“When you pay money to a merchant or a manufacturer that you may owe, the money you pay him is paid by him to others for material and other products of his business, with no charge or embargo upon it; but when you pay back to a money-lender a debt you owe him, the money stops there until it is loaned out again to come back with interest. When this grows to such an extent as to require all or most of the money in the country to pay the interest on debts, then commerce slackens and there is little or no money among the people except as loaned out by the banks and others whose business it is to loan money. They are dealing in the blood of commerce, and when they take it from the arteries of commerce there is commercial sickness and distress.” The Abstract of the Eleventh Census (page 189) gives the true valuation of all real and personal property in the United States as only $65,037,091,198. Against this we have an interest-bearing debt of forty billions. But Mr. Harvey’s figures are by no means complete. He says nothing about the capital stock of the great railroad, telegraph, telephone, insurance and other corporations, most of which is “water.” The reader may say that this is not debt. But it is debt, as it represents what the companies owe to their stockholders; it draws interest; it must pay salaries and dividends. To say that we pay interest every year on forty-five billions is a very conservative statement. And the debt is constantly increasing, for the reason that there is not in circulation, of all kinds of money, enough to pay this interest. Let us figure it out. The average rate of interest is 6½ per cent. Let us say 6 per cent. At this rate we pay each year $2,700,000,000—over $40 per capita. Think of it! Forty dollars interest for every man, woman and child! Two hundred dollars for every family! And this exclusive of taxation, which adds still more to the burdens of life. The most blatant gold-bug does not claim that there is $40 of money per capita in circulation. There can be only one result, and that result is abject, hopeless slavery—slavery under the guise of freedom, but still slavery—unless this burden of debt is thrown off before the patient people succumb entirely. [Illustration] VIII. THE LAWS OF PROPERTY. BY LYMAN TRUMBULL. “Property, or the dominion of man over external objects, has its origin from the Creator, as his gift to mankind.”—BLACKSTONE (Dunlap’s Manual of the General Principles of Law).