G.G. McGeer
The Conquest of Poverty
CHAPTER III.
War and Usury
In 1894 Arthur Kitson, who is still valiantly carrying on his great crusade against the private control of currency and credit, published a book entitled “A Scientific Solution of the Money Question”. The basis of his argument rested upon these propositions :
“Money is a tool of trade.”
“Banking should exist to facilitate commerce. Our present system is wrong because under it commerce exists for the benefit of bankers and is compelled to adapt itself to their whims and opinions.”
“A shortage of money is maintained to assist money to function as an instrument of appropriation.”
“Men producing different kinds of wealth, the exchange of which would result in the satisfaction of their wants, are prevented from doing so simply from want of this tool of exchange—money—which but for law they would create for themselves. Therefore, we witness starvation in the midst of wealth.”
Kitson also argued that the gold standard money system would be the cause of world war.
Prescience
Denouncing the right of financiers to sit on the highway of progress using a golden cat-of-ninetails with lashes of preference, privilege and usury to thwart the attempt of God-fearing and unselfish men to advance our civilization, Kitson earned the right to be recognized as a modern prophet. In the closing pages of his work the courageous prescience of an inspired writer is clearly indicated. In this book of forty years ago he wrote :
“The gold standard money system creates debts and then prevents men from settling them. It places mankind in perpetual bondage. It is a prison gate that only opens inward. Its victims are permitted to enter but never to escape.
“Not only are the factors of well-being and of progress rendered impotent by the gold standard money system, but the factors of evil minister to its exploiters. Wars, state extravagance and political corruption all serve to build up this pyramid of irremedial debts which almost every nation is now adding to and upon which the gold octopus feeds.
“Repudiation is inevitable. Let us clearly see this. It is not a threat. It is an inevitable result. It cannot be avoided. Nations must strangle this monster or it will strangle them. The gold debts of the world can never be redeemed.
“In vain men toil, in vain they produce, so long as this tapeworm of society exists. All our surplus wealth which should go to form a national store, all our surplus creations we must sacrifice. In vain science prosecutes her voyage of discovery and art labours to convert the discordant and hostile elements of nature into a system of usefulness and harmony. In vain temples of learning are reared and libraries founded. All these institutions, all these achievements that have for their object the advancement of learning and the raising of labour to a higher state of efficiency serve but to strengthen and nourish this octopus and give it a firmer grasp and a strangle hold on society. The gold standard means inevitable war. Nations cannot possibly exist long under it.
“The children born of it are fire and sword, red ruin and the breaking up of laws.
“This question, this money question, is the supreme question of the hour. It is not a mere abstract question of economics. It does not merely concern statesmen and students of finance. It is the greatest moral, the greatest social question, which mankind has ever had to consider. It concerns the lives, fortunes and happiness of every human being in society and all the generations yet unborn. It is the problem at the turn of the century, and our answer to it will determine the character of the drama we shall have to witness and upon which the curtain of the twentieth century is about to rise.”
Red Ruin
The curtain has been raised and in less than half a century every prophetic statement made by Kitson has been fulfilled to the letter. War, revolution, debt repudiation and destitution are the rewards of a civilization that made gold its God and power its religion. Eleven million human lives were sacrificed in the most imbecilic war ever waged. The blood of 45,000,000 wounded and mangled men mingling with the life-blood of the dead for four long years literally saturated the earth with human gore. This greatest of all human sacrificial offerings was attended by the richest and most bountiful harvest that the lovers of money ever garnered as the proceeds of usury. The welter of interest-bearing debt that capitalists developed through the years of war-time finance was sufficient, could it have been maintained as a sacred debt claim, to place humanity in perpetual bondage. The burden was impossible, however, and the universal debt repudiation described by Kitson came. But more than that, the debt claims payable in gold established by the Treaty of Versailles at the dictation of and under the advice of the bankers as the fruitful seeds of future wars are already beginning to germinate. Under their malevolent influence the forces of capricious ambition and lustful greed are already wrecking the constitutional powers of Democratic government and the clouds of revolution and war are forming on every horizon. Within the next twenty years, if banker rule continues, the world will be seething again in another great blood and hatred sacrifice to the god of mammon. Make no mistake about it. War is an essential instrument to the effective operation of the game of high finance.
