Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1878 — SOVEREIGNTY OF THE GREEKBACK. [ARTICLE]

SOVEREIGNTY OF THE GREEKBACK.

No Redemption. The Government of the United States is sovereign in all the powers of the General Government; sovereign in all the powers delegated to it by the people, through the constitution. Itlssu-' preme, superior to all, predominant, effectual! As God is the sovereign ruler of the spiritual, government is the sovereign ruler of the political ! The constitution has confided to government the sole and supreme power of declaring what shall constitute money, ■ what shall be a legal tender for all debts, public and private, and, whep it has so declared, what.it has declared to be money is as sovereign as money as the Government is sovereign as a power. It declared silver and gold, of a certain weight and fineness, to be money, and it became money. As money it was supreme for all the purposes 6f money; there was nothing superior to it, and, therefore, there was nothing to which it acknowledged its dependency but the Government which created it It could not be redeemed, for its sovereignty made it supreme. Government not only decd« red ita sovereignty as money, but it received it for its taxes, for its revenues, for all its demands as the supreme power. In this sense, and in this sense alone, the Government redeemed it. It re-issued it as fast and as often as it received it, thus perpetually admitting and declaring its sovereignty as money. The distinction between money that id, and may be, declared a legal tender, and State or individual bank bills, erroneously called money ,.which cannot be made a legal tender, is obvious. The State which charters, a bank, with power to issue bills as currency, through the individuals which constitute its corporate existence, has no power to make or declare such bills money— no power to declare them a legal tender. The State neither possesses the sovereignty nor the power of declaring what shall be money, nor what shall constitute a legal tender. State banks cannot create money; they may create a currency of doubtful character. They possess no single elements of sovereignty as creators of money, but are entirely subordinate to a double sovereignty, if I may be permitted the expression. For, first, they are the creatures of State laws, the State creating them being sovereign in all matters in which they are not subordinate to the Government of the United States. They—that is each of the States —are subordinate in the power of creating money. In this the States are not sovereign. The United Stateslpossesses and can alone exercise this sovereignty. From this it follows that all currency, u’hether in the formof bills, or of gold, or silver, authorized by a State, through banks, whether individual or corporate, is inferior, not recognized by the sovereign power of the United States, and therefore not money. Being inferior, and recognizing a superior kind of money, which is sovereign as money, it is compelled to redeem itself, and to maintain agents for its redemption, and means to procure the money the Government declares to be money, to redeem the promise on which it is received and recognized as currency, and the moment it fails to so redeem itself the public discard it. In fact, these State bank and individual bank bills are nothing more nor less than the individual or limited corporate promise of combined individuals to redeem the bills they issue, m legal or sovereign money of the United States. Redemption is the sole test of its value. A failure to redeem is a failure of the bank; a failure of the bank is the loss of the people who trust the bank.

It was the perpetual failures, the constant stoppages of the State banks to redeem, which constituted the curse of the system. They were founded exclusively by individuals, their entire reliability rested on individual honesty and good faith. They did not possess even State guarantees. They were subordinates of a subordinate authority, and their inferiority to national money was as distinct and as absolute as the power of the individual is inferior to the power of the nation. In a word, they were but the infinitesimal constituents of the sovereignty of power and of the sovereignty of money. The relation they bore to sovereign money was the relation oi individual, acting as a banker, or fifty individuals in a corporate capacity, bears to the 40,000,000 individuals who compose the Government; and the SIOO,OOO of the individual bank capital, or the sl,000,000 of .the corporate bank capital bear the same ratio of inferiority to national money as those sums bear to the $40,000,000,000 of our national resources. To sum up the difference, it is only essential to say that State bank currency represents an individual; national money represents the nation. Gold and silver are but limited elements ®f national production; but, recognized and declared to be money by the sovereign power, they become sovereign money,” and, therefore, neither require nor are capable of redemption. The greenbacks, like gold and. silver, are declared to be money by the sovereign potber, and are by that power sovereign as money, and, .being sovereign, they are as incapable of redemption as gold and silver, and, representing all the pi odnets of the nation and all the sovereignty of the nation, as a mere representative of sovereign power, they are as superior to gold and silver as a whole is superior to a limited constituent part. A currency which has to be redeemed is not money. It is a mere individual promise to redeem in a money that is sovereign; a promise oftener broken than kept. It was a perpetual shuttiecock flying between certainty and uncertainty, with the uncertainty as certain as individual unreliability. The greenback has killed it. The nation has declared that it will rely on the nation ; the people that they will rely on the people. The greenback is the symbol of the nation’s faith and of the nation’s sovereignty. It is money of the people, proclaimed by the people as the type of their sovereign independence of all mere individual responsibility. One has only to trace the history of the purposes of redemption of individual money to find the curse and the tyranny of the system. We have rid ourselves of the slavery of its eternal oppression. This is the new departure. It is the nation’s new declaration of independence against the long catalogue of the wrongs of capital and its crimes, its usurpations, its baronial feudalities, its moneyed aristocracies, its damnable usuries, and its monopolized compounding of interest and taxes. Let us stand by this new departure—the sovereignty of the greenback as money—living to defend it, battling to sustain jt, and

