No More Learning

I am perfectly aware that I might as well be writing Greek or talking Chinese with a foreign accent, so far as making this statement clear to the hearer or reader is concerned. And the public can most certainly not be blamed for this, as you could read a hundred books, by no means despicable books, on economics, without finding any hint that such an idea about money is possible.
The only statement in even an approximately similar form that I can recall at this moment was made by a Congressman, back in 1878. He said that an amendment offered by him to a bill about silver coinage had been: "an attempt to keep some of the NON-INTEREST bearing national debt in circulation as currency. "
? I repeat in quoting these statements that I might as well be talking Chinese or Tibetan so far as the average reader or bearer [hearer? ] is concerned. Money is a means of exchange, an implement by which exchanges are effected, it is a measure of exchange, it is called "a title to goods," a measured claim. It is both a title and a measure.
The use of measured quantities of metal should be considered as barter. Powdered gold was still being used in India when Kipling wrote "Kim. " He describes the gold broker dipping a wet fly in the gold dust, and popping it into a box, the adherent dust being his commission on the exchange.
For thousands of years men have been used to using metal discs, stamped with an alleged value, and intended to be of uniform weight and fineness. By the year 649 A. D. the T'ang emperors had found something more convenient than lugging about bags of metal. Their metal was what has been metaphorically called earmarked, or held in deposit, and bits of paper marked with designs, and seals, remarkably beautiful designs, were put into circulation. Marco Polo found the Kublai Kahn using this system some centuries later. He thought it a clever wheeze. The idea is so practical that in-- --Sir Basil Zaharoff wrote to the Times about it; or rather about extending it so that gold wouldn't have to be shipped from the vaults of one bank to those of another, across national frontiers.
The Times referred to Zaharoff as a philanthropist. He shared other great munitioneers' floral tastes. He was, I believe, a grower, or at least a connoisseur of roses. Whatever you think money is, or whatever Zaharoff thought about gold, Arthur Kitson quite conclusively pointed out in his report to the Cunliffe Commission that something had happened to money not once but several times over. His report was printed under the title "The Banker's Conspiracy. "
METATHEMENON TE TON KRUMENON, as I think Aristotle remarked. The Voluntary variation of the value or purchasing power, or
? the metalic content, or the amount of metal, referred to by a given piece of money has attracted the attention of a great and e? lite set of people: Demosthenes, Dante, Cleopatra have all found the subject interesting, quite interesting.
It is curious that no snobism has yet been openly erected by monetary economists, Bacon, Hume, Bishop Berkeley a most respectable set of men have all thought it worth their attention. John Adams, Lincoln, Jefferson, Gallatin, Justice Taney, naturally men in official position HAVE glanced at the problem, ever since Phillippe le Bel caused such distress to his subjects, both since then and before then.
Monetary crime is divisible into perhaps two major sections: the usury wangle, and the wangles in variation of value, both of which are sometimes forced by monopoly, by cornering the control of the currency. The sovereign power over the issue of money CAN of course be used for maintaining justice. Kitson's study related to flagrant injustice. He found that men who had become indebted in cheap or depreciated currencies had been forced on more than one occasion to pay those debts in money worth twice or much more than the money wherein the debts had been contracted. In Kitson's opinion this was not by accident. He thought it was the fruit of design. He cited a good deal of conclusive evidence in support of his view.
Now supposing that Kitson's view was correct, would it not be interesting to pursue the subject further? Would it not be of interest to know whether the SAME banking firms had indulged in this little practice or wheeze, several times over? Let us say after the wars of Napoleon, after the great and terrible Civil War in America of the 1860's and after the "diktat" of Versailles?
#72 (March 30, 1943) U. S. (C24) USUROCRACY
? Brooks Adams observed that after Waterloo no power had withstood the power of the usurers.
We will try to maintain a distinction in our own minds between the production system, the system of exchange of actual goods, and the wangles or corruptions of accountancy or the money wangles that corrode both the system of production and the processes of exchange.
The page of the usury system which we are trying to analyze dates more or less from Paterson's perception that the "Bank" (of England) would have benefit of the interest on all the money that it creates out of nothing.
