People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 November 1895 — To Destroy The Greenback. [ARTICLE]

To Destroy The Greenback.

Half a dozen leading goldite organs have suddenly come out with editorials on the same day, saying that “debt is money,” meaning that every form of government paper money is a debt, therefore it is not money and must be abolished. The concerted action of these journals shows that the movement springs from a headquarters, and it is the intent of these papers to do all they can in forcing the government out of what thev call the banking business —that is, out of issuing the money of the nation. The idea at the base of the bove quotation is a condemnation of their own advice to the government in the first place ever to make its paper money, in appearance at least, a debt. This was deme at the instigation of the money lenders during the war, when all attempts in congress at that time to make the greenback a declared dollar and a full legal tender, nonredeemable in anything, were defeated by these money lenders, who succeded in wording the law as if the government owed a debt in the issue of that form of money. In point of fact there is no debt about it, and that fact is dow recognized in the monthly treasury reports, which have recently removed greenqaeks, ect., from the category or classification of debt. The government qwes nobody anything for its greenbacks, but the above newspapers, in conjunction with money lenders are striving to deceive the public into thinking that it does, merely to make a point for the greenbacks’ extinction. On this point one of the above newspapers said. “The greenbacks were issued during the war for services and supplies with which to carry on the war. They were notes in precisely the sense that a merchant’s promise to pay is a note. They never were and never can be anything

else. They are promises to pay, evidence of debt. That is the kind of false reasoning this clique is putting forward in order to destroy, first, the greenback, then ail other forms of government paper money. These greenbacks bear no resemblance whatever to a merchant’s note. A merchant’s note is given in exchange for merchant’s note is given in exchange for goods, end when it matures it must be met in legal tender money the greenback is. Money is nothing but a legal tender for debt. The legal tender tendered is all that money can do, no matter which the government issuing it. Gold is merely legal tender money when so coined. Remove its legal tender quality, and it ceases to be money. Money is the final thing which can be used in making exchanges of merchandise. That is what it is issued for. To call money a debt merely because it is exchangeable into another form of money, then to be reissued on its own account, as is the case with the greenbacks, and comparing it with a merchant’s note is an unfortunate ignorance of what money is and what it is used for. Every greenbacker has since deplored the money lenders’ influence when the greenbacks were made redeemable into anything except themselves. It was a crime against the people when the money lenders at that time succeeded in their purpose for the, greenbacks should be nonredeemable, precisely as are the notes of the Bank of France to-day. Then, when the greenback is made to read in the law of its issue that it is one dollar, irrespective of any redeemability, all confusion such as the above journals are striving to engender at once ceases. But these above journals are merely carrying out a prearranged policy of the Rothchild “ring” in its intent to force the

American people to go to them (the “ring”) for the gold then made necessary to carry on United States trade. —Philadelphia Daily Item.