Better days; or, A Millionaire of To-morrow

by Thomas Fitch; Anna M. Fitch

Not more than one-half the actual cash value of the land, without estimating improvements, must be loaned, or more than $10,000 to any one borrower, or more than $20 per acre in any case.

The celerity with which Congress, during the War of the Rebellion, created an effective system of revenue and finance, leads me to the conclusion that it will be equally apt in the creation of the necessary legal machinery to speedily effectuate a permanent and safe system for making loans to the people. I shall trust implicitly to the wisdom and patriotism of Congress to carry out details if my gift is accepted, as I think I may assume it will be, and I shall attempt no interference with its action, even by suggestion, beyond stating the conditions upon which the fund of $2,400,000,000 will be provided.

It will, possibly, not be out of place for me to assign here a few of the reasons why I require that loans be limited to the owners of productive land, and why I do not permit dwellers in towns and cities, and those engaged in commerce and manufactures, to share in the opportunity for procuring cheap money.

To this very natural inquiry I might answer that I have already arranged in San Francisco, in Chicago, and in New York, for aiding co-operative labor corporations to procure, at a low rate of interest, the money necessary for their use; that I design extending similar aid in other localities, and that I hear of several instances of other gentlemen conveying large sums in trust for such purposes.

But the duty of aiding the farmers to cheap money is so great, and so pressing, and extends to so many persons, and over so large an area, that any concerted effort in such direction is not only beyond the capacity of individual wealth owners, but requires the machinery and power of government for its adequate discharge.

The farmers, of all men, most need the aid of capital, and of all men they find it most difficult to secure such aid. For years before the accidental, or, rather, providential, discovery of an immense deposit of gold-bearing quartz in the Santa Catalina Mountains in Arizona enabled me to attempt alleviation of some of the evils under which the world suffers, I had observed that even when the manufacturing and commercial interests of the land were in a fairly prosperous condition, the farmers did not share in the general bounty, and I observed that usually the produce of the farmers’ land could only be sold at such low prices as left them, at the close of the season, a little more in debt, and much more discouraged.

The official report of the Illinois State Board of Agriculture for 1889 exhibited the distressing fact that the corn crop of that State for that year actually sold for $10,000,000 less than it cost to produce it, and conditions since then have only slightly improved. Even as I write, there are thousands of families all over the land, not merely in a few localities where the crops have failed, but on the virgin prairies of Dakota, on the rich soil of the Mississippi bottoms, and in the fertile valleys of Virginia, who are in distress, not because they have been idle or dissolute, but because their last crops did not sell for enough to pay the cost of their production and transportation to market, including interest at six, eight, and ten per cent per annum on the value of the land.

Low prices, according to all standard writers on political economy, are the direct results of a contracting currency, and a consequent increasing scarcity of money, and the cost of production is not only greatly increased by inability of the producer to obtain money except at high rates of interest, but the terms upon which money can be had at all are often so exacting as to discourage permanent improvement. The farmer will not cultivate except for immediate crops if he sees no hopeful outlook for the future, and not only fears but expects that the mortgage he has given will, in the end, cause his home to be transferred to a purchaser at sheriff’s sale.

The yield of the Morning mine has already largely increased the volume of standard money all over the world, and this may do much toward removing some of the unfortunate conditions to which I have referred; but such yield may also have a tendency to discourage the loaning of money on long loans, for men who have means to invest may prefer to place them in property, the value of which must advance with the increase of the volume of money, rather than in loans, the value of which must remain stationary absolutely, and cannot but diminish relatively.

It has been and will continue to be my purpose to use the gold produced at the Morning mine, either in the purchase of existing loans, or the making of new loans, so that whatever of loss may come from diminution of the purchasing power of a dollar may fall not altogether upon those who have loaned money, but in part upon those who have deliberately or accidentally caused such increase. I suggest that if such increase in the currency be caused by the government, a similar moral obligation would rest upon it.