Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 July 1878 — BONDS, SYNDICATES, TAXES. [ARTICLE]

BONDS, SYNDICATES, TAXES.

It is always a good thing to count the cost of any luxury before indulging too extravagantly in it, especially so when one has to mortgage himself, his farm, his future, his life, and his daily earnings to pay that cost United States bonds, it was thought when they were issued, were absolutely essential as a means of raising money. Men had not comprehended the great truth that a people who will not rely on themselves will not be trusted by others. Bonds had long been the means of loaning money, and the past not only favored the plan, but the men who had money to loan favored it. They knew the United States would pay all they agreed to pay. They knew that the demand for money was so urgent, to meet the alarming expenses of the war, that capital, by holding back, by magnifying dangers, increased by the daily increasing necessities for money, and by hourly coij uring uptl e difficulties and dangers of civil war, could demand any usury the wildest apprehension of a bankrupt treasury could justify. Gold, as it always does when it is required, at once disappeared, even what there was of it; but there was not gold enough in the United States, or which could have been forced from all the coin resources of England, to meet the war expenses of 1862-3 4 for two months. Money had to be raised. It was the price of constitutional liberty, and, whatever the cost, it must be procured. No difficulty was found in using and negotiating our treasury certificates or interest notes; and if the statesmen of the time had possessed the courage to defy and put down the senseless clamor of capital against paper money there would have been no necessity for the issuing a single bond outside of the United States. With the money held by savings banks and the disposition to invest in United States securities by men of moderate means, if we had dared to have relied upon ourselves, and issued greenbacks as absolute money, to meet any and every emergency, we should have saved to the United States more than 53,000,000,000, and would have been stronger as a Government, more united as a people, more prosperous in our enterprises, than ever before ; but we dared not trust ourselves, and the question comes up, Why was it that the people of the United States dare not trust themselves to issue their own money ? In answering this question I shall hope to show not only the exact fallacy of the fear, but the enormous cost the yielding to the derisive clamor of capital has imposed upon us. The old idea upon which capital has made labor its slave was that gold and silver were the only safe basis as a medium of exchange ; that all bills issued, and circulated as money, must be redeemable in gold and silver, and that vowar oi dangerous ; that to issue bills to meet the war expenses, and to pay for all we required, would soon create an excess of paper—an excess so great as to preclude any possible idea of finding gold and silver to redeem it; that this excess would create distrust, distrust depreciation, and that the result of the depreciation would be that the money issued by the Government of the United States would become as worthless as the French assignat—the paper money issued by Fiance during the F etich R solution—or as valueless as the Continental money issued by the colonies before they had consolidated into governmental unity and power, or again as destitute of reliability as the paper money issued by the Southern Confederacy while rebels were attempting to disrupt the Union.

Timid men, ignorant of all the reasons which led to the failure of the assignat of the French, the Continental currency of the colonies, and the baseless bills of the Southern Confederacy, placed the United States in the exact position of the Revolutionists without Government, constitutional power, or resources. As France, at the time the assignat was issued, was without a Government, the colonies were united by no political or governmental obligations, and, as the Southern Confederacy was a mere revolutionary experiment, the bonds given by either of these merely revolutionary combinations would have been as utterly valueless as the currency they issued. With the United States Government it was admitted that the bonds would be good, while at the same time it was insisted that the bills they might issue as money would be as worthless as the French assignat, which at first had no foundation for a basis but jobbery, which was killed by forgery. It was upon this baseless fallacy that the bonds of the Government were forced up?n the market at the price of gold. To convince the communitiesand to create a political excuse for issuing bonds, gold, which could not be obtained and which by no possibility could be procured, was made the standard of value by which the standard of the value of the greenback was to be measured. Gold at one time went to a premium of 247 for 100, so that, according to the standard, the greenback was 40 -to 42. They then fixed the value of the bond at the price the greenback would bring in gold. Congress was duped into aiding this trick to reduce the value of the bond to the standard of the greenback measured by gold in that way. If the greenback was issued as a full legal tender for all purposes, it would be absolute money. If absolute money, then it would do what gold would do. Bankers and brokers and usurers and capitalists combined to prevent this. They appealed to the Senate. They said: If the greenback is issued as a full legal tender, you will soon destroy its value, for you will have to issue so many bills and so large amounts that ycu will glut the market, and they will depreciate and become as valueless is the assignat. To prevent this they provide that they shall not be received for revenue duties, nor for interest on the public debt, for unless you do this you cannot sell your bonds, for to make your bonds available you must make the interest payable in gold, and you cannot get the gold to pay the interest unless you require your revenue duties to be paid in gold. The Senate was duped by this cut-throat argument. The result was just what was anticipated. As the Government repudiated its own money, anl would not receive it for duties, and as it would not pay interest on the public debt, bankers, brokers, and usurers depreciated the greenback till they reduced its comparative value, as measured by gold, down to 42 up to 65. This, these same Shylocks made the measure of the value of the bonds. Then everybody who had money bought

the bonds, getting $2 for sl, in bonds made payable in coin, with interest payable in gold. A more monstrous swindle never was imposed c n the people. The credit of the Government, forced down by depreci atiog the greenback, was so low flint capit 1 also forced Congress to exempt the bonds from taxes before it would consent to take them. And yet, all the time, while the whole brood of Wall street sharps was at work to depreciate the greenback, they insisted that the bonds was the tiue way of saving the credit of the Government; they slandered the greenback, and lied it into depreciation, to get the bonds measured in value by the greenback at half their nominal anJ absolute value.

