have a right to fix rates, but that in doing so they should justly allow nothing for exorbitant salaries, extravagant expenses, illegal disbursements, nor, after discarding these, anything above the expenses of economical management and a moderate interest on the real value of the property; for the law is just, and does not tolerate dividends on watered stock and bonds.

It could easily be shown that in many of the States the sum illegally wrung from the people above the legal requirements above stated is annually more than the entire amount of taxes levied for the State government. If the men of 1776 are to be commemorated for all time for their resistance to a little illegal tax upon tea, the men who shall hereafter step forward and succeed in rescuing the people from the enormous taxation thus exacted from them, and under which they are staggering without always knowing the reason, will deserve to be remembered "far, far on, in summers that we shall not see.'

PROSPERITY: THE SHAM AND THE REALITY.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

FOR

OR four long years a great organized force in America has been engaged in the effort to make prosperity. This organized force cares nothing whatever for prosperity as a fact, but it knows that the prosperity of the nation is one of the conditions upon which its own success and security depend. For this reason it has cried prosperity, prosperity, through all the figures and forms of speech. Since the month of August, 1893, it has turned the combined energies of the greatest power in the world to the one work of creating or forcing into existence what does not exist and cannot be made to exist, but what must exist if the spoliation of the American people is to continue as heretofore.

The money power, in this undertaking against all natural and healthful conditions to force prosperity where none is, has been wise and cautious. It has had prudence and forethought and cunning; for experience has shown that only the prosperous nation is content to be robbed. He who is already plethoric with plenty will, like a full beef in a reverie, suffer his flank to be picked and flayed without rising from the blue grass to pursue the tormenting thief and toss him hornwise over the fence. But he who is hungry, he who is on his way to the bread-shop with his last hard-earned quarter, will, if the quarter be taken from him, fight the robber, arrest him -if he can, or kill him if he must. This is the prime reason why prosperity is a necessity in a country where the robbery of the people has become a fine art. We may be sure that if prosperity could have been made, it would have been made ere now. When the money power undertakes anything and does not succeed, we may know that the impediment is great. If that power be baffled in any scheme, we may assume that nothing short of the immutable laws of nature have stood in the way of its fulfilment. If it be only the trifling laws of God and humanity that stand in

the way they can be altered, amended, or annulled in the interest of" national honor." We may know, therefore, that the money power, baffled for four years in its effort to make prosperity where no prosperity is, has been encountered by some law or laws which it has been unable to defy principle or force in the nature of things which not even Wall Street, reinforced by the Bank of England, has been powerful enough to overcome. Let us for a moment study the course of that power in its frantic efforts, since the panic fell in the summer of the Columbian year, to restore prosperity by ukase and fulmination.

First, note the fact that the money power is itself the very malevolent agency that struck the economic and industrial life of the United States with fatal paralysis four years ago. The manœuvres of that power in tampering with our currency, in altering the law of debt payment, in changing every contract, from the purchase of an intercontinental railway down to the purchase of a pin, so that the debt-maker should be forced into bondage under the compulsion of paying with a long dollar worth two for one,— have been the whole and sole cause of the catastrophe. The money upas spread out its baleful branches, and prosperity was mildewed in the shadow. The poisonous dews of that deadly tree distilled upon American enterprise, and it withered and died.

Know all men that prosperity did not fail through any fault of the people. The people were not less industrious than before; they were not less frugal; they were not less honest; they were not less friendly to those forms of capital upon which, according to the present conditions of civilization, they are dependent for profitable exertion. The farmers, the mechanics, the miners, the laboring classes in general, the merchants, and all the rank and file of industry, were perfectly blameless as it respects the destruction of prosperity. They had no part or lot in the nefarious business. The American people were just the same in the summer of 1893 that they had been in the summer of 1889. The prostration of their industries, the destruction of their business, the sudden paralysis of their enterprises, the wasting of their small accumulations, the bitter industrial death that came upon them,

all these were the direct results of the iniquities and devilish schemes that had been contrived by the money power and its abettors to force upon the American people a violated contract, a false economy, a fraudulent financial scheme, and in particular, a long dollar worth more than two for one.

The money power succeeded in the scheme. It contracted the currency. It abolished silver. It got possession of the gold, and then declared that gold was the only honest money— gold and our banknotes, redeemable in greenbacks! Prices ran down to nothing; industry ceased; debt-paying became impossible; for the dollar was cornered. The mortgage of Shylock on about fourteen million voters was foreclosed; the blinds were shut, and the mourners went about the streets. It will prove instructive to note what the money power, with its adjunct missionary organizations, its syndicates, its pools, its trusts, its stock exchanges, its telegraph and railway combinations, its subsidized press, and its extinct systems of political economy has said in explanation and apology for its destruction of prosperity.

In the first place it pleaded non est factum. It denied that there had been any failure of prosperity. Every force in the vast working machine of public falsehood was set to work to prove that the people were more prosperous than ever. Whoever said the contrary was a howler of calamity. This was kept up with vile reiteration for a full year; then the tune was changed, and the organs of the International Gold League declared that the lamentable failure of prosperity was due to the producers themselves. The producers were discontented for nothing. They were better paid and had more of the good of life than ever before. They were lazy, boorish hayseeds; if they would go to work and cease talking they would be more prosperous than any people in the world.

Thus began the era of traduction and ridicule. The farmers, the mechanics, the laboring men in general, the miners, the small merchants began to be systematically disparaged. They were caricatured; they were slandered; they were cartooned; they were impersonated by mountebanks on the stage. Every issue of the metropolitan press teemed with aspersions and contumelious jokes cast at the working

classes. Every effort of the producers to lift themselves a little to a higher plane, on which they might share somewhat in the increase and blessedness which honest labor confers on the world, was ridiculed and scorned. Every attempt at coöperation was attacked and misrepresented. Every concrete action of the working men was assailed with covert hatred and open falsehood. Trades-unions were denounced as the inventions of discontent and communism. The capitalistic journals were filled with arguments to show that all combinations of the working people and all expressions of dissatisfaction with their condition were only so many signs of onfalling anarchy, so many impediments to the happiness of the masses. How greatly in those days the metropolitan press was concerned to secure the happiness of the masses by persuading them to be content with the hard but providential lot which had overtaken them!

Another change came over the spirit of the money power's dream. A new form of falsehood was discovered and sent forth. This was "the loss of confidence." Confidence had been destroyed! Capital had lost confidence; perhaps it had lost its own confidence! The stock exchange and the banks had lost confidence. Prosperity, depending upon the stock exchange and the banks, had perished for want of confidence. Restore confidence, and prosperity will return as a flood.

This was the cry of 1894-95. The appendix vermiformis of this delusion was the little gold worm in the vault. The gold worm thought that confidence could come again only with a reform of the currency. Silver being despatched, the greenbacks must be despatched also. We will have a bankers' convention at Baltimore, and will formulate a plan by which American money shall be reduced to two forms only; one metallic and one paper-the one gold and the other national-bank notes. All other forms of money shall be destroyed. Every kind of people's money shall be cancelled and made impossible by law. Make gold (which we own), said they, the ultimate money, and paper (which we own also!) the circulating money, and then prosperity will come in as a flood; for confidence will be restored - that is, our confidence will be restored! As for the people, their