and 
 thence diffused to all American newspapers, gratis, for their 
 encouragement! The chairman of the county committee is 
 thus enabled, just before the fall elections, to tell his follow¬ 
 ers that a flood of gold is coming! 
 
 So also is the device of reshipping gold from England. 
 It is very opportune at this particular juncture to reship a 
 
50 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 few millions as an aid to political oratory. The strange 
 thing is that Messrs. Lazard Freres, and other distinguished 
 money-traders, whose native American names are so powerful 
 a guaranty of the patriotic business in which they are engaged, 
 should consider the American people such fools as not to 
 know what they are about. As soon as the presidential elec¬ 
 tion is passed the tribe of Lazard Freres will discover that 
 44 owing to the low rate of exchange ” the exportation of gold 
 must be resumed. 
 
 34. How 44 Business is Reviving.” 
 
 Still another pleasing fancy of the Goldites is the great 
 and prosperous revival of business. Why, here is a marvel¬ 
 lous paradox. Business, according to the great disinterested 
 organs of public opinion, revives and does not revive ! Man¬ 
 ufacturers flourish again and do not flourish again! Enter¬ 
 prise once more goes forward with a bound, and enterprise 
 does not bound forward at all, but remains inert and dead! 
 
 The farmer, with his fat-lean kine, rejoices and weeps ! 
 The collapsed bins of ten thousand farmyards are bursting 
 with high-low wheat! The gold organ performs this paradox 
 for the reason that it must. According to the organ, the 
 adoption of the Wilson Bill in 1893, in place of the war- 
 tariff schedule that had been aggravated to an inflammation 
 by the McKinley law, prostrated all enterprises, ruined all 
 industries ; and neither can the one revive nor the other ever 
 flourish again, until the flamboyant protective scheme shall 
 be restored. Therefore, saith the capitalistic press, business 
 does not flourish and cannot flourish again until the wrong 
 shall be righted, after the next presidential election. 
 
 But on the other hand, crieth the organ, the adoption of 
 the single gold standard, instead of the bimetallic standard 
 of the constitution, has restored confidence, and with the 
 restoration of confidence, behold how business revives ! All 
 enterprises rise from the dust; all manufactures rekindle 
 their fires and pour forth their treasures. Hence business, in 
 the same act and by the same token, both revives and does 
 not revive ! The proclamation of prosperity and of industrial 
 despair, goes forth from the same gold organ on the same 
 day! The fact that the alleged ruin of American industry 
 by the passage of the Wilson Bill and the alleged revival of 
 all American industries by the coincident passage of the 
 Gold Bill of 1893, do not consist, seems not at all to trouble 
 the advocates and owners of the honest dollar ! All this 
 
PLUTOCRACY AND POLITICAL PARTIES. 
 
 51 
 
 furnishes instruction for the people and amusement for the 
 few whose understandings cannot he darkened with the 
 lying obfuscations of a goldite newspaper. 
 
 35. Degradation of the Capitalistic Press. 
 
 It is amazing to note the degree to which the capitalistic 
 press has abandoned the people and embarked in the slavish 
 services of the money power. 
 
 In the sancta of the ribald organs of unscrupulous power 
 truth is a commodity, humanity a word, and principle a rem¬ 
 iniscence! The metropolitan press, with a few recent and 
 honorable exceptions, is the subsidized agent of Europe in 
 America, fighting ever on the side of organized greed and the 
 cruel aggressions of despotism, and fighting never on the side 
 of freedom and progress and the rights of man. 
 
 Woe to truth and innocence in such a court! Woe to 
 the weak and the poor! Woe to the humble man and 
 all the children of distress and want! Woe to every 
 enterprise and to every cause that is not the enterprise 
 of plutocracy and the cause of cent per cent! 
 
 The newspaper press of New York city, in particular, pre¬ 
 sents a spectacle the like of which has never, hitherto, been 
 witnessed in the world. It has combined of its own motion 
 in a crusade against democracy. I do not mean the democ¬ 
 racy of a party, but the democracy of man. Never before 
 has there been a motive sufficiently powerful to force these 
 hostile evangels of power and pessimism into union. Not 
 even in the Civil War, when the nation reeled and quaked, 
 did the newspapers of this great metropolis, that might be 
 the pride of America, but is not, agree on anything. They 
 have been in life-long antagonism and deadly hostility. Now 
 behold the scene: they are all as one in the service of that 
 Street whose name has become a byword throughout the 
 continent! 
 
 No stronger argument could be afforded of the extreme 
 peril of the people and of the necessity that is upon 
 them to go diametrically against every monition and plea 
 of the metropolitan press. 
 
 36. Plutocracy and Political Parties. 
 
 The possession of the press, however, does not satisfy the 
 plutocratic powers. They must also purchase and own the 
 political organizations in every country where such organiza¬ 
 tions exist. It is a supreme point in the intrigue of the 
 
52 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 International Gold Trust to create an International Political 
 Trust as the agent and propagandist of the great conspiracy. 
 In this way it is hoped that the beneficiaries may be able to 
 gather in peace the full fruits of their financial and industrial 
 crimes against the people and the nation. 
 
