Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1900 — THE “CREDITOR CLASS.” [ARTICLE]

THE “CREDITOR CLASS.”

A Gross Perversion Lpon Which Brynn Buses an Assault.

The silver orators from Bryan down are never tired of reiterating that the gold standard is established solely in the Interest of the creditor class, who want whatever is due them paid in the best and highest kind of money. They assume that the debtor class is the poor who owe money and that the creditor class is the rich to whom money is always due. O’n this ground they endeavor to foment hatred and bitterness among the poor against the rich and to array class against class and employee against employer. To stir up such jealousies and hatreds opens the road to anarchy, and anarchy leads to the

destruction of government. But it is not true that the poor are the debtor class and the rich the creditor class: As a matter of fact the great majority of people belong to both classes, having money coming to them from one direction and having to pay it out in another. It is therefore difficult to draw auy hard and fast line to separate the debtors from the creditors. But if there is a creditor class in this country, a set of people to whom that designation's peculiarly applicable, it is not composed of the men who handle large sums of money and who are engaged in carrying on great enterprises. They for the most part are debtors. The real creditor class is composed of working men and women, of employees in everj* walk of business, of salaried people and of depositors in banks, especially depositors in savings banks. These are the men and women to whom money is always due and who are entitled if anybody in all the world is to the best and most stable money that can be devised. A fluctuating money, varying in value from time to time, is to them a condemnation of poverty and loss. A workingman, no matter what his labor may be, who starts to work on Monday morning is a creditor at nightfall for the amount of his day’s wages, and at the end of the week he is a creditor for six days’ pay. Whether a man works by the day, by we week, by the month or by the year he is always a creditor, for he must give his services first.

But above all it is the savings bank depositor who is the chief of creditors and who in laying by his money for “a rainy day” should when he comes to draw it out have just as good money paid as he deposited. To these creditors who are saving day by day their hard earned wages and salaries Bryanism and 10 to 1 would be disaster, ruin and despair.

Tile enemy's country Is moving westward much faster than the center of iiopnlntlon. In four years .It lias gone from Sen fork to Irulinnn. nn«l by the end of this year even Nebraska will become the enemy of i>olitienl fads.