Surely we should have learned that if it was necessary to suspend the gold standard to secure the moneys necessary to finance war that we would he unable to pay war debts and the costs of rehabilitation if the gold standard was re-established. We should have learned that when governments distribute wages an increase in buying power is established and the attendant new demands for all manner of goods and services create work and wages and profits for business, commerce and industry. But we apparently learned nothing. No sooner was the war over than the international financiers proceeded to re-establish the cruelest regimentation of humanity in a straightjacket of gold that had ever been imposed upon my civilization. The international bankers demanded the restoration of the gold standard and stupid statesmen agreed to their demand.
The Post-War Conspiracy
This monstrous conspiracy was not carried out without opposition. In 1918, Arthur Kitson, anticipating what was coming, wrote :
“The nation should be on its guard to see that the war debt is not enhanced by some jugglery with our legal tender after the war. I have already sounded a note of warning in my last book ‘A Fraudulent Standard’, on this matter. The re-introduction of a gold currency accompanied by the gradual withdrawal of our Treasury notes, will, by raising the purchasing power of money and lowering prices, double, if not treble, the actual amount of the war debt in terms of labour and commodities with which the public will have to pay both principal and interest. The method is so insidious and can be accomplished so easily that the public may be cheated before they are aware of it. The war debt has been incurred in cheap pounds, and honest dealing requires repayment in pounds and in commodities of the same value as when the debt was incurred. To raise the value of money after the war is an old trick of the world’s financiers. It was practised after the Napoleonic and American Civil wars, and led to years of industrial and social disasters and untold misery. At all costs a repetition of such jugglery should be prevented.”
This warning went unheeded. The British Government set up the Cunliff Commission in 1918. The international bankers became active and before the Armistice was signed it became apparent that they were bent on re-establishing as quickly as they possibly could all the iniquities of the gold standard system.
Danger
The Cunliffe Committee, in 1918, made an interim report, which was completely confirmed by the final report of the Committee in December, 1919, advising—
“the restoration of the gold standard at the prewar parity without delay.”
Kitson, in criticism of this interim report at that time, wrote :
“We cannot possibly go on in the sense of reconstructing and developing our trade and industries with a scarcity of money which the Committee recommend. It is therefore the bounden and patriotic duty of those who really understand this great question and foresee the dangers and perils to which our economic future will be exposed by a return to our pre-war currency system, to do all in their power to prevent the adoption by the Government of the Committee’s report.”
Again, in 1920, Kitson warned the people of Great Britain against the bankers’ conspiracy. At that time he wrote :
“We are threatened with wholesome bankruptcy and national ruin through the return to the gold standard now being strenuously advanced by the Treasury and Inland Revenue officials, aided by certain financiers both national and international and their organs. Unless the true nature of this policy is exposed and the conspiracy which lies at its root defeated, the British taxpayers will not only be saddled with a debt which will become practically inextinguishable, but we shall witness a period of industrial depression and social upheaval more terrible than that following the Napoleonic wars of a century ago. ... Deflating the currency and raising the bank rate and a period of falling prices spell evil and misfortune to both Labour and Capital. Neither manufacturers nor workmen gain anything from such conditions. ... Deflating the currency means inflating debts. If the present purchasing power of money is doubled, then it follows that everyone owing money must pay in goods or services twice what he otherwise would have to pay. In short, this movement to contract the currency means wholesale robbery. It means plundering the masses for the benefit of those who own money and bonds and credits. It contemplates the greatest system of confiscation that has ever been attempted. ... To bring the value of money back to its pre-war level means the doubling of all debts. The present war debt has been incurred in what these professors call ‘cheap pounds’ and ‘debased currency’. And they have the impudence to suggest that the taxpayers should repay this mountainous debt in ‘dear pounds’.”
This warning was also in vain. Great Britain returned to gold and poverty for the people, and in 1931, to save that nation from the disaster of revolution, gold payments were abandoned by England for ever. England will never return to gold as the means of settling debts in specie.
Kitson was not alone. John Maynard Keynes, the distinguished economist of Cambridge, did not hesitate to declare in 1923 that :
“The gold standard is a barbarous relic. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it is from the spirit and requirements of the age.”
Analyzing fully what the return to the gold standard meant, Keynes declared that its purpose was “to restrict credit”, “reduce wages” and to bring about “a deliberate intensification of unemployment” which will result in a “great depression”.
Time has proven Kitson and Keynes correct in their exposure of the diabolic inhumanity of the orthodox policy of the gold party which the academic economists call “sound money”.
