Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1878 — COMMUNISM VS. NATIONAL BANKS. [ARTICLE]

COMMUNISM VS. NATIONAL BANKS.

Money is power. Men are everywhere forced to admit it. Every crisis in public affairs proves the fact. Combined power is often dangerous, and always to be watched, for it grows as it combines and combines as it grows, till, gathering the force of the whirlwind, it sweeps all before it. Money in private hands for personal purposes often becomes oppressive, never dangerous; but money gathered into corporate magnitude, governed by corporate will, free from all personal individuality, rolls its way eyeless and soulless, like the wheels of Juggernaut, over obstacles in its way. It poisons nature into tyranny. Speaking all languages, it buys servants, witnesses, Judges, ministers, Kings and States; corrupting all power, remorseless as the grave, and devilish as the devil, it is the deity of the gambler, the god of the Jew, the idol of the banker. Such is its p wer. The national banks form in each community, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the concentrated money power of the United States. Not satisfied with the general power of money incorporated into intensified strength, they have formed a kind of leviathan corporation, whose constituent elements are already made up in unified powers—a corporation of corporations—which they te.m the “Bankers’ Association.”

Its machinery covers the whole empire of financial action. Its wheels roll through every S*ate and Territory. From center to circumference it rules the whole. Its aim is universal control. Its means 2,000 banks, wielding the combined capital of 300,000 capitalists, the deposits of 800,000 business men, aggregating more than $2,000,000,000, with $160,000,000 of surplus profits, and $30,000,000 of annual bounty robbed from the people without an equivalent or consideration. With recruits wherever there is a usurer or a gambler in money, they have formed and combined a power so leviathan in its proportion, so colossal in its centralizing strength, and so self-confident in its omnipotence, that' it boldly and openly declares that its machinery is so oiled and greased that, on a single day’s notice, it can concentrate a political power no power of Congress can resist. If the Bank Association is to rule as it has combined to rule, all property is at its mercy, all labor is its slave. * For it can make and it can break ; it can rule and it can ruin ; it can build up or it can tear down. Defiant and implacablo, as all corporate and impersonal responsibility is, it has no guide but greed, no god but usury ; as ruthless as the Boman plunderers, it controls the torch that destroys and the sword that robs.

What is the purpose of this huge combination of moneyed mom polies ? It is to make monopoly immortal, and robbery endless ! It seeks to take from the Government its sovereignty in money. Its purpose is t,o kill the greenback as a currency. Its aim and object is to assert and maintain the highest prerogative pertaining to freemen. It would issue the currency, and control the currency. It would make the $7,000,000,000 worth of our annual production subject to its own valuation. It would make progress its slave, commerce its subject, manufacture its dependent, labor its hireling, Congress its puppet, and the Government its plaything. It would make the bonds of the Government its basis to rob the people of a double interest on its money. It would make the bonds exempt from taxes, to exempt their capital from taxes, creating an oligarchy of privileges, and a nobility of aristocrats. It would make the producing farmer, the creative mechanic, and working laborer its subject slaves, to pay the taxes of the rich, and do homage to wealth. Such are the exact purposes for which the Bank Association was created. It finds it legal to combine, centralize, and unify the power of money, to tyrannize over values, to avoid taxation, to impose burdens on the people, and to crucify labor. But it will tolerate no combinations but its own. J&fef When labor combines to prefect labor, it anathematizes the people as a brutal herd of agrarian Communists. It consolidates the rich to force the people to grant the rich privileges, monopolies, and powers, and call its unions Bank Associations.

