The American People’s Money
by Hon. Ignatius DonnellyTHE FOURTH DAY.
“ FIAT.”
The debate of the two previous days had attracted a good deal of attention from the other passengers on the car, on whose hands time hung heavily ; and, after breakfast, they gathered as near as they could to section 7, sitting in the vacant seats or standing up and listening. The young lady, whose name it seems was Miss Bowman, resumed her usual place.
“ Well,” said Mr. Hutchinson, “ are you ready to go on with the discussion ? ”
“ Certainly,” replied Mr. Sanders. “ Let me see. What were we to talk about this morning ? ”
“ I think,” said Miss Bowman, “ it was about fiat-money.”
“ Yes, ” said a sharp-nosed gentleman, “ I would like to hear that p’int debated. I don’t believe in no fiat. We must have intrinsic money.”
“ What is your business,” inquired Mr. Sanders.
“ Well, I have no partic’lar business. I have some money loaned out in Californy. It keeps me busy a lookin’ after it.”
“ I thought so,” replied the farmer ; “ now do you know what ‘fiat’ is ? ”
“ Yes,” replied the other, “it is paper money, continental currency, assignats.”
“ Not at all,” said Mr. Sanders ; “ ‘fiat’ means a command—a decree. The greatest fiatist we have any record of is the Almighty, for he made the universe out of nothing by his mere word. If some of our gold-bug statesmen had been present when he said ‘Let there be light’ they would have interrupted the proceedings, risen to a point of order and remarked that the Lord could not make light by a ‘fiat’—there had got to be ‘intrinsic value’ somewhere. Now, what God is to Nature, so, on a smaller scale, is the congregated will of a people, called the government, to all the people of that country. It cannot, like God, make something out of nothing, but it can make a great deal out of very little ; it can give to a piece of paper so much value that men will readily exchange for it gold and silver and diamonds and pearls and land and houses and all things that are regarded as valuables on earth.”
“ You mean paper money ? ” asked Mr. Hutchinson.
“ No,” was the reply ; “ I have not come to that yet—I mean government bonds.”
“ Ah,” said the banker, “they are valuable because they contain a contract that they are to be paid in gold.”
“ There is no United States bond,” said Mr. Sanders, “that contains a contract that it is payable in gold. They are all payable in coin, and silver is coin as much as gold.”
“ But then both the Republican and Democratic administrations,” said Mr. Hutchinson, “have interpreted that to mean gold.”
“ I know they have ; and they have done it in obedience to the money-power, without authority from law, and to the great detriment of the people of this country. But that is only an unworthy trick, and rests simply upon the patient acquiescence of the tax-payers, and no one can tell how long that will last. And it must be remembered that the further off the payment of the bond, in coin, is postponed, by the terms thereof, the more valuable is the bond. A twenty-year bond is worth more than one for ten years, and one for a hundred years at one per cent. would command a large premium over any existing issues. It is, therefore, evident that the capitalist does not want the coin but the bond. But I have proved my proposition, that the ‘fiat’ of government impressed on a piece of paper, worth one mill, or the tenth of a cent, can make it worth one hundred thousand dollars. And the ‘fiat’ of government can take you, sir,” continued Mr. Sanders, turning fiercely to the peak-nosed man, “ and set you, like Uriah, in the fore-front of battle, to be shot down like a dog.”
“ How can they do that ? ”
“ Just as they did with hundreds of thousands during the civil war—they would draft you.”
“ All ! ” said peak-nose, “ that is a military necessity.”
“ Well,” said Mr. Sanders, “ is not the life of the nation a military necessity, whether assailed by the cannon of open and foreign enemies, or the trickeries and knaveries of domestic and secret foes ? The coat of formal expression of the popular will, which we call constitution and law, has no right to prove a shirt of Nessus and kill the Hercules (the people) for whose protection it was intended. But everything rests on the fiat of government. It is the biggest thing, next to God, on the planet. The very sneerers at popular rights exist by means of it.”