Everyone is now aware of the unemployment and the reduction in wages that the return to the gold standard has exacted since 1925. But let us look for a moment at the international situation which the gold standard was supposed to put on a basis of automatically regulated progress.
The Race For Gold
The return to gold in the post-war period created an unparalleled race for gold. Each government endeavoured to establish a favourable balance of trade payable in gold. In the vain endeavour to avoid national bankruptcy, every nation engaged in a suicidal attempt to establish national solvency at the price of national bankruptcy to its neighbors. International trade on a basis of fair exchange gave way to economic warfare waged with tariffs, dump duties, trade embargoes, bonuses and depreciated currencies. This inane and futile struggle brought about the collapse of international trade. In this mad race for gold, the United States, being the largest creditor nation, won, but instead of bringing prosperity, success in this particular instance was attended by unparalleled calamity.
The Fruits of Greed
When the crash came it started, quite naturally, in the New York Stock Exchange. It swept rapidly through Europe and into Great Britain, and by 1932 the economic chaos which was sweeping over the world engulfed the United States in a condition of bankruptcy, destitution and unemployment more serious than that which existed in Europe. The American banking system, supported by the greatest accumulation of gold ever concentrated in one nation, collapsed in a state of abject helplessness and impotent bankruptcy. In the wake of the disaster, respectability gave way in the age-old conflict with poverty. An uncontrollable wave of crime gripped he United States. In desperation the government ,et up a National Crime Commission and it reported he crime calendar of the United States for the year 1933 as follows :
“12,000 murders, 50,000 robberies, 100,000 assaults, 3,000 kidnappings, 5,000 cases of arson and 40,000 burglaries.”
Thus was fulfilled the prophecy made in 1876 by the Monetary Commission of the United States Congress, which was appointed under a joint commission to investigate and report upon the consequences of the demonetization of silver by Congress in the Coinage Act of 1873, which had passed almost unnoticed during that year. That Commission, among other things, reported as follows :
“Finally, the Commission believes that the facts that Germany and the Scandinavian States have adopted the single gold standard, and that some other European nations may possibly adopt it, instead of being reasons for perseverance in the attempt to establish it in the United States, are precisely the facts which make such an attempt entirely impracticable and ruinous. If the nations on the continent of Europe had the double standard, a gold standard would be possible here, because, in that condition, they would freely exchange gold for silver. It was that condition which enabled England to resume specie payments in gold in 1821. The attainment of such a standard becomes difficult precisely in proportion to the number and importance of the countries engaged in striving after it; and it is precisely in the same proportion that the ruinous effects of striving after it are aggravated. To propose to this country a contest for a gold standard with the European nations is to propose to it a disastrous race, in reducing the price of labour and commodities, in aggravating the burdens of debt, and in the diminution and concentration of wealth, in which all the contestants will suffer immeasurably, and the victors even more than the vanquished.”
We have lived to see this prophetic warning vindicated.
The collapse of world trade, wild red raging revolution in Europe and poverty and destitution on an unparalleled scale, have more than vindicated Kitson’s prophetic warning that :
“That the children born of the gold standard private money system are fire and sword, red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.”
The Awakening
It is difficult to understand how a Christian civilization in whose sacred books the worship of gold, usury and the love of money are all condemned, could remain blind and indifferent to the warnings that have been offered. Our eyes have been blinded and our ears have been closed. We have been able to ignore the law, but we are not going to find it so easy to escape the punishments. Disillusioned by bankruptcy we are now forced to the conclusion that the secrecy and mysticism long accepted as evidence of the involved and scientific nature of the bankers’ administration of the currency and credit was just so much “hokus pokus”. The day has now passed when the legerdemain tactics of the bankers have Power to deceive. The sweep of monetary activity during the war and post-war periods has effectively brought the private money system out into the open. The size of the financial operations during those periods produced somewhat similar results to those made possible through the invention of the microscope. Financial operations become so vast that it is no longer possible to conceal by a unique combination of cabalistic jargon and superior silence the nefarious nature of the private money system’s operations.
Anyone can now see how that system functions. This was not so prior to the war. Then no one outside the few who were actually engaged in the business of credit manipulation was aware of what was taking place. Statesmen, politicians, business men, including merchant bankers and the public, remained hopelessly in the dark. And many of them are still in the same place simply because they will not examine the facts that are now available.
