ago, as truth is unchangeable and God is no respecter of persons.

Jesus Christ understood man, his nature, and his needs, and His teachings were to free man from sickness and misery by freeing him from the cause of his sickness and his misery. He says, "I came that ye might have life and that ye might have it more abundantly." He knew that for man to lay aside the errors of life would free him from their consequences and bring into his consciousness that more full and abundant life which is health and happiness.

Christ-truth is to save men from error, from all wrong mental conditions, and not from punishment, and now and here in this world is the time and place. "Seek and ye shall find," but we must seek where it is. The kingdom of heaven is within and there we must seek. "Knock and it shall be opened," but we must knock in the right way. Truth stands at the door and knocks, the door of our mental consciousness. If we will open this door to the truth it will come in and sup with us. "Ask and ye shall receive." Jesus has pointed out the way. What is it that we may ask and receive? "All things whatsoever ye desire," for we are heirs of God, "joint heirs with Christ." We are all branches of the one vine of Life which in its inner spiritual nature in man as the divine Ego is pure and perfect and present possessor of every good thing. The only worthy object of life in our oneness with God and one another is to assist in making the without as the within in all men. "He that hath done it unto the least of these hath done it unto Me."

BANK MONOPOLY-SPECIE CONTRACTION

BOND INFLATION.

BY ALBERT ROBERTS.

One of the strongest presentations of the evils of the interest liabilities being forced upon the tax-payers of the United States through the continued and unnecessary issue of national bonds is contained in an article in the ARENA of March, 1894, by Mr. I. W. Bennett, on "The Cause of Financial Panics." He claimed that it was susceptible of mathematical demonstration that the average interest charge for the last decade upon the various kinds and character of bonds, including national bonds, more than absorbs the entire yearly increase of wealth in the United States, and that "the very foundation principle of our industrial system leads us to recognize obligations which we can never pay." He shows that during the last decade the country's wealth increased about twenty-two billion dollars and during the same period the interest charges were thirty billion dollars. Thus every ten years the assets of the country's citizens fall eight billion dollars below their liabilities. But when there is added to interest on national, state, county, and municipal bonds, the expenses of these various governments, we have, according to Mr. Bennett, $16,970,000,000 as the sum which our assets fall behind our liabilities every decade. The writer's condemnation of interest-taking applies with force to the proposition of Mr. John Sherman and President Cleveland in the scheme of unlimited inflation of the interestbearing paper in order to facilitate the compound-interestbearing device of the national bank system.

An equally strong presentation of the evils of interesttaking is given in the chapter on "Usury" in Mr. Arthur Kitson's work, "A Scientific Solution of the Money Question," comprehensively reviewed in a recent issue of the ARENA. Both of these papers are worthy the thoughtful consideration of patriotic citizens of the United States.

The foundation of all our commercial distresses and losses for the past quarter of a century may be laid to the charge of the interest-takers and usurers. The National Bank system was the most brilliant and audacious scheme of usury ever devised in the cunning brains of able and far-seeing financiers.

The political press throughout the country teems with discussions of the metallic standards, but significantly ignores the national banks of issue. President Cleveland, with a coincidental significance, in every executive message or utterance on the money question since his inauguration in 1893, has studiedly ignored the one plank in the party platform upon which he was elected demanding the repeal of the ten-per-cent tax, enacted, not for revenue, but as a protection to the monopoly to which, it is alleged, he owed his nomination and election.

Address a direct question to the newspapers comprising the Associated Press, requesting a categorical answer as to their views on the national bank system, and the result will be a golden flash of silence and an increased vehemence in the denunciation of free-coinage heresies. How consistently to discuss the currency question and persistently avoid even a reference to the instrument which creates and distributes the currency, is a problem. The opponents of the single gold standard do not seem to realize that the political Poloniuses, who do the dirty work for the bank monopoly, are fooling them to the top of their bent. The censors of the subsidized press in bank parlors adroitly direct the discussion to the metallic excitement and away from the fundamental issue. It is suspected that at the proper time they will concede the free-coinage demand, but only when they shall have secured the perpetuation of their beautiful interest-making and interest-taking system, the national banks of issue, based upon bonds. They encourage and provoke the metallic-standard agitation, but they know well that with the abolition of that system the gold-standard question dies by inanition and desuetude. For the only interest they have in contending for the gold single standard (having destroyed silver as specie of resumption) is that it is the means by which an involuntary issue of interest bonds can be forced upon the country.

