“No pent up Utica controls our powers,
But the whole boundless continent is ours.”
Yet it cannot be ignored that no other nation has such a magnificent career of expansion, development, and progress before it as the United States, united as it is by telegraph and telephone and our vast network of railways, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Maine to Florida, in unbroken continuity.
WILLIAM H. MOORE.
With the growth of our population, which even now exceeds eighty millions, we shall grow more and more in national importance and wealth, not only in material wealth but in the higher products of an advancing civilization, in the arts and sciences and literature, and all that embellishes and glorifies mankind. Therefore we should, as we go along, constantly endeavor to correct errors, shortcomings, and abuses, and prune away rotten and unsound timbers in our public and business life, and make the whole machinery of business and activities of all kinds—trade, banking, insurance, manufacturing, legislative, and the various professions and mechanical industries, work as legitimately, honestly, smoothly, and harmoniously as possible. The way to do this can be best paved by promoting public spirit, and sweeping away the opportunities for business wrongdoing in secret, such as rebating, by wise laws properly enforced, and backed by public opinion, yet laws not oppressive, unjust or too inquisitorial. This would compel the “crooks,” “grafters,” “rebaters” and “competition crushers” of the business world, who have schemed in darkness, and shunned the light, to come out into the open view, and this publicity alone would be a perfect cure for many great evils. So let us have more light—the light of PUBLICITY.
CHAPTER LXXV.
THE MONETARY SITUATION AND ITS REMEDIES.[[3]]
[3]. An address to the West Virginia Banking Association at their 13th Anniversary Meeting, at Elkins, West Virginia, June 19, 1906, by Henry Clews.
The rapid growth of our population, the great activity of all our industries, the general prosperity of the country, apart from the terrible calamity at San Francisco, and the immense speculation going on in land and mining ventures, especially in the West, are the underlying causes of the severe monetary stringency that New York has lately experienced. These influences have kept money to a much larger extent than usual active in the interior and prevented its concentration not only in New York and the other Eastern monetary centres, but at the Western centres.