No More Learning

Is there ANY common bond, apart from hysteria induced by your jews- papers? Or the common interests of men who hire their "seats. "
I mean SEATS in the Commons. Difference between those seats and a seat on the New York Stock Exchange is that in New York the men BUY their seats, and in Westminster the members rent 'em. The New York Stock Exchange system has an advantage; it may even be more democratic. I never heard democracy discussed in this connection.
But a man BUYS his seat on Change, openly and the price is known, I believe in most cases.
Whereas a member of Parliament is a renter, he is said to pay in an in definite sum per year, to DEFRAY.
Defray is, I think, the word used, defray party expenses. Contribute to the funds of the party.
That is democracy. Is it ? It has never been the American IDEAL of representative government.
I have murmured on the ambient air, now and then a few soft words about my own splay footed country. Real representation when the place
? was more or less agricultural. Method of geographic division O. K. when many people were engaged in growing the crops of one sort or another, and the seaboard in tradin', and fishin'.
Rough sections still kept in the United States but no one havin' any say now, but the banks and the Warburgs. People who FEED the lot always voted down by the RULERS. Naive blokes, populist, subject to caricature. All lead up to GUILD organization.
Which does NOT appeal to abject NON-producers. Does not appeal to exploiters, that is the rub. Early socialists were boneheaded; didn't dig down into problem of money.
I dunno how far you now KNOW what the same men took twenty years tellin' you, and that your press took those same twenty years keepin' from you.
Even supposin' you do NOW begin to see something, how are you going to GIT OUT of your present trilemma ? If SOME Englishmen could see where England's course was leading back before this war started more of them ought by now to be seeing it, seeing that Singapore is no longer called by that name. What was the Sassoonery is now Shonanko. How do you save your homes ? Revolution behind the scenes in the palace ? A group of officers of the Army ? Or guild formation ? Movement coming up from the mines or the land?
You can NOT eat minerals, and then HEROES ? The reformers all used to take it so easy. The new bright world was to be arranged over the tea cups. Why DIDN'T you settle it over the tea cups ? DID any one care for England enough to rattle the teaspoons, or risk cracking a saucer ? AND now your politicians talk of CONDUCT of the war. Don't you realize that the only men with brains enough to conduct a war are the men who foresaw what the war would be; the men who tried to keep you OUT of it, and who would now try to CONDUCT you out if it ? You
? have NOT made it a war of honor. You could have made a hopeless stand, a forlorn despair of an expedition into Poland, and been defeated with honor. Of course it would not have been right at bottom, because the guarantee to Poland was faked. It was not to or FOR Poland. But even so, you could have made a gesture and been defeated with honor.
Can you not see that the outrage of the bombardment of Paris is but one of a series of attempts to make real peace impossible, and to prepare for the war after this one ? Needless hate--sewing the SEEDS of hate for to morrow. Does it mean nothing to you that in this war you have inflicted more and worse wounds on your Allies than on the people you said were your enemies ? Can these things go on forever without some glimmer of light reaching the British mind, to show the real causes of the conflict-- the real forces IN conflict ? Usury against peasantry, usury against farmland, usury against every man who does a day's work, physical or with his mind.
Ah, against consciousless exploitation, against monopoly, against bank deals and swindles. Against EVERY race in Europe that takes the responsibility for being a nation and administering openly, as a government in the eyes of the people.
Against the crawling slime of a secret rule, a secret and IRRESPONSIBLE rule, that takes NO responsibility for the welfare of races, and nations, but eats like a cancer into the heart and soul of all nations. Even that where of its central staff is composed.
#20 (March 26, 1942) U. S. (B23) McARTHUR
It is a privilege to fight against gentlemen. And the European radio station seems to me to have been as ready to show respect to General McArthur, as they are, and RIGHTLY are, to show absolute and utter contempt and loathing for the war profiteers, and the gang of
? unmitigated newts, and vermin who have thrown the world into war in the hope of establishing a gold and money lending monopoly, and blotting out the good life in five continents. They have done this from their lust for secret and irresponsible power.
And the place to fight these syphilis bugs is NOT on the frontiers, but in the centre of your own nations.
This more than bubonic plague passes over all frontiers as Dante already perceived. It rots the heart, and the soul of the nations. It is silent, ceaseless in its action. And the PLACE to resist it is for every man LOCALLY--the means to resist it are LOCAL.
And by that fact they are hard to bring into coherence. The embezzler, working behind false laws, can mobilize quickly; the farmer, worker and peasant can not.
