Weekly Jeffersonian., 1907-01-24
WATSON'S GREAT SPEECH.
Continued from page ~

Cllno VI OciIIlC, VI Il1O Sll, VI JlS
hospital Besides, property to the
value of from $1,000 100000 to $3,000,-
100000 had been destroyed yet,
when, we come to cast UP accounts in
1870, we find that in spite of the losses
of the war, both in men and in prop
erty, the farmer has increased his es-
tate to $1,000, 100000. How do you
account for this? There is only one
way under the sun by which it can be
accounted for. Just as the plentiful
paper money, issued by the govern
ment during the war, fed and clothed
and equipped three great armies for
battle, so the same currency flow
ing into the shrunken veins of COM
merce, inspired the body polite with
new life and vigor and enabled it to
throw off the debility of four years of
civil strife.
Let us take another ten years.
From 1870 to 1880 the farmers go for
ward again, increasing the number of
hands employed vastly increasing the
amount of product. In 1880 we find
that they own wealth-the( agricul-
tural classes-to the amount of $12,
000.000,00O.
What! An increase of only $1,0oo,-
100000 in decade! Why such an aw-
full drop off? Why such a frightful
comparative loss? BY the ratio of in
crease established in the two decades
between 1850 and 1870, the agricul-
tural wealth should have been at least
$22 2000000 What has become of the
$1o,O0o,ooo,o00 that they should have
piled up? If we look into the statute
books we will find that the money
power enthroned in Wall street has
been burning up hundreds of millions
of dollars of that paper money which
the government had issued and that the
horror of falling prices has come upon
the farmer and has struck the light
out of his life. Just as in Great Brit
ain, whose paper money conquered
Napoleon, because of the fact that he
adhered to silver and gold, refusing to
issue paper, our statesmen, servile
tools of the money trust, began to de-
stroy the currency which had come to
their relief in the hour of trial, when
silver and gold the towards, had hid
their heads. The historian tells us
that there was more suffering,
more business failures, more headlong
falls from affuence to poverty, more
widespread ruin and havoc, more
beggary and starvation, in Great
Britain during the years that follow
ed the overthrow of Napoleon while
the money power was destroying all
paper currency and resurrecting the
tyranny of gold, than had ever been
known in Great Britain during all the
terrible years of actual warfare
In this country, a glance at the Sta
tistical Abstract will show exactly the
same conditions. In spite of the war.
in spite of the million wage earners
who lost their lives or their power to
work in that war, in spite of the desti-
tuition of the farmers, in spite of the
burning of great cities, like Atlanta
and Columbia, the cold census reports
reveal the astonishing fact that by
the aid of paper money, the farmers
of the Union, north, south, east and
west, had shaken off the losses of the
war, as the lion shakes the dewdrops
from his name.
But in 1870 it was as though some
irresistible power had sent forth the
mandate to agricultural progress:
Halt! Thus far shalt thou go but no
further" We have the pathetic fact,
the almost incredible fact, given to us
in the dry statistical tables compiled
by the government that here was the
limit. The eight-and-a-half million
wage earners, peacefully and indus
triously at work in the field for ten
years with a capital of $1,000, 100000