People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1897 — VOLUME OF MONEY. [ARTICLE]

VOLUME OF MONEY.

NOTHING BUT ITS INCREASE WILL BRING PROSPERITY. HcKlolej*! Delusory Scheme to Believe the People’s Burdens bj Increasing Taxation —Prosperity as Yet No Nearer Than It Was November 3. “To the Congress of the United States: Regretting the necessity which has required me to call you together, I feel that your assembling in extraordinary session is indispensably, because of the condition in which we find the revenues of the government. It is conceded that its current expenditures are greater than its receipts, and that such a condition has existed for more than three years. With unlimited means at our command we are presenting the remarkable spectacle of increasing our public debt by borrowing money to meet the ordinary outlays incident upon even an economical and prudent administration of the government. An examination of the subject discloses this fact in every detail and leads inevitably to the conclusion that the condition of the revenue which allows it is unjustifiable and should be corrected.” So readeth the first verses of the first chapter of the New Dispensation of Messages. Let all Republicans lift up their hands and eyes and —crow. Well, it is the same old bankruptcy lingo that we heard in the early part of 1893, by McKinley’s fat (if not illustrious) predecessor; with the difference that in 1893, bankruptcy was upon the business of the country while now it has worked its way up to the United States treasury which has been bankrupt “for more than three years.” With the conspiracy of the bankers with the administration in April, 1893, for the purpose of contracting the currency, in order to bring on a panic, and make it an excuse to repeal the only remaining law for the purchase of silver as money, and thus create a greater contraction of the currency—with all of this before McKinley’s eyes, is he honest in ignoring all of these things as if they never had happened? Could a sensible, honest and patriotic man close his eyes to the w r ant, misery and crime, that has grown out of that conspiracy? Cleveland’s plan was to prevent the people from having any more money to get, and it is now McKinley’s plan to pick from the pockets of the wealthproducer, with a high tariff, what little money we have got. Fellow toiler, is there any difference in the character of the two men, when one prevents you from getting anything, and the other robs you of what you have got? Fel-low-toiler, in either case you are left a bankrupt slave, just as the money power has planned to make you. It is well remembered that in 1893, such papers as the New York Tribune said that the cause of the 15,000 failures in that year, was because of a fear of Cleveland’s free trade legislation. Since the third of last November there have been failures at the rate of over 20,000 per year! It is because of a fear of high tariff legislation? Stand up, you lying Republican, and explain this thing. “With unlimited means at our command.” * * * Ah! There lies the whole trouble! The idea has crept into the oppressors’ heads that the amount that can be robbed from the wealth--producer is simply incalculable and “unlimited.” Those that have so long fattened upon that which they never earned will learn ere long that flesh and blood will not submit to every injustice. “Unlimited means!” God of the universe, what a lie! The whole land is pocked all over with business failures, and a large per cent of the wealth-producing masses are idle, and all that toil deeply engulfed in squalid poverty, and a bankrupt condition of the United States treasury has “existed for more than three years!”

With this universal lack of money among the wealth-producing people, where is the “unlimited means” to come from? The “unlimited means” will not come from the wealth-absorbing class, for that gang of devilish hogs never did pay anything toward supporting the government, and never will, so long as money can make a scoundrel of a judge. Did robbing Peter to pay Paul, or skinning a beggar to patch the hide of a landlord, or the plundering of a toiler to enrich a knave, ever produce general prosperity? Does increasing the taxes on the people increase the volume of currency, and thus produce prosperity? Some political idiots imagine that prosperity is produced in that way. God pity the people when such knaves or fools run the government! This idiocy and knavery, under Cleveland, killed the Cleveland party dead as a door nail; and the same foreign and financial policy will kill the Republican party too dead to skin in less than two years. “So mote it be.” The Americans have not much to brag about, for they only trade onion for garlic at the last election. The Lord pity us! “We are presenting the remarkable spectacle of increasing our public debt by borrowing money to meet the ordinary outlays incident upon even an economical (?) and prudent (?) administration of the government.”

Good Lord, help us! Did any honest person ever expect a being on earth, or in hades, would have the unblushing cheek and devilish effrontery to declare that the late administratoin was “even an economical and prudent” one? Every sensible and honorable man, woman and child in the land all know the late and blackest of all administrations sent up an immoral and improvident stench, so dense and stifling that ft would strangle a skunk from Tophet.

If six months’ association with Cannibal Hanna will make McKinley apologise for Cleveland, what will four years of association with the Cannibal do? Can any one comprehend the iniquitous character of the vile brood that dominates the words and. actions of the people’s servants? After “an examination of the subject discloses this fact in every detail” to Mr. McKinley that more taxes must be piled upon the shoulders of poverty-stricken wealth-producers, in order to raise more than $1,045,000,000 which it took to run the government “upon even an economical and prudent” basis, during the last two years! If McKinley and congress honestly want prosperity, they can produce it, in less than two months, by issuing to the people, through postal savings banks at a low rate of interest, all the money required to make all exchanges on a cash basis; crush the life out of every damnable monopoly, and give no more privileges to the money-absorbing hog than the toiler has got. Then we will have a prosperity that will cause the honest to rejoice, instead of the kind that makes devils giggle, such as we now have. With honesty, and an ordinary amount of common sense, no president will be “regretting the necessity which has required me to call you together,” for there would be no need of congress convening oftener than once in four years in time of peace. h. d. mcdowell. Brookfield. Mo.