People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 November 1893 — THE GOLD STANDARD. [ARTICLE]

THE GOLD STANDARD.

It Enable* the Creditor Nations to Dominate the Debtor Nations. Ab there are in all the world but about $3,600,000,000 in gold; in money, on a gold basis, Great Britain completely dominates the world. Worldwide financial disorders are prevailing, owing to the efforts of money lenders, for their own profit, to establish gold as the single and universal money standard, without the gold being in existence to meet such extensive and universal use, even if gold were equally distributed among the nations of the earth. Much more serious than a general lack of gold for all the world’s monetary uses, is the unequal distribution of gold among the various nations. Some have much, others but little, some nene. As related to us, Great Britain has the financial strength of a great creditor nation; the United States the financial weakness of a great debtor nation. Our gold can be called from us, whenever the interests, necessities, or caprices of foreign investors, or creditors dictate the call. And we are helpless to resist these calls, as long as we, in practice, maintain the single gold standard; as witness the current financial history of the day. On the single gold standard, with the present great demand for, and limited supply of gold, no debtor nation can maintain such gold standard, as against a creditor nation, except by sufferance. Practically, the United States are borrowing gold on call. In this regard we have no independence, whatever. Let the United States, by legal enactment, or otherwise, make gold the exclusive money basis, and we will be a completely ruined people. As the result of what has been done by the government of the United States already, and as the result of what is foreshadowed, the industries of this country have been paralyzed; business men have been thrown out of employment, and a universal depreciation of property values has occurred, east, west, north and south; everywhere throughout the, United States, and to an amount, within the last six months, equal to the whole money cost of the late war. For whose benefit is this? Not the people of industry, for they are suffering. This wreck and ruin is for the profit of the money lenders of Europe and the United States. Out of the depreciated property values in railroad and other kinds of investments, the money lenders select their prey at their own prices, and those who before were exhorbitantly rich become richer at the expense of and by sacrificing the men of industry, who are the stay and support of the nation. The money lenders and their advocates say they do not want cheap money. For once, they have not lied. They do not want cheap money. They want it as dear as by any possibility they can make it. But there is no cheap money in the United States. Of whatever material it may be; in whatever form it may exist; to whatever issue in money form the laws give the money function; all is equally money in the United States, to pay all debts and obligations, and to purchase all kinds and forms of property. In the effort to exclude silver from the mone5 r use in the United States, which the money lenders falsely call eheap money, the money lenders have made cheap labor, cheap farms, cheap factories, cheap wheat, cheap corn, cheap cotton, cheap everything, among us, that has its value measured by money, and a cheap nation, for all we have seems to be in the market, at the depreciated prices fixed by the money lenders.—Cor. National View.