“ How so ? ” said the peak-nosed man.
“ Because your life and mine would not be worth an hour’s purchase if the fiat of the government did not decree that we should be protected. It is the fiat, the command, the authority of the consolidated people, that represses the robbers and murderers. Repeal all law, and we would be mobbed at the next station this train stops at, and despoiled of our possessions and probably slain. The same greed that inspires the money-lender would inspire the non-capitalistic class to plunder the money lender. They would foreclose on him—with a revolver or enjoin him with a bowie knife ; and he could take his writ of certiorari to the Almighty and try it during eternity. Fiat,” continued Mr. Sanders, “ why, the government can take you, on the charge of violating the laws of the land, and whether guilty or not, hang you up by the neck before an admiring audience, until you are choked to death.
“ Fiat ! Fiat ! ” he continued. “ Why, all that you are, all that you have, all that you will be in this world ; the safety of wife, children, property, peace, order, culture, civilization ; the very bread you eat and the boots on your feet represent fiat ; and it makes me mad all over to hear nincompoops sneering at fiat, and declaring that this government of 70,000,000 people, with power to issue legal tender money, good for all debts public and private, cannot create money unless it promises to redeem it in a yellow accident called gold. Redeemed ! Why a greenback is redeemed every time the government receives it for taxes ; every time A pays a debt to B with it ; every time it is exchanged for wheat and pork and flour and woolen and cotton goods, or all these hundreds of things that constitute the real wealth of the country, of which money is but the conventional shadow, type and figure.”
“ You surprise me,” said Miss Bowman. “ I thought gold was the real wealth.”
“ Yes,” said Mr. Sanders, “ that is the poisonous nonsense which is poured into the porches of the ears of the sleeping Hamlet—the people. But test it. Take one of these wordiferous editors, filling all space with resounding lies, at $25 a week, and put him down on a desert island, with $100,000 in gold pieces and nothing else. Let him starve for three or four days, and he would give his whole pile for a square meal of potatoes and corn bread ; and finally realize, in his death agonies, that wealth consists of those things which are necessary for man’s life, and that gold is a mere conventional symbol, with no value save what the common consent of society gives it. When Columbus landed on one of the West Indian islands a sailor exchanged an iron nail for a big piece of gold, and the savage, as soon as the trade was completed, ran away like a deer, to escape, before the sailor had discovered how worthless was the stuff he had given him, in comparison with a piece of that wonderful metal, iron.
“ No,” continued Mr. Sanders ; “ the farmer who makes twenty bushels of wheat (food) grow where one is sown ; and the mechanic who turns wool and cotton and flax into cloth to protect the human frame from heat or cold ; or the workman who converts the growing forest trees into houses, or the ore of the mine into implements or machinery—these add to the wealth of the world, for they produce those things without which civilization could not endure. But the man who brings money into the country simply makes slaves.”
BORROWED MONEY BREEDS SLAVES.
“ Makes slaves ! ” cried Mr. Hutchinson.
“ Yes,” replied the farmer, “ for he will not put it out until human beings agree to work for it ; and the man who works for another, without compensation, is a slave, whether you can sell him on the auction block or not.”
“ Such utterances astonish me,” said Mr. Hutchinson. “ Look at the money invested in railroad building in this country. The nation could not have been developed without it. Does that make slaves ? ”
“ Certainly,” was the reply. “ The railroad bonds are simply a blanket mortgage put upon the immense areas of country through which the road passes ; and the people living thereon have to work from early youth to the grave to pay the interest on the same ; and when they die they transmit the burden to the shoulders of their children, and they in turn to theirs. And they not only have to pay interest on the money actually invested in the construction of the road, but on as much more, or twice as much more, of ‘ watered stock,’ for which not one dollar was ever paid. They are thus doubly slaves—slaves to a real debt and slaves to a bogus debt ; slaves to fact and slaves to fiction ; slaves to substance and slaves to shadow.”
