The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1895-05-13

conflict.
With all that has been said of the
despotism of the party caucus. and
the discipline of the party whip, par
ties after all are but reflections of
events and conditions as they may be
perceived by the masses that compose
them. These reflections, again, are
not exponents of emjurical formulate
or decayed or expired conditions, but
Of living necessities. The present
conflict has been gathering force out
of the events of thirty years, which
have become localized into crisis,
and the focal point concentrated into
political expression in the dominant
silver question.
This question is dominant because
It is perceived to underlie the ex-
IRENE necessities involved in the prob
lem of distribution. Since the era
of the French revolution the energies
of civilization have been devoted to
the solution of problems of production
and in the broad sense, the solution
has been achieved. The laws, the
growth of parties. and their political
expressions in platforms, manifestoes
and politics on both continents have
all ranged upon lines bearing upon
production and have ignored, because
the necessity was not apparent, legal
and political expression of problems
of distribution, until the legal and po-
litical states have become invested
with respect to the forces which have
come to govern the operations Of pro-
duction.
These governing forces through nat
ural acceleration have grown to over
shadowing proportions, and the new
mechanical era was complete oblitera-
ton of most of the accumulated
wealth of ages. Vast systemsAof rail-
roads, vast expenditures for cables
and telegraphs, prodigious improve
ments in city construction, sewerage.
paving and architecture, proceeding
along with complete revolution in
methods of manufacture involved in
the word machine have all displaced
the past in less than one hundred
years and by far the most of it within
the last half century. The same con-
ditions have affected the cost and
methods of governments. Naval and
military armaments have increased in
enormous proportions, involving enor-
NOUS expense both for construction
and maintenance.
Along with all this the machinery
of finance has kept pace, and the evo-
luton of the eraeas become expressed
in an enormous aggregation of debt,
public, municipal and private, bear
ing hardest upon those nations max
ing the most rapid development, and
therefore affecting the United States
perhaps more than any civilized peo-
pie. By natural process this mass
of debt has become the property of
the few who have made the machin-
cry of finance their especial business
during the era.
Along with this prodigious evolu-
ton of property has come an evolu-
ton of its value, and prices Of COM
modities have declined in the ratio
of their quantity. But the exponent
of this property-the bonds, mort !
cages, and public and private paper
have not participated in the decline
as measured in relation to their face
value, but to the contrary have &C
CELEBRATED in purchasing equivalency in |
the same ratio that the property has /
declined, until the masses of the peo-
pie are confronted with a mass of /
tax, interest and costs, which their |
incomes, as derived from their pro-
auctions, is utterly inadequate to /
meet, and through direct shrinkages
In the values of products, and the en-
forced idleness of millions, owing to
periodic stagnation which the condi-
ton involves, are becoming less and
less unable to meet, until the status
quo represents, as completely as it
did in 1876, an irrepressible conflict
between the elements that will not,
because they cannot, combine.
This conflict is one to re-establish
squivalency between money and prop
erty. But property is only another
name for production and money
means income. The energies of the
Ind interest costs. and we have the
spectacle of the entire mass, en-
,loyer as well as employed, shop
keeper as well as farmer, engaged in
he most pinching economies, exactly
1t the time when the reverse should
De the case, and when productions lit
erally rot from lack of consuming
power.
The conflict invites one of two pos
;ible solutions. Either the relative
7alue of money must decline to the
evel of products, or the products
must rise to the level of money. 1t
s not the first time the world has
confronted a similar condition, as it
las been repeated at intervals of about
/ century for ages, and the solution
las always come through exhausting
vars, that destroyed both products,
money and overcrowded humanity,
md their effect is the same whether
hey come as foreign or domestic con-
licts. AS the conflict at present is
outlined politically, it is between a
smaller fraction whose policy Is to
wipe out old debts by creating new
ines. and under circumstances which
.ause the conditions of the new ones
o be more exacting, and to still fur
her widen the chasm between the
-alue of money and productions; leav-