Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1878 — GREENBACK CURRENCY. [ARTICLE]

GREENBACK CURRENCY.

A National Paper Mtoney—lta Importance— Coin and Specie-Redemption Currency Costly and Necessarily Dishonest. The institution of a national paper money, redeemable only in and by the exchanges it makes, to contract and expand at the will of those who pay for and use it, in strict agreement with the laws of economic science, at cost, is the money which an advancing civilization imperatively demands. Inasmuch, therefore, as all laws derive their qualities from the government principles which underlie them, and the law which institutes a money being the most fundamental law in a nation, it becomes all-important for the people te know upon what basis of justice, or otherwise, such laws are instituted. Money is not a mere commodity, but an authenticated medium or instrument of exchange clothed with sovereign power, as much so as a judgment or decree of court. If wisely instituted, by it labor is compensated and property economically and justly distributed. But if a mere corporate wealth-gathering power, labor will not be compensated nor property equitably distributed; and this wrong increases in a geometrical ratio in every exchange subsequent to the first. Coin and coin-redemption currency necessarily cost very much in excess of the value of their use. As the object of an exchange through a money medium is to make commodity pay for commodity, and labor pay for labor at the least cost, an absolute paper money redeemable only in and by the articles it exchanges, can and will be, if properly instituted, a reliable money, at less than one-tenth the cost of a coin or coin-redemption currency. The latter moneys, therefore, being unnecessarily costly, are dishonest, because they impose burdens on the people not required for the purpose of making for them an honest, reliable money, blit to create the greatest gains to a money-monopoly class. Hence, freedom, advancement and civilization demand the institution of an honest, economical, non-coin-redeemable paper money —that of serfdom, barbarism and despotism, non-improvement and nonadvancement coin and coin-redemption currency. On the proper solution of this important financial question largely depends the future well-being of the industrial and business classes of this nation.

Currency-contraction and gold-fund-ing by the National Government, under the specious but false pretense to inaugurate specie payments, has brought on a financial crisis or crash of unprecedented severity. Such ever has been and are the bitter fruits of this wicked financial system. A crisis is the natural result or end reached when it ’is not possible for the people longer to subsist under civil or ooclooicmtioo.! ortlai* previously existing. This end, when reached, is called a crisis. It is a judgment or winding up of a bankrupting government system. These crashes, therefore, are a general judgment day upon and against the labor* and business classes and in favor of the money kings of the corporate class. For ten long years the pirate chiefs of this barbaric specie-gold-bond-funding-and-currency-contracting system, by all the wicked appliances which the concentrated wickedness of the ages has devised, have been gathering their harvests, but, ana-conda-like, they have not been able to digest the prey with which they are gorged. At length, however, there are symptoms that we are nearing an end of this carnival; the Bankrupt act has been repealed, the lords of the treasury and gold-room are remodeling their fiscal contrivances, and business and labor classes are being leveled down to a common serf or proletaire herd. This new role of syndicate despotism was in augurated by McCulloch and is now being relentlessly carried out by Sherman.

