you go about exhorting the substitute for war which all reasonable men knew before you were born. All this light and lucid morality has burst into you simply because you had to take the medicine which you so loved to give other people, you were ordered out to fight with your own sacred carcass and patriotism in place of sending your neighbors' bodies to buffet the bullets.

6. Millionaire Screws.

When the Spanish war loan came to be made it was realized that too many people were seeing through the loan-and-bond business, which led to a ruse to popularize the loan, give the war a grip on popular affections, and kindle up patriotism. With much misgiving a common people's loan was invented, for 'there was a strong feeling in Congress in favor of arousing the interest of the masses of the people in the loan, even at a small loss to the Treasury, so that thousands of small property owners might become partners in the fortunes of the Government, as is the case in France.' Hence the small subscriptions to the loan were to be accepted before the large ones.

Note the confession in this. If the common people had a few dollars invested in the war it would be popular with them the rich who have heretofore taken up war bonds have money invested in wars and therefore wars are popular with them: proving as we have said that their flamboyant patriotism is only investment, a patriotism drawing its sustentation from the blood and dollars of the masses. Before wealth was monopolized the patriotism. of these masses was healthy and spontaneous, rising from the knowledge that the country was theirs. They did not expect to make money out of wars, hence there were no wars of aggression; they did intend to maintain their rights and when this was necessary every man fought with the spirit of one who knew that the nation was his nation. But now the country is not the people's country,

and popular patriotism has shriveled and must be stimulated by a bribe; it is the trusts' country, the wealthy skinflints' country, and if the masses are to fight and perish for it as heretofore some artificial incitement in the form of a $20, $100, or $500 bond must be administered, Uke a mustard plaster.

This "big popular loan" was considered a brilliant success by its propagators. 231,000 persons subscribed in these three amounts a total of nearly $100,000,000; the other hundred million was taken by about 60,000 persons in sums less than $4,500 each. Let us analyze this remarkable popular achievement. First of all the structure of the loan indicated great poverty of surplus savings in the coffers of the masses, since out of 70,000,000 people only 231,000, or not one in three hundred, had even $20 surplus to invest where there was absolutely safe security. They did not abstain because these safe investments, however small the interest, are not desired, for they are; the people now distrust banks of deposit, savirgs banks and every form of small investment because they regard them as robbing establishments and more than half expect to lose whatever they deposit there. But when Mr. Cleveland offered his $100,000,000 loan in '96, 4,640 people of the rich had jingling in their pockets nearly $600,000,000 to invest-that is, one-fiftieth as many people had six times as much spare and uninvestable wealth.

Secondly, as to the popular character of the loan. How many of the 60,000 who furnished the second $100,000,ooo were of the rich, who wanted at least what they could get of the prize? The real sham of the loan is that whatever part of it was assumed by small buyers will not long be held by them, they will soon be compelled by the 'stringency of the times' to realize on their little bonds to get the money to live on, when the rich will step in to buy and the celebrated popular loan will become like all the rest a rich man's fund. This transference of bonds to the

rightful holders of debts-the giant skinflints—has probably been already largely consummated. Soon the people will realize the fiction of popular loans as a basis for military patriotism, and what will be done then to induce them to vote and die for national debts?

There would be but one way to keep the mask of popularity on these loans, which are popular to the degree of reaching 1-250 of the population on the broadest construction, namely by a law providing that no person shall be able to acquire more than one bond and forbidding those whose wealth exceeds a moderate stated sum to purchase the bonds from their holders at all, on pain of forfeiting them to the government. This would be a good provision, as it would soon expose the utter humbuggery of popular subscriptions. If the rich could not buy these popular bonds as soon as the people were hard up for money, the people would soon cease to subscribe for such bonds, for they would find it impossible to realize on them among others of their condition, the small propertyowners, and they would no longer bid. Then the fact would stand out in its nakedness that whatever the disguise may be a military loan-like any other-is merely a choice depository for the surplus capital of the rich.

All cries for war are therefore cries from the rich for war loans among other blessings. It is a precious arrangement for extracting boundless perpetual annuities. from the people, under the lid of the State; the term 'Government' is a figure, a popular dummy, in what is a thoroughly commercial deal; it is a popular varnish to make the people fancy the transaction theirs. Government is an agent or factor of the rich which comes to the people saying, 'We must have an armament for national protection and I know where we can borrow the money for it. This seems so brotherly! It looks as if the whole idea emanated from the people; and the cozened people take it up and strain themselves to death to sustain it.

In Europe the carrying out of such ideas costs the common people $3,000,000,000 annually, exclusive of the interest they pay the capital loaners.

Loans are safer than business. A man with governinent bonds is the completest drone in the universe, the idler paramount, a massive dead-weight on mankind in all his qualities; he does nothing but swallow interest year in year out; for bonds are as safe and certain as sunrise, no responsibility, no carking directors' meetings, no oversight of manufacturing concerns, no constraint even to find a good manager, for there is nothing to be managed; he merely sits in a lifelong summer shower of wealth and it falls on him. How many of these serene beings are there in the world? The formidable concentration of wealth answers not many, and we can tell fairly what nutriment they suck out of the world through bonds. The aggregate national debt of the six European powers is in round numbers $25,000,000,000,* and fixing the interest rate at 3 per cent the annual sum of interest on these goodly billions is $750,000,000 for distribution among the drones. Is it a wonder that the drones want wars and war establishments? It is not his nature that loves war but his bond account; you would not have to change human nature at all to bring about general peace-simply change the rich man's bond account by abolishing it, and peace will reign.

The magic of interest-bearing debts has often been descanted upon. You pay and pay and never get paid up. In thirty-five years paying $750,000,000 interest annually the whole debt would be paid off, but the alchemy of it is that when it is paid off it remains as large as ever. Thirty-five years is a generation, which signifies that each generation will pay the total sum of the debt, twentyfive billion dollars, and then the next generation will take up the joyous sport and do it over again. Capitalists are

*This was Whitaker's estimate in 1891. The Austrian debt includes that of Austria, Austria-Hungary and Hungary, the German debt that of Germany and the German States.

longlived, through commanding all the health resources of space, Switzerland and Norway, the sunny Mediterranean, and many of them will live to receive the payment for their part of the debt twice, seventy years, and will then transmit it unimpaired to their children. It is the people who die young, those who do the toiling that earns and pays this interest, in factories and field, ever under the doom of the twenty-five billion dollars which they must raise in their span of life! To whom is war profitabie, those who toil to pay the stupendous interest, or those who loan the funds and dissipate the interest in redolent tranquillity? Here is what the shrewd Francis Bacon said about the gluttonous game three hundred years ago: "Usury bringeth the treasure of the realm or state into a few hands: for the usurer being at certainties, and the others at uncertainties; at the end of the game most of the money will be in the box."

Capital owners are not enterprising, their sons are less so, and cutting coupons is the most congenial business enterprise the fully fledged capitalist can embark upon. Today through universal monopoly surplus capital increases by leaps and bounds in these men's pouches: where are they to invest it? Why, that is simple enough, use the forces of persuasion which money commands, preachers, editors, politicians and president, to harangue the populace that the glory of the country calls for soldiery and provinces, it touches the mainspring of the popular cortex and the people vote the policy which orders loan on loan, and the surplus funds of the capitalist are now secure. This patriotism, a Gorgon love of barbarian glory, unlocks every heart and every chest that the rich require, the people can always be destroyed by catering to the barely smothered feudal passions and pricking them up to accommodate their masters 'for their country's sake.' "It is a strange desire which men have, to seek power and lose liberty," said the same Bacon.