“ But how do you make out,” said the peak-nosed man, “ that the people pay any such interest ? ”
“ Easily enough,” replied Mr. Sanders. “ In our vast inter-continental regions—and that term applies to four-fifths of this great country—those who dwell in a territory traversed by a railroad cannot communicate with the external world except by that means of transportation. Every time they leave their habitat they pay tribute to the corporation. Everything they sell, that goes outside their immediate neighborhood, has to go over that road ; and everything they buy has to come over it ; and as the charges on all this transportation have to be great enough to pay the expenses of running the road and repairing it, and the interest on the real debt and the interest on the bogus debt, it all comes out of the tributary population, who are life-long slaves of invested capital, and its shadow, unreal capital.”
“ Must we not have railroads ? ” asked Mr. Hutchinson.
“ God give us back the simplicity, the purity and the prosperity of the early days, when Jefferson rode to the Capitol to be inaugurated (after blacking his own boots) on horseback ; when Andrew Jackson hurled the conquerors of Napoleon pell mell out of the valley of the Mississippi, and then proceeded to crush the head of the giant serpent of Plutocracy, represented by the National Bank and smashed the reign of corruption for a generation. Would that we could call up old Andy from his grave.”
“ ‘ One blast upon his bugle horn
Were worth a million men.’ ”
“ But, my dear sir,” said Mr. Hutchinson, “ you are wandering from the subject—that was, the power of the government to create money by its fiat, apart from intrinsic value.”
“ Intrinsic value,” was the reply. “ What intrinsic value is there in gold and silver ? ”
“ Complete and absolute,” said Mr. Hutchinson.
THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF GOLD AND SILVER.
“ I deny it, ” replied Mr. Sanders. “ The value of the so-called precious metals is simply that given them by the consensus of the opinions of mankind.”
“ What is your proof of that ? ” asked the peak-nosed man.
“ The history of silver,” replied Mr. Sanders.
“ So long as it had equal access to the mints with gold it kept side by side with gold, in value, at the proportion fixed by the nations. The moment the mints of a large part of the world were shut against silver it began to fall and fell to one-half its previous price. If its use as money in Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Oceanica was totally discontinued it would not be worth as much as tin. For of what use is it ? ”
“ It would be used for ornaments,” said the young lady.
“ Do you wear decorations of tin or lead or copper or brass ? ” replied the farmer.
“ No-they are too cheap.”
“ Precisely,” said Mr. Sanders, “and if there was no market or use for silver any more than there is for tin or lead or brass, and it was equally cheap, it would be a disgrace to ornament one’s self with it. If the demonetization of gold had continued——”
“ What are you talking about ? ” said the peak-nosed man.
“ I mean just what I say,” retorted the farmer, “ gold was once demonetized over a large part of Europe, and if that demonetization had gone as far as the demonetization of silver has to-day, it would have fallen off one-half or more in price, just as silver has.”
“ The demonetization of gold ! I never heard of that.” said Miss Bowman.
“ Nor I,” said the peak-nosed man.
GOLD DEMONETIZED.
“ The discovery of gold in California and Australia,” replied Mr. Sanders, “ in 1849 and 1850, resulted in the pouring fourth of unlimited quantities of that money, which largely found their way to Europe. The bankers took alarm. It seemed as if the heavens had broken open and were raining gold. The shrewd leaders of the financiers said ; ‘This will not do. Abundant money means cheap money. When money is cheap it will buy less of the products of human industry ; prices rise ; the people get out of debt ; our money is thrown back on our hands and we cannot rent it out for large interest ; it is useless to us ; we cannot live on our accumulations ; we will have to go to work on equal terms with the rest of mankind. We must, therefore, demonetize this over plentiful metal, gold, and make silver, the scarcer element, the basis of the world’s business.’ Prof. Levi says :
“ ‘ Frightened, and not without reason, at the possible consequences, some countries heretofore anxious to attract and retain gold in circulation, even at great sacrifice, showed a feverish anxiety to banish it altogether. In July, 1850, Holland demonetized the ten-florin piece and the Guillame ; Portugal prohibited any gold from having current value except the English sovereign ; Belgium demonetized her gold circulation (that is, repealed the laws making it legal money); Russia prohibited the export of silver ; and France, alarmed but less hasty, issued a commission to look into the matter.’
