Los Angeles herald., 1890-06-13
FRIDAY, JUNE r3, 1890.
JOHN SHERMAN AND HIS HONEST
DOLLAR.

Inere are no appearances III the united
States senate at any time so pretentious
or so hypocritical as those of John Sher-
man. Here is man who has been a
place-hunter all his days. He never
earned dollar except in public life, and
he occupied posts whose highest pay
was the salary of a congressman, viz. !:
5000 year, except when he filled the
position of the secretary of the treasury
when he got $4,000. Yet John Sherman
is millionaire, how or why no man can
tell without indulging in the gravest
imputations on the integrity of the
ice molecule. Nevertheless, to COM
pensate for his lack of genialty,
the frigid John is endowed with gall
that would poison the chyme and chyle
of dozen men, and with cheek beside
which the hide of rhinoceros or hippo
potamus is as thin as gold foil, or as
those plates of platinum that are ham
mered out SO fine that they are invisible
to the naked eye. The other day he
went into the United States senate and
raised pitiful howl against the standard
dollar, or its silver certificate substitute,
because it was not an honest dollar. If
not, why not? Where does this cold and
calculating appropriation of somebody's
goods-without such an appropriation
he could never have been millionaire
get the matchless effrcntery to talk
about an honest dollar, when he knows
in his heart that this standard silver
dollar of the fathers is as honest as the
day Is light, and that its demonetization
in 1878 was the most infamous piece OF
financial legerdemain ever chronicled-
a positive wrong and theft in itself, and
a calculated and successful attempt to
increase the sum of misery in the world.
When we contemplate John Sherman
in the role of clamoring for an honest
dollar, we cannot help thinking of three
famous characters, one the creation of
Moliere and the other two OF Charles
Dickens. He seems to us malign COM
pound of Tartuffe, Pecksnif and Pun
blochook. His financial and political
performances remind us OF the pious
pretenses of the former, while his formal
and hypocritical preachments SAVIOR of
the latter.
No people in the world have ever been
victimized by the money classes to the
extent to which the people of the United
States have suffered. There is large
and doubtless a subsidized class in this
country who are ready to hold up their
hands in holy horror at any common
sense treatment of the national debt,
the currency or our fiscal interests in
any phase. This is the clacque of the
people of "fxed incomes,' many of
whom never release dollar until it has
sweated away several per cent. of its
value in their itching palms. These
worthless bought national debt, ex-
pressly payable in lawful money of
the United States, with greenbacks at
an average depreciation of forty-ive per
cent, saw their bonds appreciate to par
and then bribed Republican congress
to make them payable, principal and
interest, in gold The moment they
had achieved this monumental steal-a
larceny on scale so grand that it has
never been approached in the history of
the world-they hired men like John
Sherman to howl about the sanctity of
the national debt and to talk about an
''honest dollar"
Out on such hypocrites They are
the money changers of the temple and
the whited sepulchers of our public life.
On all grounds it is fitting that they
should occasionally be painted as they
deserve.