Keeping up their assault upon the greenback, continually prophesviog that they would be as worthless as Continental money, and declaring that they were being printed by steam power, and in such quantities as to have to keep all the paper-mills in the country at full head to supply the paper for the rag money, these same bankers, brokers and usurers finally said; “ Well, we will not take your bonds unless you will make them the basis for banking, and give us an issue of bills equal to the amount of the bonds, and grant us a mom poly of banking privileges. Your greenbacks will soon be good for nothing, and unless you enlist the banking capital of the country to give character and credit to the p per money of the country, the credit of the nation will be ruined.” Again Congress became the dupes, and added to the purchasers of bonds the further inducement of giving them S9O of bills, guaranteed by the Government, with every SIOO of bonds, to lend out as money at con p mnd interest.

Thus the bankers, brokers and usurers, by depreciating and causing the Government to repudiate its own greenback money—every dollar of which was intrinsically as good as gold, as they represented absolute solvency and absolute ability—they got for every $42 SIOO in bonds, an interest payable in gold, and equal to 9j per cent, and equal to 25 per cent, on the investment, and 90 per cent, in bills at compound interest, which facts show have earned 9} per cent, which would be 19 per cent, more, which, added to the 25 per cent. , makes 44 per cent. Add to this the interest received on bank deposits, which averaged the full amount of the capital of the banks in bonds, and equals 18 per cent, more on the actual investment, and aggregates 62 per cent, annual income on every dollar invested, so that the amount stands as follows: Amount actually invested $42,000. Amount realized in bonda bearing gold interest SIOO,OOO Amount national-bank bills to lend 90,1.00 Amount of deposits, on which banks made loans 150 000 The $42,000 realizes the use of $310,000 Amount of income on above: Interest, payable in gold, average 50 per cent, premium at 6 per cent, in gold $ 9,000 Interest on bills loaned, being compounded on 30, 60 and 90 day paper, equal to per cent 8,550 " *> J • l>eeu equal to the whole capital, at 9% per cent 9,500

. To 1 al annual income (on original $12,000).527 150 Thus showing that an investment in United States bonds by the bank usurers of $42,000 earned an annual profit of $27,050, and that without taxation, or about 62 per cent, dividends to be paid by the tax-burdened people, without the slightest earthly benefit, to a monopoly of bank aristocrats, who now proclaim it to be their duty and mission to reduce American labor to the lowest standard of European pauperized wages. All of this time the standard of responsibility of the Government was exactly the same for greenbacks as it was for bonds, except only that the bonds bore interest and the greenbacks did not.

The banks have in this way filched from the people of the United States, in the fourteen sum of $1,559,285,941.34, making an aristocracy of prwer, of wealth, and of associated impudence and privileges which to-day defies the Government and threatens civil liberty. Every dollar of this monstrous leech would have been saved to the people and to the Government if the Government had issued greenbacks as full and absolute legal tender for all debts, public and private, in place of issuing bonds.

Again, if the Government had issue-1 greenbacks instead of bonds, and made a sinking fund of the sum paid for interest on the bonds, we should to-day have gold enough in the treasury or its equivalent to have redeemed every dollar that would have been issued, and have thus been free from any national debt. These are not random statements, they are concrete facts. The interest-bearing debt, April 1, 1876, was as follows: Principal. Interest $lB4 999 65U at 6 per centss9.i 99.979 00 ■s7l* .037 090 at 5 per cent 35,!M 1,850 00 $23,181,360, miscellaneous at 6 percent. 1,391,0i1. 0 Total annual interest;s9>.992,B>o 60 This is about the present amount of annual interest we are paying for the enjoyment of the bond luxury. The in-terest-bearing debt has been steadily decreased since 1866, and is now $482,431,080 less than it was then; so that, taking the aver ge for fourteen years, the interest has been at the rate of $111,494,779.20 yearly in gold. Had this sum been funded it would have been hundreds of millions more than our national debt. This is a proximate estimate of what it has cost the Government to build up a bond-banking aristocracy at the expense of every interest but money, making the laborer a slave to capital, industry a h reling to money-bags, and the Government a dupe to usurers. But this is far from all. The taxes on $1,600,000,000, at 2 per cent., is $32,000,000 annually, which has been taken from the bond-aristocracy to be imposed on the betrayed and insulted producer. All of the capital and all the profits—all the exemptions grown, by fourteen years of outrage, into immense proportions of capital and power—are now consolidated to secure the continuance of bond and bank monopolies. It is the absolute duty of Congress to put an end to the infamous extortion from the people. It must be the issue in every Con gressional district: Bank monopolies or no bank monopolies; tax exemptions or no tax exemptions; syndicates and bonds or no syndicates and no bonds; the sovereign money of the people—the greenback—absolute as a universal legal tender and irredeemable, or nationalbank sovereignty. These are questions and issues that cannot be skipped over or neglected. We want no more bonds; we want no more syndicates. The American people can get along without any red-shield dictation as to who shall buy bonds,

or who shall dictate the expenditure of their money; and they will not submi* to any system of finances which will place the Government or the people in sul j action to Jews, to syndicates, or to corporations. Bon Is and syndicates are the curse of the land. The people demand an issue of greenbacks as absolute money adequate to pay all the bonds—adequate to sweep*away all the national banks, al) monopolies, all privileges, all syndicates, and if the present Congress does not understand the demand we will elect a Congress that does. It is such outrages that give birth to revolutions. The outrage must cease or it will be made to cease. Stephen D. Dxllaye. Tbknton, N. J.