 Until recently this policy of owning the political organiza¬ 
 tions has been highly successful in America. The leading 
 political parties have differed from one another chiefly in the 
 degree of their subserviency to the money power. It always 
 comes to this in the last stage of partisan degeneration. The 
 partisan logic of the epoch has been this: If we offend plu¬ 
 tocracy who shall pay our bills and load our caissons with the 
 munitions of war ? 
 
 The elections held in the United States from 1890 to 1894 
 have had no other significance than that of a blind attempt 
 of the disorganized and confused people to punish the authors 
 of their distresses, first one and then the other. The people have 
 been groping in this manner, and have apparently been afraid 
 to rise in political insurrection against their masters. They 
 have followed their local leaders and the monitions of a polit¬ 
 ical press that has been almost wholly in the possession of 
 the enemy. Until the present year scarcely a single great 
 newspaper could be found that in its tone has been heartily 
 friendly to the common people. 
 
 87. How “Our Gold Will Fly Away.” 
 
 The Goldites have, in the meantime, invented a long list of 
 arguments in terrorem. They are trying with bugbears to 
 scare the people into submission. They declare that under 
 free coinage, our gold would take to flight. It would wing 
 its way to foreign shores, they say. Gold coins, under the 
 action of Gresham’s law, would rise a-wing and fly away. 
 The United States would be drained of gold and the nation 
 left floundering and drowning in a sea of silver. A panic 
 would ensue, the like of which the world has never wit¬ 
 nessed. 
 
 Than this, nothing is further from the truth. If under 
 free coinage our gold should begin to fly abroad it would 
 not, could not, continue to fly. For observe with care 
 what the result would be. To simplify the argument 
 let us limit the supposed case to the United States and Great 
 Britain. Suppose that in the United States we have an 
 aggregate of two thousand mi]lions of money. Suppose that 
 one-third of this amount is gold, one-third silver, and one- 
 
QUESTION OF THE DUMPING-GROUND. 53 
 
 third paper. Suppose that we have free coinage, and that 
 under the working of Gresham’s law our gold begins to flow 
 to England. What will be the result on the price of gold 
 at that point to which it flows ? Manifestly gold will there 
 decline, and it will continue to decline as long as the process 
 goes on. 
 
 But wlutt will be the result at the point from which the 
 gold goes abroad? There the two thousand millions of 
 money will be reduced, let us say, to fifteen hundred mil¬ 
 lions by the exportation of five hundred millions of gold. 
 What will be the effect on the price of all the remaining 
 money? Silver, being a large part of the remainder, neces¬ 
 sarily begins to appreciate under the increased demand and 
 the diminished supply of money, audit will continue to appre¬ 
 ciate as long as the exportation of the dearer metal continues. 
 The price of that metal declines in London, and continues to 
 decline. The price of silver rises in New York, and con¬ 
 tinues to rise. The process goes on until the action of 
 Gresham’s law is inevitably reversed. It goes on until the 
 question solves itself by the certain and tolerably speedy 
 equalization of the price of the two money metals in the 
 market of the world. 
 
 38. Question of the Dumping-Ground. 
 
 They tell us also that in case of the restoration of our 
 coinage to the condition which it held prior to 18T3, America, 
 that is the United States, will become the dumping-ground 
 for all the silver in the world. Train-loads, boat-loads, ship¬ 
 loads of silver will be seen coming from every direction. 
 The country will thus be overwhelmed with a debased cur¬ 
 rency worth intrinsically but little more than copper or iron. 
 This bugbear of the Goldite imagination has been exhibited 
 to the people in every place with the accompaniment of dec¬ 
 lamation and calcium light. 
 
 But where is this imported silver to come from ? What 
 country is to produce it ? Where, for example, would Eng¬ 
 land or France get the silver to send to us? Would they 
 buy it of the United States in order to bankrupt us by 
 returning us our own product ? As for Germany, would she 
 pull down the mediaeval plate from her feudal castles and 
 ship it as bullion to America ? Russia has barely her own 
 supply and must frequently resort to the American market to 
 get what she needs for coinage and the arts. Great Britain 
 has been obliged, for a long time, to buy in the American 
 
54 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 market from forty to fifty million ounces of silver annually. 
 The American mines virtually supply the demand of the 
 world for silver ; and yet under free coinage we are told that 
 our country would be flooded with foreign importations! 
 There might be such a thing as the importation of Russian 
 lumber into Wisconsin, or East-Indian cotton into Georgia, 
 or Egyptian corn into Iowa; but a serious importation of 
 silver into the United States is an unthinkable absurdity. 
 
 39. Wickedness of the “Silvek Barons.” 
 
 The minions of the money power, in their frantic efforts to 
 blind and pervert the judgment of the American people, seek 
 also to prejudice and enrage them against the “ silver barons.” 
 Miners and mine owners, if it chance that their mines are of 
 silver, not of gold , are held up to the scorn and contumely of 
 the world. The people are asked to believe that there is an 
 organized coterie of wealthly speculators in silver, and that 
 they are combined in a nefarious scheme for promoting their 
 own interests at the expense of the people and nation. 
 
 These “silver barons” are to send their 53-cent bullion to 
 the mints of the United States and compel its coinage into 
 100-cent dollars, thus enriching themselves at the expense of 
 the nation. At the same time the nation is to impoverish the 
 people by returning to them only 53-cent dollars! Miracu¬ 
 lous is this, that the dollars thus dropping from the national 
 mints are to signify 100 cents each to the silver barons, in 
 whose interest they are coined, and only 53 cents each to the 
 rest of the people ! 
 