That the private bank of issue scheme, the gold, or speciecornering scheme, the bond-forcing scheme were part and parcel of one colossal scheme of usury and interest-making, goes without saying, and cannot be successfully refuted. The object of issuing bonds was to create a debt, whereby a few would be enabled to accumulate the representation of wealth, without working for it or producing it. It is estimated that the bond-holders have received in twenty-eight years profits amounting to $3,048,972,903.77. This they received without taxes on their bonds, and it was drawn from the taxes of the people. The English bankers, in col

lusion with others in the deal, in the United States, sent over in 1862 the "Hazzard Circular," which, while favoring the abolition of chattel slavery as a mere owning of labor carrying with it the care of the laborers, was for capital to control labor by controlling wages, and this secured by control of the money. Said this infamous circular:

The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made of the war must be used as a measure to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, the bonds must be used as a banking basis. We are now waiting to get the secretary of the treasury to make this recommendation to Congress. It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money for any length of time, for we cannot control that.

Thus the debt was created, and has been growing ever since, not to borrow money, but to be used as a measure to control the volume of money. The system was introduced by London bankers, adopted by an American Congress, and favored by two secretaries of the treasury from Ohio, Salmon P. Chase and John Sherman, as essential preliminaries to the National Bank Act, which became the law in March, 1863. E. G. Spaulding, in his "Financial History of the War," says:

No national bank currency was issued until about the first of January, 1864. After that time it was gradually issued. On the first of July, 1864, the sum of $25,825,695 had been issued; and on the twenty-second of April, 1865, shortly after the surrender of General Lee, the whole amount of national bank circulation to that time, was only $146,927,975.

It will therefore be seen that comparatively little direct aid was realized from this currency until after the close of the war. All the channels of circulation were well filled up with the greenback notes, compound-interest notes, and certificates of indebtedness to the amount of over $700,000,000, before the national bank act got fairly into operation. This bank issue was, in fact, an additional inflation of the currency.

The Hazzard circular was followed later by a circular said to have been sent out by the National Bank Association to bankers. It, substantially, urged them to support such daily and weekly newspapers, especially the agricultural and religious press, as would oppose the issuing of greenback paper money and withhold patronage or favors from all applicants now willing to oppose the government issue of money. The same practice is pursued to-day in the buying up of papers opposing the bank monopoly, and in the distribution of gold-standard literature over bank counters. The provincial bankers were advised that the issue

of more greenbacks would furnish the people with money and "therefore, seriously affect your individual profit as bankers." The convenient and impecunious press, carried by national banks, were prompt to denounce the greenback as "rag money" and "the rag baby." Yet during the war, according to Spaulding's History, "the greenback was indispensably necessary and a most powerful instrumentality in saving the government and maintaining the national unity." The government had no money and could get none except by creating it. Greenbacks were paid out to the soldiers and for supplies, paid back by taxation, and would have continued to circulate, but for legislation dictated by the bank combine against the people. The issue of treasury notes in 1862 was made legal tender for all debts, public and private, except interest on the public debt and duties on imports, and exchangeable for six-per-cent bonds redeemable after five years. The act shows that they were issued for funding the floating debt, not to borrow, but to destroy, money. It was to give the usurers opportunity to exchange non-interest-bearing greenbacks for untaxed, interest-bearing bonds.

In a little brochure published by I. C. Vallette, of Norwich, Conn., he shows the absurdity of the proposition that the first bonds were issued to borrow money, when the government issued more than $830,000,000 of seventhirty treasury notes, made them a legal tender, and within three years' time they were all destroyed and bonds put in their place. The efforts of the money power were directed against the government issue of greenbacks. The only reason for opposing greenbacks was because the government was furnishing the people with money without interest and they could not control it. Mr. Vallette shows, by high official authority, that a large part of the bonds were issued after the war was closed and the soldiers and contractors had all been paid. Of the $1,854,736,150 issued from 1862 to 1868, only $603,262,250 were issued before Lee's surrender, and $1,251,473,900 after it. There are many people in the United States who yet believe the bonds were issued to carry on the war.

To further this colossal scheme of debt-making and interest-gathering, the banking association procured legislation which was a long series of shameless repudiation of honest money. They repudiated United States treasurynote obligations in 1862 by inserting the exception clause as to import duties, to give coin-hucksters a chance to make "honest money." They repudiated greenbacks in 1863 and