Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1878 — Business Failures. [ARTICLE]

Business Failures.

The Sherman crash is working up, up. First it shipwrecked the workingman. Now it spends its force on the men of business. But the rich man of fixed income is safe enough. Whatever he wants to buy he can have it at half price. He has lent on house or lands half their value, or less. He can now take the house or land, and send the owner adrift. But he won’t do it. He knows better than that. Here is a big example, and the little examples count by millions: Ben Wood, brother of Fernando, our Congressional tariff tinker, buys a house for $150,000, pays $50,000; balance on bond and mortgages; interest $7,000 a year; taxes SI,OOO or $2,000. Ben’s newspaper business falls off. He can’t pay those heavy, ever-recurring sums. He begs the former owner to take the house off his hands—Ben losing the $50,000 he has paid. No! the mortgagee has no notion of it. He will foreclose, buy in the property as cheap as he can, and hold Ben or his bond for the balance. It is done. The house Ben had bought for $150,000 now sells for $40,000. Ben loses his $50,000, and is held on his bond for $60,000 more. To escape from this

he takes refuge under the Bankrupt law, and even that law is about to be repealed, so that tae debtor will always be held to stagger under the debt, discouraged and kept down by it to the end of his life. The careless, selfish, stupid “business men” are now paying the heavy penalty of their public apathy. They saw that the country was going to ruin under the choking grasp of John Sherman and a frail Congre s—or, rather, they did not see it. They did not lift up their eyes to see it or to look around them at all. “ What is hops worth ? Is flour, sugar, hides, Jumper, coal, up or down this morning ?” That was their continuous thought. If on “ ’change,” they saw nothing but what was “ changing” there. If behind the counter attending customers, that counter and their wares and the customers were the whole world to them. Supine and submissive to all public wrong, they offered a big, ripe harvest to the reaper of Sherman, Shylock, Syndicate, Scoundrel Sc Company. That company had nothing to do but mow down the harvest and gather it in. And what has it come to now ? Financial wrecks ! failures, comprising $750,000, in New York city in the month just closed ; and 150 applications in bankruptcy in the same place and the same time. So events succeed each other. First, the millions es workingmen are thrown idle—thrown into a condition of suffering that never, never can be computed. Next, and from the same cause, crash come the business houses in one widening ruin—one falling firm pulling the other down, one burning house setting fire to the next one, and no end seen to either the “ falling ” or the “ fire.” —lrish World.