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Show That Big Loan IT is not profitable for people, native or foroign born, to discuss the' motives in the souls of the syndicate of bankers -who negotiated the great loan to France and Great Britain. Banks are not exactly eleemosynary institutions. Something like fifty-four years ago, a great Civil war was sprung upon the United States. So terrible was it that it threatened the very life of the nation. Suddenly all the gold in the banks went into retirement. It was all that the government could do to purchase gold and silver enough to meet its interest demands. It was forced to issue paper pa-per promises to pay to serve as money, and that was all the money the people of the eastern states had to serve as a medium of exchange for years thereafter. Those were trying times. But after a while the little monitor demonstrated in Hampton Roads that all the great fleets of the old world were but pa- :"- -r") '" """ " nf.onV" irnro nhnnt n Hvo way to "ribs of steel" on the sea and that the conquest con-quest of this country by sea, would not be nearly so easy a task as had been supposed. Then Forts Henry and Donelson were captured and Shiloh was fought and it became clear that the war had settled into a war of endurance, and that the north, in the long run would certainly win. Then our secretary of the treasury, Mr. Chase, in connection con-nection with a few bankers, drafted the original national bank law, which provided that any bank that would buy government bonds to say $100,000 should receive the full interest on those bonds and in addition the' government would issue to that 'j bank $90,000 in bank notes, so that with reasonable j prudence the banker could sit in his office and j draw full interest on $1.90 when all he possessed M was the one dollar. The law was founded not on M the wealth but upon the indebtedness of the na- H In the stress of the war the paper promises M of the government fell to less than 40 cents on the H dollar. The next move of the banks was, so soon as the M war wore itself out, to have a law passed making H all these promises to pay, payable in specie, that is in gold and silver coin. That made what they H had bought at forty cents on the dollar payable at H par, which seemed at the time like a rather hand- H some profit. In its stress the government had been forced H to make its bonds draw heavy rates of interest H about twice what British consuls or French rentes H drew. H The next move of the bankers was, when the H interest-bearing debt of the country was more H than 2,000 millions of dollars and the railroad H debts were as much more, to do away with half H the country's real money that the debts might be H made perpetual and the people be placed forever H under the interest harrow. H A bill compelling this was by a sneak and H covert fraud passed through congress and be- H came a law, and by fraud, misrepresentation, brib- "H ery, coercion and other sinister means has been H maintained ever since. How many hundreds of H millions of useless interest the people have paid H since cannot be computed, but it has been enough H to give to the interest gatherers the domination H of the country's business and in great measure H the control of the government for the past twenty H years. H As we understand it the terms of this great H loan give the banks who negotiated at 1 per cent H discount or more clearly speaking 1 per cent H commission. That amounts to $7,500,000 and wo H suspect that by this time the public has taken the H entire loan and all the interest the negotiators H have in it is the $7,500,000 in their vaults for their I services as negotiators. So when Mr. Morgan tells of the high motives behind the suggestion in his secret thought ho refers to the commissions received for making the loan, and his meaning would be more clear were he instead of saying "high motives," to say "our motives come high to Franco and England." And if Germany feels that the loan is an indl-1 indl-1 mitiuii'-oE unCi'tenJlmuu jit-fchevii'tivt of omi" people.. it may take comfort in the thought that by paying pay-ing a like commission and furnishing equally good securities, it could from the same source obtain twice the amount. |