Kansas agitator. [volume] (Garnett, Kan.) 1890-1905, 1897-07-30
MRS. LEASES SAY
RELATIVE TO THAT MORTGAGE.
An Able Defense.

Mrs. Lease wrote the following letter to the
Wichita Beacon. 1t is an interesting paper:
EDITOR BEACON: When the slave-holding
arstocracy of this country, with its cruelty, its
arrogance and sel6shness, was subdued, fer
vent thank God went up from every patriot S
lips, for they believed the Republic had passed
its cruelest test. But time has demonstrated
that the victory over the Shareholder was not
such great victory after all, since the methods
used by the slave holding aristocracy to live up
OH the toll of others have been adopted by a
more dangerous element in our national life,
known as land loan and mortgage companies.
These organizations with headquarters general
" in New York, Boston, and London have their
outposts and ramiications in every Western
town and hamlet, controlling legislation when
ever practicable and possible; having as their
allies the selfish partisan office seekers a1d with
scarcely an exception, that class of middle-nen
who rob without compunction the producers of
the West, and while protesting it is solely in the
interests of ''the widows and orphans of the
East (over whom they shed crocodile tears),
enrich themselver by system of commission
and interest on loans that would put Shylock to
shame.
The system of robbery practiced by the Jarvis
Conklin Mortgage Company, the Western Loan
and Trust Company and other syndicates of
similar operative tactics, has heaped such man
ifest injustice upon the people of the West that
they are entering protest at the ballot-boN
against the men and methods that have been
fostered and rerpetuated by the party of trusts
and dcorporations-the Republican party. Hence
it is that in the West there is breaking up of
the waters of the great political deep, an align
ment of forces that shall drive out of our bor-
ders and destroy as completely the money mo-
nopoly as was the slave monopoly destroyed by
the men who wore the blue.
The men and women who braved the DAN
gers and endured the privations of frontier life
to develop the great West will not always sub
init to the injustice which has made New York,
Philadelphia and Boston the great money CEN
ters of the nation, and has placed go per cent
of the property of the country in the hands of
a few men who buy legislation and public Of
fee, and sell public honors, as boldly as the
Pratoran guards sold the purple of the I'm
peria city of Caudus or Galba. They will
not always submit to that high-handed injustice
which gives Eastern Shylocks money at per
cent and permits them to loan it out to the
wealth producers of the West and South at 10
per cent in cut-throat mortgages.
1t has been said that the more ignorant the
masses the more submissive they are to the ex
actions and abuses of power, but here in the
West nature has been so bountiful, and the rob
berry perpetrated OH the people has been con
Quoted so speciously and adroitly, that while
the people are intelligent to marked degree
they were for long time scarce conscious thai
they were being robbed l have no sympathy
with that class of people who are transformed
by the alchemy of debt into an injured class
who seek to avoid by any pretense whateve
the paying of the last farthing of just debt
The per cent of such debtors in the West is in
6nitesstmally small. But there is larger class
who came here with faith and hope sublime, t.
,deve their bread from stubborn prairie soil
who left The amenities of civilization to win
home fol loved ones who were deprived by leg
islation of an adequate supply of that most i'm
portant tool of trade--money--and who, in OF