The interest bearing debt of the United States, at this date, is about one thousand millions. This in one hundred years at six per cent. would amount to $340,000,000,000; five times the whole present wealth of the nation.
The smallest national bank organized, by the deposit of $25,000 of bonds yielding two per cent. interest, and permitted to re-loan the same funds to its private customers at eight per cent., could gather to itself in one hundred years, $345,225,000.
The wealth of an individual or of a family may also grow with the years as they pass. The property may be in public bonds or that of incorporations, requiring no care or effort on their part, yet it may be continually increasing. A usurer in any community in one life comes to absorb the wealth of that community, though the amount loaned at the beginning was small.
The accretions are the irresistible result of the principle of usury.
The wealth is more and more centralized as the years pass. Great trees in the forest shadow the smaller, and rob them of the sunshine and moisture until they perish. Great fish in the crowded pond feed upon the smaller. Individual manufacturers are absorbed by the great combinations called trusts. The stockholders of a railroad are absorbed by those who have large and controlling interest. But the railroad is itself absorbed by another yet greater corporation, and this again by a great combine that eliminates the influence of all but the chief control, and tends to a complete centralization of all the systems.
There is no escaping from this centralizing draft upon all resources, when the system of interest-taking is as general as now. Freedom from personal debt does not deliver us. The farmer, the most independent of men, in his own home, free from personal debt, yet must contribute to this centralizing by paying interest on bonds in every shipment of produce, and every mile of railroad travel. He pays tribute also in all the tools that he buys, in the food that he eats and the clothes that he wears.
This centralizing draft is constant, though not always equally apparent. Certain favorable conditions may hold in check, for a time, the adverse influence and cause a temporary distribution of wealth to the producers. Its force is not, however, destroyed, but only restrained for a time, and then draws with accumulated power.
Times of industrial depression and commercial disasters are occurring over and over again. Some economists attribute them to the peculiar industrial and monetary conditions of the periods in which they occur; but they have seldom agreed as to the causes of any particular panic. They are so regular in their recurrence that some economists have thought they must be produced by some constant cause; like the moon causing the tides of the ocean. Both are true. There is a general and there is also a secondary or superficial cause.
The times of greatest commercial disasters in this country were in the years 1809, 1818, 1837, 1873, 1893.
The political economists can assign as reasons some peculiar conditions prevailing in each of these periods, but the wisest have never gone deep enough to discover the general cause; this constant centralizing draft of usury.