“Your social, and therefore your financial, conditions are vastly different. Your _individual_ buys land. He builds a large factory, he erects his own dwelling, he constructs a railroad, runs a store, builds a ship, keeps a dairy, etc. Under these conditions your individual needs a large sum of money at a time. Your natural opportunities are not open to all. Thousands of your industrious men and women are forced idlers, and millions of them have no fair opportunity to labor. In the United States alone there are probably two millions more laborers than there are places for labor. Thus an opportunity is offered to monopolize money, to compel him who needs it pay _interest_, and every cent of interest that the payee receives gives him additional opportunity to collect _more_ and _higher_ interest, while it makes the payer more and more dependent; for interest is money for which the taker _gives_ nothing and the payer _receives_ nothing. All these evils are so conspicuous and so destructive of human welfare, and yet only a few of the earthites see them clearly; and it will, no doubt, be a long time before the masses of the people here on earth will become thoroughly informed on them. “8. As to counterfeiting, I may say that in a community or world in which a sufficient quantity of money can easily be obtained by an agreeable, healthful amount of productive labor, money is not liable to be counterfeited. There are causes for counterfeiting, and whenever these causes are removed counterfeiting ceases. By making the conditions of earning money easy and pleasant to all, we have removed the causes. “In a social and financial world, like yours, where so many industrious persons are prevented to labor, where so many are pinched by poverty, where the dollar is the highest aim of nearly all, where productive labor is looked upon with contempt by your ‘best society,’ where money offers special privileges to the possessor of it, where want and the fear of want are wrecking countless constitutions, and where the poor have to work the treadmill of toil from early youth until feeble old age, money is liable to be counterfeited by some, who endeavor by this means to escape these disagreeable burdens. It is no use to deny it; we all become dishonest, as you call it, if we are only pinched severely enough by poverty and want. This is the reason why you have so much counterfeit money. “9. The next feature of a just and convenient medium of exchange is, that it must give the person who possesses a large quantity of it, no advantage, or special privileges over him who has a less quantity of it.