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Show OUR FINANCIAL FOLIC. The most natural thing in the world is that a man who has something to eeil ie in favor of high prices, and the one who buys more than he sells is in favor of low prices. This 1b probably prob-ably true of every individual, and is also true of most nations. England is no exception to this rule. The London Times in a recent issue, when defending defend-ing the gold standard of currency, Bays: It seems impossible to get bimetal-listB bimetal-listB to understand that there is quite a large number of us for whom a general gen-eral rise in prices has no charms whatever. what-ever. We like them low, and the lower the better. If they all went down to half their present figures we should rejoice, re-joice, because we have nothing to sell and a great manv things to buy. For those who have things to sell we do not feel any great concern." England buys more than she sells and pays the difference by using the interest she collects on the money she has loaned. The United States sells more than she buys, she has to pay interest on the money she owes, and the strangest of ail strange things is that the financial policy of the United States is to lower the prices of everything we haye to sell, and to make money harder to get. We produce jrrainr cotton, silver and many other commodities which we have to sell to pay our dobts to foreign countries; the higher priceB we can get, the less quantity it takes to pay our debts, and yet we are adopting a policy whicn is gradually lowering the prices and making it harder and etill harder for us to pay our debts, and every day of our lives the financial web in whicn we are entangled is being strengthened; we are in the quicksand, every effort we make to get out sinks us deeper because we are going in the direction in which the quicksand is still deeper, and with a strange perversity perver-sity will not even Bee the solid ground close bv, upon which we may, if we choose, plant our feet firmly. We have adopted a system of so-called so-called protection that relieves a few at the expense of all the rest, but this only makes it worse for those who have to pay the money, it only makes those who produce for sale in foreign countries, coun-tries, pay more for what; they must have, and at the same time they have to sell their products at a less price. No wonder the farms of the country are mortgaged, no wonder we have financial finan-cial crises. It could not be otherwise. And yet we go on in the eame suicidal groove. Our own people who have money to loai. see what England is doing do-ing and follow her example. They have captured the machinery of government, and the drones of American Ameri-can society are revelling in the sweets of the workers of their own hives and the roor working bees are toiiin?, toiling, toil-ing, toiling, but tbe cells are not any fuller of boney; the drones are "protecting" "pro-tecting" the workers by eatiDg up all the honey they can glut themselves with, and the interest collecting Englishman Eng-lishman comes along periodically and takes out of the hiy all the honey that can bs Bpared, and if he happens to take so much that the working bees cannot be kept alive he will replace part of the vacuum by buying another installment of bonds. We nearly all egree that bimetallism will relieve us, in other words that we need more mcney; but it ought to come, some say, by international agreement. It never can come that way. England cannot afford to raise prices; she will cot willingly consent con-sent to pay more for what ehe must have. She has gajued the ascendancy by lending her money. She cannot sustain her population by labor, she J must have the interest on her money to keep up htr present style. The less money there is in the world the more her money is worlh., Scarcity of money and low prices are the Englishman's harvest and the American's famine, and we are quiescently waiting for her to take the first etep to relieve our financial strain, by reducing her income. in-come. She will never voluntarily do it. In the meantime our own financiers finan-ciers are adopting England's policy, and daily the rich are becoming richer, and the poor poorer, sleeping to the syren songster singing its lullaby of a dollar of intrinsic value. Bye and bye the American people will awake and open their eyes to the truth, and reverse this suicidal policy. |