“ In 1855 Germany demonetized gold and made silver he only legal money. Even in England numerous cabinet meetings were held to consider the advisability of doing he same thing. But it was soon learned that the gold supplies were principally surface deposits, and the yellow lood began to decrease ; and the nations of Europe took the back track. Then came the large production of silver in Nevada, and the bankers said : ‘Gold is to be the scarce metal and silver the abundant one ; therefore we must remonetize gold and demonetize silver.’ ”
“ I am very much surprised,” said Miss Bowman. “ I have read so much in the daily press in praise of gold and in denunciation of silver, that I can scarcely think it possible that only forty-five or fifty years ago the very men who are now trying to crucify silver, and drive it out of existence, were ready to make it the sole money metal of the world, and reduce gold to the position of a proscribed commodity. Are you sure of your facts ? ”
“ Perfectly sure. I will ask Mr. Hutchinson whether the statements I have made as to the demonetization of gold in 1850-1855 are not true.”
“ I believe they are,” replied Mr. Hutchinson.
“ And the motives were as I have given them ? ”
“ Well, I do not care to go into those questions,” replied the banker.
“ You will at least admit,” said Mr. Sanders, “ that the warfare upon gold at that time was because it was supposed it would be the more abundant metal.”
“ I suppose that can hardly be disputed,” replied Mr. Hutchinson.
“ Now,” said the farmer, turning to the peak-nosed man, “ suppose this recent story now going the rounds of the press, proved true,—that the whole American beach of the Pacific ocean, for 5,000 miles, is largely made up of gold washings, and that gold was about to become as abundant and as cheap as copper, do you think you would still advocate gold-monometalism ?”
“ Not at all,” was the reply. “ I would go in for silver-monometalism.”
“ But suppose mountains of solid silver were discovered in Alaska, what then ? ”
“ Then I should be in favor of a limited issue of greenbacks.”
“ Then, ” said the farmer, “ your whole policy would be to make money out of something that could not be abundant.”
“ Exactly,” said the other, “how could I lend my money out and live on the interest of it if every man was prosperous and had his pockets full of cash. I must look out for my own interests.”
“ And must not the people look out for their interests ? ”
“ Certainly.”
“ And their interest is diametrically opposite to yours.”
“ How do you make that out ? ”
“ You want scarce money ; they want abundant money. They want everybody out of debt ; you want all those who have any assets in a condition that they will be forced to borrow from you, at a high rate of interest. They want universal prosperity ; you want general embarrassment. They want to rise to a higher level of civilization ; you are hanging on to their legs to pull theirs down. They desire to work for themselves ; you want them to work for you, that you may live in idleness. They are producing, you are consuming ; they are creating, you are swallowing ; they are the wheat plant, you are the chinch bug ; they bless mankind by their work, you benefit nobody but yourself, and in a few short months or years there will be nothing left of you but a coffin full of rottenness ; and after all your grabbing you will not be able to pick he worms off your face that are eating away your nose. And if the essence of life is continuous and immortal, you will be then a wretched, unhappy prowler of the spiritual kingdom ; or, reincarnated as one of a herd of filthy jackals, scrambling and fighting for offal.”
“ Thank you,” said the peak-nosed man, very red in the face.
