Show TilE MEMPHIS DECT VKVTIOX The series of resolutions made by the silver convention at Memphis is a remarkable document It is a clear cut well analyzed dispassionate statement state-ment of the adverse conditions which srround the American people and what is more to the purpose throws the sharpest of definition on the de tails of execution through which the j conditions may be reversed and needful need-ful reforms be accomplished It defines I de-fines the lines of a conflict that has been gathering for a generation so that there is no mistaking the standards stand-ards around which men must range themselves The conflict is between the hoarded dollar and the invested dollar or I usury against productiveness Over a nations obligations to usurers and its obligations to the masses of Its own people Between the power to exact taxes and the power to pay them The temperateness and simplicty of the new declaration dispose of the sneer I of eastern sentiment that in the past has denominated sporadic efforts toward to-ward reform as communistic anarch j I istic and destructive for the magnitude I magni-tude of the masses involved in it Is i sufficient answer i It is not a conflict between labor and capital for such in any true sense is an impossibility although it is a conflict between labor and the false capital that has usurped the true and that has turned legitimate productive industry and commerce into a shambles of speculation specula-tion and absorbed the energies of the whole people by gigantic schemes of taxation through watered stocks tax beneficiaries and special privileges Labor in its true and generic sense is the power for production In any modern productive enterprise the capital cap-ital invested is as much a part of the I I labor element as the workingmen who actually do the constructive work The profits of both rest upon the activity and relative value of the product and the profits of both decline under any condition or circumstance where the product declines and when these products pro-ducts have been caused to decline through a legal conspiracy which destroys de-stroys the relative power of money by which the equity of relative value of products is destroyed the destruction destruc-tion is as complete as if It hrd been accomplished by an invading army and that such a condition has resulted j result-ed through the invasion of the principle prin-ciple which has made money the object I ob-ject inst ad of the means of produc I f S tiori Is only to be measured in its consequences by the enormous productive I pro-ductive capacity of this machine age when money as interpreted by the wishes of usury has come to represent repre-sent less than 2 per cent of the real transactions and that 2 per cent withdrawn from circulation in order that European banks might use it to impose an equal servitude on the helpless help-less Austrians or to assist some Bar ings out of the bankruptcy caused by their own recklessness Between capital cap-ital so expressed and the labor that it so oppresses there is a conflict irrepressible ir-repressible inevitable and laden with I farreaching consequences A pyramid pyra-mid on its apex cannot stand long The lucidity and completeness of I the declaration of Memphis transform It from a political platform to a declaration I claration of human rights which it is I not possible to sophisticate or misunderstand mis-understand Like the declaration of 1776 it is not a mere specimen of rhetoric however concise clear or elegant but is the expression and concentration of the events of years I and the thought of the age which the people have vainly been trying to ex presa The declaration of 1776 was not merely an American but a human document and it worked the death of the feudal system throughout the world There is that ring in the I declaration of Memphis which will be I heard by the human element of the i civilized nations because it touches I the necessities of the European producer pro-ducer in its plea for the restoration of American liberty I |