n a company, incorporate, then persuade,
wheedle or bribe a certain entity called a legislature to grant them a
certain bit of paper styled a charter, and lo! they were instantly
transformed into money manufacturers.

A MANDATE TO PREY.

The simple mandate of law was sufficient authorization for them to prey
upon the whole world outside of their charmed circle. With this scrap of
paper they could go forth on the highways of commerce and over the farms
and drag in, by the devious, absorbent processes of the banking system,
a great part of the wealth created by the actual producers. As it was
with taxation, so was it with the burdens of this system; they fell
largely upon the worker, whether in the shop or on the farm. When the
business man and the landowner were compelled to pay exorbitant rates of
interest they but apparently had to meet the demands. What these classes
really did was to throw the whole of these extra impositions upon the
working class in the form of increased prices for necessaries and
merchandise and in augmented rents.

But how were these State or Government authorizations, called charters,
to be obtained? Did not the Federal Constitution prohibit States from
giving the right to banks to issue money? Were not private money
factories specifically barred by that clause of the Constitution which
declared that no State "shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make
anything but gold or silver a tender in payment of debts?"

Here, again, the power of class domination of Government came into
compelling effect. The onward sweep of the trading class was not to be
balked by such a trifling obstacle as a Constitutional provision. At all
times when the Constitution has stood in the way of commercial aims it
has been abrogated, not by repeal nor violent overthrow, but by the
effective expedient of judicial interpretation. The trading class
demanded State created banks with power of issuing money; and, as the
courts have invariably in the long run responded to the interests and
decrees of the dominant class, a decision was quickly forthcoming in
this case to the effect that "bills of credit" were not meant to cover
banknotes. This was a new and surprising construction; but judicial
decision and precedent made it virtually law, and law a thousandfold
more binding than any Constitutional insertion.

COURTS AND CONSTITUTION.

The trading class had already learned the importance of the principle
that whil