According to Lord Overstone, everything rolled on merrily as long as the Bank actually discounted all bills rising from legitimate transactions. Overstone is now considered an idealist among usurers. The Bank according to him was there to "satisfy the true needs of commerce. "
But Sam Loyd thought up another one. He saw, as Brooks Adams puts it, the possibilities of the single standard. He understood that as business and exchanges increase, the value of the monetary unit IN AN INELASTIC money system, will increase.
That is to say, with the same amount of money and increasing goods, the goods get cheaper in relation to money, and money more valuable in relation to goods.
He saw that a class or gang possessed of sufficient means could wangle a rise almost at pleasure, and could doubtless run it to almost any length. Also maneuver a contraction of the fiduciary circulation. As for example had been done in 1935, debtors could be made to accept almost ANY conditions dictated by the creditors.
The wangling of foreign exchange, that is, foreign money exchanges, were used for this purpose. There is no item in this present talk that I
? have not mentioned in preceding communications, but the historic importance of every one of these items is so tremendous, and the difficulty of getting them [in] their sequence, their cumulative significance into the public head is so difficult that I should be justified [in] repeating them ten times over. Kitson's Bankers Conspiracy was written to show that extortioner Loyd's little perception had become the base of a system. A regular practice among Rothschild's and the rest of the bleeders.
The world was to be enslaved according to plan. Slavery consists in having to do uninteresting work, at another's bidding. The modern means of getting a man to work are lack of money, his lack of money, and debt. Mr. Kitson quoted Mr. Lindbergh's quotation of the now famous Hazard circular of 1862:
It will not do to allow the Greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money for any length of time, as we cannot control that. But we can control the bonds and through them the bank issues.
The "we" naturally refers to the financiers.
The great debt, capitalists will see to it, is made out of the war, must be used as a mean to control the volume of money. To accomplish this the bonds must be used as a banking basis.
They were. Lincoln said "and gave to the people of this republic (the U. S. A. ) the greatest blessing they ever had, their own paper to pay their own debts. " Lincoln was shot. The bankers triumphed. It was all very simple. Some 30 years later another letter was sent to the AM. nat. (as they are called), the American national bankers.
Dear Sir, etc. The interest of national bankers requires immediate financial legislation by Congress. Silver, silver certificates, and Treasury notes, must be (note that imperative) must be retired and national-bank notes upon a gold basis made the only money. This requires the
? authorization of some five hundred million to one billion dollars of new bonds, as a basis of circulation. You will at once call in one half your loans. Be careful to make a money stringency felt among your patrons, especially among influential businessmen. Advocate an extra session of Congress for the repeal of the purchase clauses of the Sherman Law, and act with other banks of your city in securing a large petition to Congress for its unconditional repeal as per accompanying form.
I. e. , sign on the dotted line. Quote continues:
Use personal influence with Congressmen and particularly let your wishes be known to your Senators. The future life of national banks as fixed and safe investments, depends upon immediate action, as there is an increasing sentiment in favor of governmental legal tender notes and silver coinage.
One takes an example from Cleveland's time rather than from Van Buren's in the hope that some aged survivors of the 1890's may still dimly remember the actions referred to.
Mr. Churchill as Chancellor of the British Exchequer, the Cunliffe Committee, quite naturally paid no attention to Kitson's recommendations. And a few years, merrily, after the Indian farmers were paying up twice as much grain to meet their interest payments and taxes. Naturally the usurocrat press supported the Loyd system of altering the value of the monetary unit, right along from the day the newspapers were invented. That is perhaps the main reason for having newspapers, especially large newspapers in usurocratic regimes.
Newspapers govern the world, remarked the Conte de Vergennes to Mr. John Adams. The American Bankers Association circular of 1877 reads: "It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such newspapers, especially in the agricultural and religious press as will oppose the issue of greenback paper money, and that you also withhold patronage and
? favors from all applicants who are NOT willing to oppose the Government issue of money. " Unquote. The quite exquisite spirit of illegality and treason in these manifestations of the usurers SHOULD need no comment.
It takes five million dollars to start a daily paper of any size in the U. S. A. One should have ten million to do so with any chance of getting a paper going. It is hardly safe to attempt it without twenty million, and in that case you must be willing to "CONSIDER" the views of your advertisers.