The embezzler sets up his papers, dailies and weeklies. That curse of God Willkie was puffed up by the Weeklies. The plague does not stop with the dailies. It sets up publishing houses, it grinds down all private liberty--economic--I mean, fewer and fewer men or groups have the MONEY to run a paper. Every cranny is infested. Every college campus has a book store. LOOK to these bookstores. Look to the LAST vestiges of approximate freedom of the press, even the scholastic press, that gets out small editions. Communicate, Communicate, and CO MUN ICATE.
A plot was outlined years ago to blot out classical scholarship, to blot out the historic sense. It went about on soft paws, making no noise, it was DEADLY.
It worked while the nations slept. A contempt for the Latin authors. The idea Greek was useless. The concentration on innocuous authors. Erotic poems and NOT the state of life as shown in the Athenian law courts.
? The aesthetic angle, that the whole of my generation grew up in, all LOOKING harmless, so HARMLESS.
America was killed by the kid-glove generation, looked simple. Henry James describes these innocuous flops: on the beach at Newport, none of 'em meant any harm, after the Civil War the American people was tired. I'll say they were tired.
With reason. Killed each other off to make room for the vermin.
After Cato's death there was no Republic, says some old Roman historian. Perhaps after Lincoln's death there was no United States Republic. Bowers, the TRAGIC ERA, go read it. Johnson couldn't hold out against the infection. Civil War dragged on. WITH INTENTION. Halleck, why was he general ? Or at least why in command ? Waaal, that is old scandal. Can't fight Antietam now. Can't go back before Gettysburg, the very names are forgotten now. Names we, the men of my time, grew up on, but we WERE being taught to forget. Or rather the WHOLE of the history was aimed at FORGETTING. It was top dressing, a monotony of military encounters, done with music and banners, to KEEP the nation's mind OFF the causes--off the REAL causes. Debts of the Southern states, to the bankers of New York City.
My ole great uncle had a wooden leg,
went stumpin' 'round after Gettysburg.
Ole uncle dot and carry one,
and every gun was a golden egg, for the Bankers in New York. For the bankers in New York, OHoooooo.
No wonder old uncle Hiram wrote poems about P [J. Pierpont] Morgan, that as a kid of nine I didn't understand. NO wonder the profit of 15 thousand on a lot of condemned rifles, looked like pretty poor stuff to men who had lost legs and eyes for the union.
? After them came the kid glovers. Too refined to touch politics. THAT was an error. But you can't very much blame 'em. Tired of five years war, of bad food, and army blankets. Also the weak'uns left, Henry James, Henry Adams, John, John Quincy, then Charles Francis in London. That part of Henry Adams "Education" is still EDUCATORY. Read it. Charles Francis Adams workin' against Lord Russell, as cold a son of a fish as ever got into Parliament.
Then he came home, Charles Francis, and didn't make a fight for the presidency. Possibly it would have been useless and then Brooks Adams trying to set down the real reasons.
Where is BOSTON ? Damn it, is the Kike and Kahal radio station all that is left of Boston?
Is New England a midden ? The war you ought to be fightin' is NOT five thousand miles OUTSIDE Boston. Or five thousand miles outside New York, or even outside San Francisco. It is INTERNAL.
And if you let 'em bilk you with the idea. that they will PROGRESS AFTER the war is over, and a few million of you under the daisies, you will be being worse FOOLS than the Hindoos.
This war, internal war, can go on QUITE as well, SIMULTANEOUS with General McArthur gettin' killed in a hopeless fight against Aguinaldo's successors, as it can after the war is over: if it ever is over.
BEING at peace for twenty years AFTER Versailles did NOT conduce to a victory of the American people over the shysters. WHY should the twenty years after THIS war be any more favorable to setting up an honest government and killing off the Morgenthau and Warburg Satrapy: and having a United States of America State or REPUBLIC ? What earthly argument is there against cleaning up and cleaning out the embezzlers DURING the present conflict ? How can you DO it ? Damn
? it, you can start by cleaning up your own minds. You can clear out the crap that you JOURNAL ISTS KNOW is crap: when they write it.
You can then clear out the crap that journalists BELIEVE along with their fake news, along what the advertisers LET the OWNERS (so called), let the editors PUBLISH. There is a second layer of crap that newspapermen believe to be real. BUT it is not grounded on a real knowledge of ANYTHING.
They have NOT gone into the documents. They have not read the real history. They chase one butterfly after another.
