The Ottawa free trader. [volume] (Ottawa, Ill.) 1843-1916, 1875-11-13

The FREE TRADER is too BourbOniSh in
all its instincts to see or appreciate the crisis
upon which the country is entering, or which,
il may be said, is now upon 1t. Among its
heresies, it claims that if the producing class
es have to pay three or tour times the rate of
annual interest that the country increases IN
wealth, 1t serves them right They have no
business to borrow. If they are mere slaves
of the monied task.masters they receive what
they deserve, and the country Is approaching
the summit Of bliss just in proportion as their
substance is drawn from them, and the wealth
of the country accumulates each year in few
er hands
1t is now through legislative favoritism
that the five per cent of parasites have more
wealth than the ninety-five of producers pos
sess. According to the FREE TRADERS theO-
ry if il was diminished to three per cent. il
would be better still. In this the Age differs
with its friend The Age believes the Amer
lean republic was formed by the people, for
the people, and not for the people TO he hew-
ers of wood and drawers water for a band
Of schemIng and heartless parasites; nor can
it believe that any government thus formed
would conduce to the happiness and welfare
OF the whole people, for whom 1t was created,
and whose blood and treasure have defended
and perpetuated it,-Lndustria! Age
Anybody but the writer of the above must
see that this Is the veriest swash. 1t Is q sort
of defamation which Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs.
De Geer and hundreds of other bedlamltes IN
pants and petticoats can indulge in by the
hour, and yet there is no tangible, practical
idea in forty barrels full of such stuff. The
splashy verbal discharge, of which the above
is brief specimen, was provoked by few
words of the FREE TRADER a month ago on
the subject of interest, in reference, possibly,
to some slush akin to the above. The gener-
al drift of the leaders, remarks was, that
undoubtedly in general people were too
needless in undertaking to pay high interest,
as they were in contracting many other pecu-
MARY obligations that they afterwards found
Oppressive; and while legal restraints were in
eaectual to guard them in the latter case, so
legal restraints, or usury laws, would prove
inefficient to protect them in the former.
Money was like any other commodity-when
times were flush, all property on the rise and
speculation running high, people would pay
almost any interest on money, while in dull
times like the present, people who could
give unquestionable security could borrow
money at very low rates. That no laws of
congress or of the legislature, no more than
Imitation or contraction of the currency, could
permanently affect the rate Of interest on
money, that beng wholly regulated by sup
ply and demand, which varied with every
hour. The result in England, which did
away with all usury laws in 1889 and has had
none since proved this, as the effect was
rather to lower than TO raise the average rate
of interest.
1t was few simple propositions of this
sort.in the very A B c of political economy
which no intelligent man in these days ques-
tons any more than the simplest rules IN
arithmetic, that opened upon the FREE IRA
DER from the washy pen of the IRdastridrA Age
the wordy inundation of which the above,
though short, is, on the score of intelligi-
billty, better than an average specimen.