Hence the totalitarian states, hence fascism, and nationalist socialist revolution.
The American citizen can, of course, appeal to his Constitution, which states that: "Congress shall have power to coin money, regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin. "
Such appeal is perhaps quixotic.
#73 (April 4, 1943) U. K. (C30) LYRIC TENORS
A few faint voices have been raised in England to request a new order; but the speakers have possessed an unrivaled talent for avoiding any honest discussion of the means whereby a new order would be possible. The men who had done some WORK toward that end, are either in jail or excluded from the microphone, and so far as one knows, from the press.
The supreme betrayal of Western civilization is manifest in the alliance with Russia. The perfect and swinish readiness to have all Europe destroyed in order to maintain the domination of all of us, the British people included, by a gang of extremely unpleasant monopolists, many
? of whom have moved their chief offices right over to Wall St. , that is, to the new ghetto. Debt is the prelude to slavery. And neither Baruch, Lehman, nor any of their British bootlickers and servants says a word about freedom from debt. Or the freedom to keep OUT of debt. It is nine years since Jeffrey Mark published The Modern Idolatry.
Interest payments due on Western capital have been made possible by the creation of slavery conditions in Western countries.
In the past the progressive accumulation of debt claims has brought about the ruin of civilizations as single units. Nearly all the creations of the nineteenth century capitalists such as, for instance, the power loom cotton industry of Lancashire, have been broken by usury.
Forty years ago it was the habit to make much of Shakespeare and the styge [stage]: by people who seem never to have thought about the text, the meaning of the words used by Henry Irving and other darlings of the theatre public.
The daughter and ducats theme is familiar to many who have not meditated [on] the six lines that Mark uses to introduce the third part of his volume:
I hate him for he is a Christian, But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down The rate of usance here in Venice.
If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
I strongly suspect these lines have been omitted in more than one Jewish performance of Shylock. There is something too near to nature, something too pertinent: "Brings down the rate of usance. "
? That just won't do; and the Times, Telegraph, Yorkshire Post, and the Beaverbrook papers are all there to keep discussion off that so dangerous topic. And Reggy McKenna and the big Five are there to deplore OUTSIDE interference. Discussion of usury, that is, banking as understood by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden, and I imagine Lord Lee would deplore the use of the very word usury in polite conversation. And yet the big FIVE are making higher profit now than they were before the war started.
France brought in the black troops. Churchill's England is allied to Soviet Russia. And the Times on September 12, 1933 spoke thus of Rumania:
Rumania can not make the payments (that was debt payments) in foreign currency until markets have been assured abroad for her surplus products.
The Times was quoting M. Modgearu.
This has not been done up to the present and to make things worse, prices of the products which Rumania exported have fallen considerably. Rumania cannot leave its officials, widows and invalids to starve in order to pay debts abroad which have become burdensome.
Just why England today has learned nothing from Rumania's position a decade ago would be a mystery if one didn't know how little the usual Briton cares for looking at ANYTHING. Yes, ANYthing that could serve to enlighten him. Mr. Mark observed pertinently at that time that Sir Otto Niemeyer had left a trail of economy, increased taxation, and a lowered standard of living behind him in every country he had visited. Twenty-six central banks formed since the other war to facilitate the service on internal and external debt. Note the title Sir, and the implications, racial implications in the name Niemeyer.
? You have NOT had to learn harakiri from the Samurai. The Japanese do it with a difference.
To maintain the loan capital swindle, Britain has been ready to wreck all of Europe. That is the ONLY explanation of the alliance with Russia. There is no honor in it. And it does NOT serve the people of Britain. By liquidating your empire to the kikes and semi-kikes in N. York you are NOT conferring a benefit on the American people. You are doing nothing that will or should earn you the gratitude or tolerance of the American people. Basset Jones, writing to the editor of Electrical Engineering in December 1932, wrote:
Taxes and obsolescence included the fixed charge on debt are 34 billion dollars a year, practically half the national income.
England's forty million inhabitants by acquiescing in the debt swindle merely aid the bleeders and cheaters to keep on going and sink the Americans under the same imposition.
