The Bottineau courant. (Bottineau, Bottineau County, N.D.) 1895-1929, 1918-07-18
WEALTH.

How much money would you give for your
life? How much for your sons life? How
much for my life, and for my sons life?
This question of the value of life, as compared
with the value of property, is the question OF
our time; and never was it more pressing than
at this hour. Because of peril to the nation,
the government asserts the right to take your
son and my son and send them to their death.
Very we'll; we love our country, and we submit.
But what about money-yourm money and my
money, Morgan's money and Rockefeller's
money? Has the government any right to
that?
It is the glaring shame of political life that
we have enforced CONSUMPTION of manhood, and
not dared even to suggest CONSUMPTION OF mon
ey. Money is sacred, money is established,
money has it's way. When the government
wants money it has to go to Wall Street and
beg. It has to launch enormous campaigns, to
~convulse the country with excitement, to send
out tends of thousands of speakers, to waste
tens of thousands of reams of paper on adver-
tisements and appeals, to persuade those who
have money to let it be used for the war.
And even then, the government does not
really get the money-it only gets the use of
it for a few years; it has to promise to repay
and meanwhile to pay interest at four per cent:
In other words, it has to establish a new and
more permanent form of privilege, it has to en-
dow parasitisrh, to root in our land forever the
very evils of injustice and exploitation which
it seeks to destroy in Europe.
Billions upon billions of profits are being
made out of this war; fortunes beyond telling
and beyond belief are being piled up by the in
siders of the Coal Trust, the Steel Trust, the
Copper Trust, the Oil Trust, the Beef Trust,
the Powder Trust. While your son and my
son are dying in the trenches, the owners OF
these gigantic profit-machines are making
twenty, forty, sometimes as high as eighty per
cent upon their capital stocks: and in most
~a.>. 4Looo o%1o1r Lox,o ham On xryofoyo1 fhof
the true rate of profit is thousands of per cent
on the original Investments. r.
We strive to be a democracy; we think that
England is a monarchy. But in England the
government takes for war purposes eighty per
cent of war profits, and is planning now to take
twenty-five per cent of capital as well. But
in this country we take only a billion a year in
an excess profits tax, while VIZ raise fifteen or
twenty billions by the method of mortgaging
the labor of the future-the labor of your sons
and my sons, after they come back crippled
from the war.
If there is any life left in the radical move
ment of America, if there is any real care for
democracy in the hearts of our people, they will
send to Washington during the next few months
an overwhelming clamor for the true measure
of Justice in NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS. of Wealth.
Let the government take eighty per cent of in
comes over five thousand dollars, and a hundred
per cent of incomes over ten thousand dollars.
WuV SuOulU ally llldu IldVC ulOAO OAA0AA VOAA VAAVN0
and dollars while other men cannot get the
decencies of life?
And why should the people in the Sums OF
our cities go without decent food, why should
our children go hungry to school, while hun
dreds of millions of acres OF land are held IN
idleness by spectators? Let us have a ma
tional land-tax! Let us conscript the idle acres.
as well as the idle men, to win this war and
save democracy! Sinclair's Magazine.
#6#%@ @##
The exceedingly mild tone employed by the
anti-league papers in disapproval Of the recent
outrage at Devils Lake, when the Journal Of
fee was smeared with yellow paint BY some IN,
known miscrents, lends color to the suspicion
that their deprecations OF the dlsplcaple ac'
should be taken cum grano sails.
IT'S no secret that there viii be more nonpar
tsans ia the state this fall 4 ever before
Th7av win probably vote nonpaItisan too
3xfs IEII,n