day is suffering from a contracted and
contracting currency, on account of which the debtor class has had its
burden doubled, to the corresponding advantage of the creditor class;
that if contraction has been good for creditors, inflation must be
good for debtors; that any measure, therefore, which looks toward an
increase of the circulating medium is to be favored; that free silver
coinage is to be favored; that instead of flying to the relief of the
stall-fed speculators of Wall Street in times of financial stringency,
it is time that the government was coming to the relief of the common
people; that loans from the government should be made at a merely
nominal rate of interest, not to exceed two per cent., because any
higher rate is a congestor of wealth and gives capital a leverage over
labor; that money-loaning as a business, except on such a basis from
the government to its subjects, should go out of fashion, and might be
expected to disappear under a proper financial system; that the
unemployed capital of the country would then seek investment, labor
would then be employed, factories would hum and the credit system
might go to the dogs; that rates of interest cannot be satisfactorily
regulated by law until we have banks that are national in fact as well
as in name, managed by salaried officials of the nation whose duty it
shall be to make loans at cost, under wise and conservative rules, to
those needing them who can bring themselves within the rules; that the
proposed sub-treasury and land loan plans are suggestions in the right
direction and calculated, when perfected, to bring the government into
touch with the needy citizen, and make of it a distributor as well as
a creator of money; that paper in the shape of checks and drafts
already transacts ninety-one per cent. of the business of the country,
and might be trusted to properly supplement our currency and make
supply equal demand, were it not that the great bulk of our people are
not known beyond the communities in which they live, and therefore are
debarred from using checks to any extent in the outside world; and
that each piece of national currency, issued as a full legal tender,
in the hands of the people, would be in the nature of a certified
check, enabling the citizen to do business with despatch anywhere.

Running through the above statement of the independent doctrine of
finance, we see that three ideas are most prominent. First, a desire
that the g