As Mark points out, Basset Jones was writing not of a debtor nation, but of the greatest creditor nation in the world. That ought to put a rock through the sham term NATION when applied to any particular section of the usury system. A Warburg, Sassoon, Beit, Goldsmid, Schiff or other potentate of the bleedery can get to N. York by plane in a very few hours. First the gold, then the Jews, then one helluva war in the place where the Jews are not.
According to the fashionable system of accountancy, the wealth of the American nation shrank from 36 billion in 1928, to 160 billion in 1933, Now just what do you think causes that sort of flimflam? Does it sound crazy? Does it sound as if something or someone MONKEYED with the account books?
I am not for the moment engaged in selling you the Axis, OR the European system, or the late desires of the late Napoleon Bonaparte. I
? am trying, still patiently trying to excite a little curiosity among my possible hearers in Britain. In 1943 one of those voices that sound like an advertisement for Bird's custard was complaining that the Germans use metaphor. In June 1932 more than ten million gallons of port wine was poured to waste by the wine growers and distillers of the Duoro district in Portugal as, quote, "the only hope of preventing wide misery and privation among the workers. "
Oh no, it wasn't only in pore little Portugal. In Lancashire, nearer home to you, a proposal was made to dismantle or immobilize ten million spindles and 100,000 looms as quote "a means of restoring prosperity to the British textile industry. "
When are you going to look into this? These statements are absolutely free from all trace of metaphor.
#74 (April 6, 1943) U. S. (C27) FETISH
I am opposed! I believe that no American should kill or be killed in order to maintain the fetish value of metal, of ANY metal.
The pattern of the crime is known. The patterns of the various component parts of the major crime are known. They have been witnessed time after time.
A weak and cowardly nation invokes the aid of savages to crush a rising more honest power. England, inciting red Indians against ENGLISH colonists in America; France, in the grip of her usurers bringing black troops into Europe. London and New York inciting aid of the Tartar and Muscovite. And no man knows better than Churchill the meaning of the Stalin canal. NO literate man in Europe or America is ignorant of what Judeoslavic domination has meant and means.
? Sheer terror and lust of greed, and no amount of evasion and hired propaganda will hide it. The governments of London and Washington have betrayed civilization and KNOW it.
They fight for monopoly, and the American people have been betrayed into fighting for the gold bugs.
Throughout the ages it has been the favorite device of the creditor class first to work a contraction of the currency, which bankrupted the debtors, and then to cause inflation which created a rise, during which they sold the property they had laid hold of.
This alternate lifting and debasing the value of money is not accidental. When Kitson met Bryan, Bryan already knew that the silver propaganda was an implement or a camouflage over a major issue, that namely of the control of the national credit, or the national power to buy.
England makes war to HAVE war, war being the maximum sabotage. And without sabotage on this scale it was impossible by 1939 to create scarcity, and without scarcity no monopoly, and without monopoly of goods, or more particularly of money itself, extortion is difficult.
Samuel Loyd understood the use of the single standard, After Waterloo no effective power withstood the usurers until, by 1914, the complete usurocracy had been constructed. For fifty years or for seventy it had been almost impossible to get any large scale propaganda against the fetish value of gold save by ballyhoo about silver. By 1978 [1878] silver ballyhoo was already necessary to get in a motion to keep at least some of the NON-Interest bearing national debt in circulation as currency. Those words are Greek to most hearers. Bryan denounced the cross of gold, but needed support from the silver interests, and it was insufficient.
Most of the gold in the world is in the British Empire, in the U. S. and in Russia. And mankind is against dying to maintain the fetish value of gold. Thousands of Americans have already died for that metal. They have died for a fetish, a fetish used for more than a century to hypnotize
? mankind into accepting certain frauds inherent in the money system. In the CONTRACTION of the currency, periodically, in order [to] force other people (sometimes called the debtor class) to pay double for what they have had. But beyond that, to extort produce, wheat, cloth, natural products, and elaborated goods, from the producers.
Can you ever understand that the return to gold under Lloyd George and Churchill meant that 73% of the population of India had to pay up twice as much grain or farm products to meet taxes and interest charges? Seventy-five percent because that is the percentage of Indian population that depends upon agriculture.