 But what about the gold barons ? Why should they be 
 virtuous and patriotic while the silver barons are so base? 
 Are not the gold speculators — if such there be — even as 
 the others ? Is it honorable to be a gold miner and dishonorable 
 to be a silver miner? Do not the two pursuits stand upon 
 precisely the same merits ? Is it not as just and true to 
 charge the owners of our gold mines with conspiracy and des¬ 
 perate intrigue against the government and national honor, 
 as it is to rail against the “ silver barons ? ” Why should we 
 hold gold miners in one estimation and silver miners in 
 another ? 
 
 The fact is that the American people are not concerned in 
 this controversy with the fortunes of either silver producers 
 or gold producers. The American people wish well to the 
 silver-mining interest, and will promote it as much as 
 may be without favoritism or injustice. The American 
 
SHALL WE WAIT ON FOREIGN NATIONS? 55 
 
 people wish well to the gold-mining interest, and will 
 promote that also as much as may be, without subser¬ 
 viency or prejudice to other forms of human industry. 
 They will promote and favor all mining as much as they 
 will promote and favor any of the other primary pur¬ 
 suits by which the world is made richer, by which com¬ 
 merce is impelled, by which manufacture is suggested, and 
 the agricultural life inspired. But beyond this, the Ameri¬ 
 can people care nothing for the “ silver barons ” or for 
 the gold barons — for either or for both. 
 
 The question before the American people is not a question 
 of mining. It is not a question of getting silver bars or 
 gold bars out of the caverns of earth, and their conversion 
 into merchandise or coin by combinations of interested men. 
 The American people consider this question from the 
 national point of view. The special interest is disregarded. 
 The cry of “ silver baron ” is no argument against the pro¬ 
 duction of silver and its use as money. The charge that 
 the demand for the restoration of complete and impartial 
 bimetallism in the United States is a measure to favor the 
 silver barons is as false as it is absurd. 
 
 40. Shall We Wait on Foreign Nations? 
 
 Another point in the policy of the gold jobbers of the 
 world is their pitiful plea, that we should conform our finan¬ 
 cial policy or rather our monetary system to that of “ the 
 great commercial nations.” This phrase, u great commercial 
 nations,” means, in the concrete, England. Our financial 
 policy should be English. If we attempt an American 
 policy, all the woes are predicted. Every calamity from 
 local disorder to national bankruptcy will come down on us 
 like night. This they tell us we must do, namely, await the 
 consent of England before undertaking a policy of our own. 
 
 Bimetallism, if it is to he reached at all, says plutocracy 
 must be reached by “ international agreement.” So depen¬ 
 dent are we ! True, England has thirty-seven millions, and 
 we are seventy millions of people; but we are younglings, 
 weaklings! We are in the infantile stage! How should 
 we know what kind of monetary system we desire ? True, 
 we are naturally a bimetallic nation. Nature provided this 
 for us before the world was. Great Britain is a monome¬ 
 tallic nation. She produces gold, but does not produce sil¬ 
 ver. She has to buy her silver of us. She wants a dear 
 market for gold and a cheap market for silver. But we, 
 
56 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 according to the dictum of the money gamblers, must wait 
 for bimetallism until Great Britain assents to it. 
 
 We have the spectacle, in 1896, of a political platform, 
 carefully excogitated by one of the great parties, in which is 
 written this supreme absurdity : We favor a gold standard; 
 but we also favor bimetallism; we favor loth ! We favor the 
 gold standard because we must . We favor the bimetallic 
 standard because we would. We let U I cannot wait upon 1 
 would” We would have bimetallism if England would 
 consent! We will have monometallism because England 
 will not consent! If she would only consent, we would 
 favor free coinage. Since she does not consent, we favoi 
 gold coinage only. On this preposterous, abject, and 
 wholly un-American platform, a great party calls for the 
 support of an intelligent people! 
 
 41. False Charges of the Plutocrats. 
 
 Aye, more, the creators of this extraordinary platform 
 turn upon the genuine American patriots, who stand up for 
 their own country and will have nothing of foreign dictation 
 and foreign domination in our financial system, and denounce 
 them in a storm of epithets and objurgations, the like of 
 which have never hitherto been heard in party warfare. 
 Because men favor American bimetallism and will have it, 
 the churlish opposition of Great Britain to the contrary not¬ 
 withstanding, they are denounced as enemies of their coun¬ 
 try. We are called “ repudiators,” “ defilers of the national 
 honor,” “ robbers,” “ lunatics,” “ communists,” u anarchists,” 
 and indeed everything which the vocabulary of vituperation 
 can furnish. 
 
 The idea that the masses of the American people, who have 
 rallied by the million to the standard of free coinage, are 
 repudiators, communists, anarchists, and robbers is too absurd 
 to require refutation. To it all we answer with one argu¬ 
 ment — contempt. There is only one kind of anarchy in 
 • this country and that is the high-up anarchy of the million¬ 
 aires. They it is, and not others, who defy the law and 
 consider themselves above both law and law-makers. They 
 it is, who regard the constitution as a rag. T/iey it is, who 
 regard the government as their possession and even the army 
 as their agent for enforcing a plutocratic despotism upon the 
 masses. 
 