Is this battle to be endless, or, seeing and knowing the infamy of the object, will the people end it ? The Roman patricians were never more insolent than the aristocracy of the Bank Association. In the old battle, patrician wealth, patrician monopolies, and patrician aristocracy were on one side; on the other were plebeian producers, plebeian manufacturers, plebeian labor, and plebeian poverty. The Roman aristocrat pursued his way to grandeur and wealth regardless of human suffeiing. Man, as an individual, if outside of the privileged order, was a thing, a slave, only fit to labor for the rich, pay taxes, and starve. Conquest, rapine, and slavery were his policy. We have got to root out this oppressive insolence, or it will root out liberty, equality and justice. We have got to conquer the Bank Association, or the Bank Association will conquer the people. The issue is definite, palpable, and irresistible. The living and the coming generations of men are bound up in its solution. With the Bank Association there is. nothing sacred or respectable but money; in its philosophy power belongs to the few; the great public heart of the populace is but the laboring rabble. Its vital life is oppression; the very spirit of its existence is an antagonism to equality of rights. It is an iron-shod oligarchy, combined into monstrous wealth to march over the very tendrils of human welfare, crushing all it cannot seduce, and conquering all it cannot control. The birth of Christianity was the birth of Communism. Religion was charity, and mercy, and hope. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” “Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you,” created Communism, built up the Church of the Messiah, and laid the foundation for those equalities of eternal justice which formed the type, and, after centuries of struggle, grew into 'political Communism. Communism in France was the first practical assertion of the political rights of the people. In the Pantheistic Governments of Greece and the Democracies of Athens, political equality was never admitted as a principle, as the history of those States attests, and as the learned Balmes proves to demonstration. In France Communism created free cities; out of. the free cities, originated the Third Estate; out of the Third Estate, liberty. It took centuries for the principle of equality to battle down the iron bulwarks of tradition. Kings,

feudal lords, the aristocracy were its antagonists. They had gathered up the power of oppression out of “the divine right of might," and they held it The people were denied all rights; they were slaves to power. This principle pervaded through all Grecian history till it killed Grecian power. It annihilated Roman ascendency. It drove civil and political civilization from the shores of the Mediterranean to the shores of the Atlantic. Civil liberty was manacled and in irons till the French Communes asserted and maintained the political equality of the people. The Bourbons associated to defeat equality in politics as the Bankers’ Association have associated to defeat liberty in America; and, weakened ns Bourbonism was, it yet combined the capital of Europe, and for more than 800 years it kept up the savage reign of “ might makes right." Printing finally became the ally of right. Yet it took centuries to tear a way the fetters of ignorance and flood the world with the illuminations of education, justice, hope and equality. Ignorance with the masses was essential to power with the privileged. The revolution of 1776 was the first national revolt. The revolution of 1789 waß the revolt of humanity. The Bank Association would drag the American people back to the black ignorance of night, to slavery, to subjugated dependents, to lordly masters, to cringing taxpayers. To do this it bribes capital to join capital; it feasts intellect, suborns ta'ent, buys legislation, rules money, and demands with Iladrianic ostentation that the American people shall ignore their sovereignty, and give up to this association of the money-bags the management of the finances of the nation.

These aristocrats of money, the barons of the puise, the foster-brothers of lailroad monopolies, stigmatize every asso ciated effort of labor as Communism, and Communism as the license of murder, robbery and theft. They have no appreciation of that community of effort and energies which originated free cities, or of that highest and noblest of purposes which, while battling for equality of rights, battles for the civilization of the poor, for the uplifting of the downtrodden andthesupportof theoppressed; for homes won by labor; for bread earned by toil, but denied by greed; for education for children, secured by industry and provided by the State; in one word, for the respectability of oom • fort. Labor associations have become essential to repress the insolence of capital. Labor unprotected is crushed to slavery. It is the declaration of the Bank Association that they will put their screws on labor until they have brought it to submission to the dictated prices of capital. Labor has learned to know its power, not to abuse it, not to trample on the rights of others, but to protect its own. It has come to know that it is the architect of progress and the originator of wealth. Always inventing, and creating, and producing, its Communism is this : It says to Capital: “In the past you made me your slave, for the future I make myself a freeman.” Heretofore, especially prior to 1776, the producer was the mere servant of the consumer. In an age when mind is an essential element of labor , and humanity an element of the mind, the only rank for man to recognize is that which is foremost in producing for the body and for the soul. The laborer's life is his nobility. To create is to be noble. He who creates the best to elevate labor by labor, unto the enjoyment of equality, illuminated by education, radiated by justice, purified by charity, and refined by religion, is the most of a man. This is the Communism of the laborer. Franklin was a Communist, Guttenberg was an agrarian, Arkwright a civilizer, and Morse a leveler. They were each laborers to level up, not down; to civilize, not to heathenize; to feed, not to starve. From their toil-worn hands they built into light, not into darkness; to health and strength and intelligence, and not into decrepitude, weakness and ignorance.