NOW the facts are NOT wholly hidden. There are fifty authors whom you could read, Brooks Adams, among 'em. You could read the works of the men who fought for the making of the Republic, John Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, hidden or kept in shadow by punk propaganda.
You could get down to the usury swindles, lit up by Demosthenes. Will you wake up to the fact that the gradual elimination of the classics had a purpose, a damn dirty purpose ? Get boiled down to a few harmless authors, say to Tibullus and Virgil, taste for the unreal in poetry, and the student's eye got off the reality.
Look at John Adams' paideuma. Look at what a man in those days, with no million dollar library, could learn while living on American farm land. Boston having about 15 thousand inhabitants.
No, it is the habit of "not being interested in takin' things as seriously as"-- --That refers to a young American college graduate tellin' me his friends and acquaintances weren't interested in taking things as seriously as I do.
Waal, it would have been just a bit better for 'em and, as Mr. Patchen remarks in the headin' of one of his poems "I don't want to alarm you, but we are most of us going to be shot. " Also a fellow named Caidwell, I
? think it was, went to the Spanish red war. These fellows got around to taking it serious.
What are you fighting for ? Fighting for the starvation of Europe ? Fighting to spread famine in Asia ? Fighting for vain boast proved false ? Fighting for the Sassoonery ? Are you fighting for the National Heritage ? For the heritage of wisdom, the heritage of Washington, and of Monroe, of John Adams and Lincoln?
I'll say you are not.
You are fighting AGAINST what all these men stood for. And it will take
more brains than I got, to get you out of it prettily.
Ezra Pound speakin' from Europe for the American heritage.
#21 (March 30, 1942) U. S. & U. K. (B24) THE PATTERN
When are the American and English people going to take note of the pattern, the pattern in which wars are made, not one war, but wars, in the plural?
Whether you go back to the start of THIS war in 1696. 1696, when the virus of death, the invisible silent virus, more deadly than syphilis, was shot into the English people. Bank of England, makin' money from VACUUM, and levying interest tax in respect to it.
Waaal, you can't all be students of history. Look to what you can remember, if you are over 40.
How was the last war started ? Murder at Sarajevo. Look back at the assassinations that have served as a spark for wars. And at those that were intended to start wars, but something went wet in the fuse.
? Connect 'em up. THINK what might have been back of 'em. To use a people, to send a people into war UNPREPARED is called destroying the people.
Ideogram of the knife and the sliver. USE people in war UNPREPARED. That is called destroying the people. ALL right, do you see anyone still blotting God's sunlight with their swollen bodies ? Roosevelt and Churchill, for instance, who have pushed the American and English into the war. That is the first phase. Hurl people into wars they CAN'T WIN. KNOWN in England in 1938 that England would LOSE.
Damn it, I was told in London in November 1938 that England would lose. Military expert sez to me (a furriner): "WE will lose India, we will lose all our eastern possessions. "
WELL, why weren't men like that LISTENED TO ? Why didn't the British people listen to THEM, and not to the dirt off the hog's hind leg, like they did listen to ? What causes that ? Astor, Times, Manchester Guardian, and the rest of 'em. Chief Usurer's usurious brother at the head of the B. B. C. before that stable was cleaned that much, and an equally mendacious traitor to the people of England, put there to replace him, to be followed by another S. P. O. B. and Mr. Churchill's last by- blow. Yaaas, and what is the SECOND phase, or second link of the poison offensive--London OR Washington?
Cries for prosecution of the war (not of the bastids that caused it).
Bevin and company in the HIRED fake labor pseudo-opposition crying for more energetic, etc.
Get the nation's neck against the buzz saw, and then PUSH. Russians in the last war and in this war. Something pushing 'em. Someone HAD BLUNDERED.
? DAMN it all, every man that dies in McArthur's army is sacrificed to Frankfurter's friends. But NOT to WIN. To destroy himself, to destroy any nation, one after another. Not that the Russian empire should survive, that the Austrians should survive, that England or the British Empire should survive, but to pull down the mighty.
Will you OBSERVE what these forces are, that shove nations from one disaster to another ? France hurled against the unbeatable Germans, England pushed unprepared, and the climax of unpreparedness, the Lehman, Frankfurter, Morgenthau SUCCESS, of SUC/Cess in hurling America into the conflict, and now yelling for MORE disasters.
I did NOT stand with Lindbergh. I am not a pacifist of the prize-taking variety. There are times when a nation should fight, even without what appears a chance, as Finland against Russia.
When threatened with extinction. SUCH was NOT the case in 1939 with the United States, NO one for the past hundred years had dreamed of threatening the United States of America with extinction.
