If this centralizing power is destroyed then the natural distribution would be undisturbed, and these, so-called, panics would be unknown. CHAPTER XXX. MAMMON DOMINATES THE NATIONS. The debt habit has been diligently cultivated and encouraged, until the nations are enslaved. Public bonds imply bondsmen, and the nations are no longer free. There is a mortgage upon the inventive genius, industry and productive energy of the world. Usurers greatly prefer an organized government as a debtor. The individual may die, but a nation's debts bind from age to age, are bequeathed by the fathers to the children, and thus descend from generation to generation. The bonds of no corporation, however great and rich, can be so secure. They embrace special industries, while national debts are a claim upon every industry and a mortgage upon every foot of soil, and every dollar of present personal property, and of all that may be produced in the whole realm. If we express the world's indebtedness, the national debts, in the terms of our currency, as nearly as we can reduce the currency of other nations to such an expression, we find the national debts as follows, in 1890: Denmark $ 33,004,722 Great Britain 3,848,460,000 United States 915,962,112 Germany 1,956,217,017 Austria-Hungary $2,666,339,539 France 4,446,793,398 Russia 3,491,016,074 Italy 2,324,826,329 Spain 1,251,433,096 Netherlands 430,539,653 Belgium 360,504,099 Sweden 64,220,807 Norway 13,973,752 Portugal 490,493,599 Greece 107,306,518 Turkey 821,000,000 Switzerland 10,912,925 --------------- These debts aggregate $22,955,386,008 Hundreds of millions have been added to these national debts in the last ten years. Nearly every nation has increased its indebtedness, possibly no nation has decreased it, and others, like China, with its recent great loan, and little Korea, with its twelve millions, must be added to the list. The debts of the nations of Europe have been increased until they now amount in the aggregate to twenty-three billions. The debts of the nations of all the world have increased one-half since 1890, and now aggregate thirty-three billions. These great national debts are practically perpetual, and though they may be at so low a rate of interest as three per cent., they absorb the energies of the people, and, like a glacier grinding over the earth, crush all beneath them.