Translated by G. H. A. Meyer and J. Henry Wiggin, from
the manuscript of Camille Flammarion.
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Thousands of the women toiling in the cities on starving
wages, might be given in the Southern States pleasant employment in
fruit culture, and other light agricultural labors.
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A year after this was written, the following advanced
sentiment was uttered by Rabbi Schindler: “Have the dead the right of
imposing laws upon the living, of making contracts of which future
generations ought to bear the burden?”
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It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive
facts which have not been made familiar to the majority of readers, as
farmers’ interests have received very little consideration in the
East. The financial policy of the general government ever controlled
by capital against labor, has been the most gigantic imposition by
financial jugglery that history has recorded, and has been effected
chiefly by manipulation and contraction of the currency to make debts
more oppressive, and during the war by depreciating the people’s
money. After the war when $500,000,000 were needed to compensate the
destruction of confederate money, a criminal contraction of
$500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to the whole
country. Let us look at it from the standpoint of the largest body of
laborers, the farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert
Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data are all
correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale robbery: The national debt at
the end of the war was about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have
cost the farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could have
been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or 1,380,000,000 bushels of
corn; or 10,000,000 bales of cotton. But financial legislation has
increased the value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the
value of the products of labor, so that practically, the debt has been
increasing faster than it has been paid; and, after paying nearly
$2,000,000,000 of the principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest,
it will cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than to have
paid the whole at first. It would require to-day, instead of
1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000 bushels of corn to pay the remaining
third. This being the case, it would seem that the payment of about
four thousand millions during the last twenty-six years, leaving the
debt substantially unpaid, was virtually a robbery of the
commonwealth by corrupt or ignorant legislation. Mr. Stewart mentions
also, that in one year the binding twine trust, by raising prices,
drew $21,000,000 “from the farmers of the West to the sharpers of the
East.” The reports of the State Board of Agriculture of Illinois show
(what is a fair statement for the whole country) that during the last
thirty years the corn crops of Illinois have for more than half the
time brought less than the cost of their production; and taking the
entire thirty years together, the losses so nearly balanced the
profits that the average net profit of the thirty years has not
exceeded seventeen cents an acre for each year, in the cultivation of
over six millions of acres of corn. In the official report of Iowa
also, it is stated “the general range of farm products have sold below
cost of production, since 1885.” The official “Farm Statistics of
Michigan,” just issued, tell the same sad story. It shows that the
wheat crop of 1889 cost more than it sold for, the loss being
$1,471,515. The entire loss on wheat, corn, and oats amounted to
$9,226,510. Thus is agricultural labor crushed that millionnaires may
grow. Hence it is that farmers are sinking under their burdens of
mortgage indebtedness, paying seven per cent. or more, losing their
farms, and often compelled to mortgage crops, tools, and stock. In the
single year, 1887, 35,334 farm mortgages were recorded in Illinois,
amounting to $37,040,770, and “nine million mortgaged homes” is the
war-cry of the Farmers’ Alliance.
Thus the independent farmer is disappearing, and although there was
scarcely a tenant farmer in Illinois in 1840, there are more than
110,000 tenant farmers now; and we have a vast increase of large
farms. But while the farmer sinks into poverty, those who handle his
products grow rich. The Chicago Stock Yard that was started with a
million of capital has grown so prosperously that its stock now
amounts to $23,000,000. The monetary interests control all things, and
Mr. Stewart forcibly says: “The time has come, gentlemen, when the
government must run the railroads, or the railroads will run the
government. In Pennsylvania to-day two roads own the State, its
legislature, its governor, its courts, its people, own them body and
soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them with. You elect
men to positions and pay them salaries, and then the railroads buy
them and make you pay for bribing your own officers, in the freight
rates they charge you. The net income of the railroads of the United
States is three times that of the entire revenue of the government.”
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Parker Pillsbury mentions a Governor of Maine, who owns
in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and Canada, 691,000 acres.
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As a single specimen of this, I would mention that those
eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H. English, of Indiana,
under the laws engineered by cunning and accepted by ignorance,
invested $200,000 in a national bank scheme when greenbacks had been
knocked down to forty cents, and in thirteen years from 1864 to 1877
they made a clear profit of $2,133,000—more than ten for one of their
investment. But this is very moderate in comparison with land
speculation. The Elyton Land Company at Birmingham, Alabama, with a
cash capital of $100,000, has declared in five years, ending in 1888,
dividends amounting to $5,570,000, and is believed to own property
still that will amount to $5,000,000, a return of more than a hundred
dollars for every one invested—a clear profit absorbed of over ten
millions—the gift of law to monopoly. Will this ever return to the
commonwealth? The robbery of the commonwealth goes on in every
direction. Shall we continue the present system under which, while the
nation is losing its inheritance daily, one man in Chicago tied up the
wheat crop of the United States, and one man also tied up or cornered
pork, and both levied millions on the people?