A damned fool, or a half hypnotized vacuum in our White House threatened Japan with starvation, sent silly school girl notes to Mussolini and Hitler, threatened to starve the world, talked TOSH to the Axis powers and to Japan. The world has seen that propaganda and smelt the stink.
I did not, however, take Lindbergh's line, wrong line as I see it. The Nordic race seemed to be wholly ignorant of the nature of England's owners, expressed sympathy with England, NOT distinguishing between the nice Englishmen that one meets, and the gang of thieves and murderer's pimps who have been in control of the London government.
Out-in-front-men, for the in-behind-men, Beits, Goldsmid, Sassoor's, and Sieffs and Rothschild. I said the cause was rotten, it was ROTTEN, and it was KNOWN to be rotten, and it was known that MOST of the
? gold in the world is in the United States, in the British Empire and in Russia. And as I was told in our National Capital, any attempt to diminish the power of them that held it will meet with fairly serious resistance.
Waaal, it was NOT honest resistance, witness dirty Donovan, in Yugoslavia, witness the betrayal of one after another by the nations who are CONTROLLED by the gold VERMIN. William J. Bryan must have been unhealthy. His family is so gone to rot that they can let Hank Wallace say, "NO PEACE without restoration of the gold standard," and NOT shove Hank's head into a milk pudding, and treat him for progressive infantilism.
WHERE are the men of the sons of the men who had the sense to hear of the CROSS OF GOLD, are they all dead?
Anyhow, that dirty alley cat is out of the BAG. Whoever died at Dunkirk died for gold. Whoever was shot at Dakar died for gold.
AND the bombardment of PARIS ? As I have told you, NOT military, done to PREVENT the cessation of wars, done to so embitter French feeling that there can be NO peace between France and England. Oh yes, pullin' in more nations, hope of stealing Martinique, and Madagascar.
But for God's sake look at the POLICY, look at the pattern, how is it done ? Who now is drawing pay for demanding vigorous prosecution of war?
Vigorous prosecution of Frankfurter and that golliwog glove that covers his fingers.
Frankfurter down inside the Punch and Judy show booth, and that curse of God, Franklin D. Roosevelt, gesticulating and shrieking up there in front to distract the children, to get the boys into the trenches. And the papers, the hired press, howling that the interventionists musn't be
? allowed to take advantage of the abysmal mess made by Roosevelt, that the war must be PUSHED.
The place to defend the American heritage is ON the American continent. AND no man who had any part in helping Delano Roosevelt get the United States into it has enough sense to WIN ANYTHING.
If Roosevelt were not BELOW the biological level at which the concept of honor ENTERS the mind, below the biological level at which human beings can CONCEIVE the existence of such a thing as HONOR, that liar would go out on to the steps of the American Capitol and commit hara-kiri to atone for the evils he has wrought on the American people.
And I say it. Here's my John Hancock.
Ezra Pound speaking from Rome, speaking as an American citizen, and hoping to God there are still some Americans left as distinguished from IMPORTATIONS.
#22 (April 6, 1942) U. S. (B27) DESTRUCTION
Ezra Pound speaking in the name of a little sanity and human intelligence. The mere distruction of vast amount of goods, tools, ships, etc. solves NO problem, save the temporary, artificial and man-made problem of: GLUT on the market.
It does NOT solve the market problem as a whole. The mere absence of GLUT does NO good either to marketer, maker or would-be buyer if the absence of GLUT is accompanied by the absence of everything else, or even of nearly everything else.
Sumner Welles and company have, I admit, opened up a market for tankers. Anybody who can make tankers can now sell them. IF he is con
? tent to receive Morgenthau dollars as recompense, regardless of what the Kike dollar will buy. The continuance of destruction does NOT remedy the effects of destruction.
You have lent some more "Money" as you call it to Chile, a country notoriously in default. The confessions of a bond-salesman, an informative work, written by an author who had learned very little from his own tribulations, might be reprinted. The author was pretty much of an ass, but an intelligent reader might derive benefit from his revelations. The Loeb Chart of Plenty, the Chart of United States potential production has just been reprinted here. That shows the opportunity that the United States once HAD. Shows the abundance that might have been if Lehman's damn son-in-law had never been born, or if the American people had had sense enough to keep him and his likes OUT of the American Treasury, and if our lunacy commissions were more effective. NOW the American money system is cuckoo. It is dishonest. It is unethical, it is blitheringly idiotic, and every man fit to be called human knows it.
