People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 June 1895 — THE PUBLIC DEBT. [ARTICLE]

THE PUBLIC DEBT.

A MOST STUPENDOUS FRAUD AND SWINDLE. The American People Have Drank Too Deep at the Fount of Liberty to Submit to Enslavement by the Bond Schemes of Europe. The interest bearing public debt is a burden which never ought to have been imposed upon the nation. It is the most stupendous fraud and swindle ever perpetrated upon a free people. It was conceived in fraud, and brought fourth in iniquity. It was a scheme to rob of people after they had emancipated 4,000,000 at the sacrifice of rivers of blood, and millions of treasure. Before the legal tender act had passed the threshold of legislation, it was met by the money sharks of Wall street. * * * We will show you how and why they opposed it. We are told that on the 11th of January, only four days after the introduction of the bill, the wolf-howl that had during the time, echotd from bank to bank, called to Washington a convention of the money power, consisting of four delegates frem New York banks, three from Philadelphia and three from Boston. * * * What arguments were used, or what undue influences were brought to bear upon the law-makers of the government will probably never be known. Every greenback that wenat out to fight the nation's battles was accompanied by a bond shark. to gobble it up, as soon as it had performed its service. The act of 1862, athorizing the issue of the first $150,000,000 of greenbacks, authorized $500,000,000 of bonds to absorb them. There was never a dry day, after the passage of the first legal tender act, but what the government was in possession of all the money it needed, of its own creation without borrowing a dollar or selling a bond. The only object of the bond was to enable the money sharks again to get control of the money of the country, which they never could do without the bond. The government established the fact that it could meet all its obligations. purchase all its supplies and defray every expense by its own legal tender; and if so, what what was the necessity of borrowing? You answer that the bonds were accessary to absorb the excess, occasioned by the extraordinary demands of war. I deny that there was an excess. Let only him dare assert it who had more than he had use for. Even if there was an excess the bonds did nut diminish it. The excess has only been transferred from the pockets of laborers and wealth producers to those of usurers, importers and international dealers. Every bond is used as money. They are used by English capitalists to buy American cotton and bread stuffs, and by American dealers to purchase imports. Just in the proportion as the people’s money has been contracted, that of the money king has been inflated. That their inflated paper bond money may be current all over the world, they require it to draw interest, and that they may be relieved of the burden of such interest they compel labor and its producers to pay all the axes.

The difference to the people of A merica letween the greenbacks before they were converted into bonds and the bonds, is a* follows: The fifteen hundred million dollars of greenbacks earned their owners nothing while lying idle. In bonds they earn their owners fully as much. while resting in their fcafes. The people and taxpayers got tired of this. If they are to be taxed to support the government, they claim the benefits of the government and taxation. \\ hen bonds are given for the loan of money, and that mtnrav circulated among the people, they can afford t-o bear the burdefls of the debt; but when such bonds are given, to absord ind destroy the pe-pie’s money, thus creating new burdens, by destroying the very- m»*ans necessary to bear t".- '<se already existing, the sufferers wul refuse to submit to the outrage. It matters not what the result might be, the American people have drank too deep at the fount of liberty, to submit to be enslaved by’ bond fraud schemes of Europe.—Labor and Finance Revolution. • Give the people a vote on the de-, struotion of greenbacks and they will not be destroyed. Typpwrlters Like to Be Petted. Typewriter girls are said to grow attached to their machines, and to regard them almost as much in the light of living creatures to be petted and managed and judiciously disciplined as the traditional railroad engineers of fiction do their locomotives, to which they invariably refer with the personal feminine pronoun. The typewri ing young women declare that their machines are as sensitive and subject to caprice, ant- that they know who is opera-ing them as well as a dog knows its master, that they will sulk,* and perhaps flare up and refuse to work at ail. under unskilled manipulation. and that they can be soothed into a complacent and obliging frame of mind again simply by the return of their usual m it:' -r