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To save the nation we must reform and stop the
production of 60,000 boy tramps and the half million of paupers and
criminals which our horrible system has produced, which at the present
rate of increase will, in fifty years, be a million and a quarter, and
in a hundred years will probably exceed FOUR MILLIONS. I see no
measures but those I propose that will save us from this terrible
condition. They will not be adopted in time to prevent civil war, but
they must be adopted afterwards.
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Succession and income taxes are now beginning to be
considered. Two very feeble propositions have been brought forward.
The Massachusetts Legislative Committee, on probate, reported a bill
well adapted to be worthless—to discourage benevolence and keep
property in the family by imposing a tax of five per cent. on property
left by will, except when going to relatives or connections.
Congressman Hall, of Minnesota, introduced a bill in the last Congress
for an income tax, a fourth of one per cent. on incomes between two
and three thousand rising gradually to one per cent. on incomes over
$10,000. This very small business is not what was demanded by “The
Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union” in the Ocala convention, which
demanded the abolition of national banks and “the passage of a
graduated income tax law.” These demands were reiterated by the last
legislature of Missouri, in a resolution calling upon Congress to act
upon them, and pledging the legislature to enforce the farmers’ demand
as far as in their power. North Carolina, too, has adopted the
Alliance principles. The income tax will probably be a growing
one—one per cent. will not be its maximum. The British income tax
under Mr. Gladstone in 1885 was three and a third per cent. But this
is mere child’s play, being about equivalent to a property tax of one
seventh of one per cent. When seriously considered, the question will
be between five, ten, twenty, and thirty per cent.
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The United Presbyterian in a recent issue says, “It
appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the theological
seminaries of the Presbyterian Church as a teacher of dangerous views
of inspiration. Four of the professors of Lane Seminary have declared
themselves as equally radical.” The Interior says, “The paper of
Prof. Smith, of Lane, published in a pamphlet with that of Prof.
Evans, goes much beyond anything that has appeared on the subject from
Presbyterian authorship in this country.”
At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological Seminary, on the
eighteenth of May, the newly elected professor of systematic theology,
the brilliant Rev. Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the
following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: “If we cannot have
orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go and let us have liberty.
Liberty has always produced progress.”
In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist
clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of
barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and
ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of roasting
flesh.
On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, of the Madison
Square Presbyterian Church, of New York, quoted the ringing words
given above by Dr. Van Dyke, with his cordial indorsement. He
continued to thus severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the
Presbyterian Church:
“This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther, and many
others did not believe in the Bible’s inerrancy. If this is not
according to the confession of faith—I don’t know whether it is or
not—we had better square the confession with the truth rather than
the truth with the confession. Let those who would prove that there
are no mistakes in the Bible produce a cud-chewing coney, and then we
will consider the question of inerrancy.
If the Church is to go on in the way that some are trying to persuade
us it ought to go, the sooner it gives up the ghost the better, to
save the medical expense.”
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Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more
renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in
the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In
his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent
inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing,
eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it
declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American
Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster
Confession of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of revision
pervades the whole Christian world. Finally, he asserts that, as the
theory of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is not in the
Westminster Confession of Faith, it cannot be demanded from any
Presbyterian minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any
attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra Scriptural and
extra Confessional theory upon the Church will create a split worse
than that of 1837. The Herald observes that:—
“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian
will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the
Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian
churches.
As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and
acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the
Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D.
from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of
sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He
is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other
historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and
is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch
of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance
delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty
of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.
He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was
appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875
was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of
the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the
conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to
promote Christian unity.
Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church
History, and is the author of a great number of historical and
exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been
translated into English.”
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Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has
voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus,
from a numerical point of view, Dr. Briggs is in the minority. This is
by no means surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of the
Assembly that, while they hold to the severe doctrines popularly known
as Calvinism, they repudiate all the great liberal scholars who refuse
to believe and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly
accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment of the present
century shrinks from with unutterable horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves
a dishonest man and recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary,
if that institution remains in the Presbyterian fellowship.
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