Illustrating the method by which the one party appropriates the property of the other, Mr. Pinckney cites our infamous Tariff System.
“The amount of prices advanced under a 40 per cent. tariff and transferred from one private pocket to another, would ... soon extend to figures to dwarf the national debt.”
Some one has calculated that from Independence to 1861, the amount thus transferred from private pockets to other private pockets, without consideration, was something like $2,770,000,000.
The sum so stolen from private pockets by the damnable Tariff, since 1861, and put into other private pockets is a great deal more than the colossal figures mentioned above.
Mr. Pinckney likewise takes up the National Banker and shows how the Government allows him advantages over his fellow man that are “utterly without right, reason, or justification.” After explaining the juggle which takes place over the bonds, and the notes, he sums it up thus:
“The people are taxed in order that the privilege of issuing money may be farmed out to the banks.”
Nobody has ever summed up the iniquity of the National Banking System in a more startling sentence, and a good Democrat, like Mr. Pinckney, must have been sorely grieved when he saw every Democratic Senator and every Democratic Representative unite with the wicked Republicans in 1893-1894 to renew the charters of the National Banks for twenty years.
Space forbids the extending of these comments further. I will only add that no student of present conditions can afford to miss Mr. Pinckney’s book.
Letters and Addresses of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Wm. B. Parker, of Colombia University, and Jonas Viles, of the University of Missouri. The Unit Book Pub. Co., New York.
When two college professors start out to give the world a new book on Thomas Jefferson, the world has a right to expect an unusually valuable book.