 These men are few but powerful. They are said to num¬ 
 ber in all between four and five thousand in the United 
 
FALSE CHARGES OF THE PLUTOCRATS. 
 
 57 
 
 States, though they are probably twice that number. They 
 are combined in a common cause. Among them there are 
 many honorable exceptions. To the credit of humanity be 
 it said that there are millionaires who are as great as they 
 are wealthy. Others are as noble as they are strong. Some 
 of them have gone so far as to renounce their kind and to 
 espouse the cause of the people; but the great majority are 
 bound together in an effort to put the people down, and to 
 stamp upon the residue of popular liberty. 
 
 In the United States there is no prejudice against the rich. 
 There may be some natural jealousy among the poor directed 
 to those who are in abundance and ease; but there is no deep 
 or settled prejudice towards them. It is not because the 
 millionaires are millionaires that they are disliked and 
 dreaded by the masses of the American people, but because 
 they are tyrants and spoliators. They are, we repeat, the 
 only practical anarchists in the United States. They believe 
 in no government but their own. They trust nothing to the 
 good will and justice of their fellowmen. They wholly de¬ 
 spise and contemn free institutions. They look with supreme 
 contempt upon democratic government. They think popular 
 elections the means of perpetuating the bad and of engender¬ 
 ing mobocracy. They heartily, in their souls, disbelieve in 
 democracy in all of its moods and forms, and squint ever at 
 monarchy and the restoration of monarchy, and the spread of 
 it into America as the greatest good. 
 
 Than these men, no human beings could be further re¬ 
 moved from the standard of true American manhood. They 
 are wholly un-American. They are unpatriotic. They are 
 untrue to society. They are true to nothing but themselves 
 and their own selfish interests. They regard life as a battle 
 to preserve and increase the millions which they have heaped 
 up by the spoliation of society. They concede nothing to 
 the masses. They regard the masses as no more than the 
 concrete of clay and sand on which their own superb palaces 
 are reared. For men as men they care nothing. Humanity 
 to them is dirt. Human rights they disregard. Liberty they 
 trample on. By them the great public is openly damned. 
 Government they try to destroy — except in so far as 
 government will serve them. They conform in a word 
 to the exact definition of anarchists. They will have no 
 government at all — no control, no supreme authority over 
 them — unless , forsooth, they can construct such authority by 
 their own agents and be sure that when it is constructed it 
 
58 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 will operate only for the promotion of their interests and the 
 further destruction of the interests of the people at large. 
 
 42. Hatefulness of the Money Despotism. 
 
 All forms of despotism are repulsive and inhuman; but 
 nearly all of them have some redeeming traits. Every kind 
 of slavery is degrading to the human race; but even slavery 
 is sometimes touched with the pencillings of humanity that 
 excuse, if they do not redeem, it. The oriental tyrant of 
 antiquity put men and nations under the wheels of his war- 
 car and dragged them along; but he sometimes encouraged 
 enlightenment and promoted peace. The Roman emperor 
 was the bloated and conscienceless exponent of a cruel race 
 whose bloody passions were untempered by any of the softer 
 and more serene virtues; but he had great strength of char¬ 
 acter and was sometimes magnanimous. Marcus Aurelius 
 was a poet, philosopher, philanthropist — a gentle and humane 
 ruler, the latchet of whose sandal the age was not worthy to 
 unloose. The feudal lords of the middle ages were cruel 
 and ferocious chieftains; but they brought chivalry into 
 Europe and scattered the germs of politeness and literature 
 wherever they built their castles. 
 
 The average European king has been an ignorant and 
 arbitrary wretch ; but he has, in many instances, shown true 
 courage and a praiseworthy devotion to his subjects. The 
 old, proud devotee of African slavery in the United States 
 — the owner of a thousand human chattels— was not infre¬ 
 quently humane and good. Mark well the character of 
 George Shelby, the friend and avenger of poor Tom. The 
 great generals of the Confederate Army (and they were great 
 generals) were nursed, not a few of them, on the bosoms of 
 old mothers as black as their souls were white; but the 
 Money Pow6r — the Plutocracy ! what shall we say of that ? 
 
 Other kinds of wrong and oppression have been redeemed 
 Avith something so like the virtues of life as to make them 
 tolerable; but the money power, the imperial plutocracy 
 Avliich is now entrenching itself in every quarter of the world 
 and planting its batteries for the defence of a colossal 
 despotism built on the ruins of human liberty, is untouched 
 Avith any gleam of discoverable goodness! It is unredeemed 
 by a solitary trait that history may record in its favor. It is 
 the coldest, cruelest, coarsest and most irrational tyranny that 
 ever had mankind under its heel! It is the most calculating, 
 Mephistophelian, low-flying form of power that ever triumphed 
 over the rights and hopes and aspirations of man. 
 
THE NATION AT LAST AWAKE. 
 
 59 
 
 Princes, nabobs, tyrants of all kinds and degrees, have 
 been wont to relent sometimes and display themselves in 
 better mood; but not so plutocracy. They are sometimes 
 generous and kind, but the money power never ! Plutocracy 
 once victorious over man will bind him, as it is now attempt¬ 
 ing to do, cast him down, and sit on his breast, smoking che¬ 
 roots and sipping absinthe, while the crows pick out his eyes 
 and premature worms wriggle in the sockets! 
 
