Part 31

The gold reserve, we are told, is to "protect the credit of our currency." Protect it from whom? You and I are making no assault upon it--wouldn't hurt it for the world. When we get a paper or silver dollar we don't trot around to the treasury to have it "redeemed" in a slug of yellow metal--we make a bee line for the grocery store and have it redeemed in a side o' bacon. Who is it that chisels desolation into the blessed gold reserve--the so- called "bulwarks of our currency?" The fellows who want bonds--the capitalistic, the creditor class; the men who own the mortgages and have millions of dollars corded up in bank--the men who have most to LOSE by any bobble in the credit of our currency. And every time the capitalist tries to hoist himself with his own petard, the administration smothers the blaze with a block of interest- bearing bonds. If he wants to make a sky-rocket of himself, let him kerosene his coat-tails and apply the match. If the gold reserve were really necessary to the credit of our currency, capitalists would no more make war upon it than they would bestride a buzz-saw making a million revolutions a minute. Instead of systematically draining it they would, whenever it struck "the danger-line," gather all the gold they could get and send it on to Washington. The capitalists are not crazy; they've simply got a soft snap in that "bulwark" business and are working it for an it's worth.

Calico is sold by the yard, kerosene by the gallon, coffee by the pound. These measures are immutable, and those who buy and sell by them make their contract in perfect confidence. But suppose they altered from day to day or from year to year,--the yard ranging from 25 to 50 inches, the pound from 10 to 20 ounces; would our exchanges be effected without much friction, think you? Would not such a ridiculous system of weights and measures paralyze exchange and demoralize industry? Would not those who could juggle the system to suit themselves--buying by a long and selling by a short yard-- accumulate colossal fortunes at the expense of the common people? Would we not have "panics" in plenty and "depressions" galore? Well, that is exactly what is happening to the dollar, our measure of value, the most important of all our trade tools. And mark you, a change in the purchasing power of the dollar is equivalent to an alteration of every weight and measure employed by commerce. Understand? When the purchasing power of the dollar expands or contracts it has the same effect on exchange as would the expansion or contraction of the yard, the gallon and the pound.

A shifting measure of value is the nigger in our industrial woodpile. We have got to have a measure of value that's as immutable as our measure of quantity; a dollar as reliable as an official pound; a dollar that's the same yesterday, and to-day and forever, before we see the last of these panics and periods of business depression. We have got to have a currency that will adapt itself automatically and infallibly to the requirements of commerce-- that will constitute an ever-effective exchange medium-- before we can obtain a smooth working industrial machine and the maximum employment of labor.

We know from experience that gold will not supply us with such a currency, that silver will not do it, that bi- metallism will not do it--that greenbackism, as we understand the term, will not come within a mile of it. Then what will do it? That's the problem. Solve it, and you forever put an end to commercial panics in a land of plenty; you deprive capital of its power to oppress labor; you assure industry a constant friend where it has so often found an insidious foe. Solve it and Columbia can furnish happy homes for half the world--homes unhaunted by the wolf of want, but crowned with sweet content and gilded with freedom's glory.

For a century economists have been seeking the solution of this all-important problem. Even conservative old Adam Smith dreamed of the emancipation of the world from the multifarious ills of metallic money; but we still cling with slavish servility to the silver of Abraham and the gold of Solomon.

I do not claim to have found the philosopher's stone, for which so many wiser men have sought in vain; but the currency plan I proposed in 1891--and which was again outlined in the ICONOCLAST for May of this year--has been carefully examined by the ablest financiers of Europe and America, and they have been unable to point out a fundamental fault. It is known as the interconvertible bond-currency plan, by which our circulating media would be bottomed on the entire wealth of the nation instead of upon fragments of metal of fluctuating value; by which the volume of the currency would depend, not upon the fecundity of the mines, the fiat of Congress or the greed of Wall street, but upon the needs of commerce itself. By this plan the proportion between the money-work to be done and the money available to do it is always the same; hence it would afford an immutable measure of value. In studying the plan it is well to bear in mind that our foreign trade--that bogy man of the metallists--has no more to do with our currency than with our pint cups and bushel- baskets--no more than with our language and religion; that we can pay our foreign debts and collect our foreign credits only in commodities; that the prattle indulged in by the metallists anent "money that is good the world over" is mere goose-speech--that there is no such money. We buy and sell with England and France to the extent of tens of millions annually; yet I haven't seen a British guinea or a French franc in fifteen years. And if you had a foreign coin and should go around to a resort, and call for a glass of--er--of buttermilk, and plank the little stranger down on the counter, the party in the white apron and Alaska dazzler would say:

"Wot yer givin' us?"

