Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1921-11-25

all that they said would happen did not
happen. and all that they said would
not happen did happen. They have
left the black horse on which they rode
and jumped to the white one. They
have headed it back to the highways
they deserted and will spend, the ap-
preaching months IL trying to get
back to the old trail that they aban-
doned.
The world could never have paid
even the interest on its debt under the
credit and currency terms the Federal
Reserve board proposed. But while
the Federal Reserve Board has been
learning that obvious fact, the pawn
brokers have been taking their toll the
world over, and the railroads alone
will pay millions, for years to come,
in exorbitant bonded interest that the
board required of them. :.,i 20
The rate of discount is not yet right.
It is still scandalously high. But it
wilf go down. 1t is part oil the pro-
gram we believe, of the gentlemen who
are engineering formula for the
economic reconstruction of the world
to bring about a new era Of what
they will later describe as imitation.
The stage must be set right. That Is
what citizers not ordinarily suspicious
will believe. How do they know, if
they borrow money now on decent
terms, that the Washington board will
not again suddenly and luthlessly
raise the rediscount rate to ruinous
heights without warning? What con-
fidence can business mon have in the
permanence of financial conditions
when the power arbitrarily to change
them is vested in tiny group of bu-
reaucrats in Washington? And the
more so when the chief of those bu-
reaucrats is the very person who turn
ed the trick before? Can business get
anywhere without confidence? Can
business have confidence in Governor
Harding and his associates? BY their
in judgment, long persisted lin, the
consequences of which have been so
overwhelmingly destructivef that 1t is
remarkable they have the hardihOod to
show their faces. much less continue
to. pose as financial statesmen. Until
these men are thrown out of office,
business cannot and will not recover.
And the burden of them is passing to
the shoulders Of President Harding,
who, for some unknown reason, re-
tains them in office.
When we seemed to be voice cry
ing in the wilderness, we never once
doubted that events would fully vindi-
cate and overwhelmingly justify the
campaign of education which we have
waged against the Federal Reserve
boards warfare upon world prosper
ity. Economic laws are, in truth, un-
changeable and unchanging. So, when
the board talked blithely aboutsits own
autocratic and arbitrary DEGREES as the
mere evidences Of natural law, we
knew that the actual natural law, so
utterly different, would prove itself so
completely that all men could under
stand. And. so ii has. "Milestones in
the progress toward recovery" says
Secretary Hoover. Millstones removed
from the neck of business! The bar
riers that ought never to have been
erected are being torn away, that is
all.
So complete is the demonstration of
the boards betrayal of prosperity that
congress can no longer, in mere de-
cency, refrain from the enactment of
remedial legislation. 1t should pro-
hibit any change in the rate for money,
as it does in the rate for transporta-
ton, without due notice and full hear
ings. It must take from little board
of seven men in Washington their un-