The age-herald., 1901-05-09
Quick Tranalt Good Thing.


 Pursuing powerful argument a learned man writes to each delegate of the Ala bama constitutional convention about to assemble:
 Dear Delegate: Whereas. a passenger now travels from Birmingham to Wash ington in the time our fathers took to go from Elyton to Tuscaloosa, ergo Ely ton to Tuscaloosa are played out!
 It Is fraud upon public credulity, the ar gument that annihilation of space and time, quick transit for body and mind matters of words, tends to destruction of liberty and restoration of monarchy. The argument, in truth. is all the other way The text book from which Jefferson drew the inspiration of his theories is Mon tesquieu. Montesquieu lays down the axiom that small areas are essential to the integrity of republican principles. Granted, but the garden" of Eden was once the whole world. Was 1t a small area? The commerce of the world was once the commerce along the Mediter- anean sea, just one small sea it's "area". You catch the thought would suggest.
 Now, dear sir, do you forsee that your fellow delegates are likely to appreciate duly the fact that a constitution for Alabama. made in 1901, has a wider field for the promotion of free institutions than any previous constitution from the be- ginning? I am not speaking of the poly glot populations that have been and are annually imported to other states, but of this population, native to the soil, be- ginning with the first of the nineteenth century and descended exclusively, we'll nigh, from virginians, Carolinians, Geor- gians and Tennesseans who had them selves descended from native Americans
 All you have to do is to consider that beats, towns, counties. states and their varied interests, in unremitting contact with each other, require less active gov ernment from a common center than ever before. Destroy the beat autonomy and you have the county politician enthroned at the county courthouse, but bring the beat direct into the State government over his head and you have the utmost refinement of civil liberty. Destroy the right of the county to legislate on it's own local affairs. so that the county does not forfeit in the enjoyment of It's privileges the character of the State-destroy this right, then you have provided for a General Assembly whose members. of ficers and clerks may, with impunity, vitiate the bill amending tho charter of the city of Montgomery, or the bill re- moving the county capital of Shelby, or the bill providing for a dispensary at Uniontown. Destroy the bank of issue, regulated by the State, and you transfer the basis of the medium of exchange from the local commodities of commerce to the taxing power of the United States government, which brings in a. national paper currency as a substitute. Do this one act and you create an all-absorbing use for currency in the gambling of stock exchanges, which attracts a plethora of it to Wall street, to the star vation of the remoter sources of produc- ton. Do this, and, as you will see at a single glance, the only supply of cur through the successful competition of the Morgan-Rockefeller trust. ct i'd omne genus, with the stock exchanges for the employment of currency. If there is to be no local currency. as of old, founded upon local values, and if all the currency allowed to the people is to be founded up- on United States bonds or mortgages, then stock exchanges and trusts become, in the nature of things, the only two sources of distribution of that national currency. It can reach producers in no other way.