the peace toward us. There is no more
unpatriotic, no more unmoral, no more cowardly man than the British
financial agent and money-lender. If only the security is good, he
will rather lend money at 4-1/8 per cent. for the most devilish than
at 4 per cent. for the most divine purpose. It is due to the influence
of the money-lending class that England has so completely lost the
grip of heart and brain on her imperial duties.

It is said that John Bull pays a tax of $700,000,000 a year to the
liquor interest, to say nothing of the indirect damages resulting from
the fact that the liquor interest is the chief supporter of the
brothel, the baccarat table, and the Tory Democracy. The beerage has
proved of late years also a highway to the peerage; and it has also
served to deplete the pockets of a good many British fools, who were
misled into the insane delusion that they could earn as much from the
profits of American guzzling as from those of British beer-drinking.
America has been infested for some time by a crowd of Englishmen, who
came here hunting options on American breweries, which they sold at a
high price to their English dupes. In one case some breweries, which
cost the owners less than $2,000,000, were sold in England for
$6,000,000, the Englishmen and Americans who managed the transaction
making enormous profits at the expense of their dupes.

On investigating the published accounts of some twelve American
brewery companies in which Englishmen have been induced to invest more
than $41,808,000, I find that the depreciation in selling price of
shares, taking the highest rates of November, 1894, was no less than
$21,917,280, or 52.42 per cent. on the paid-up capital; and, taking
the common stock alone, the loss exceeds over seventy per cent. on
the paid-up capital.

I am glad of it. The Englishman who, knowing the influence of this
infernal traffic on his own countrymen, would make money by extending
its curse to the United States, deserves to lose his money quite as
much as the Tory investors in the Confederate Loan deserved their
loss. Now suppose this $70,000,000 thus invested in "Alabama damages,"
Confederate Loan, and American breweries had been put into
Newfoundland roads and railways, what would have been the result? An
immense amount of traffic which now must pay toll to American
railroads would have gone over purely British lines, all the way
through British America to China and Japan. All the mining an