And what goes for Indian agriculture in a case of that kind goes for agriculture all over the world. Wars are made to make debt. You have already got quite a lot of it, and the judeophile N. Y. Herald is already howling to have it quadrupled by the simple device of returning to GOLD as the fictitious basis of bank loans, and currency. Willkie I take it is already being groomed up to work that betrayal on the American people. The wheeze was worked after the wars of Napoleon. It was worked after the American Civil War. It was worked by the Cunliffe Committee, after the last war.
Ships are sunk IN ORDER TO HAVE SHIPS SUNK. When ships are sunk, there is a greater demand for new ships. The sinking augments the MARKET for new ships. More ships are wanted because more ships have been destroyed. And LOAN CAPITAL, usurer's capital, money made by a stroke of the banker's pen is wanted for FINANCING new construction. Arabs are murdered to keep things lively. Cities are destroyed IN ORDER that cities may be destroyed. The frontier means nothing to the financier. The MORE houses fall on BOTH sides of the frontiers, the more loan-capital will be wanted so long as the usurocrat system endures; so long as the usurocrat system endures, the more loan capital will be required to finance reconstruction. The more simple people are ruined, the more bankruptcies, the more bankrupt concerns
? can be snapped up cheap by the owners of loan capital. Has NO one ever examined the reconstruction period, the period after the American Civil War? from this angle?
With race or without race, examine it. The more energy goes into destroying goods, the less will go into making them. The more energy goes into goods intended for immediate destruction, the less will go into goods made for USE. The faster you destroy goods, the faster superfluous money will mount up, unless you employ a Gesellite or similar mechanism to destroy the money as fast as the goods are blown to hell or sunk in the oceans. Without Gesell that means inflation; i. e. a dollar worth ten cents worth of potatoes.
Debt is already upon you. Some of you know that. But 99% of you don't see that the DEFLATION, the contraction of the currency, is already PLANNED. That the same banking houses that have worked the wheeze four times and more times are already waiting their moment to spring.
If there is a sane man or an honest man left in America, let him get out a new edition of the Bankers Conspiracy. A ten cent edition, an edition people can buy. Henry Ford or Firestone, or whoever survives of their generation OUGHT to have memories long enough to remember Olney and Cleveland, and the struggles of 1893. Hank Wallace betrays Martin van Buren. But there ought to be some college campus left where the local historian still has liberty to correlate the works of the American founders, and to put the works of Kitson and Brooks Adams together, DESPITE the new censorship, despite telegraph restrictions, despite, and I warned you of it, the interruption of inter-communication between one American and another INSIDE the U. S.
Your means of communication by your own automobiles have been curtailed.
? #75 (April 13, 1943) U. S. (C29) VALENTINE
About St. Valentine's day the light broke on Steinie Morrison and he mentioned the word "collaboration. " No longer going to shut down on all European radios and suppress all discussion of vital topics, but England going to collaborate in a world system.
This after Iran or Persia had mentioned wanting to control its own banking and currency. The light of hither Asia? Perhaps.
On June 19, 1934 a gent, now I believe in jail in the U. S. A. , wrote me from Ashville, after professing disinterest in European personalities as follows:
The working out of the problems of America is exactly along the policy of constructively eliminating the power of money as money (it is absurd that the medium of exchange should have value in itself); scrapping the banking system and the international warplots; and installing a currency which will provide an equal balance between the capacity of industry to produce and the ability of the public to buy.
If that be treason, go to it. My correspondent continued:
It is as simple as this, but will not be accomplished until the present time worn system, capitalized upon by the Rothschilds, Ginsbergs, Sassoons, Warburgs, etc. , in their century-long plot (already fighting among themselves for the loot) collapses of its own worthlessness.
My correspondent believed in the American Constitution, and mistrusted Jefferson, retrospectively. The ideal political prisoner, I suppose. And the Commonwealth Party. What is it? Is it a real party? Does it stand for the
? just price and the homestead, or is it just another fake opposition set up and financed by the financiers? Longnosed or shortnosed?
There is manifestly no freedom without economic freedom. Freedom to keep out of debt. In 1936 a discussion of Simonds and Emery's "The Price of Peace" appeared in London and contained a division of nations which seems to me inadequate. The first group, according to the criticisms of Simonds and Emery, consisted of status-quo powers, such as France and England, who were "naturally satisfied with their enormous possessions" and desired to see no change.
