People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1893 — We Told You So. [ARTICLE]

We Told You So.

For sixteen years, the Greenbackers, Grangers and Knights of Labor have not ceased to decry against the wricked, absurd, and ruinous financial policy of this government. It is wicked, in that it has, at the instigation of domestic and foreign creditors, established a standard of payment more valuable than that in which the debts were created. It is absurd, in that it creates money, declared to be legal, tender for all debts, public and private, and then refuses- to use that money in the payment of its war debts and allows the people to contract debts that cannot be paid in full lqgal tender money. It is ruinous, in that the standard of payment is so limited that prices paid for all agricultural products barely covers the cost of production, which will ultimately end in national bankruptcy. The experience and observation of every farmer is that the prices of all agricultural productions have been forced down so that holders of our securities abroad could and would take farm products instead of gold; for upon them they could make a profit on the Other side of the water, a thing tney could not do with gold. The experience and observation of our agriculturist is not the only proof of the last proposition. We have the declaration of the Chicago Tribune some five years ago, that gold payments had been maintained at the expense of the agriculturists. It argued that the tariff should be so reduced that our manufactured articles could be sold abroad, thereby placing a portion of the burden of maintaining the gold standard upon the manufacturers. It has been clearly seen by those who have watched the trend of financial affairs in this nation, that the continual increase of our indebtedness abroad in gold contracts, and continued investment of foreign capital in this country, the dividends of which are payable in gold, and the continued fall in the prices of the agricultural products; that the time was not far distant when our surplus products would not meet the drain, and we would be compelled to send gold. We have now reached that point. When the gold is gone, and it soon will be, we will be in the position of the Argentine Republic, have out a promise to pay and nothing to pay with. We have due foreigners, fourteen billions with an annual interest of eight hundred millions. They command us through our boards of trade to sell our products at such and such prices. We refuse, then they demand gold, whereupon Wall street and all their harpies yell panic, panic, and down goes all prices. Such is our condition to-day, and thinking men have known for twenty years that it was surely coming. What remedy do our so called statesmen propose, the Harrisons, Glevelands, Shermans and others? Why, sell bonds, nothing else. Now can’t a fool see* that is no remedy? Don’t they know that is piling the debt higher and making the drain greater, that it only aggravates the evil it is intended to cure.

Had we maintained the double standard, coined all our silver, and paid it out wherever we had a legal right, silver would have retained its commercial value and our condition would have been prosperous in the highest degree. Our present condition would have been prosperous in the highest degree. Our present condition is the inevitable outcome of the suicidal financial policy inaugurated by the Republican party. Our only way out is to reverse that policy, stimulate production and rigid economy.