G.G. McGeer
The Conquest of Poverty
PREFACE
Ever since the passage of the English Bank Act of 1844 the creation, issuance and the regulation of the circulation of the current medium of exchange, though being duties that constitute the most conspicuous and sacred responsibilities of government, have been in large measure delegated in blind faith and absolute confidence to bankers and financiers.
The complete collapse of the economic structure under banker management in a withering blight of bankruptcy that brought on a veritable welter of destitution and chaos, proves that the private control of credit is fundamentally unsound. The failure of the private monetary system has been more disastrous than its most bitter opponent has ever dared to prophesy.
World war followed by the complete failure of domestic and international trade at a time when science guided by education has made peace possible, and plenty-readily and easily realizable proves that once the lucrative profession of usury becomes likewise a post of honour and a power in government, national strife is inevitable, progress is impossible, Democracy is doomed, and faith in God is endangered.
Necessity now compels all to recognize that the creation, and issuance of the medium of exchange, the monetization of public credit, the circulation of the medium of exchange, and the general supervision of the monetary system must be restored to government. If we are to make the Golden Rule the “ism” of Democracy we must drive the money changers out of the temples of government and put the spirit of Christ in charge. By such changes the sovereignty of usury can be overthrown and the elected representatives of the people may become the rulers of the “economic bloodstream of the nation”. Responsible government as an expression of Christian Democracy may then be maintained.
No one has any right to say that the establishment of Democracy based upon the laws of God cannot and will not produce progress, prosperity, peace and respectability until it has been given the same trial that the sovereignty of Money Power has been privileged to enjoy. Let no man say that Christian Democracy has failed because it has not yet been given a trial.
Responsible government must abandon the misguided policies of Money Power, or banker mismanagement of money, credit and trade will destroy responsible government and the civilization that brought it into being.
Money must he restored to its proper function. It must be issued and circulated primarily as a tool of trade serving as the medium of exchange in the creation and distribution of the wealth essential to the need, convenience and existence of humanity. It must cease to be an instrument of appropriation functioning primarily for the purpose of impounding the wealth of the nation to the service of lovers of wealth and money power.
“Thou shalt not make unto you gods of silver or gods of gold,”
“Thou shalt not lend on usury”, and
“Thou shalt not worship mammon,”
sayeth the law and the laws of God must be obeyed.
GERALD GRATTAN MCGEER,
4812 Belmont Avenue,
Vancouver, B.C.
January 6th, 1935.
FOREWORD
The Spirit of Lincoln
If the Great Emancipator, who lived to serve humanity through the abolition of the last form of physical slavery, and who called upon the people of his land to dedicate their lives to the resolution “that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom-and that Government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth”, were privileged to speak in this time of danger to Democracy he would probably say :
“The prayers of rich and poor, of capitalist and socialist, go forth to the deities of their own conception. They are all praying for assistance in this time of destitution and uncertainty. They are all bewildered at the sight of universal poverty in the midst of easily and readily realizable abundance. Chaos threatens to overwhelm progress.
“Unless all are prepared to accept the exalted Liberalism of the Carpenter of Nazareth, which aims to build Democracy upon the Spirit of the Golden Rule, they cannot find any common ground upon which to dissolve their variant aspirations; for it is true that the prayers of all conflicting forces cannot be satisfied.
“ ‘Ye cannot worship God and mammon.’ God will not answer the prayers of a nation wherein the wages of money are placed above the wages of man. Unless we overthrow the dominion of usury and cease to worship gold and silver, our prayers will remain unanswered. Nor will we find success by making government the expression of proletariat or any other form of class dictatorship.
“History and the existing depression prove that we cannot muck Divine authority with impunity.
“ ‘Thou shalt not make unto you gods of silver or gold’; and ‘Thou shalt not lend on usury’; are no less clearly defined than are those that declare—‘Thou shalt not kill’: and ‘Thou shalt not steal’. In this depression history is being repeated. We have forgotten God and His laws and we are suffering the punishment that Divine authority has decreed. Worshipping mammon, with gold as our God, we have vainly tried to advance our civilization under the guidance of financiers, forgetting that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’.
‘Woe unto the world because of offences for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by wham the offence cometh.’
If we shall suppose that selfish ownership of wealth is one of those offences which, in the worship of mammon, must needs come, but which, having continued through its appointed time. He now wills to remove and that He gave to the world a brief moment of false progress as the aftermath of World War, to be followed by a devastating social revolution ‘as the woe due to those by whom the offence came’, shall we discern therein any departure from those Divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him ?