revolutionizing, if necessary, to make it permanent as the nation, and universal as the people. But, in denouncing the principle of a money issue which requires redemption, let us see and comprehend what redemption is. Redemption has been the weapon of the banker. It has been his instrument of tyranny, his means of crashing, and, therefore, his instrument of torture. New York has been the center of the nation; Boston the center of New England ; Philadelphia the center of Pennsylvania. The old theory was that the country bankers must redeem their bills as they accumulated in these centers, and a failure to redeem was a failure of credit. So long as the bill of the qqqrtry bank was redeemed at these centers it was regarded as good and current, less the cost qf redemption at these cities. Tais difference, under the old goldbasis system, was called exchange. Nominally it is intended to represent the cost of transferring the bill to New York from St. Louis. New Orleans, Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, or Buffalo, or any other point, and getting it changed into current funds, the equivalent of gold ; really it meant not only the cost of the exchange, but the risk run by the exchangers of the solvency of the bank whose money was to be exchanged. This exchange varied with sections, cities, States, and communities. It varied from a quarter or an eight of 1 per cent, up to 3,4, and 5, and 10 per cent, in ordinary times. It was always a crushing burden upon the producer as well as the consumer. The city banks held the county banks as their subjects. They had the power to sweep down upon them whenever they could accumulate their bills in sufficient quantities to make it an object to do so. If a country bank was strong, and if money was plenty, then the New York banks would use the currency, and not retain it for redemption ; but if a bank showed the slightest signs of weakness—that is, if, in the desire of its officers to accommodate manufacturers, merchants, and dealers, it discounted freely, and paid out its own bills—it always ran the risk of having its currency find its way to the money centers, and, through the bankers there, to a demand for redemption in New York city funds or gold, and they had to be ready or they had to fail. This system of redemption was essential for the safety of the lenders, or redemption houses at the centers; for, as the circulation of the country banks was based on bonds and mortgages, and the individual liability of the stockholders, the security was always uncertain, and therefore all credit had to .be based on the promptness with winch the redemptions were made. It was an endless curb on bank accommodations; it was an endless uncertainty, and therefore the system always lacked that positive stability which creates certainty, the mother of confidence. A customer applying for a discount was met with the excuse, “The New York banks compel us to redeem weekly, and we never know when we are safe.” This enabled the b r nker to require, first, that the paper should be short; second, that it should be made payable in New York; and, third, that it should be paid in drafts, purchased of the discounting bank in New York, at the regular rates of exchange. The system was vexatious, expensive, and uncertain, but it brought grists to the mill of the great redeeming houses and to the banks. The national currency known as greenbacks is free from all these complications, for it redeems itself. It is money. The national-bank issues are still subject to the old curse—they have to redeem in greenbacks or in gold, and it affords the banker the argument by which he can magnify the power of his money. It is this system of divided and diversified liab-.lity, resting on individual passions, abilities and strength, which is the curse of the national-bank currency; and just as long as that is furnished by the Government to the national banks will these endless fluctuations exist. Money speculators live on these fluctuations; they are the nutriment and soul of all the gambling infamies of Wall street. The greenback theory is the only one ever invented which strips paper currency from all the ceaseless burdens and fluctuations caused by the cry for redemption. The greenback is money—money possessing all the power of gold; it needs no redemption, for there is no superior to it. It is superior to gold, for gold is one of its subordinate supports; gold is one of its inferior constituents, as wheat, and corn, and cotton, and wool, and cheese, united to the whole manifold round of production, are its constituents. These are the elements of national strength and national wealth. The greenback is the nation itself; combining all that is material with all that is intangible, it is the united whole, not a part to be classed as a product of labor, but the combined entity of all constituents united into a power which knows no superior. It can, therefore, know no power to redeem it. It is irredeemable, because it is the whole. It pays for everything we want to , eat, drink, rwear, burn, consume or create. It pays all debts, public or private. It buys all that can be bought, and pays for everything demanding payment. It is money in the highest sense of nationality. It is not cursed with the limitation of any individual liability. It is not limited by individual wealth or corporate wealth, measured by State laws or State liability. It is the grand realization of *‘l! Pluribus Unum.” It is of one value everywhere to everybody. It is the same on the Atlantic coast as it is on the coast of the Pacific. From Alaska to Key West, wherever the sovereignty of our flag is recognized, the greenback is recognized. It owes no one, and being the highest, the strongest, the best indication of value, as the expression of national will there is no center to which it must culminate. Wherever the constitution is paramount the greenback is paramount. As gold is one of its constituents, so is silver; so that, whenever either of these metals is wanted for exchanges beyond the sovereignty of our nationality, the superior always can and always will command them, either as coin bearing the stamp of tire mint or as bullion in the bar, representing its value as a merchantable product. The greenback being superior td all ideas of redemption, it bqnes and forever all individual moneys or corporation moneys which have so long made redemption a ' necessity. ‘ The greenback is the nation, and one might as well talk about exchanging or redeeming the nation as to talk about redeeming the greenback. When we want to turn back the wheels of progress and make the great mass of our pqpple mere serfs to the soil and slaves to a nobility of task-masters, theu wepiaywant the feudalism of Prussia

and the irop. hand of Bismarck to control UfJ. For the future the people will regulate their s own currency. The greenback is the child of the people; the. people will, nurture it. It has saved us in the jtast; we will sustain it {or the future. Stßphkn D. DiILaYE. TBENTOIt, U.S.