substituted national bank notes based on interest-bearing bonds, by making the greenback non-receivable for bonds after July 1, 1863. They repudiated our fractional currency of 1864 by substituting in 1865 fractional coin at an annual cost of two and a half million interest on bonds sold by bullion. They repudiated treasury notes in 1869 by making them payable in coin, contrary to the law creating them, by which they were redeemable exactly as gold and silver fiat money was redeemable in debts due the government save the one cunning exception as to duties; and finally they repudiated the silver specie of the constitution in 1873-4. Said Professor Lumley, of Wheaton College, in his little work on "National Suicide":

In corruptly repudiating just obligations to the people, they have destroyed thousands of millions of value of other people's property and are, before God, responsible for the loss of thousands of human lives of men who have died by suicide because of their losses; and for much of the intemperance, poverty, crime, misery, and idleness that now make every thoughtful patriot tremble for his country.

If no more bonds are issued before 1907, the maturity of those outstanding will put an end to the present unsatisfactory national bank system, and with the fall of that system the necessity for the gold-standard monopoly and the necessity for a prohibitive tax upon competing bank circulation, will not exist. Of the bonds available for the use of national banks, the most numerous are the four-percents, of which there are some $559,605,700 outstanding. These are not due until 1907. Long before that time it will be necessary to improvise a new banking system and the plans may as well be inaugurated now as later. The present system was established in 1863 while the war was raging, and when gold was held in the East, affording that section the opportunity to reap the greatest measure of profit from it. Mr. Goldsmith, of Georgia, describes thus the modus operandi:

Greenbacks were worth forty cents on the dollar, and United States bonds the same price. Now, see what these shrewd people did with the $4,000 in gold. A decided he would establish a national bank. He had $4,000 in gold, his entire capital. He borrowed from his friend B, for a few days, $90,000 in currency. With this $4,000 in gold he bought $10,000 in currency. He went to Washington, bought $100,000 of government bonds with his $100,000 in currency, and applied for a national bank charter. The government took his bonds as collateral and handed him $90,000 in national bank bills. He returned to his friend B the $90,000 in bills, so that he was out only $4,000 in gold. The minimum rate of interest paid by the government on the bonds was four per cent. At this rate the government has paid $120,000 for the use of his $4,000 in gold. It was paid semi-annually and frequently in advance. Just after the war,

interest was high, and the man who had ready money could get almost any price he chose to ask for it. This interest paid him each six months $2,000. He has loaned easily at ten per cent per annum for the average time. What do you suppose it amounts to? $736,915.86. Deduct from this the $4,000 invested and the interest on it at the same rate, and he has a net profit of $732,738.86.

Of course this profit has all been "taken out" of the pockets of the people by direct taxes, tariff taxes, revenue taxes, etc. Is it any wonder that 30,000 people in the United States own more property than 64,970,000, that they are getting richer each day, until they will own all the property and the 64,970,000 will own none? The national banking laws have been a great thing for them; and is it to be wondered at that they should advocate their continuance, and that they should spend millions of dollars in perpetuating the system?

No warrant of the constitution ever authorized a congress to give to holders of bonds the exclusive right to bank, and monopoly control of the circulating medium of the people. By this monopoly land and real estate are denied all bankable value; bonds and stocks were the only collaterals and the monopolists held the bonds and stocks, and the borrower must buy them at the holders' price to hypothecate. The prices of these collaterals were churned up and down in the stock exchange, which has always been a convenient appendix to the banking combine. They act in concert. The banks lend on stocks and bonds, and the exchange gambles in them. The gamblers, by "wash" sales, mark the collaterals up and down, and the banks will accept no other price than this fictitious one. And yet, great as is the contractile power of the banking monopoly, it is weak at the base. Says Col. Thomas M. Norwood, of Georgia:

It is a seeming paradox in physics and dynamics that the claw of a crab which can pinch to the bone, is so highly articulated that a baby can break it off. This banking system, so powerful to crush, is so weak at its base that a few small depositors in New York, by concert of action last year, could have forced every bank to suspend. So sensible were the officers of this result that they had to turn back to back to prop themselves up, and took refuge or safety in refusing to pay out currency, and in using certificates of credit. Even depositors had to use these certificates.

By this system of robbery the banks themselves are handicapped by their inactive reserves from which they earn no interest, and the people are burdened with an interest-bearing circulating medium which costs them twenty millions a year in unnecessary taxation-some estimates making it from thirty to forty millions. These are bank reserves $571,000,000 at five per cent, making $28,550,000, and treasury reserve of gold $100,000,000 at five

per cent, making $5,000,000 more, and a total loss to the people of $33,550,000. And this to make the government pretend to do what it does not and cannot do for itself, viz., currently redeem $1,200,000,000 of currency notes. Instead of adding to local circulation under this system, we really send out from a state $6,000 more money than we receive in return for every national bank of $100,000 capital started in that state. Hence the more invested in United States bonds as a basis for circulation, the greater the loss to the banks-the greater the drain upon the actual money circulation of the state. Hence an inflation of capital, but contraction of currency. In short, we are banking upon the debt of the country instead of upon its wealth.