 Plutocracy in America will be even as it is in Ireland. 
 Here also, as there, it awaits its opportunity to evict the 
 humble toiler and his wife and children from their hovel, 
 and to fling broken chairs and straw mattresses after them 
 into the night. Here too, as in Russia, it is ready to seize 
 upon the insurgent patriot of the field or village and send 
 him whirling into Siberian exile. Here too, as in India, the 
 Nabob and Begum are waiting their opportunity to build up 
 ivory palaces and. tombs out of the proceeds of the toil of 
 American peasants. Here too, as in every land under the 
 sky where it has gained the victory, plutocracy only awaits 
 its opportunity to laugh freedom to scorn, to put democracy 
 under foot, and to hale civil liberty to prison and to death. 
 
 43. The Nation at Last Awake. 
 
 To the alarming aggressions of the money power, the 
 nation is at last awake. The common people are in revolt. 
 Their instincts and reason and sense of justice have led them, 
 at last, to break through the meshes of falsehood that self- 
 interest and unscrupulous power have woven around them 
 and to rise in political insurrection. 
 
 Once on a time the tocsins sounded in France to the 
 answering shout of “ the people risen against tyrants.” That 
 great uprising was flecked with blood upon a background of 
 flame and devastation. The American revolt is not of this 
 frightful kind. It is the indignant but quiet uprising of the 
 New Democracy. It is a political revolt which portends a 
 peaceable revolution in the administration of government. 
 It portends simply this : the restoration of the government to 
 the people and its conduct in the people’s interest. It signi¬ 
 fies the revival of the old patriotic and uncorrupted theory of 
 our Republic; namely, that it is a republic resting upon the 
 consent of the masses and administered in their interests. It 
 is a revolt against the new and spurious theory of the Repub¬ 
 lic, that it rests upon the support of special interests and is 
 administered for the good of the classes only. 
 
60 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 44. It is a Revolt of the Producers. 
 
 The political insurrection of 1896 is, first of all, an uprising 
 of the producers against those powers that have for thirty years 
 planned to take and consume the products of labor without 
 just or adequate compensation. It is a revolt of the farmers, 
 of the merchants, of the humble artisans, of the tradespeople, 
 of all who labor in field or shop or market to create the 
 resources of life or to distribute them to consumers. It is a 
 revolt of all the primary industries, and of the secondary 
 industries involved therewith, against those high-up industries 
 which under the false and arrogant pretense of being func¬ 
 tions of the “ business interests ” of the United States, are, in 
 reality, only variations in the great sport of gold gambling. 
 Be assured that these methods of getting gain which prevail 
 around the bourses and in the exchanges of great cities, both 
 American and European, are not business at all. They are 
 refined and dishonest methods invented by the ingenuity of 
 the beneficiaries for getting something for nothing; for 
 appropriating the proceeds of the labor of the millions with¬ 
 out even the semblance of an equivalent; for grabbing by 
 sleight of hand, the wealth of others without incurring the 
 dangers of the law. 
 
 45. What are the “Business Interests”? 
 
 What are, in fact, the “ business interests ” of America ? 
 The business interests are production as well as merchan¬ 
 dising. They are manufacturing as well as trade. They are 
 ail the honest and rational industries of the people applied 
 first to the soil, secondly to the shops, thirdly to the stores 
 and streets; last of all and highest of all, to the intellectual 
 and moral resources of the nation. The idea that business 
 is that high-up, occult and shadowy fact, which we see in 
 spectral outline behind the bond, behind the stock exchange, 
 behind the secret conclave of millionaires banqueting at 
 night, is one of the false and pernicious aphorisms which the 
 enemies of public liberty have promulgated, by a subsidized 
 press, to delude the people and lead them to their own 
 destruction. 
 
 Nay, nay ; business is not speculation. It is not gam¬ 
 bling. It is not bond selling and bond holding and bond job¬ 
 bing ; but it is something better than these. Business is the 
 garden and the orchard. "Business is the humble potato 
 patch and turnip field. Business is the ploughed land, the 
 
WHAT ARE THE “ BUSINESS INTERESTS ” ? 61 
 
 fallow land, and the barn-yard with its cackle, its bleat and 
 its clatter of incoming wagons — with its neigh of horse and 
 answering low of bullock and cow and ox. Business is the 
 meadow and the oat field. It is the corn field and the field 
 of golden wheat. It is the cotton field bursting into a field 
 of snowflakes, and the dark, waving sea of sugar cane. It 
 is rice and flour and hominy and bacon and beef. It is all 
 the resources of life taken from the ground and from the 
 animal kingdom by the industries and energies of the free 
 and patriotic laborers of America. 
 
 Business is also the dark mine of coal and iron; of copper 
 and lead and silver and gold. It is the deep shaft into 
 which free men go down, not to become slaves, but to remain 
 free men in the dark caverns below, and to rise with their car¬ 
 loads of carbon and heavy heaps of ore free as they were 
 before. Business is the riches of the underground as well as 
 of the soil. The miner shall not be counted out from the 
 list of business men; for a business is his, more important 
 to the interests of the world than is the business of the 
 speculator in stocks or the wrecker of railways. 
 