The second group consisted of revisionist powers: dissatisfied powers, Germany, Japan, and Italy, who wanted the world to move. Otherwise their standards of living would sink, and national existence shrivel. You will at once think of a third set of powers, namely, Roosevelt's Hebrew Republic, and Stalin's Russia, both possessed of vast wealth. No need to expand their borders, having vast need of clean sane and decent distribution INSIDE those borders. But rich beyond the dreams of anything but Rothschildean greed, and flagrantly determined to expand, grab and pervade.
And England certainly has entered some sort of plot, or gang, to betray Eastern Europe, to betray pretty much all of European civilization. There is no truce with Adam Zad, the bear that walks like a man. That on the one hand, and W. Manning Dacey, in the Observer for January 10, telling you and the world that the profits of the Big Five (that is BANKS), the chief banks of your country, are for the first time above the 1929 level. Cui bono, whom doth it profit?
For gold I arm their hands And for gold I buy their lands
and for gold I sell their enemies the yield Their nearest fees may purchase, or their furthest
friends may lease.
? Said, or as they say "sang," the late Rudyard Kipling in a poem called "The Peace of Dives," or dives.
Who grindest for thy greed Men's belly pinch and need.
What hope have you in a Russian invasion of Romania and Finland?
I hear your Sunday parsons howling to Christ. It is unconvincing, YOU know, at least many of you know as well and better than I do, what the Soviet system has been for the past 20 years. For yourselves you do not believe in the communal ownership of gardens, bathtubs, a woman, you like a bit of promiscuity, but you don't run to the communal system.
You had a decent proportion of communal ownership of pasturage; village commons, common lands, and you would do well to get back to it, 150 ducal filchings, somewhat tangled skein, but you could untangle it. He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. Tom Paine said it and died only partially honored. I repeat that, quote: "He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression. " You don't appear to want to put that in practice. You do NOT fight for world freedom, you are stampeded. You, some of you, had dislikes, quite proper dislikes, dislikes of being oppressed; and a great laziness, a very great laziness, especially in the head.
Even Lenin saw that the "easiest way to debauch the capitalist system is to debauch its currency. " No, you don't exactly want the capitalist system either. Especially if it is to be somebody else's capitalist system, with you vainly trying to get back to the udders. And so this is the new opposition, the Commonwealth Party. [It] don't seem to have got to your microphones, not at the moments I have unhooked a receiver. It is said to be of Communist tendencies. That is suspicious, considering the
? presence of yiddo slays, and associates of the late Mr. Trotsky and the pressing desire of the Bolshies to get control of the Labor Party.
Why, God alone knows why they want to get hold of the fake opposition. But still they like to be as ubiquitous as possible.
I wonder, has the Commonwealth party said anything about money, control of the national power to buy? If so, of course a poll often thousand against eleven thousand votes for the Big Five, the City, the Gold exchange, is peculiar.
It might even be a real party . . . but Lord alone knows . . . can it be? Is it?
#76 (April 17, 1943) U. S. (C31) J. G. BLAINE
I was highly diverted, along in January, to hear that American historical sense had got down to an almost invisible minimum. They were havin' a celebration or commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mr. Blaine, J. G. B. I couldn't quote the pertinent document, without a return to Rapallo, but I note that in late 1880 in August, August 27 to be exact, of the year wherein Grover Cleveland was elected, a stalwart Republican, state legislature 1864 and subsequent, Congress 1876 and subsequent, wrote to General E. Bryant a letter that was reproduced in a good number of papers western and eastern, includin' the N. Y. Evening Post.
The Philadelphia Times called it the most significant of many recent Republican protests. That is perhaps why Blaine's commemoration occurs during a Democratic administration, The Democrats owed him Cleveland's elections. It is a two-column letter and I don't think I can get it into my time. It began with reference to President Arthur, his integrity. Regretted that he had not been nominated for the subsequent term which, being the case, the writer supposed that the nominee should
? be a man of the highest type of political integrity, and republican principles.