The financial activity of the private money system during the last 20 years has opened our eyes to the fact that while the merchants of death reap while war rages, the credit dealers reap for countless ages after the carcasses of the war dead are buried and the sacrifices of heroes are forgotten.
Now that all governments are called upon to ask the veterans and their dependents to accept reductions in pension allowances and to tighten their belts to weather the financial storm, it is not unfitting that we should look closely at the harvest which the barons of credit, successors to the money changers of old, have reaped from the debts developed during the period when millions gave their lives to save the world for Democracy.
The Wages of Credit
Future historians will no doubt recognize the facts that I shall now review as the evidence of the blind and stupid greed of mass usury that was responsible for the wiping out of the sovereignty of Money Power in the twentieth century. The private money system cannot survive its own outrageous record.
In 1914 the National Debt of Great Britain was £700,000,000. On March 31st, 1919, it was £7,434,949,429. From 1920 to 1933 inclusive there was paid towards the redemption of the British National Debt £4,104,843,068. During the same period there has been paid in interest charges £4,288,925,186. By adding these two items together, we find that the total amount paid by the British taxpayers since the war ended amounts to £8,393,768,254, some £868,000,000 in excess of the total debt as it stood at March 31st, 1919. Notwithstanding this enormous payment, the National Debt of Great Britain on December 31st, 1933, was £7,947,000,000, or roughly £500,000,000 greater than it was at the close of the war.
The same story may be told of Canada. In 1914 her National Debt was less than $500,000,000. In 1920 this debt had been increased to $2,700,000,000. Between 1920 and 1934 upwards of $2,500,000,000 had been paid in interest and debt redemption, and in 1934 the National Debt stood at more than $3,000,000,000, or more than $300,000,000 More than it was in 1920.
In the United States the National Debt in 1914 was $1,000,000,000. In 1920 it was $26,000,000,000. During the period of post-war prosperity it was reduced to $16,000,000,000, but since 1929 the National Debt of the United States has been increased to a new high of more than $32,000,000,000 and it is still going up. Usury is responsible for every dollar of these unpayable interest-bearing debts because if it were not for the power of organized mass usury every nation would issue the spending power of government and no public debts would exist.
If we ask the simple question—How was the war financed?—we do not need to depend upon bankers and financiers for the answer. We know that it was financed by the operation of a bankers’ system of accounting, and this is how it was operated. When war broke out, the government issued war contracts carrying substantial margins of profit. War contractors took their contracts to the banks and the bankers entered credits in their books which they called bank deposits and which the war contractors were able to use by the chequing system as a means of financing the production of war material. The bank deposits that financed the war were produced with pen and ink. Similar credits were entered in favour of the bond dealers who under-wrote governmental issues of interest-bearing bonds. The government used the credits to finance army payrolls and to pay war contractors. No money was borrowed to finance the war, but governments paid for the privilege of using the accounting system of the private banks as though the bankers were lending money. When the credits were transferred from the government to private individuals they in turn purchased from bond dealers and bankers some portion of the bonds so issued. Public debts and bank deposits were therefore increased enormously. Under this system the banker could have gone on financing the war forever. In Canada bank deposits rose from $1,000,000,000 to $2,400,000,000, while the debt increased by more than $2,000,000,000. In the United States deposits rose from $18,000,000,000 in 1914 to $37,000,000,000 in 1920, and national debts of the United States climbed from $1,000,000,000 in 1914 to $26,000,000,000 in 1920.
Men Conscripted—Credit Bonused
During the war period the government did not hesitate to conscript men to serve in the labour of death and to fix their wages at $1.10 a day, a reduction of at least 50 per cent. on the standard labourer’s wages at the time. The bankers and financiers during the same period, through their privilege of issuing and charging interest for credits created in their own books, reaped a harvest at the time and from succeeding generations. They out-profiteered the most favoured of all those who found in the war the opportunity to amass fortunes of undreamed-of proportions. Instead of conscripting the credit machinery and financing the war without cost in usury, the rates of interest were increased from 2½ and 3 per cent. to 5½ per cent., an increase in the wages of credit of nearly 100 per cent. Thus we see in war-time that the wages of men who died as a part of their work, were reduced by 50 per cent., while the wages of credit were increased by double that amount.
