People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1896 — BOND IS A VAMPIRE. [ARTICLE]

BOND IS A VAMPIRE.

national debt has never BEEN REDUCED ONE CENT. John Clark Kid path, LL. D., Dlkohs the Devilish Work of the Shylork* Through the Agencies of the Bond and the Dollar.The Road: John Clark Ridpath, LL. D., has an article in the January number of the Arena which should be read and pondered upbn by every producer in the country and by every man and woman who has the welfare of our country at heart. The article referred to is the first of a series of three upon “The Bond and the Dollar,” and describes “The Genesis and Evolution of a Monster.” The schemes resorted to by the money power, the results so far, and the inevitable slavery sure to follow soon if something is not done to dethrone the Shylocks who turned the greenbacks into an interest-bearing, bonded debt and forced the single gold standard upon us, are depicted by a master hand. John Clark Ridpath can hardly be laughed down as a “crank” or his utterances characterized as “vagaries.” He is a scholarly gentleman who has an international reputation as a historian; his “History of the United States,” “The Seven Great Races of Mankind,” “History of the World,” etc., being recognized everywhere as standard works. He looks at the question of “The Bond and the Dollar” from the standpoint of the historian, and reaches conclusions which every honest reformer can endorse as true. The article should be read in full to be thoroughly appreciated—get a copy of the January Arena and keep it for reference. In his description of the “Genesis and Evolution of a Monster,” the authoi says in part: “War preys on two things —life and property; but he preys with a partial appetite. Feasting on life, he licks his jaws and says. ‘More, by your leave.’ Devouring property, he says, between grin and glut, ‘This is so good that it ought to be paid for.’ Into the vacuum of the wasted life rush the moaning winds of grief and desolation; into the vacuum of the wasted property rushes the goblin of debt. The wasted life is transformed at length Into a reminiscent glory; the wasted property becomes a hideous nightmare. The heroes fallen rise from their bloody cerements into everlasting fame; the property destroyed rises from the red and flame-swept field as a spectral vampire, sucking the still warm blood of the heroic dead and of their posthumous babes to the tenth generation. “The name of the vampire is Bond. “On the first of March. 1866, the national debt of the United States entailed by the Civil War reached the appalling maximum of nearly three thousand millions of dollars. The American people were inexperienced in such business. They had never known the incubus before. Europe had known it, but not America. For a long time the public debt of the nation had been so small as to be disregarded. Now all of a sudden, with the terrible exigencies of the war, the debt expanded and settled over the landscape like a cloud from Vesuvius, darkening from shore to shore.

“It was intended by those who first contrived the legal tender currency that it should be absolute money in the payment of all debts of whatever kind. The Supreme Court of the United States has since decided by a voice of eight to one that congress possessed—and pos sesses—the right and power to make such a money, whether in war or in peace. The validity of the Legal-Ten der Act is now as much a part of th* constitutional history of the United States as the abolition of African slavery. But they who were skillful ii watching their own interests, even i» the throes of our national break-up and impending catastrophe, adroitly contrived that the national currency should have an exception in it in favoi of those who should lend their mean to the government. They who shoult make such loan should receive there for a bond: and the interest on th* bond —as also the duties on imports o foreign goods—was exempt from th( legal tender of paper and reserved foi coin. * * *

“The party of the bond became skill* ful and adroit. * * * They under stood the situation perfectly, and adopt, ed as their method a policy embracing, two intentions: First, to perpetuate the bond and make it everlasting by the ; postponement and prevention of payment; second, to increase the value of •the currency in which all payments were to be made; that is, to increase the ! value of the units of such payments as ! the payments should become due. so ; that whatever might be the efforts of j the people to discharge the debt, il i should increase in value as rapidly as* they could reduce it! •< * * For thirty years this game has been persistently, skillfully and successfully carried on. * • * If the treasury ‘ should have to-day, or in the year 1900, , a surplus of six billions of gold, the government could not call and cancel its bonds. They were not made to be called and canceled, but to be refunded and perpetuated. * * • “Besides, the reduction in interest has been a reduction only in name. In no case has the reduction been made until the value of the dollar of payment has been so enlarged as mofe than to balance the reduction. The same thing is true of the payment of principal as well as the payment of coupon. For thirty years the Amerlc n T «'->ple have been

jKiurmg into tnat torrid maelstrom the Tolome of thoir great resources. They, have paid on their debt, or at least they have paid, in this long period such a prodiaious sum that arithmetic can

partly expvass It. (At the Okoee to 189 S the interest account a love on the national debt had cost the American people over $2,635,009,000.) The imagination cannot embrace it. And yet it is the truth of the living God that in the year 1895, at its close, the national debt of the United States, in its bonded and unbonded forms, will purchase as its equivalent in value as much of the average of twenty-five of the leading commodities of the United States, including real estate and labor, as the qame debt would purchase at its maximum on the Ist of March, 1866! The people have paid and paid for thirty years, and at the end have paid just this—NOTHING.” (Mr. Ridpath furnishes facts and figures which prove indisputably the truth of the above assertion.)

“Let all men know it. Let the world know it. Let the common man ponder this appalling statement of an undeniable truth. Let our national authorities know it. Let the leaders of every political party have it shouted in their ears. Let every administration that has been in power from the first bf Grant to the last of Cleveland be told in trumpet voice that the publications put forth from month to month as statements from the treasury about the reduction of the national debt of three millions or seven millions or ten millions have been essentially and utterly false. True It is that the debt has been nominally reduced according to the publications; but it has never been so reduced, for until by the contrivance of those who possess it the purchasing power of the currency has been augmented fully as much as the equivalent of the payment!

“Thus from month to month and from year to year the astounding process has gone on. And thus from year to year the judgment of the American people has been abused with the iteration and belief that they were paying their debt, when in truth all the multiplied millions on millions and billions which they have paid have been simply contributed to the fund-holding class, whose claim after a lifetime is worth as much as it was at the beginning! The resources of a great people have beep poured like a roaring river into a sinkhole that has swallowed all; and •the golden streams of the contribution have issued silently through a thousand unseen spouts into the private reservoirs of the holders of the debt.”