 Business also is the shop. It is the place of the bench and 
 the forge. It is the plank wall where the carpenter’s planes 
 and saws and hammers are hung. It is the blacksmith’s 
 anvil and his glowing fire and his ponderous sledge. It is 
 the wagon shop and the shop of the plow. It is the manu¬ 
 factory where implements of husbandry and the industrial 
 arts are made by thousands; where men are gathered by hun¬ 
 dreds and by thousands ; where the saw-dust makes misty the 
 air, and the shavings of wood and iron and steel spin with 
 singing noise from a hundred lathes; where the tires are 
 welded, and the wheels are made, and wagons and carriages 
 and reapers spring up under the industrious hands of free 
 men. It is every establishment which enterprise has cre¬ 
 ated, which genius has developed, which industry and inven¬ 
 tion have perfected for the good of the human race. 
 
 Business also is trade. Commerce is one of the honorable 
 pursuits of men. Business is the store. It is the mart. It 
 i ; the street and the lumbering vehicle. It is the wharf and 
 the boat and the ship. It is the flying train traversing the 
 land of the free with its cargo of life and its burden of mer¬ 
 chandise. Business, in a word, is not gambling but honest 
 work. The “ business interests ” are the interests of the 
 laboring people of America, and not the special interests of 
 stock jobbers and money kings, of speculators and manipu¬ 
 lators and bond gamblers on two sides of the sea. 
 
62 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 But business is more than this ; more than all of these. 
 It rises still higher. There is a business of the mind and 
 heart. The schoolhouse is business, and the academy and 
 the college. Every place where human beings are taught 
 the elements of a nobler life is business. The mother’s knee 
 and yearning heart are business, without which the world 
 would be a blasted desert. Invention, too, is business and so 
 are art and learning and literature. Every upward impulse 
 of the human soul, seeking for noble things, is business, and 
 woe be to him that chokes it! Woe to him who strangles 
 the mind and denies to the opening intellect the blessing of 
 the sunshine and the day! Type and composing-stone and 
 revolving cylinder of Hoe, and printed leaf, on its flying mis¬ 
 sion of truth to men, are business. The book and the map 
 are business as well as the shovel and the saw. There is one 
 business of the body and another business of the mind. It 
 is business to labor with the hands and it is also business to 
 labor with the thought. To speak and to write in the cause 
 of truth is business as well as to turn the soil or wield the 
 sledge or drive the flying train. 
 
 46. Attempt to Create Fictitious Issues. 
 
 Meanwhile the attorneys of the International Gold Trust 
 are striving hard to create fictitious issues upon which to 
 induce the people to divide and agitate. One boss says, Lo 
 here; and another boss says, Lo, there. Now it is the 
 revival of the tariff question; now it is the mythical Monroe 
 Doctrine; now it is the annexation of Hawaii or Cuba ; now 
 it is Venezuela; now it is Armenia ; now it is this and now 
 it is that, in the hope that the people may be deluded there¬ 
 with and lose sight of the fundamental question of their 
 wrongs until what time they shall be completely bound and 
 translated out of the character of free men. 
 
 How much further this malevolent and ruinous work can 
 be carried on before the end comes no man may well foretell. 
 Summer and winter come and go and the distress of the 
 country continues unabated. A measure of forced activity 
 has been produced in the business world. After the horrors 
 of a three yearn’ prostration the haggard workman returns 
 downhearted to his tasks. A crippled tenant husks the corn 
 in a field that was his own. He is an old soldier! The 
 farmer and the mechanic labor on in hope deferred that a 
 better day is coming. Whether it will ever come depends 
 upon the people themselves. 
 
SHAMEFUL SUBSERVIENCY OF A POLITICAL PARTY. 63 
 
 In one of the inspired passions of the French Revolution, 
 the Democrats made a statue like a Titan, and set it up near 
 where the Bastile had stood. They called it Le Peuple 
 Hercule . It was the People Hercules. It represented the 
 great ideal in its strength and majesty. Whenever the spirit 
 of*such an ideal shall repossess our American citizenship, the 
 end will come, and the people will recover their own. 
 
 4T. What is it to be an American Patriot? 
 
 What is it, then, in this year eighteen hundred and ninety- 
 six to be a true American ? What is it to be a patriot ? It 
 is to stand under the broad folds of the stars and stripes and 
 defy the world! It is to be an independent man, afraid of 
 nothing. It is not to taunt the Old World nations or to 
 denounce them; for they too are composed of peoples who 
 toil and wait. They are as human as we. To be an Ameri¬ 
 can, a patriot, is to love mankind and to try to serve the 
 human race. It is not to strut and parade ; but it is to love 
 our country and to honor our country more than all else in 
 the world. It is to revere the memory of our fathers. It is 
 to glorify the Revolution that made us free and independent. 
 It is to believe the Declaration of Independence the greatest 
 and best political document, the noblest charter of freedom 
 and equality, that was ever traced by the pen of man. It is 
 to love American things because they are American. It is to 
 defend our free institutions, at every challenge, even with the 
 life. 
 