He continued:
Mr. Blaine is not such a man. He embodies most in American politics that is menacing to public morals and INTEGRITY in government. [A] long public career distinguished mainly by a sort of declamatory and pugilistic statecraft, not the inspiration of a single valuable policy, or author of an important statute. Opposed good and supported bad legislation. Record clouded by suspicion and accusation of jobbery and corruption undefended. He brings to us personal antagonisms which have torn and weakened our party in the past, invading the administration of Garfield with demands of personal vengence so virulent as to inflame the spirit of assassination and culminating in the defeat of Judge Folger and the election of Grover Cleveland, Governor of the Empire State.
I skip some references to Roscoe Conkling, and continue re Mr. Blaine:
A speculator, enjoying a fortune too great to have been acquired by honest industry. Legitimate business enterprise of his country's service at five thousand dollars a year, he sympathizes with and profits [from] speculative stock jobbing and gambling methods of acquiring wealth, methods which have wrought ruin, disgrace and business disasters beyond computation, schooled youth and persuaded middle age to avoid honest and useful industry, made suicide and insanity commonplace, unsettled values, placed the fruits of honest toil in the power of Goulds and Armours, to bear down and bull up in the markets, as whim or interest may dictate, methods which gave us but an exaggerated illustration of their iniquitous consequences in the Grant and Ward 150 million dollar failure and robbery.
? Reference to Blaine's Congressional record relating to subsidies, class legislation, corporate exactions, etc. will readily satisfy the honest inquirer of his uniform support of monopolies and indifference to the common weal.
Little wonder that he omits from his letter to refer to, or explain, the cause of the great disparity in the distribution of this marvelous increase of wealth accumulated during the period he chooses for comparison, that he fails to note the fact that one 300th of [the] 44 billion dollars is held by one man, while others rank little below, and his own palatial residence [at] a rental of 11 thousand per year suggesting more than an average per capita of wealth. Little wonder he is silent on the subject of interstate commerce, the regulation of which is demanded by all producers and legitimate traders. Great corporate interests demand noninterference.
Sorry to skip reference to people fed at public crib, Brother Bob etc. Nor will the citation of his pacific assurances to Mexico quite cover up his
S. American policy and interference to protect the Landau Guano scheme. Death of his servant Hurlbut, etc. The disingeneousness of his letter of acceptance is further betrayed by its significant silence touching the events of the past three years (1881, 2, 3).
Bringing down his historic figure to the present would have revealed the fiction involved in his statements, would have shown a marvelous shrinkage in nominal values, would have noted the downfall of business prosperity and business morals and would have pictured as few can do so graphically as he, the furnace fires dying out, the wheels of factories standing still, wages reduced, beggary usurping the place of labor, bank and business failures, creditors and depositors wantonly defrauded, homes lost, and crookedness in public affairs.
Mr. Blaine is objectionable, furthermore, for the company he keeps, for the "friends he has made. " Will the chief promoters of his nomination be
? his chief advisors if elected? There's the rub. I need mention no names but will suggest that the least objectionable of his pet supporters are the Tribune supporters of Greeley in 1872, accusers of Blaine in 1876 and 1880, charging him with bribery and other penitentiary crimes. With no pronounced issues between the two great parties, we can safely afford to yield temporary executive control at this time.
It is vastly more important to good government that the Republican Party be restored to supremacy in Congress than that the administration of law be entrusted to an unworthy partisan surrounded by bad counsel. The N. Y. Times commented on the letter thus: that Blaine's advocate will be amazed to see how formidable is the list of his offenses and how small a part the Mulligan letters (sufficient in themselves) play in the arraignment.
You will say: why rake it all up? Hasn't Woodward summed it all up very neatly? It was an unfortunate choice. Blaine was thoroughly tarred with financial scandals. The worst of it was that the public knew all about his slippery doings. He declared during the campaign that his life was an open book. It was, indeed, but it had been opened by somebody else. For the first time in our history a major political party nominated as its candidate a man who was known to be dishonest. All of which is, indeed, past history, and could have been let alone were it not that a Democratic administration, the Morgenthau-Lehman administration, has run a commemoration of a defeated Republican candidate. Now isn't that odd, just a bit odd? It is just part of [the] process of falsification of history.
I hope my little bit of reminiscence may shed a side light, and even back up Woodward's summary. He is sometimes laconic.