You'd reply: "I'm givin you gold--money good the world over."

"Wot is it--watch charm? Dis ain't no pawn shop."

"But that's money."

"Eh?"

"Money--gold coin that maketh the heart glad."

"Wot kind o' money?"

"It's a British guinea."

"Well, why don't you go to Great Britain to blow yourself?"

"But my dear sir, this is money of final payment. This is value itself. This does not depend on the stamp of government, but circulates throughout the world on its intrinsic merit."

"Well, it don't circulate in this joint. See?"

Slam your THEORIES up against CONDITIONS before you tie to them.

. . .

You all know that in this country there should be no such thing as able-bodied pauperism. You know that until the last arable acre is brought to the highest possible cultivation, every mine developed, every forest made to contribute to the creature comfort of man, there should be remunerative work for all. You know that, with the aid of wealth-creating machinery every laborer should be able to acquire a competence to comfort his declining days. You know that until Need is satisfied and Greed is gorged there can be no such thing as overproduction--that under normal conditions when there's a plethora of necessaries, the surplus energy of the nation turns to the creation of luxuries and the standard of living advances. You know that with such wonderful resources, touched by the magic wand of genius, the golden age of which poets have dreamed and for which philanthropists have prayed, should be even at our doors.

I hope to contribute in some slight degree to the establishment of conditions that will enable us to utilize to the utmost the free gifts of a gracious God; to the proper distribution of wealth; to the emancipation of labor, not by the law of blind force, but enlightened self-interest--not by riotous revolution, but peaceful evolution. I want to see every American Citizen in very truth a Sovereign, to whom life is a joy instead of a curse. I want to see every rag transformed into a royal robe, every hovel into a cultured home. I want to hasten, if by ever so little, the day when we can boast with the proud sons of imperial Rome, that to be an American is greater than to be a king.

And when we so amend industrial conditions that each can find employment at profitable prices, we do more to eliminate crime and foster morality than have all the prophets and preachers, from Melchizedeck the mythical to Talmage the turgid.

No man can be either a patriot or a consistent Christian on an empty stomach--he's merely a savage animal, a dangerous beast. You must get a square meal inside of a man and a clean shirt outside of him before he's fit subject for saving grace. You must give him a bath before he's worth baptizing. And when you get him clean and well clothed, fed and housed as a reward of his own honest industry, he's not far from the Kingdom of God. But if you want to degrade a people beyond redemption; if you want to transform them into contemptible peons and whining hypocrites who encumber the earth like so much unclean vermin, educate them to feed on the crumbs from Dives' banquet-board and accept his cast-off clothing with obsequious thankfulness.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of the common people until it was the bread of charity or the blood of the revolution, has ever been the herald of moral decay and of national death. So passed the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and, if we may judge the future by the past, so will perish the greatest republic that ever gleamed like a priceless jewel on the skeleton hand of Time. Self-interest, humanity, patriotism, religion itself, admonish us to weigh well the problem of the hour--a problem born of human progress, forced upon us by the mighty revolution wrought in the industrial world by the giant Steam--and that problem is: Shall the average American Citizen be a Slave or a Sovereign?

Don't imagine for a moment that I'm an anarchist-- that I'm going to wind up this seance by unfurling the red flag and throwing a hatful of bombs. I admit that I haven't much respect for law--there's so much of it that when I come to spread my respect over the entire lot it's about as thin as one of Sam Jones's sermons. Still, I don't believe in strikes, and riots and bloodshed. I'm for peace --peace in its most virulent form. I've had a sneaking respect for Cleveland ever since he employed a substitute to put a kibosh on the Southern Confederacy while he remained at home to play pinochle with the pretty girls. He may not be much of a statesman in time of peace, but there's no picnic ants on his judgment in time of war.

It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really commutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice--hell's great triumvirate--to banishment eternal. Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase--it can only concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism.

It is time that American citizens of alleged intelligence ceased trailing blindly in the wake of partisan band- wagons and began to seriously consider the public welfare --time they realized that the people were not made for parties, but parties for the people, and refuse to sacrifice their patriotism on the unclean altar of partisan slavery. Blind obedience to party fiat; the division of the people of one great political family into hostile camps; subjection of the public interest to partisan advantage; placing the badge of party servitude above the crown of American sovereignty--the ridiculous oriflamme of foolish division above Old Glory's star-gemmed promise of everlasting unity--have brought the first nation of all world to the very brink of destruction.

. . .