“ I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said Mr. Sanders, “ but have I not told the truth ? What have you ever done, or men like you, to merit a moment’s kindly consideration from the Lord who made you ? With what part of the universal Benevolence, of which this earth is a tremendous testimony, have you ever held a second’s communication ? What would you do among the blessed saints of heaven, the elect of God, with your present feelings, instincts and impulses ? You couldn’t get a chattel mortgage on their wings, or foreclose on their golden harps ;—and what else would you be capable of thinking about ? ”
“ You have no right to talk that way about me,” said the other, “you know nothing of my life or history.”
“ Well, if I have done you injustice I am sorry for it,” replied the farmer. “ But Providence is not like the youthful artist who was obliged to inscribe under his sketches : ‘ this is a pig,’ ‘ this is a house.’ The soul writes itself upon its tabernacle, even as the sea-shell adapts itself to the convolutions of the creature that dwells within it.
“ But I take it all back. Perhaps every man has to fulfill his destiny, and the wolf and the lamb are made out of the same material ; and one could not by any possibility be the other ; and even while we defend society, we should therefore be very merciful in our judgment of those who assail it.”
“ Dinner ready in the dining car ! ” cried a young man whose complexion was due to the fact that Noah cursed Ham, for some slight misbehavior, several thousand, years ago. But the young man would not have known anything about it if the sons of Shem had not kindly preserved the legend ; and the sons of Japhet had not used it as an excuse for making him work hard for small pay. But if a man cannot be responsible for the deeds of his ancestors, 6.000 years ago, what are ancestors good for ?
* * * * * * *
“ Mister,” said the peak-nosed man after dinner, “ do you know anything about ‘trusts ? ’ I should like to hear something on that subject.”
“ Yes,” said Miss Bowman, “ what causes them—how do they come about ? ”
TRUSTS.
“ They are simply another form of the universal selfishness—‘the hog in human nature’ I spoke of,” replied Mr. Sanders. “ They rest upon the inability of the people to defend themselves.”
“ And why is that ?” asked a red-headed man, who had been an attentive listener to the discussion.
“ Because,” was the reply, “ of the inability of tire average man to think a new thought that has not got its roots entangled in a lot of old thoughts. Each age is therefore the shadow projected by the preceding age—an incongruous mixture of errors and truths. The ancients believed in the ‘ mandrake.’ ”
“ The mandrake ? What is that ? ” asked Miss Bowman.
“ You know, ” said Mr. Sanders, “ the great poet says
‘ Could curses kill as can the mandrake’s groan.’
It was the belief that the ‘mandrake,’ a plant growing it wet places, and bifurcated like a man, (whence the name ‘ mian-drake,’) would, when pulled out of the earth, utter dreadful groans and shrieks, and any one hearing them would die. And so it was the custom (according to the legends) for the man who wanted the ‘mandrake’ to loosen the earth around it, tie a stout cord to it, fasten the other end to a dog’s tail, get a good distance away and call the dog. Up came the ‘mandrake’ and the dog died ! Of course all this was false. The ‘mandrake’ had no more occult power than a turnip ; but the human family faithfully believed the yarn for ten thousand years ; which only shows that the human family is capable of believing anything, and that it is safe to doubt anything it believes. Well, what I was going to say, was, that bigotry is the ‘mandrake’ of the moral world ; its roots reach down to the center of the globe ; you cannot pluck it up without terrible groanings and shrieks and curses ; the very earth comes up with it ; and the men who drag it out of its bed generally perish as martyrs for the truth ; but when it is once thrown prostrate on the earth it is a poor, mean, shrivelled, nasty, poisonous weed, and the world wonders how it was once capable of so much harm. The ‘mandrake’ which afflicts this country to-day is party bigotry ; the newspapers are the tongue of the thing—full of screams and groans and lies and slanders and imprecators—but the miseries of the unfortunate people are pulling the bigotry out by the roots.”
