No words are lurid enough to portray properly the terrible evils and personal suffering that its use causes, and I submit that it is time people should begin to consider earnestly the question, Had we not better insist that some kind of real money shall be substituted for the unreal now in use, and thus permanently remove the cause that so often produces such baleful results? Conditions were never so favorable for doing this as they are now. No election is pending; the two great parties are lazily talking on similar platforms; all financial organs insist that the country is prospering; and, although people are deeply stirred, they are not excited. The use of hocus pocus money, and its evil results, have increased steadily from the beginning of the deposit banking system. From time to time methods change, but every change increases the power and profits of the few—and the helplessness of the many. The gravest of these changes began to be felt about a decade ago. Leading bankers had always used some of their hocus pocus money for the promotion of their own schemes, but from that time the Rockefellers, Morgans and others have been systematically getting control of the principal deposit banking institutions, and using, not only a rapidly increasing proportion of their depositors’ real money, but also more of the hocus pocus money made possible by those deposits. Mr. Lawson and others have shown how this has been done on a gigantic scale, in specific cases, and of all unfossilized, sober-minded people I ask, can 999 business men afford to permit the thousandth man to continue appropriating to his own use the hocus pocus money their own deposits have made possible—and, in addition, help him to keep the volume of real money ruinously small? Indeed, would it not be idiotic folly to do so? To me the problem appears to be: How can hocus pocus money be safely eliminated—or so restricted as to be harmless—and the quantity of real money so increased that all will, at all times, be able to exchange their products and services; that commercial panics and long periods of business depression will become impossible; and that a few men in each community will no longer have the power to ruin all who refuse to obey their orders? Space will not permit me to tell here how this can be done, but I will say that, fortunately, this greatest and most overshadowing of the economic problems that confront humanity is the easiest of all to solve; that, as bankers are the controlling spirits in—or back of—nearly all trusts and combines, settling the money problems will make the solution of all the others easier; that it can be done without wronging anyone, or imposing additional burdens on the people; and that economic and social conditions would improve during the entire process.