stuff out of which dollars are made, so that each one shall constantly
stand for more and more wheat, or, using wheat merely as
representative of commodities in general, so that it shall constantly
require more and more of all other things on earth to get a dollar. It
is wholly credible that the man with dollars should profess this
philosophy, but it is absolutely inexplicable how it should receive
the support of men interested in getting dollars with things, who
comprise about seven-eighths of society.

Now as it continually takes more products to get a given quantity of
gold, is it not clear that the producer who becomes liable for taxes
and gets into debt must constantly bear an increasing burden of
taxation, and that his debt, payable in more commodities than it
represented when he incurred it, needs only to run long enough to grow
beyond the hope of his ability to pay it? Such a policy cannot but be
fraught with certain ruin to producers. It is causing in the United
States a condition frightful to contemplate. The mass of debts is
piling up at a ratio that absolutely threatens, if a halt in the
automatic process is not soon called, a universal insolvency. Indeed a
general liquidation is already impossible. He is no alarmist who
counsels a timely and rational remedy as not only demanded by justice,
but as anticipatory of violent readjustment. Under such disquieting
conditions is it not as criminal as it is unscientific for men to go
about prating of the system that has occasioned these things as
"honest money," and "sound money," and denouncing its opponents as
repudiators and anarchists?

In the presence of epochal and fundamental disturbance, when men,
patient beyond example and willing to argue the correctness of their
claims, are crying out against the injustice of a money system that
day and night and year upon year, with unerring and pitiless
precision, takes from the producing many and hands over to the idle
few that which it ruins those to lose and but pampers these to gain,
our ex-President offends decency and insults millions of his
fellow-citizens with this reference to their contention: "Honest
accumulation is called a crime." Where does he find anybody calling
honest accumulation a crime? Men indeed stigmatize the maintenance of
this odious money system as a crime, but only because of the things
they claim it to be guilty of. Why does he not join issue on these? He
knows that nowhere in all this world