 To be a true American is not to fawn or creep in the pres¬ 
 ence of any power or combination of powers in the world. 
 It is to stand up. It is to demand and have our own. It is 
 to be above the blandishments of authority and the corrup¬ 
 tions of money. It is to despise the mercenary spirit, and to 
 look at human life as something nobler than merchandise. 
 It is to walk abroad “ with malice toward none, with charity 
 for all.” It is to look with compassion rather than hatred 
 even on the truckling un-American hordes of plutocracy 
 cringing at the knees of foreign States and daring not to 
 step or breathe without the consent of the directors of the 
 bank of England. 
 
 48. Shameful Subserviency of a Political Party. 
 
 The spectacle of a great political party in America await¬ 
 ing the beck of England! The spectacle of a party submit¬ 
 ting its platform, after publication , to a syndicate of Anglo- 
 
64 
 
 THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 American bankers, whose hearts are in one country, while 
 their brains are in another! The spectacle of such a party 
 parading itself as the patriotic party, as the American party 
 par excellence , as the embodiment of pure purpose and politi¬ 
 cal virtue! Surely the day of impudent mendacity has risen 
 on the world, and the two-faced giant of Sham has usurped 
 the throne of truth. 
 
 The standard bearer of this party of subserviency bows 
 down with his followers and leads them in prayer before a 
 foreign throne. In accepting his nomination to be President 
 of the United States — the greatest and highest station in the 
 world — he says; “ Until international agreement, it is the 
 plain duty of the United States to maintain the gold stand¬ 
 ard.” He further says : “ The Republican Party has declared 
 in favor of international agreement, and if elected President 
 it will be my duty to employ all proper means to promote it.” 
 
 This is humiliating ! Bimetallism is either right or wrong. 
 It is either a good policy for the United States or it is a bad 
 policy. If it is good, the Republican candidate wants to post¬ 
 pone the good until Great Britain will let us have it! If it 
 is bad, he is in favor of it unless Great Britain will not let us 
 have it! If the gold standard is good he will uphold it only 
 so long as Great Britain is for it! If the gold standard is 
 bad he will stand for it always until Great Britain consents 
 to bimetallism ! Good or bad, he and his party are in favor 
 of the one or the other just as Great Britain shall dictate. 
 Political shame and humiliation can go no further! 
 
 The writer of this claims to be an American. He claims 
 to be a patriot. The venerated dust of his revolutionary 
 great-grandfather is at rest in a humble grave on the crest of 
 an Old Virginia mountain. I shall not go back on the graves 
 of my ancestors. Many of them have fought the battles of 
 freedom. Their blood is fresh and hot in the veins of their 
 descendant, and, by the stars on high, he will stand by their 
 memory and glorify their deeds and honor their record to the 
 end of his days ! I believe in Independent America and in 
 her institutions; the one shall live, and the other shall be 
 defended by true hearts and brave voices, while the world 
 endures ! 
 
 49. Wit at Follows? 
 
 If plutocracy wins the impending battle, what follows ? 
 We do not venture on prophecy but only point out the logical 
 and historical tendency of a present victory of the money 
 
WHAT FOLLOWS? 
 
 65 
 
 power over the people. Such a victory tends to bring in a 
 long train of disastrous results to the American people, and 
 if to them, then to the whole civilized world. If the battle 
 goes against the people, plutocracy will become not only tri¬ 
 umphant, but rampant and riotous in its triumph. It will 
 turn victory into license. It will at once proceed to fortify 
 itself and to make sure of all that it has won. It will recom¬ 
 pense itself liberally for all its alarm and expenditure. It 
 will laugh to scorn all protest and moderation. 
 
 In the first place the gold standard will be fixed and forti¬ 
 fied, and under it all the values of the world will be 
 bolted down as if in an iron sarcophagus. All legal-tender 
 paper money will be cancelled and destroyed. This part of 
 the programme is already openly declared. The existing sil¬ 
 ver coinage will next be attacked, and not a dollar of it will 
 be spared as primary money. It will be sent to the silver¬ 
 smiths, to the smelting pots of two continents, to the bullion 
 shops of every mart, to the mints for subsidiary coinage, to 
 every place where it may be consumed, until not one dollar 
 of our old constitutional money shall remain. 
 
 The vacuum thus produced in the money supply of the 
 people will be filled with bank bills, issued and loaned, 
 expanded and contracted, at the pleasure of the owners. The 
 banks, with a small stock of gold, will send out their own 
 notes ad libitum , till the country is filled to plethora. Money 
 will be wonderfully “ easy,” and for the day the false verdict 
 against the people will be glorified. But in another day, the 
 first day of alarm, this great nation will fall prostrate before 
 the banks. Then will come a panic in comparison with which 
 all preceding financial storms that have swept the country 
 will be as zephyrs to the awful hurricane. Such will be the 
 ruin that the fragments of exploded enterprises will not be 
 worth the gathering. Before such a storm not a single 
 legitimate business can survive. He who wishes to con¬ 
 tribute to this catastrophe, and to hasten its coming, has only 
 to follow his leaders until the victory of the money power over 
 the people shall be confirmed by a majority of votes. 
 
