An Aristocracy is a government in which the few make the laws for their own benefit, and rule the country for their own good.
Therefore it must be apparent to the most casual student that if we, by law, confer special favors upon any class of our citizens, we are building up an aristocracy and are departing from democratic principles.
(1) For instance, the power to create money and to regulate the volume thereof is a sovereign power belonging to the state.
In countries ruled by kings that power has always been one of the prerogatives of the crown, as was the power to make war and peace, to negotiate treaties and to levy taxes. It was recognized that the king could not continue in the full exercise of his kingly authority if he parted with the tremendous power of creating money.
Not until the English crown rested upon the head of the most dissolute of the Stuarts, Charles II, and he had become the slave of an abandoned woman—who was in turn the tool of a grasping corporation, the East India Company—was the power to create money transferred from the king to a corporation.
Ever since that day Great Britain has suffered from this surrender of sovereign power, and it was this mistake of the king which Alexander Hamilton, either through mistake or by design, adopted when he came to frame a financial system for the American people.
It was his express purpose to create an aristocracy of wealth, and he must have realized that when he took from the government the power to create money and put it into the hands of a private corporation he was creating an aristocracy of wealth.
The national banks of today represent an aristocracy of wealth, supported by the governmental function of creating currency.
There are, in round numbers, 5,000 national bankers who have in circulation $400,000,000 of their “promises to pay,” which the law practically makes legal tender.
In other words, their “promises to pay” are used as money.