A system that permits one section of the people to enjoy the unbridled privilege of enslaving posterity by indulgence, in an insatiable lust for gain while all the rest are sacrificing and serving unto death to maintain the security and tenure of national life is out of tune with Democracy. It constitutes a scandal against public decency and outrageous Christian morality. The oligarchy of Money Power by its action during the war and post-war periods has proven itself willing to ignore the Scripture, anxious to repudiate the teachings of Christ and ready to spit in the face of God. That is why what is left of our Christian world thrilled with hope when President Roosevelt declared :
“The money changers have abdicated their high seats in the temple of government. We may now restore to the temple the ancient truths.”
Prosperity and Depression
Now let us look at what has actually happened in the post-war period that followed a war financed with inflated bank credit which the governments borrowed at interest and agreed to repay as to both principal and interest in money exactions levied upon the taxpayers. The governments raised the cost of financing war-time expenditures by borrowing from the private money system on the security of interest bearing bonds. Let us assume that the average life of the bonds was twenty years repayable with interest at 5 per cent. During the twenty-year period, the government repaid an amount in interest that equalled the total amount of the loan and still had to pay the full amount of the principal. The credits that went into circulation to finance the loan were manufactured in the books of private hankers, but unfortunately nothing was put into circulation to take care of the interest charges; consequently as the loans were repaid with interest, more was being steadily taken out of circulation than was being put in. The consumers and taxpayers gradually became poorer. The credit lenders became richer. Circulation declined and in some quarters ceased entirely. Then the calamity of depression was experienced.
Here then we see the working out of the great fallacy in the bankers’ scheme of circulation. Here we have the proof that the bankers’ theory that all government investment must be made upon the basis of interest-bearing debts redeemable in money is impractical and unsound. Such a policy can only be maintained at the cost of disaster to commerce. Thus, we see that the monetary policy imposed by the “sound money” theorists on government serves the lender of credit, but in satisfying usury it destroys progress.
The Crash
Let us keep these facts in mind as we recall the consequences that followed when war-time expenditures and post-war investments were withdrawn from circulation. For a brief period after the war the circulation of war expenditures created prosperity. Other expansions of debt followed, but unfortunately upon the same basis. Bankers and financiers, drunk with profit and mad with power, exploited state and municipal government, industry and commerce, and the accumulated savings of the public. During the post-war years the $37,000,000,000 of inflated bank deposits that represented the money wealth of American depositors in 1920 was further inflated to the sum of $54,000,000,000 in 1929.
Towards the end of 1929 the demands of capitalists for interest and dividends on investments developed a drain upon the consumers’ buying power that brought about its collapse. The shortage of real money definitely maintained as the fundamental security for Money Power became painfully apparent. In the name of “sound money”, government, commerce and industry had been trapped into the slavery of unpayable interest-bearing debt that had been financed with a pure fiction of money. Usury demanded its pound of flesh and the crash came.
When the crash came in 1929 from the withdrawal of $8,000,000,000 of credit loans from the New York stock market, the demand for payment of debts became acute, and the deposits alleged to be in the banks of the United States totalling $54,000,000,000 began to shrink. Under the programme of deflation inaugurated by the banks to save themselves, this total fell steadily until 1932, when it was down to $41,000,000,000, when the banking structure itself collapsed. The fact that the American bank deposits in the United States are now some $25,000,000,000 in excess of what they were in 1914 has not prevented wages and prices from falling and continuing on depression levels.
Here then we find the circulation of bank credit doing exactly what its managers place it under contract to perform. It was issued to serve in the social system, supporting the government at war, and progress in the post-war period for a limited period of time. At the end of that time it was under the terms of its issue compelled to return to the bankers and credit dealers with its freight of interest, leaving less of the medium of exchange in circulation than existed when the credit loans were advanced to government and other borrowers. Unfortunately more debts were created than could be paid. But sufficient of principal and interest has been returned to the banks and the credit dealers to disastrously impair the circulation of the medium of exchange necessary to progress. The remaining debts are largely unpayable. Bankers and credit dealers, unable to collect interest, refuse to lend to a world that has been bankrupt under the evil influence of the system they have been privileged to operate. Fortunately, however, the bankers and credit dealers have come to the limit of their resources. The chaos they have precipitated is beyond their control. They are involved and cannot escape. Their system has brought about the necessity for its own destruction.