 And in the twentieth century, what? For the ominous 
 shadow of the present reaches far into the future. It requires 
 no prophetic eye to discern the consolidation of political 
 power following hard after the consolidation of wealth. With 
 that comes a great standing army, and then the total suppres¬ 
 sion of popular liberties. Then the masses in the cities will 
 become the hotbeds of sedition, and the masses in the country 
 
66 THE . BOND AND THE DOLLAR. 
 
 will subside into a peasantry without hope. The commercial 
 and social league with Great Britain will be made organic 
 and perpetual. Bondholding will be the one honored and 
 profitable enterprise of men. Production will get a servile 
 reputation, and labor will become the vocation of serfs. The 
 European condition, in a word, will come and prevail, and 
 of free American citizenship will be a thing of tradition. 
 
 On the other hand, if the people shall win the fight, a new 
 era of freedom and progress will open to the people of our 
 country. The success of the popular cause will signify the 
 beginning, but not the completion , of a work upon which nearly 
 all that is good in civilization depends. If the people win, it 
 will be the triumph of Men over Things. It will be the lift¬ 
 ing up of American manhood. It will be the assurance that 
 no form of slavery shall exist under the stars and stripes. It 
 will be the confirmation of the work of Washington, of Jef¬ 
 ferson, and of all the patriots of the Revolution. It will be 
 the ratification of the life and work of Lincoln and of the 
 great statesmen and warriors who surrounded him in the 
 dark but heroic days of our national trial. It will be the 
 victory of truth over falsehood; of right over wrong; of jus¬ 
 tice over injustice; of republican virtue and democratic 
 simplicity over aristocratic arrogance and the hollow pride 
 and tinsel of an artificial life. 
 
 Such a victory will bring back the nation and people to 
 the straight ways and modest ambitions of the fathers. It 
 will check the license of wealth, and put a bit in the mouth 
 of plutocratic lawlessness. It Avill be the proclamation of 
 justice among men and the subjection of all the combina¬ 
 tions of greed to the rights of the individual. It will 
 re-establish local self-government; decree equal burdens to 
 the rich and the poor; foreshadow the adequate reward of 
 labor; give assurance of protection to all alike in the enjoy-, 
 ment of the blessings of life and liberty. It will make 
 impossible the further cunning and fraudulent manipula¬ 
 tion of our currency — the further substitution of a long and 
 dishonest dollar for the honest dollar of the law and the 
 contract. It will save to us a portion, at least, of the 
 peoples’ money. It will rescue from destruction the rem¬ 
 nant of our old national greenbacks, made sacred with the 
 memories of the Union War. It will make certain not only 
 the preservation of our existing supply of silver money, but 
 will open the mints to both metals alike. It will break the 
 corner on gold, and reduce the exaggerated purchasing 
 
WHAT FOLLOWS? 
 
 67 
 
 power of that metal to the normal standard. It will restore 
 and maintain the commercial parity of the money metals and 
 compel other nations to follow our lead in the cause of 
 universal bimetallism, which is simply the option of the 
 debtor to pay in the cheaper and more convenient standard 
 unit of either, according to his preference and the terms of 
 the contract. It will destroy a hundred prevailing monetary 
 and financial fallacies which have been invented, always, in 
 the interest of the fundholders of the world and never in the 
 interest of the people. It will bring back the government, in 
 all its departments, to the noble manners and pure practices 
 which, during the first century of our existence, made us 
 the pride and envy of the nations. It will put in authority 
 men of the people. It will present a President, a Congress, 
 and a Supreme Court to whom the welfare of the people is 
 the first great concern and to whom syndicates and trusts 
 and all special interests are either unknown or of no concern 
 at all. It will open the way for the great and salutary 
 reforms to which the attention of the people is already 
 turned, but which have thus far been postponed or defeated 
 by the ruling powers in our government. It will restore to 
 honor the agricultural life. It will make a coal mine as 
 respectable as a bank. It will decree the honor and respecta¬ 
 bility of all honest labor, and turn the sarcasm of prostituted 
 art against the gamblers of the stock-pit and the arrogant 
 progeny of idle wealth. 
 
 If the nineteenth century closes in the United States 
 with an unequivocal victory of the people, it will be the 
 fitting counterpart of the great battle which was fought and 
 won at the close of the eighteenth century. That heroic 
 epoch was called the Age of Revolution; this shall be 
 called the Age of Humanity. 
 
The Leading Liberal and 
 Reformative Review Published in 
 
 the English-speaking 
 
 A Word to Men and Women Who Think. 
 
 Thoughtful and earnest men and women are 
 everywhere beginning to appreciate the fact that we 
 are in the midst of a period of transition. New 
 ideas in the social, economic, ethical and religious 
 world are taking the place of those which have held 
 the popular mind for generations, while in the do¬ 
 main of education and of science the rapid progress 
 which has marked the last few decades has opened 
 up broader vistas on every hand. In many respects 
 this century resembles the renaissance. In every 
 direction we see the old ideals giving place to newer, 
 broader, higher and finer conceptions. It will be the 
 mission of the ARENA for the ensuing year to voice 
 these larger truths and nobler conceptions by a series 
 of papers dealing with the living issues along the 
 various highways of vita) thought. Especially will 
 it emphasize the problems which relate to the happi¬ 
 ness and well-being of humanity, and the triumph 
 of justice, freedom and knowledge over tyranny, 
 prejudice and ignorance. 
 
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