Now, do you suppose our markets would be flooded with British goods if our producing and manufacturing interests had all the money they require without interest? If there are any borrowers at ten per cent. who hear my voice, let them answer. No; it is the tribute that industry is compelled to pay to capital that forces our government to exact ten, twenty, fifty, aye, even a hundred per cent. for the privilege of bringing merchandise into this country.

But they tell us if we go to free trade that our country would be flooded with foreign products, so there would be absolutely no production of manufactured goods in the country. Now that would be true, if we should attempt free trade and leave the monster Interest with his grip upon our vitals. And here is the short-sightedness of Free-Traders. If we want free trade, we must, in the first place, attack, throttle and kill this demon, after which we may manufacture at prices that will not only absolutely forbid the importation of almost everything that is now imported, but which will also enable us to play the same game with Europe that Europe has played so long upon us. Free money in this country would abolish every European throne within ten years. And yet people cannot be made to see that this country is their support. With free money what need would we have for a protective tariff? Can any Protectionist answer that?

You see, my friends, that it is the people who catch sight of an idea and pursue it to the death, regardless of relative ideas, who make reform so ridiculous. One reform cannot advance alone. All kinds of reform must go on together. Interest and free trade must go hand in hand; interest, if either, a little ahead.

And in this regard I am free to confess that the National Labor Union’s demand for a decrease of interest is the most reasonable single reform now being advocated. We want free trade; but we want free money first, so that not a spindle or forge in this country shall stop at the command of those across the ocean.

But how are we going to get free money? Why, in the very easiest way possible. It is the simplest problem of them all. I am not going into this discussion to prove to you that gold is not money, since everybody ought to know that it has no more the properties of money than cotton, corn and pork have the properties of money. Now, money is that thing which, if every dollar in circulation should be destroyed, there would be no loss of wealth. Gold, cotton, corn and wheat are wealth. Destroy these and there is a loss. But when money is destroyed, there is no more loss than when a promissory note is destroyed. A note is an evidence of debt. It is not wealth, but its representative. So also is money not wealth, but its representative. And if we had a thousand million dollars in circulation to-day, there would be no more wealth in the country than there now is, and we would have quite as much wealth if there were two thousand millions dollars, since money and wealth are two entirely distinct things.

But they tell us that unless money is made redeemable in gold, it is not of any account, and that, too, in the face of our miserable greenback system, which was so much better even than gold that it saved the nation when, had we stuck to gold, we should have been destroyed. Oh, but it was a depreciated currency, says some one. Yes, it was a depreciated currency, and we should have ample reason to be thankful if when we come to pay our bonds, we have a depreciated currency with which to liquidate them, instead of being obliged, as we shall, to pay a thousand dollars in cotton for what we realized less than five hundred in gold.

It is not the gold only of a country that constitutes its wealth. What should we care if we had not a single ounce of gold, if we had a thousand million bales of cotton, ten thousand millions bushels of corn and wheat, and a billion dollars’ worth of manufactured goods to send to other countries? So you see it is not the gold after all that makes a circulation good, but the sum total of all kinds of wealth. Now, that is what we propose to substitute for gold as the basis for a money issue. And instead of permitting corporations to issue it and remain at liberty to dispose of their property and let the people who hold their circulation whistle for its redemption, we propose that government, which can neither sell our property nor abscond with it, shall issue it for the people and lend it to them at cost; or if you will insist on paying interest for money, why, then, pay it to the government and lessen your taxes that much, instead of paying interest to bankers and supporting government besides.

Now, don’t you think that would be rather a good sort of a money system? I know that every manufacturer in the country would like it. But I can tell you who will not like it; and whom we may be compelled to fight before they will permit us to have it; and these are the money-lenders and money-changers, such as it is related the Head of the Christian Church—one Jesus Christ, of whom we hear a great deal said, but whose teachings and doctrines are wofully perverted—scourged out of the Temple at a place known as Jerusalem.

I have not been guilty of frequenting the temples of the country much of late, but if I am not misinformed upon the subject, and unless they have changed since I did frequent them, if Christ should pass through this land of a Sunday, scourge in hand, he would find plenty of work to do in the same line in which he labored so faithfully among the Jews.

But the National Labor Union say they won’t be so hard upon these money-lenders as we would be. They are willing that they shall be eased down from the vast height to which they have attained. They say they shall have three per cent. interest instead of six, seven, eight and ten, or as much more as they can steal out of the necessities of the case, by the circumstances and discounts. But they shall be limited to three per cent., and in a way that they cannot evade, as they now evade, lawful interest. It is proposed that government shall issue this money, but that it shall be convertible into a three per cent. interest-bearing bond; so that when money shall be so plenty that it will be worth less than three per cent. in business, it can be invested in bonds drawing three per cent.; and the bonds to also be reconvertible into money, so that the moment business shall demand more money than there should be in circulation—which would increase the value of money to more than three per cent.—the bonds would be converted into money again; and when there should be no more bonds to convert, and money still worth more than three per cent., then the Government shall issue more money to restore the equilibrium. In this way money would always be worth just three per cent. No more nor less, and there would always be just enough; or, in other words, money would be measured, as it never has been, and which has been the cause of all our financial troubles. What would you say to a person who should talk to you about measuring your corn in a bushel that had itself never been measured? But you complacently talk of money being a measure of values, and money has never had a measure regulating its own value.