People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1895 — Who Shall Furnish the Money? [ARTICLE]

Who Shall Furnish the Money?

It is impossible to do business in this age of the world without 'money. Peop(p must have means of exchaning commodities, the old method of barter, swapping one thing for another, is too slow. Money must be furnished from some source, and it must be a uniform measure of values that will not vary from day to day, or from month to month, or from year to year. The fathers realized this, and provided in the national constitution that “the congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coins,” and they conferred this power on no one else. On the contrary, they provided the severest penalties upon those who should attempt to imitate or counterfeit the money thus made by authority of congress. They went still further and forbade the States, powers second only to the nation itself, from making anything but “gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts.”

Notwithstanding these safeguards thruwn around the important functions of making money, there has always been a class who claimed the high privilege of furnishing their CREDIT, issuing EVIDENCES OF THEIR own indebtedness, to circulate among the people as a medium of exchange and perlorm the functions of money. We can scarcely conceive an idea so absurd, and yet it is one to which the people have yielded, and from which they have suffered financially as from no other cause. As a result of this private and corporation credit money, manipulated and controlled in the interest of speculation, about every ten years have witnessed a financial panic that has swept fortunes from honest men, crushed men of business enterprise, wrecked homes and starved industrious work people.

There could be no more unsound money furnished the people, and the desperate efforts of the government to make it sound by hedging it in with laws that compel the purchase of bonds for a basis, the hoarding of reserves, official protection, etc,, proves this. And yet it is unhound, a lie, a delusion and a snare—a means of buildingup aprivileged class and plundering the great body of the nation’s people who are producers. Better far would it be to wipe out this system even if nothing else were provided to take its place. The stopping of the drain of interest on bonds and the release of the reserve would better serve the people as a currency than the evidences of the debts of these corporations. But we are not driven to this alternative. “The Congress shall have power to coin money and regulate the value thereof,” says the constitution. To coin is “to stamp and convert into

money,” says Webster, the lexicographer. The United States may issue paper money and make it a legal tender in peace as well as in war, says the Supreme Court. What more is ndeded ? The general government draws from the people of the United States about $500,000,000 every year to pay its expenses: Suppose, in addition to coining the gold and silver as provided by the earliest laws of the nation,it should meet one-half of these expenses by an issue of legal tender paper money, or so much thereof as shall be necessary to maintain a definite per capita circulation, by an issue of legal tender paper money as it did to meet the expenses of the war. How soon would the money question be settled, prosperity insured, and panics made imposssible ? Whom would it hurt ? Only the issuers of money, a privileged class that has always been a dangerous class, and so held by the greatest statesmen of the world—a class that has been the bane and ruin of all’other nations. God help the people to see what is the matter with them !

But the struggle now on is to turn the entire business of money making over to these corporations. That is what the gold standard means. Gold coin will not meet the demand for money. It cannot. There is not enough of it. It will not circulate. It compels the people to do business on the debts of a privileged class, that will, before another quarter of a century own all that is valuable in the country. It cannot be otherwise. They own and hold the money, and sell their debts to the people to do business on. If any one were to propose such an absurdity in any other line of human enters rise, he would be confined withe in the walls of an asylum for th insane!—Progressive Farmer.