If during the war period the government had conscripted the bankers’ credit machinery it could have issued its own currency and monetized its own credit. There need not have been any harvest to usurers. There need not have been war debts or any arbitrary withdrawal of credit, and there was no good reason why peace should have ended in economic chaos. The purchasing power created to finance war could have been continued in circulation to finance peace, and there need not have been any postwar depression. Surely if war were to break out again we would conscript the money and credit machinery of the nation. Well, that being so, we must soon recognize that all nations are at war with usury. Why, oh God, are men in government so blind that they cannot see that a mighty civilization is being debauched and ruined by men who receive their power from our stupid and asinine monetary laws ?
Unsound Bank Credit
The monetary statistics in all leading nations disclose that while academic economists and statesmen, misled by the shibboleths and fetishes of the private money system, have wrangled over “hard money” and “soft money”, “sound money” and “unsound money”, “specie payment”, “the gold standard” and the nebulous theories under which the price level is supposed to be controlled by the supply of purchasing power, all have ignored the necessity of maintaining the distribution of wages so that consumers’ buying power could be sustained. Everyone has been equally indifferent to the proposition that while the banker professed to be worshipping “sound money”, he was actually controlling government and restraining the possible rise in the standard of living by financing interest-bearing claims with unsound bank credit. Unfortunately, the bankers’ “soft credit loans” are always repayable in “hard money”.
Now great as the evil is of allowing one group in the community to collect interest on loans financed by a medium of exchange that is created by printing currency or operating a bookkeeping system, it is by no means the most dangerous feature of the private money system. The most dangerous element in the system is to be found in the fact that all the bankers’ credit loans and the interest charges are repayable in legal tender cash which neither government nor banker puts in circulation. Neither government nor private enterprise can escape bankruptcy under such a system, for it is designed to give to usury a strangle hold on the entire wealth of the nation.
The Octopus in the United States
In the face of these facts, it is a great mistake to conclude that the monetary system “just grew” like “Topsy” or that it is like the weather, something be yond the control of human beings. It is equally a mistake to believe that it is the result of laissez faire. The private money system is a coldly planned, highly organized, definitely managed and closely guarded institution. Up until 1914 powerful banking groups in the United States maintained the bankers’ control of credit. In that fatal year the American Government was induced by bankers, desirous of perfecting their monopolistic control of credit of the nation, to enact the Federal Reserve bank law. This Act is modelled after the banking laws of England. Thus we see established in 1914 the identical racket that Alexander Hamilton proposed in 1790 and which Congress refused to continue in 1811, which Jackson vetoed in 1836, which was established in England in 1844, and which Lincoln died opposing.
It is not surprising that this system has ended in chaos. The surprising thing is that men should have ever expected it to succeed, for it contravenes the fundamental law of Christian philosophy, viz :
“No man can serve two masters, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
The mere fact that the private money system has failed and that it cannot operate carries with it no assurance that the sovereignty of Money Power is going to be overthrown. Before a monopoly so powerful as the private money system can be destroyed, God-guided leadership on the part of men in whom the public have confidence must be developed. Public condemnation of the private money system must be established. A monetary policy under which government delegates to bankers and financiers the right to issue credit as a substitute for money, and the further privilege of managing the monetary system as the stock in trade of a profit-making monopoly must be considered a menace to social welfare.
The greatest danger of usury is that its sponsors are master students of human nature; they know its weaknesses and susceptibilities to deception, and they work secretly and relentlessly, and agents are maintained in every structure and element of the social system.
In spite of the cunning of usury there is some evidence that the required leadership is appearing, and that it is securing a generous support from men in all walks of life and in all nations throughout the world. Once public opinion is prepared to condemn the gold standard, banker-managed money system, there will be leaders quite willing, able and capable of establishing a sane monetary system that will have one objective, and one objective only, and that will be to issue and circulate national currency and credit for the purpose of aiding in the production and distribution of wealth. It is not surprising in the face of what has happened that there is a great army of thinkers at work enlightening public opinion upon the iniquitous evil that we have so long revered and respected as a sound money system. Progress and prosperity are ready to be ushered in the moment the people demand that Democracy shall assert its right to rule by destroying the sovereignty of Money Power. We are at the dawn of a new era. Necessity has created a demand for a sound money system. Knowledge based on experience is now emerging to supply the need of this great age of boundless opportunity. Will reason prevail over greed? That is the great issue. The answer will be disclosed, but it is now held secretly in the matrix of time.