The only way to break the backbone of this crushing monopoly is to give emphatic voice at the ballot-box against the further issue of bonds. It will also be necessary to quit sending to Congress bank presidents and bank directors to make our financial laws. That the founders of our government had a salutary dread of the bankers' influence making itself felt in shaping legislation on national finance was shown in the adoption of this resolution in the Third Congress, Dec. 23, 1793: "Any person holding stock in any institution of the nature of a bank for issuing or discounting bills or notes payable to bearer or order cannot be a member of the House whilst he holds such office or stock." This resolution was signed by President George Washington. At that time there were only three banks in the whole country. The three banks of 1793 had grown to over 3,000 in 1894, and the banking interest had at one time within the past twenty years 189 representatives in Congress the next largest representation being that of the legal profession. Any party-yea, even the Republican party-espousing the cause of the abolition of interest-bearing bonds, the abolition of specie redemption primary money, the abolition of national banks based upon bonds, and the abolition of an interest-bearing circulating medium, would sweep the country from ocean to ocean. Not only this, the party so determined would give to the United States twenty-five years at least of unprecedented prosperity, and would save the Union from dismemberment or revolution and the national debt from repudiation. The demand for the repeal of the ten-per-cent tax on bank circulation other than that of national banks, by many opponents of the tax, was less a desire to return to the old system of ante-bellum state banking than it was a protest against the present national bank system. The repeal of the prohibitory ten-per-cent tax was

regarded as an essential preliminary step toward breaking the monopoly behind which the national bank system had entrenched itself.

In a well-considered paper by William Knapp in the American Journal of Politics for August, 1894, these evils of the present banking system are vividly and pointedly presented. Briefly summarized, they are "the power conferred for the prevention of the use of the currency so as harmfully to contract its volume." Mr. Knapp holds that all banks should, as individuals, be required to do business upon their own resources, and exercise no control over the currency, except in their legitimate current business transactions, and on equal terms with all the people, for whose use and benefit it is created. The principal injustice inflicted upon the people by the present system is the great power of its organization to monopolize and contract the currency and divert its use by all alike. In furtherance of this, he shows how the policy of the creditor class is "to keep the volume of currency for actual use as small as possible all the time, regardless of its volume," and of course, of the much vaunted large per capita of circulation, a few individuals holding and withholding the per capita from distribution. The radical and fundamental defect of the present banking system is the theory of "doing business upon the money of depositors, with a nominal capital." Why, indeed, should not banks, like individuals, do business upon their own resources? Why should paternalism furnish an interestbearing debt to be used as a basis for circulating notes, and exempt this circulation from taxation? "To allow them to do business upon the funds of depositors, and not upon their own capital, or from the avails of the sale of stock, and not even utilize the surplus funds for this purpose," is certainly an extraordinary privilege to be extended to a private association of individuals.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS.

BY MRS. CALVIN KRYDER REIFSNIDER.

CHAPTER IX.

They sat in the morning room of the chapel. Salome had called, as was her wont, to get herself in condition to begin the day. Poor girl! They both welcomed her, and with words of love and encouragement strove to help her into the right path. They understood that the trouble lay within her own young heart; the older woman felt that nothing is so bitter as the aspirations of a proud heart conscious of inability to reach its goal. She longed to see the mother, to thus learn the source, but every effort to learn anything of this girl's home life was unavailing. At times she alluded to her mother with great affection and always with a genuine respect; but a kind of shame, fear, or horror accompanied any allusion to her home, and they noticed that after one of these conversations she would sometimes remain away for days and then appear again and seem to studiously avoid broaching any subject that would lead them into that channel, until it became tacitly understood that it was dangerous ground. But she never avowed a sentiment that did not give them a clew to her unhappy surroundings, mysterious as they were, for she evidently had been reared with care and by a woman of superior mental and moral attainments. Her neatly fitting clothing was most beautifully made, with every evidence of taste and skill, and she sometimes alluded to the fact that her mother was her dressmaker.

This morning the question of envy and jealousy was broached in some incidental way. In a moment Salome was on fire.

"A woman without envy, jealousy, or any of the baser passions of the human heart-I would like to see her," Salome said with the most withering scorn.

"Do you not believe there are such women?" asked Mrs. Goode, raising her calm eyes to the excited face of the young girl.

"No; woman is woman's natural enemy. Who so heartless to woman as woman?"

"Do you believe that they are worse than men?"