The Washington herald., 1913-04-13
CEN: COXEYS DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE

bruised my legs and often fell down
searching for the light. but l kept on
reading, thinking and exploring. For
ten years I was the stationery engineer
of q rollingmill at Dansville. Pa. There
was little to do except to start ana stop
the machinery. / didn't loaf mentally,
but turned questions over in my mind
at every opportunity. Then I went into
the scrap-iron business. My travels took
me to Massillon, in Ohio. There / saw
and bought a stone quarry and grinding
stone into sand has been my principal
business ever since. Some OF the largest
steel works in the country have long
been customers OF my company.
1T was my conviction that banks,
should not have the sole privilege or
issuing money and making profit on
the transaction. That function. ! be-
lieved and now believe, belongs to the
government. The night Of my financial
ignorance began to break when 1 reached
that conclusion. Next, I saw that SEN
sibe men who held opinions like my
own could not reply to the charge that
the 'Greenbackers,' so-called. wanted the
printing presses started and kept going
eternally There had to be some con-
troll, i realized. over the issue of money.
put out by the government. 1 turned
a way to answer the inquiry.
The Birth of An Idea.
Meanwhile I had been driving four
miles into the country every day to my
stone quarry. In the fall and spring my
horse, my buggy, and myself literally
wallowed in the mud. l was getting
some first-hand information, you under
stand, about the rural transportation
OIL
much thought. Farmers, L saw, were
often kept away from their markets for
weeks at a time by impossible roads.
think l can say in truth and nodesty
that the present countrywide movement
for good highways was actually begun by
Coxeys march to Washington
Finally the panic of 1893 FRUSTRATED
labor and capital all over the country.
Four million men were thrown out of
employment. Professions of them passed
through Massillon. The region where.
live and thence onward to Cleveland and
Pittsburg was as dead as a graveyard.
1t was then that / began an active agi-
tation to have the national government
issue $500 900 of paper money and put
the idle men at work making wagon
roads. Carl Browne, printer, an artist,
a politician. and cowboy, who wore
long hair and buckskin clothes, was a
MEMBER or my houSehOld. i had met MIN
at silver convention in Chicago and
had employed him as an orator and a
blackboard cartoonist.
MY good roads suggestion swept over
the country like a prairie fire. Every
Idle workman and every suffering family
wanted 1t carried out. But asked hum
dreds OF the persons who wrote to me.
what relief do you propose for the men
who live in cities and who cannot go
out into the country and find work on
the roads? 1t was a rea sonable inquiry.
labored with that proposition for many
days and nights, toiling over 1t as an
inventor does when he is trying to solve
a mechinical problem.
solved tho Problem in Red.
"On New Years morning. 1894, l got
awake with the solution of the difficulty
clear and sharp in my mind. I would
write bill and have it introduced in
Congress. permitting States. counties,
townships. cities. and villages to deposit
Notwithstanding bonds. running twen-
ty-five years, with the Secretary Of the
Treasury in Washington, the amount of
bonds not to exceed one-half Of the as
sessed value of the property of the city.