"Money, which you developed as the medium of exchange to facilitate accumulation, store of value, and property transfer, grew into the agency of tribute or usury power, progressively expanding to an extent comparable to that of an enormous, monster Octopus Colossus, covering and holding your entire earth within its grasp. Each of his tentacles is a symbol representing your economic and other ills. Each one of them multiplies into clusters or parasites. They are submissive and especially amenable in the hands of those of you who are adept, and know how to manipulate them. With the connivance and at the direction of these operators, they hold humanity in bondage. Continually searching, they reach every corner, nook, and cranny within the innermost recesses of your homes. You have no hiding place or escape from them. They produce and contribute to all your ills and control every act of your life.
"'On the one side, man is so heroic and so noble, and on the other side so base and so cruel,' Mark Twain once said. Time again many of your economists have tried to extricate you; they have wrestled with these tentacles and, like the old tribal medicine men, recommended cutting each one off, but like the nine heads of Hydra, each one of these tentacles on being cut off becomes two. These economists, by their other nostrums, try to convince you they have found a cure; each one of them has his own theory. Your libraries are full of their books.
"Time and again many of you have tried to find a way to save yourselves, but have been betrayed by your corrupt leaders, who, through selfish motives, have led you deeper into the quagmire of the dangerous morass they create for you. They and theirs may some day also become the victims.
"One of these tentacles spreads and disseminates the infectious polio and other deadly diseases by distributing from person to person your disease-carrying, paper money and metal coins. It takes them out from the foulest and dirtiest parts and places of some of the unbathed, drunken, and diseased bodies of your living and dead persons. This money passes along from person to person and merchant to merchant, handled constantly by your food handlers, held by your children in their hands and even in their mouths.
"Another tentacle taints you with pride, arrogance, contempt, insatiable greed, covetousness, and lust. It brings in its wake envy, jealousy, hatred, and malice, followed by the most atrocious crimes. It breeds temptation, suspicion, dishonesty, ingratitude, and corruption, vitiates your entire morale. It was directly and indirectly the cause of 1,361,593 known crimes in the United States, ranging from murder to petty larceny for the year 1943. It is responsible for physical, mental, and organic disorders of diseases among 95% of your population. It is the cause of separations, divorces, and even of serious misunderstandings between parents and children, brothers and sisters.
"Still another one of them coiling about you incites and forms in you a strong magnetic desire to pursue wealth, even by the most unfair or illegal means and methods, destroying in you your finer human feelings. It brings out in you the primitive instinct to plot the undoing of your fellow man to gain his property. It not only distorts your good resolutions, but in many of your individuals and nations, it creates greed to the point that a promise, a contract, or a treaty, no matter how inviolable, is with impunity cancelled or broken.
"How many of you can conscientiously plead innocent to your own selves that you at no time illegally or immorally benefited from your fellow man? Many of you boast how smart you are in cheating your friend.
"Desire for money has blunted your moral views to the point that many of you do not know or do not want to know what a moral sin may be. It has created among you many flatterers, and hypocrites. Many of you join ultra-exclusive clubs, orders, lodges, and other similar organizations solely for this purpose. Some of you even choose your religions with these motives.
"For money, you even subdue your natural love instinct. The craving for money makes many of you desire, and some of you execute the death of your nearest and dearest relatives or friends, in order to enable you to inherit his property or to cash in on his life insurance policy.
"Those of you who have developed in yourselves the habit of thriftiness are very gullible. You deposit your savings in banks, for interest earnings and safety. A great many of you have lost your life's savings through dishonest mismanagement of these banks, or other mediums of savings.