What these sovereigns of toil were to progress the Bank Association is to slavery, to despotism, to the centralizing power of wealth. Its policy is to subjugate and enslave the people by controlling the money power of the nation. It is now robbing the people annually of $30,000,000 of a subsidy, for which it gives no pretense of an equivalent, and for which the people receive no semblance of a This annual robbery the Bank Association would make perpetual. Their means is corruption. They bid for a corrupt and purchasable press, and corrupt and villainous Hessians, vile panderers to mammon, advocate their monopoly. They would bribe Congress to tax the producer, and State Legislatures to sustain their unholy and infamous purpose. With a reserved fund of $166,000,000 of reserved profits, wrung from the industries of the nation, they have leagued themselves into a moneyed oligarchy to rule or ruin the country. By attempting to kill the greenback they have prostrated labor to want, busim ss to bankruptcy, and prosperity to ruin. There is one thing certain—the people must kill the Bank Association or the Bank Association will kill the equalities of liberty. There can be but one sovereign power in finances. It must be the greenback as the money of the nation, sovereign, absolute and irredeemable, because it is sovereign and absolute, and adequate, because the nation can measure and supply its wants without usury, without interest, without bonds, and without cost; or it must be the national-bank money, created by a combination of individuals to rule the nation, a money dependent upon the fluctuations of gold, the greed of usurers, the will of aristocrats—to be doled out as speculators may choose at high interest, at usurious compounds, and at such times and places as the Shylocks of the money market may choose. There can be no independence if the people and the nation are to be dependent for money on banks. The banks must yield or the people must yield. The banks have money; the people have the ballot; the laborer's vote weighs as much as the banker's vote. There are one, two, maybe three hundred thousand bondholding, tax-exempt, bank-monopolist aristocrats, who would tear down the flag of. the free, make slaves of the laborers and dependents of the producers under the standard of Shvlock, waving his scales and brandishing his knife, as the emblems of mammon and the ensign of the moneypower. But the people can count their hosts by the millions, and each one of this host, marching upward and onward to labor recompensed, to education secured, to comforts won by industry, to independence obtained by the equalities of law, and to that civilization where want is a stronger and crime a foreigner, will bear aloft the ballot, on which,

in letters of living iight, the world can read : The sovereignty of the people is education. 4 The sovereignty of labor is progress. The sovereignty of the nation in the sovereignty of the greenback, is independence, prosperity, and the death of ll monopolies, subsidies, and privileges. The national banks would have us pawn our future to the Jew. They would hang around us the remorseless skeleton debt, forever gnawing with its vulture-like greed upon the vitals of our prosperity. Let us cut the cable. Let the people commune together as the burghers and people of Cambray, and Mefz, aud Arles, and Narbonue communed. Lot us swear ns they swore to be free, to submit to no monopolies, to permit no privileged exemptions, to allow no Bankers’ Association to regulate, control, or dole out individual money to take the place of national money. Let us be sovereign to secure education. sovereign to protect labor, sovereign to make the greenback sovereign. To do this, the people must use tho bnl--1 t, and through it reign. Their souls, though separate, must have but one prayer, acting to one end, inspired by one purpose, and ascending into uuity as the wings of the bird bear it into the heavens, moving ever apart and yet ever in unison to secure the reign of equality and the prosperity of justice. Labor, long docile, ir.ust learn the logic of political logic. It must use the ballot. It must demand tho light and ask no more. It must reason to secure it, but it must prepare tq resist oppression. Capital says, “ Work at my wages or we will starve you to it.” Power, whether it is clothed in the impersonal impudence of corporate strength or in the self-elated tyranny of brief authority, says, “ You yield or we shoot;" “ You submit or we kill;" “ You work at our wages or you get no work." “You are getting too comfortable ; you can eat as the rich eat; you clothe your children'as if you were independent. You educate them an if they had a right to hope. You are getting proud. You have a home. We must stop this ! You must be contented to live as the European laborer lives." Yes. capital says this, and capital, to carry out its purpose to make labor its slave, combined its power in the Bankers’ Association. It is the duty of every laborer, of every producer, of every thinker and of every human being who loves God and humanity better than he loves gold, to put it down, down, DUWN. Let us do it.

STEPHEN D. DILLAYE.