“The Almighty God has His own purposes but ‘fondly do we hope and fervently do we pray that destitution horn of greed ‘will speedily pass away’. Yet if God wills to deny His blessing to a vain and selfish world until all the wealth accumulated from two thousand years of strife and unrequited toil shall he sunk and till every body broken upon the altar of mammon shall be paid for by another sacrificed in revolution, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
“Peace having brought want instead of plenty proves that statesmanship is blinded by malice and selfishness and is leading the world in the darkness of avariciousness rather than in the light of charity and love.
“ ‘Humanity can have peace and goodwill, but it cannot have peace and usury.’
“Let us in an attitude of Christian charity glorify the bountiful treasures He has placed in our keeping by releasing all debtors as we, in like position, would want to be forgiven. Let us rebuild the temple of our government and restore that temple to the ancient truths by driving the money changers from the chambers of authority they have defiled and made corrupt with infamy. Let us not deceive ourselves by vainly attempting to evade the laws of God. The private money system is ‘a tree that has borne evil fruit’. Our duty ‘to cut it down and cast it into the fire’ is now a public duty. We have, by trial, proven that we cannot advance by building our social structure upon a foundation of interest-bearing debt.
“The temple of our civilization is greater than the gold and money it sanctifies. In our desire to secure the value of money, we have sacrificed the value of our homes, farms, industrial, commercial and social institutions, and we are denying ourselves the right to progress.
“Although we have been fully warned, we have persisted in our folly. Knowing that the farming out of the taxes brought Rome to disaster, we have fallen into even greater error by farming out the issue of money to credit dealers, successors to the money changers of old.
“What man, with power to create money, would give it away to his neighbor and bankrupt his family by borrowing at interest that which he rightfully owned. No less absurd is the practice followed by governments which give their power to create money to a private money system and then bankrupt the taxpayers and the social system by borrowing at interest that which the government should issue as its own.
“Let us take from bankers ‘in sheep’s clothing who are ravening wolves’ the power of managing the nation’s currency and credit, and restore it to the nation by placing it under the administration of men responsible to the nation and the people. Let us prove our faith in God-guided Democracy by placing it under the control of men who will be charged with the responsibility of maintaining the circulation of national currency and credit that will be as safe and as sound as the nation itself. Let that currency and credit be issued not for the purpose of acquiring gain, but let its circulation be regulated so that mankind, enjoying the distribution of plenty, will be freed forever from the scourge of usury and the slavery of unpayable debt.
“Let the fairly-paid and properly-disciplined trustees of ‘the economic blood stream of the social system’ guard and protect the administration of the nation’s credit and make the nation’s currency forever a tool of trade and never an instrument of appropriation. We can discipline the public servant, responsible in the administration of currency to the government, but we cannot discipline the private banker who enjoys the power of government to issue a credit substitute for money because the banker, in such circumstances, actually controls the government.
“Let us cease the evil practice of farming out the issue and management of the nation’s prerogative power to create and circulate the spending power of government and the buying power of the consumer to men who are not gods, but who are usurers.
“In the reconstruction of our scheme of government, let us take the national administration of the monetary system, the stone that the builders of our civilization have rejected, and make it the head of the corner of a true Democracy. By so doing we will free our nation from the godless and soulless sovereignty of Money Power and by our works establish our right to the favour of God.
“In meeting the problems that progress has developed, we should recognize that the technique of monetary management and taxation is now perfected to the point where government in the twentieth century can undertake and execute responsibilities in the realm of economic practice which the governments of our forefathers were wholly incapable of performing.
“We can rationalize the financing of progress by co-ordinating the government’s power to issue national currency and monetize public credit in a national banking institution, with its power to levy taxes. The issue of bank credit by bankers during the war period and the existing confiscation of wealth by taxation prove that such powers are available.
“By establishing a national bank with a sub-national bank in each State in the Union, the nation’s power to create and issue the medium of exchange can be administered as a public utility, financing national, state and municipal government free from the impossible expense that the private money system has exacted and, unless such a change is made, will continue to exact.
“Fears that unbridled inflation will follow are groundless. Income and excess profit taxes, together with probate and succession duties, offer ample means to prevent the acquisitive from accumulating more than a just and righteous share of the nation’s wealth. The sales tax, license and excise fees constitute powers that are amply sufficient to withdraw from circulation any amount necessary to stabilize the value of the unit of exchange.
“Once the means of maintaining the stream of consumers’ buying power is in operation and lack of wages, due to involuntary unemployment, is eliminated, we will find that reasonable regulation of prices, wages, working conditions, production, distribution, competition and the quantity and quality of public works and social services to be undertaken, will cease to be insurmountable problems. Nor will we find the management of external trade, commerce and credit beyond the power of government of a prosperous nation.