Hence it is that our political struggle has just this significance: the Government regime, which had its origin in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution adopted upon our final separation from England, was brought to a close by the slaveholders’ rebellion. Their despotic reign has ended. But the twin relic of African slavery, the guild corporate branch of feudal slavery and heir-loom of English despotism, has mounted the vacant throne and seeks to found an oligarchy of corporate dollars. The slaveholders’ dynastic rule was a divine-right institution which originated with Moses, and was sanctified by laws coeval with the creation of man, and was deliberately incorporated into the constitution of the United States. But the oligarchy of corporate dollars are not to be outdone in traditionary legends. Their money, too, is of divineright origin, for the Supreme Being, it is impiously claimed, placed this royal gold and silver deep in the bowels of earth, that man, by hard digging, might find a divinely-ordained representative measure and standard of value by which all other values are to be measured. If Moses did not institute it Aaron did, and, like African slavery, it is sanctified by laws and customs of all ages and nations, and was a divinity measure; enthroned in the constitution, to be regulated by Congress and ornamented with the likeness of a calf, or beast, or bird of prey, as may be thought bestsuited to the genius of our free institutions. Hence the intense desire of the money changers or the clothes-selling Jews of modern times has nothing mercenary in it. It is only and purely the love of justice, divine-right gold and silver, honest, royal value • measures, which makes them so ardently desire the precious metals—with only a little variation—their immaculate specieredemption wild-cat national currency. But notwithstanding the supereminent merit of divine, right, royal money, that our financial distress and ruin has come from this source, through Congressional enactment and treasury administration in line with the despotisms of the European world, is a truth so plain that the wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein. Hence the pretense that the efforts of the Government to perpetuate this iniquitous system, under the guise of an effort to create an honest money, is a disguise so thin that nobody ought to be deceived by it. It is not true, and the people ought by this time to understand that the Lombard and Wall street and specie-redemp-tion-gold-bond-syndicate of McCulloch, Sherman & Co. is to rob by, while the honest, national paper money, which the people desire to take its place, is a cheap, honest medium of

exchange, invaluable because it gives to them as human beings a reasonable chance to live and enjoy the fruits of their labor, and is in fact the only secure foundation upon which the money ;of a free nation can be based. They, i the people, do not want to escape Scylla —the State wild-cat-redemptioq system —to perish in Charybdis—this national wild-cat maelstrom, engineered by the i Secretary of the National Treasury of bondholders. 41 Hence comes the howl of the syndicate, through its Government agencies, reiterated by the corrupt leaders of the old political parties and a venal public press, against our inflated national paper money. Oh! what untold wickedness there is in such vile, worthless rag-money. How it has cheated the people! True; it enabled them to receive the fruits of their labor to an extent unknown in the history of the world. They bought, paid for, and improved more land, built more miles of railroad and more houses, made more improvements in cities, towns and country, in the period of about eight years, than was ever done in any other period of twenty-five years since we were a nation. But then, it is said that the increased prices, which were the product of increased demand and decreased sup|>iy of commodities, was all inflation. These lands, railroads and other material improvements are all gross inflated things, all dross as compared with the precious metals and specie-redemption currency; and it is therefore necessary to take the inflation out of these gross substances, that royal gold may reign supreme and rule. Hence the people are told their lands are drossy, and they must be content to come down to the hard-pan of specie payment quit this extravagance —and pay off their honest debts, by a surrender of their lands, their homes, goods, wares and merchandise into the hands of the saviors of this world—royal gold and silver—engineered by the Kings and potentates, bank presidents, gold gamblers, and stock jobbers, and that a national paper money which is not enthroned on their gold and silver gods by specie-redemption laws, and coin legal tender, will defraud the people as badly as did the specie-redeemable Continental or the land-dividing-assignat-redemption scheme of the French Revolution, or the cotton-planting-land-emi-gration - and - stock - jobbing - bubble-act scheme of John Law—never intimating, however, that all these were but revolutionary and speculative branches of their own immaculate specie-redemp-tion-swindling scheme; nor do they ever mention that other important item touching the coin swindles, to-wit: that outside of the fact that the history of coinage is for a thousand years a history of counterfeiting and cheating by the European Governments; that the boasted uniform-ly-high prices of gold and silver in the norma] condition of the industries of IIHtIODS 1b fn mu 20 Lu <lO per ooikL. on gold and silver and more than 75 per cent, on copper, nickeland bronze above the market value of these metals —if divested of their coinage Dagon laws—all which will in a subsequent chapter be more fully shown and demonstrated, being only mentioned here to present a correct outline of this barbaric, despotic system. Hence, then, I unhesitatingly declare that specie and specie redemption is a serf-Government money, in perfect unison with the clumsy, bruteforce, royal, man-worship Governments of the Old World, and answers well all their designs, viz.: the centralization of power and the robbery and brutalization of labor—from whence has come the enormous wealth of the few and the grandeur and despotism of the state.