There are simple means of remedying it. Had they been applied, you would not now be at war. Applying them now will not mend all the harm already done by Kuhn, Cohen, and Company to the American people, but the LONGER you put off starting, the worse rotted the whole country will be by the financial syphilis, whose out-in-front chief protractor is Franklin Delano.
And NO war promises have ever been kept by usurers' governments, not since Cain took a pot shot at Abel. IF the monetary reformers IN the United States of America don't get busy NOW, the opportunities offered 'em at the end of the war will be NIL.
If you can't learn from England's experience in homes for heroes, and war veterans trying to sell matches in the gutters of the Strand, after the last war, then God help you.
? A system wherein the public is MILKED and bilked of TWO dollars for every dollar spent by the government is not the way to win either a war or a peace.
And the usury (now the Warburg) system is as old as the gold brick wheeze. The money system practiced by Monty Norman, and by Baruch's fireside cronies is the system of claiming MORE than there is.
The CLAIMS are printed on paper (in the old days they were printed on metal), they are also partly printed on paper, and those forms filled in with ink.
Twenty dollars printed on a gold piece will NOT buy eggs on a desert raft, where no eggs are. It is as impotent to get tungsten out of grass in your back yard, as is a claim for 20 bucks printed on a Treasury note.
The value of money, as Aristotle observed, is determined by what it will BUY.
Hence, the howls about INFLATION. I'll say inflation. Baruch will NOT want inflation until he has got out money and put it into something else, or until he is two jumps ahead of the public in unloading a dying currency like the British STERLING, and getting into Pesos or [some thing able to rise if anything in the western hemisphere] can be considered as rising or promising.
OVER a hundred years of stealing and cheating the South Americans is NOT [the] basis for lasting delight. Morgenthau's government can pump money OUT of the AMERICAN people and spend it on Brazilian Ambassadors, it can LEND it to insolvent countries, who have neither the intention nor the capacity to REPAY it.
The banks can UNLOAD some of the bonds onto suckers, of whom the United States seems to possess a super-Loeb-chart supply. CHEAP agricultural products can be BOUGHT in South America and dumped
? into North America to the ruin of North American farmers so long as the ships will carry the stuff. BUT you can not get tungsten or even petroleum out of the carcasses of Brazilian ambassadors.
In fact your chief purchases in South America seem to be GOVERNMENTS, and you have yourself got more government than you can use.
You are tied up to Moscow and you have not yet the faintest conception of what that union means. You are tied up to England in a somewhat de pressing hour. BUT the knot either may or may not prove a slip knot or noose. When the strangulation becomes excessively painful, Winston's name may be spelled PAUL REYNAUD.
You should keep an open eye on these possibilities. I know Franklin has his EYE on Australia and on Madagascar and on the African gold coast the Belgian Congo, Liberia, and the whatnots.
BUT the dawg in the fable also had his eye on the meat, reflected meat in the water. The aqueous metaphor may be invidious.
If I start on all the whatnots and the might have beens, this talk may start gettin' depressin'.
God Almighty, you go get out your readin' books. They say no man knows more than his grandad. If you can't learn about money from Jackson, Adams (I mean John Adams) and Van Buren, I dunno when you are I going to start learning to read. Of course, very few people HAVE read any history and it will become increasingly difficult for you to get the real books. Henry Adams' Life of Gallatin cost 35 dollars last time I heard: and was out of print, nacterly, at that time. So I don't even know what is in it. But you MUST someday either DIE or learn the nature of money.
? I told you about that chap in a prison camp, writin' to ME for some of my books on economics. Seemed to me a bit late. But anyhow, he is still livin'. You CAN read about money in a Gefangenenlager, but you can't read about it in Davy Jones s locker. You can NOT. When are you startin?
INTEREST on money. When does it become a title to what don't exist ? When can you divide the fruits of nature and Labor?
You can divide 'em AFTER the harvest. England, by REFUSIN' to put that into law, is now losing India. Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon, Bombay tomorrow. CAUSE she would collect taxes before the harvest. Farmer hadn't got any money. Even TITHES can not be paid before harvest, so Hindoo had to borrow MONEY from the bunyah, the kike, to PAY taxes, and got more and more into debt.
DEBT. Debt, or the white man's burden. The people of the United States may be fairly low in the scale. I doubt if they are much lower than others, but your Washington government still HOPES that South American Indians are and WILL STAY sufficiently ignorant of how bank swindles are swoggled, to keep a gang of theives above water, for the next twenty years.
The last hope of [the] North American war party is a victory in South America.
