Thus year after year this system went on, beggaring great numbers of people, enriching the owners of the banks and virtually giving them a life and death power over the worker, the farmer and the floundering, struggling small business man alike. The laws were but slightly altered. "The great profits of the banks," reported a New York Senate Committee on banks and insurance in 1834, "arise from their issues. It is this privilege which enables them, in fact, to coin money, to substitute their evidences of debt for a metallic currency and to loan more than their actual capitals. A bank of $100,000 capital is permitted to loan $250,000; and thus receive an interest on twice and a half the amount actually invested."[123] THE WORKINGMEN'S PARTY PROTEST. It cannot be said that all of the workingmen were apathetic, or that some did not see through the fraud of the system. They had good reason for the deepest indignation and exasperation. The terrible injustices piled upon them from every quarter--the low wages that they were forced to accept, often in depreciated or worthless banknotes, the continually increasing exactions of the landlords, the high prices squeezed out of them by monopolies, the arbitrary discriminations of law--these were not without their effect. The Workingmen's Party, formed in 1829 in New York City, was the first and most ominous of these proletarian uprisings. Its resolutions read like a proletarian Declaration of Independence, and would unquestionably have resulted in the most momentous agitation, had it not been that it was smothered by its leaders, and also because the slavery issue long obscured purely economic questions. "Resolved," ran its resolutions adopted at Military Hall, Oct. 19, 1829, in the opinion of this meeting, that the first appropriation of the soil of the State to private and exclusive possession was eminently and barbarously unjust. That it was substantially feudal in its character, inasmuch as those who received enormous and unequal possessions were _lords_ and those who received little or nothing were _vassals_. That hereditary transmission of wealth on the one hand and poverty on the other, has brought down to the present generation all the evils of the feudal system, and that, in our opinion, is the prime source of all our calamities. After declaring that the Workingmen's Party would oppose all exclusive privileges, monopolies and exemptions, the resolutions proceeded: We consider it an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the _means of education in colleges_, while another is restricted to common schools, or, perhaps, by extreme poverty, even deprived of the limited education to be acquired in those establishments. Our voice, therefore, shall be raised in favor of a system of education which shall be equally open to _all_, as in a real republic, it should be.