State for a merely nominal consideration to issue two of paper to one of bullion he may or is supposed to possess. On this principle, the six different private banks in New Zealand, holding two millions of bullion, could issue four millions of paper money... Now these four millions of paper note issue become interest-bearing bonds to these banks directly they are issued... Since then, by the act of issue, they become interest-bearing bonds, let us see how they react upon society. When £5% is charged, a depression will occur about every ten or twelve years, that is when worked in conjunction with profits arising from discount on bills of recommendation, varying in the rate of time with the charge made for discount. The Bank of England returns for 1847, 1857, and 1866, convincingly prove the truth of this statement. These depressions were by the unthinking attributed to the scarcity of money, but were not; in reality depressions are the offspring of interest and the revertionary powers of interest. So then the two millions of bullion held by the six different Colonial Banks, by the addition of four millions of paper note issue which the possession of this two millions of bullion empowers them to employ, would, if fully used at 5%, give them a capital of eight million in a little over fourteen years, and that without any of the coin lying in the coffers of these banks; and this result is obtained without taking into consideration or account the profits arising from the discount on bills which could much more than pay the expense of management.” That is the way the financiers amass their unearned fortunes wherever the monopoly of money exists. They succeed in demanding every year an ever-extending increase on the gold they lend out, and the promises to pay the gold which they have not; and this, in spite of the fact that the world’s gold supply is diminishing each year, and is totally useless to measure the increasing commerce between the nations. And the workers never cease toiling to satisfy the insatiable demands of usury, and to pay the interest upon the millions they are supposed to owe. Of course, the whole of this is paid for by the laborers out of their own products. Not even do the capitalists pay any portion of it, for they are only speculators interposing between the usurer and the laborer and joining in the plunder of the latter. All the interest which the capitalist is called upon to pay for the money loaned, he first takes from those he employs or from those laborers who purchase the product of his employees. Labor not only pays all rents, but it pays all usury as well. Thus is the laborer bled. Monopoly first checks production, and usury follows to check consumption.
It is labor alone which supplies all human wants. It has produced in the past all the capital it now employs, and it is producing all the capital
