Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1878 — A Snake in the Eye. [ARTICLE]

A Snake in the Eye.

There is a horse at Penn Yan, N. Y., with a snake under the leDs of one of its eye% The reptile is comfortably located in the watery humor of the left eye, is about three feet in length, perfectly formed, of a white color, and about the size of an ordinary darning needle. It is plainly visible, and is constantly on the move, wiggling and twisting in every direction. Its presence does not seem to annoy the horse in the least, and has evidently created no inflammation in or about the eye. It has, however, changed the color of the eye-ball, it being of a lighter shade than that of the right eye, and has affected the sight somewhat. The snake was first discovered about two months since, when it was much smaller than it is now. How it came in the horse’s eye is a question which puzzles scientists. The above is told by the Penn Yan Express. The snake may have been in the editor’s eye.

CONTRACTION YS. INFLATION.

Contraction Hurts Nine-Tenths, Inflation One-Tenth. Jesse Harper, of Illinois, writes as follows to the New York Advocate : The specie payment banking system is a great wrong. To grant the privilege to a few men to issue their promises, then cajl that stuff money, is a dreadful crime against labor, and has in some countries robbed from labor more bread than have piracy and war combined. The wicked part of this is, that these paper promises of the bankers, called money, and allowed to circulate as money, are all to be redeemed in a higher type of money— coin. This is their assumption. But this is not all. The rule of every banking system (®f issue) that has ever flourished has been to issue from $3 to $lO of paper to $1 of coin. So, when the system has been tested, it has' proved to be a sham, a fraud, a means of stealing by the forms of law. Still further. This system is more hurtful to the material interests of man than war. Because it establishes a “coin basis,” upon which it rears its superstructure of credit. A superstructure that falls on an average of every six years—and in its fall, each time, robs labor of seventy cents on each dollar of its hard-earned substance, and thus crowds down toward bankruptcy and ultimate pauperism 90 per cent, of the people. All this, in order to raise to opulence, to the “height of money despots,” 10 per cent, of the people—making them a ruling class by operation of law. This system was conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniqfiity. The banking system carries on its work of plunder by a process—the devilish engineering of which they understand as thoroughly as ever Satan knew the plans by which he accomplished his schemes of sin. This process is inflation and contraction. .And the more effectually to carry on this murderous business of making the rich man richer and the poor man poorer, they subsidize the press to their interest. They take whole administrations under their control, and convert to their own base use the head-centers of the church of God. And having filled up by these means “ their army of villains,” they go forward.

They first inflate, send the business of the country forward at a whirlwind speed, then “ issue ” bank credits, filling the channels of trade as thickly as do the falling leaves the autumn ground. “Credit" is their motto. Bank checks, bank notes, bank credit does 991 per cent, of the business, and coin a half of 1 per cent. Thus England for a century has pushed forward her scheme of robbery. We are trying to reach it in this country, so that our ruin will be complete. Now this going up, this inflation, does not hurt like the reverses—the downward road. For 90 per cent, of the labor masses, as money in volume is abundant, increase the aggregate wealth as rapidly and as happily to themselves as does the busy bee in the blooming flower time, increase the honey in the hive. But from this height of bliss—this mountain-top of joy, where there is work for all and all work,-the fall to “hard pan.” to an “honest basis,” is to be sudden as death, and cruel as the grave. Labor is to be told—by those who have been the authors of “ inflation ” —that the toilers have been too active; that their too close and intense application to work, their joyous, heroic following of the industrial pursuits has brought upon the country a great calamity, an over-production. The people are told when the politicians have reached this stage that there are so many shoes that the people must go barefooted, that there are so many clothes that the people must go naked ; and there is such an abundance of food that the people must starve. At this point it is discussed that the other wheel of the “ bankers’ warder mill” has been stealthily at work—“contraction.” This device—as slyly as the assassin dees his worL —has, with noiseless step, passed down through the ruined fortunes and dying hopes of 90 per cent, of the business, and reached “hard pan.” The truth begins to be realized, as it never has been realized before, that inflation is in the main a blessing when applied to the whole body politic, because more than 90 per cent, of the entire population become active in all the pursuits of productive industry, and only about 10 per cent, are disagreeably affected—and that only in the particular of getting a less amount of commodities for their money than they would have got if there had been no inflation. , While this is true as to the increase in the volume of the money, contraction of the volume is appalling in its results. The contraction of the currency has, and always must, work an appalling destruction—a ruin of labor, of all productive and industrial pursuits. Read this authority : The danger of an unduly increasing money is theoretical and fanciful. The mischief which practically threatens the world, and which has been the most prolific cause of the social, political aud industrial ills which have afflicted it, is that of a decreasing and deficient money. It is from such a deficiency that mankind are now suffering, and it is the actual and present evil with which we have to contend.— Silver Commission , p. 61.