There is only one way to counteract this wicked spirit; and that is, to give notice to the world that debts contracted in such an enterprize, bind no one and cannot be collected. If it be wicked to engage in wars, it is also unjust to pay money to carry on wars; but if it be unjust to carry on wars by ready money, how much more atrocious to carry them on by anticipating the credit of generations. It is the duty of all sincere peace men to make a demonstration against this usurpation; and let it be understood that no debt made on the interest of a war of premeditated plunder, can be enforced upon a free people, or be sanctioned by the friends of peace.

There is an Equity, which, in all public affairs, looks to the purposes, the mode and the application of monies in the creation of debts, when debts have been created in fraud, for purposes of corruption, and the parties issuing evidences of debt were particeps criminis and beneficiaries, then the question goes back to the legislatures, which must levy taxes before they can be collected. The new legislature must be elected by the people. The people of no country hasten to pay debts known to be fradulent or unjust. Against the indiscriminate payment of no debt ever contracted, has there been so many conclusive arguments for utter repudiation as the debt now claimed by the foreign capitalists and domestic speculators, holding bonds and certificates of indebtedness against the United States, as the basis of a perpetual system of gambling upon the labor and commerce of the country.

The objectors and objections are susceptible of a clear and easy classification, and when carefully embodied, embrace all of the elements of good government.

1. EVERY CONSISTENT FRIEND OF PEACE MUST OPPOSE THE PAYMENT OF THE DEBT.

If it be wrong to engage in a war of unparalleled cruelty and horror, it cannot be right to compensate the worst participants in it; men whose business is to inflame wars, to fatten upon the blood of the innocent, and hoard up the treasure gained by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of human beings, hurried into the presence of God without thought or preparation.

What care these men the brokers in immortal souls for

the burning of cities, barns, mills, and the desolation of whole regions of cultivated lands; with the food and raiment of decrepid old men, feeble women, and helpless children; the razing of churches and desecration of cemeteries?

Experience for the last three centuries demonstrates that the capitalists of the world hold the peace and the destiny of nations in their hands; they create war and make peace. The superstitions of religion and the malignity of politics, are under the mercenary control of capital. The payment of this debt is a test question of civilization, which the gamblers in public stocks, watch with an intense interest, that Christians might well emulate in the propagation of the gospel.

Wars in Europe have placed her mercenary bankers in princely opulence. They furnish the sinews of war, and command peace whenever they have sufficiently involved the imperial powers to secure an increase of annuities, and kings quiescently yield to their behests.

These kingly brokers watch the probabilities of war with the same keen scent that vultures follow the camp of moving armies, to fatten on the offal. Such has been their success and sagacity, that whilst kings exercise arbitrary power over the lives and liberties of their subjects, by war and conscription, these bankers divide the regal power by subsidizing the labor of the subjects of kings in advance, absorbing it in taxations levied at their dictation; purchasing kings, bribing judges, suborning witnesses, entering into partnerships with legislatures, commissioning military officers, and hiring standing armies to stamp out the liberties of the people, who are forced to support all of these by taxation.

The United States have laid the foundation for just such a comprehensive system of monied oligarchy. There is now thrust into our faces the frightful picture, by every newspaper under the control of capital, predictions of war, and clamoring for blood as the remedy for every trivial evil, that adventurers may reap a rich harvest from the vices of the wicked, the follies of the weak, and the general profligacy of society. Such is the spirit of fanaticism, and the maddened temper of bad men aspiring to power, that all argument is ridiculed, except that which

opens up a new field of plunder, or draws new victims into the net of their insatiate lust of gain.

If such men succeed in funding and consolidating the public debt made during the war, they have established a precedent which will assure them the power to incite a war at any time hereafter, when whim, interest or bad feeling may indicate either its profit or necessity. A strict and rigid settlement, according to the equities of eternal justice, is the only remedy for the great evil upon us. This is the clearest and most direct way to teach these gentlemen what they may not do, although they inflame the vilest passions of human nature into war; yet they must be taught that they cannot control the public conscience to enslave itself, and enforce perpetual bondage upon a people born free; that they cannot safely create and carry on wars, wicked and destructive in themselves, which might be averted, but for the persistent chicanery of capital, which uses all of the well known arts of diplomacy to involve the people in civil war; which, failing in every other means to precipitate their revolutionary ends upon the country, connive at war, eschew compromise, and mob and murder the friends of peace.

The only hope of peace is in the destruction of the prosperity of mercenaries engaged in provoking civil wars. He is neither an intelligent nor a true friend of peace, who will not boldly repudiate every illegal, fraudulent and vicious claim against the labor of the people to satiate the venality of capital, fattened on blood.

This style of mortgaging labor in anticipated taxation is a wicked device of modern times, to carry on wars of conquest, wars of subjugation, wars for plunder and wars to feed the malignity of bad men. It has never been successfully carried out to ensure more than annually accruing interest on the debt, and then only at reduced rates, and when it could be made the ministering servant of a system of aristocracy and overbearing power. Let it be an avowed article of American faith, that no war of money, no war for money can be successfully prosecuted and carried on under the auspices of a free people; henceforth capitalists will have neither the will or power to involve a peaceful people in uni

versal carnage. Such has been the work of war upon our social system, sought to be ratiified by the sanction of the people in the submission to this debt, that it binds us hand and foot and adds to war slavery, to slavery all of its concomitant degradation.

CHAPTER X

A PLAN FOR THE PAYMENT OF THE PUBLIC DEBT.

I. Let the government pay to the holders of all the different kinds of bonds, government certificates to the full amount of their face.

II. Let the national banks be compelled at once to surrender their bonds and redeem their national bank notes with these treasury notes or certificates, and abolish the whole national banking system, appointing receivers to compel them to go into liquidation.

III. At once reëstablish the sub-treasury system for the safe keeping of the government monies.

IV. Restore in its full force the specie basis of our currency according to the Constitution, to all contracts entered into after the year 1867; but for the protection of the business of the country, let all debts created from the institution of the so-called legal-tender, as a currency, until the restoration of the gold and silver basis, be paid in these government certificates, not because they are a legal-tender, but because a vicious legislation misled the people and drove them into the use of this paper money.

V. Let parties, by contract, take these certificates as they would any other article of commodity by special agreement.

VI. Let these certificates be liable to execution as any other personal property, for all debts contracted after the restoration of the constitutional legal-tender; then let them be sold to the highest bidder for gold and silver.

VII. Private banking can be carried on then as now, upon the personal responsibility of the bankers, like all other business, upon the personal liability and capacity and integrity of the individuals, without loaning the aid of the government to enrich the banks or defraud the people.