There are 80,000,000 natural persons in this country; there are 5,000 corporations called national banks! The 80,000,000 natural persons may sign promissory notes for five dollars each, and these notes are simply commercial paper, having no circulation as money. The 5,000 national banks sign their promissory notes to the same amount—$400,000,000—and these notes constitute, for all practical purposes, a national currency—a national money.
The law gives them the special privilege of getting rich on what they owe. They have also the more dangerous power of enlarging and contracting the volume of currency, thus unsettling values, destroying markets and producing panics, as they did in 1893.
(2) The democratic principle of equal and exact justice to all men requires that the government should derive its revenue from a system of taxation which deals fairly with every citizen. Each man should contribute to the support of the government in proportion to his ability. And taxes should not be laid for the purpose of building up one man’s business at the expense of another’s.
Our tariff system, from which the government derives the greater part of its revenue, violates democratic principles.
Its purpose and result is to build up manufacturers at the expense of everybody not engaged in manufacturing. It gives the manufacturer a price which he could not get without the law which insures him the monopoly of the home market. All the world can compete with our laborers by sending immigrants to our shores; all the world can compete with our farmers; but nobody is allowed to compete with our manufacturers, and the result is the Trust, under which Americans combine to rob the helpless American citizen, who is not allowed to buy his food or his clothing or tools to work with from anyone except the American manufacturer.
By this system, which lays the taxes on the things which man buys, a citizen who is worth only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars pays just as much to the support of the Federal Government as is paid by the man who is worth tens of millions of dollars.
Consequently the inevitable tendency of the tariff system is to create a class which controls the government for its own enrichment; in other words, an aristocracy.
(3) Consider our corporation laws. Early in the history of our Government Chief Justice John Marshall decided that a charter granted to a corporation was a contract and could not be changed by the sovereign power of the state. This decision was not good law, and no good lawyer has ever considered it so. John Marshall had a great mind, but he was one of the rankest partisans that ever lived. He stretched every constitutional power in the effort to build up what Hamilton wanted—an aristocracy of wealth.
Just as a natural person is born into a community and lives in it subject to having his status changed by the will of the majority, expressed in a legal way, so a corporation, born into a community through its charter, should have been required to take the same chance of having its status changed, in a legal way, by the will of the majority.
A railroad corporation comes to the legislature and procures a charter to build a railroad; but the state cannot compel the corporation to build that railroad. In other words, the state cannot compel the execution of the powers granted under the charter; therefore such a charter lacks the very first element of a contract, because a contract is one in which each party can be compelled to perform his part or pay consequent damages. But, in pursuance of the decision of John Marshall in the Dartmouth College case, our state and national governments have erected a rule of the corporations, and they are now more powerful than the governments which created them.