#23 (April 9, 1942) U. S. (B28) INDECISION
That yaller hound Dawg Franklin Roosevelt was complainin' the other day about "indecision" or people favorin' indecision. I trust there is nothin' Undecided about my position.
? I think Roosevelt ought to be jailed, if a committee of doctors thinks him responsible for his actions, and I think he ought to be in a high walled gook house, or insane asylum if he is NOT.
And I do not belong to that romantic school of writers who think lunatics are interestin' or that their characters are necessarily more admirable than those of plain low down crooks.
I trust this statement is perfectly DECIDED, and that Lord Halifax will not get any more free feeds with Finkelstein. To have conspired to bring down the United States to a level where Finkelstein can get by the Ellis Island or other port authorities on ANY excuse whatever is to deserve ILL of the American people.
And I think Mr. Morgenthau is outside Sing Sing, through an IMPERFECTION, or indecision or lack of foresight on the part of our national legislators. I trust there is nothin' undecided about that statement EITHER.
I do like to be CLEAR. SOVEREIGNTY inheres in the right to issue money, and the American sovereignty belongs by LAW to the people, and their representatives in CONGRESS have the right to issue money and determine the value thereof. And one hundred and twenty MILLION suckers have lamentably failed to insist on the observation of this "DECIDED law," and have been DIDDLED since along about the time Abe Lincoln was getting himself bumped off. Since then the people OUTSIDE Nebrasky and Dakota have been signally slack about demanding a legal GOVERNMENT of our country. AND there is NO time like the present to STOP being such asses as the American people have been for the past 80 years, or 79 years or whatever.
THAT is the first point.
The point at which embezzlement of the nation's funds on the part of high officers becomes treason can probably be decided only by jurists,
? and not by a hand picked set of JUDGES hired to support illegality. BUT the swindles performed by the present administration should be ANALYZED carefully while there is still some faint memory left among us as to what the United States Constitution once was. The American nation will never win a war or a peace or anything more than the support of a few BRIBED South American ambassadors and bought governments, as long as the Frankfurter, Lehman, Morgenthau, Roosevelt amalgamation is settin' on , the top of our government, not if the war goes on FORTY years; you won't win it with that set of Kikettes running the nation, and the treasury acting like one huge running sore. And I haven't the latest items, I have only some old reports signed by the mute in the treasury. I use the term mute in its technical, its highly technical, significance.
I trust I am bein' clear and decided. I objected to having the United States governed by British espionage service. I object to having it governed by secret committees who have NO responsibility for the government and NONE by law to the people. I trust I am being DECIDED.
AND I do NOT want the United States to lose Hawaii. I do not much hanker to have us become a race of cheats and thieves makin' war (de facto) on the South American people for the sake of a job lot of loan sharks, but that may be beside the immediate question. A government worthy of the name from 1932 onward WOULD have made sure of the Caribbean defenses, instead of dragging Japan into war.
That is the sort of thing that I incline to regard with disfavor. I mean the neglect of what is near, for the sake of attempting to starve out some far distant nation in the interest of a kike-like Sassoon, or some other hook- nosed exotic. I am not flattering some of the so-called old timers. The stock broker is NOT my ideal. He is NOT a sport. A poker player plays with his own money; if he loses, he loses. A man who buys a lottery
? ticket takes his chance with the other purchasers of lottery tickets, neither gambles with the bread of the people.
Hence the old disparagement or contempt for stock jobbers, long away back when there still was some perception of ethics, and men were supposed to LOOK at the consequences of their acts, before thinking they were being both honest and clever. This remark will make me exceedingly unpopular among the American rich, if any of 'em become aware of my saying it. There are various devious and twisty ways of arguing about the uses of short selling, etc. , none of 'em, NONE of 'em would cut any ice with a jury of IMPARTIAL and disinterested men sufficiently intelligent to understand the question. NONE of 'em have any ethical weight. A century ago a congressman could rise to the creation of such a phrase as "a very undigested system of ethics. "
That is what the stockbrokers have mostly got wrong with 'em.
Except those who say frankly that they are predatory ANIMALS, and want to rob and predate. Well, that predatory spirit is NOT inspirin' Europe at this present moment. Certain primitive types go out of fashion, one might almost believe in social progress, the cave man, the robber baron, etc. are not in the front line. They are relegated to history. And anyone interested in the theory of historic PHASE might by now lay a conjecture as to whether the old Wall Street ideal of robbin' the widdys and orphans by means of stock deals, and rigged markets etc. , may not be driftin' OUT of the picture.