“We need not assume that a national system of monetary management, taxation, economic control and regulated international commerce, supported by the authorities of the States and local governments working in co-operation with those responsible to the government of the nation will iron out all the social and economic inequalities that exist. We can assume, however, that the establishment of such a system will aid us in moving onward towards the goal of perfect social justice. We can balance budgets. We can maintain government that will be balanced in its service to every class and section of the land.
“Owing at interest for national, state, municipal, corporation and private debt a sum of five times as great as the total bank deposits, which are inflated by more than $40,000,000,000 over our total gold reserves, we are bankrupt simply because we have allowed bankers to finance all manner of loans and investments by the use of a bookkeeping system and the manipulation of currency.
“When the government of a nation allows a group of privileged monopolists to advance bookkeeping entries as a substitute for money on loans at interest that are repayable in money, it invites economic chaos. For not only does the lender collect interest on nothing actually advanced, but the borrower is compelled to repay in something that is not put in circulation. This misguided extension of the vice of usury cannot be allowed to continue. It must be destroyed or the nation must perish.
“Abundance languishes in the very sight of the supply simply because we have failed to recognize that no duty is more imperative on the government than the duty it owes the people of furnishing them with a sound and uniform currency.
“In bringing about these changes we de not need to socialize private finance, nor need we destroy the business of legitimate merchant banking. The merchant banker, under proper regulation, can continue to invest his own capital and the capital actually deposited in the bank in the normal channels of commercial enterprise. He should not be allowed to issue credit as a substitute for money nor should he be allowed to pyramid his investments by using his depositors’ money to purchase assets for himself.
“We cannot allow practices that exploit the egregious principle of trading short to masquerade as sound business or honest trade.
“We should not hesitate because the tasks are great. Although we must wrestle with the rulers of the darkness of the world and assail spiritual wickedness in the realm of high finance, ‘let us not be weary of well doing: for in due season we shall reap if we faint not’.
“Let us finish the work we have undertaken by abolishing war and establishing human freedom by conquering poverty and want. With firmness in the right as God gives us to see it, let us go forward in intelligent goodwill, healing the wounds of all nations, caring for him who has borne the battle and who bears the heat and the burden of the working day. Let us seek, by international co-operation, to change international trade from covetous acquisition into equitable exchange of goods and services to the end that we may assist in eliminating from this earth national and individual destitution, the primary causes of war, revolution, anarchy and crime.
“In the tasks that lie before us may we ever be reminded that our success will be measured by our ability to place human values over material things. May we have the power to renounce the practices in government that come to us from the ancient paganism of Rome, which made government an institution of service to monopolies, privileges and vested rights that were designed to permit the few to exploit the multitude. These practices must give way so that all economic activities will be controlled by the same ideas of puritanism and ethics that we teach in our schools and churches as the guide for individuals in their relations with their fellow beings. Let us not hesitate to destroy monopolies that ignore the demands of social justice.
“If we are to enjoy the abundance which a benevolent providence has placed at the service of mankind and which God-guided intelligence, expressing itself in every realm of science, is multiplying, we must accept and put into practice the spirit of Christian Democracy that is based upon the simple proposition that no section, class, group or individual in the nation shall be permitted to unrighteously advance at the expense of any other. In a true spirit of goodwill let individuals and nations advance together.
“Thus all may enjoy ‘life more abundantly in safety under their own vine and fig tree’. Then will we gain the respect of posterity. The truth of our highly-resolved professions that the war dead of every land shall not have died in vain will be proven by the works of enduring value.
“Mankind, with malice towards none and with charity for all, will secure a new birth of liberty that will make possible ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ under the sovereignty of God. Governments functioning under such auspices can conquer poverty and banish crime and destitution from this earth. People in every structure of the social system and in every nation will be free to truly follow Christian lives. Education may conquer ignorance and spiritual leaders will be blessed with a power to bring the love of God into the hearts of men. Then may the Son of God be pleased to return to establish the Kingdom of God on earth and fulfil the promise—
“ ‘Fear not, for Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be unto all people.
‘Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.’“Emerging from the misrule of the oligarchy of Money Power, true Democracy will become a glorious reality, guiding all to freedom in a universal brotherhood of peaceful progress.
“Thus will the assault of the Nazarene upon the money changers be vindicated and the sacrifice of the Son of God be glorified in the service of suffering humanity, and His parting message ‘Fear not, I have overcome the world,’ will be established as a triumph of Christianity.”
Gerald Grattan McGeer, The Conquest of Poverty, ch 1
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