“ Party bigotry has rendered the people incapable of self-defense. It blinds them where their eyes should see dearly ; it divides them where they should be united ; it makes them suspicious of each other when the warmest feelings of brotherly love should prevail among all honest men ; it turns their thoughts from their own welfare and the happiness of themselves and, families, to old contentions and hatreds, concerning interests and issues long since dead and gone ; it makes this lovely world a hell, in quarrels over the next world, when it is barely possible there may be no next world ; or if there is, that it may differ as widely from our conceptions as the conditions of Jupiter differ from those of the earth. ‘Divide and conquer’ is the policy of our plunderers. ‘Unite and crush’ should be ours.”
“ Have you any statistics,” asked Mr. Hutchinson, “ as to the extent of the trusts in this country ? ”
“ Yes, ” replied Mr. Sanders, “ here are some figures which have been published. The bankruptcies of some of the schemers have perhaps modified this table, but it will not, I think, be found far out of the way.
|
A FEW TRUSTS. The following are a few of the trusts that have been organized in this country, with their capitalization : | ||
Standard Oil..................... Cottonseed Oil................... American Typefounders.......... Anthracite Coal ................. Ax .................. .......... Barbed Wire . .................. Biscuit and Cracker .............. Brewers (Chicago) ............... Bolt and Nut..................... Boot and Shoe ................... Cartridge .................. ..... Condensed Milk ................. Casket .......................... Celluloid ....... ................ Cigarette........................ Copper Ingot ................... Cordage ......................... Cotton Duck..................... Envelope........................ Flint Glass...................... Fork and Hoe ................... Lead............................ Linseed Oil...................... Lithographic .................... Locomotive...................... Match........................... Musical Instrument .............. Oatmeal......................... Railroads........................ Rice........................... Rubber.......................... Safe............................. Schoolbook...................... Sewer Pipe....... .............. Western Union Telegraph........ Smelters ............. .......... Soda Water Machinery... . . ..... Spool, Bobbin and Shuttle........ Starch .......................... Steel............................ Sugar........................... Trunk........................... Wall Paper...................... Total................. |
Capitalization. $ 110,000,000 41,700,000 9,000,000 513,000,000 5,000,000 12,000,000 5,000,000 6,000,000 5,000,000 7,000,000 3,000,000 15,000,000 5,000,000 11,000,000 25,000,000 20,000,000 15,000,000 10,000,000 7,000,000 4,000,000 1,000,000 90,000,000 18,000,000 11,500,000 15,000,000 6,000,000 5,000,000 3,500,000 10,000,000,000 2,000,000 60,000,000 5,000,000 18,000,000 5,000,000 84,000,000 40,000,000 9,000,000 7,000,000 10,000,000 35,000,000 76,000,000 2,000,000 20,000,000 ————— $11,371,700,000 |
Water. $ 45,000,000 25,000,000 3,000,000 75,000,000 .............. 4,500,000 2,000,000 2,000,000 2,000,000 ............... ............... 3,000,000 2,000,000 3,000,000 .............. ............. 5,000,000 2,000,000 ............. ............. ............... 60,000,000 12,000,000 ............ ............... ................. ............... ................. 6,000,000,000 ........... 23,000,000 3,000,060 ........... ................ 50,000,000 ................ ................ .............. 3,000,000 ........... 30,000,000 ................ 6,000,000 ————— $6,360,500,000 |
“ Look at those stupendous figures, ” said Mr. Sanders, “ eleven billions, three hundred and seventy-one millions, seven hundred thousand dollars of organized capital, and six billions, three hundred and sixty millions, five hundred thousands of bogus capital, or water ! It is simply appalling.
“ And just think that every dollar of it means an interference with the freedom of trade and market, and the right of a human being to sell where he can sell for most and buy where he can buy for least.
“ And on top of all these burdens they demonetize silver by the aid of British gold and reduce the price of all the commodities by the sale of which our people hope to pay their overwhelming debts.”
“ I am surprised,” said Mr. Hutchinson, “ to see so intelligent a man as you are repeating that exploded and demagogic slander about the corruption of Congress by British gold.”