People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1893 — HARTER ANSWERED. [ARTICLE]

HARTER ANSWERED.

A Banker** Reply to a Letter from Congressman Harter. Some time ago Congressman Harter, of Ohio, who is a rank monometallist, sent out a circular letter to all the bankers in the United States, urging them to keep up their efforts until silver was thoroughly demonetized. Among the replies he received was one from the president of the Lafayette bank at Lexington, Ma It is interesting reading, and the main features of the letter are given: Hon. M. D. Harter: A printed circular sent by you over the country asking for the expression of an opinion on the present law for the purchasing of silver bullion by the government reached me, too. Though doubting you want this answer, I send it Thomas Jefferson said the art of government was the art of being honest I worked with the party founded by Jefferson until absolutely sure that you and other leaders of it are just 180 degrees of the circle away from Jefferson. You know as well as I do—everybody knows—that the constitution never gave congress the power to demonetize silver. You know that it was fraudulently carried through congress; that Ernest Seyd was sent over to this country by a London and Frankfort firm of bankers to aid in the raid on our constitution. You know their allies, puppets and hired men in this country carried ou£ their wishes, fbr the benefit of the Frankfort-London bank ring. Nobody ought to blame the bankers of Frankfort and London for keeping Gentiles forever in bond, for they have been persecuted for twenty centuries. But for an American to become their hired servant or make himself a member of their ring and help to plunder his own countrymen in order to slave the spoils, no word in twenty languages can furnish for him a true and expressive name. That some demonetizes are honest in their opinions I well know. But your opportunities for knowing the question thoroughly, are such that I give you no such credit As an American business men, as a banker who has studied the financial problem for twenty years from a broader standpoint than personal greed, I think that the present law should stand until a return to the coinage of the constitution takes its place. I do not see that the constitution gives gold mine owners a monopoly of furnishing and holding the only thing that will pay a debt. The county in which I live has a large debt. When it was made all the gold and silver in the world could have been turned into American money to the desire of the owners. We pay that debt with wheat, corn, hogs, cattle and .other products of the farm. Because gold and silver were thus monetizable, money was plenty, a large quantity of them could be had for a given quantity of farm produce. We paid 10 per cent on our county debt us annual interest. Wheat was about fl. 50 per bushel. Now we have reduced the Interest to 5 per cent and wheat is 50 cents per bushel and under. The real rate of interest paid is higher now than then, though the nominal interest is lower. This is because money had been made scarce by the raid on the constitution. I was in this bank for ten years when it was like an arsenal, and in six years’ time seven banks were raided and eight men killed in a circle whose radius wai not over seventy-five miles. The men who did that had exactly the same principles that the members of the ring have whose mouthpiece you are in congress, and they had personal courage. Your ring is plundering in a way in which personal courage is not required. Geoboe Wilson.