The Loanmongers of Europe

by Karl Marx

THE LOANMONGERS OF EUROPE.

In order to understand the facility of raising at any time immense amounts of money in Europe for the use of Governments and Courts and church establishments, we must begin by understanding the peculiar social state and the peculiar machinery called into play in performing such extraordinary operations. In the first instance, we see all over Europe-chiefly in Great Britain, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Switzerland. Poland. Hungary, and Livonia, and various other parts of the Old World-the accumulated moneyed result of the people's labors of ages past, either in real estate or invested in Government bonds, still vested in the hands of the descendants of the Norman robbers, Danish pirates, or adventurous knights and other more or less disreputable brigands or warriors of the dark and feudal ages, when might trampled on right, and no cant about Christianity or civilization yet existed to create meta physical distinctions. The guilt was hardly so much in the first robber who built his castle on his neighbor's bones as in the law which subse. quently sanctioned the burglary by baptizing as right what was wrong and surrounding that wrong with laws of entail and similar intrenchments to vest for all time to come in the children of the descendants of these bandits the bloody spoils of their forefathers. The masses of men all over Europe were born not to be men-to assert the dignity and enjoy the blessings of humanity-but to become the beasts of burden of this jolly progeny of a clique of robbers.

When English statesmen or English philanthropists, even now-a-days, speak of "the people," of their tender regard for "the people's" welfare, we have always looked upon such pleasant deceit as an outrage on the manly Anglo-Saxon idiom. The masses of Europeans are no people. To call them so is a lie, and one of unusual corpulence, though it has grown into an institution. In franch, alone, was a vigorous attempt ever made to break this oppression of the land-owners, and it was a bloody, coarse and revolting one. Yet there, at least the power of the great land-owners was partially destroyed, and in other parts of Europe, as in Russia slight modifications have taken place, but substantially and practically "the people" of Europe are this day, as some hundred years back, but beasts of burden. The name of people is a mockery, a delusion and a snare.

Without any generally diffusive system of liberal education except in Holland and Prussia, with the load of tyranny on conscience and freedom of thought still smothering the progress of civilization, with laws protecting the ill-gotten property of the landed and moneyed monopolists of former ages, the masses of the people still go through this beautiful world not to toil and labor and live for their own happiness but for the purpose of contributing to 'the happiness of a privileged class. No wonder that such contempt exists in Europe for the laboring classes, when those who labor have no sense of their own rights, and with wretched cowardice allow themselves to become the victims of the might accidentally above them-It is only when masses of human mir ds are for a long series of ages unqualified for any mental effort by the depressing influence of remorseless bodily labor, unrelieved by any intellectual aspiration, unblessed by any human joy, that deepotisms, church establishments, the rule of Jesuits over the conscience and of usurers over the pur. suits of men become possible.

This slight recapitulation of these well known features of European civilization is unavoidable in order to show how it is possible to raise with so little difficulty such extravagant amounts as we hear of every day in Europe. The accumulated wealth of feudal Europe is in the pockets of a small band of landowners and money-lenders. Indeed the slow progress which Europe has made in industry in comparison with our country is mainly owing to this fact of the centralization of wealth in the hands of monopolists: while here, as long as the country remains free from the curse of largely accumulated individual fortunes which inevitably lead to monopolies, capital will only be scarce because it is diffused. The bulk of European property being held by comparatively few persons, it becomes a comparatively easy task for governments to raise money upon it. Take Austria, for instance-a country which suffers from a chronic scarcity of cash. What is she doing at this moment? She proposes to raise money by negotiating the mortgage bonds of the land-owners of the Austrian dominions. But how is such an operation possible? Through the Jewish houses, who, shut out from all more honorable branches of business, have acquired in this an unenviable degree of aptitude. There are in Vienna the Rothschilds, and Arnsteins, rand Eskeles, and the Jew-Greek house of Seria, for whom the management of a loan of $100,000,000 is a matter of most easy accomplishment. The way they start a the loan is to get all their correspondents to canvass their business constituencies, and with the allurements of a particular commission, their correspondents of course do their best to ensnare their customers.

The broad facts we have pointed out have naturally produced all over Europe, especially in it Northern, Western and Central portions, where the indolence which prevails in the Southern part (as Italy, Spain and Portugal) is modified by elimate, all manner and kinds of capitalists, speculators and jobbers, who have no other business beyond that of dealing in money. Now there are posted in every point of Europe, Jewish agents, who represent this business, and who are the correspondents of other leading Jews. It must here be borne in mind that for one big fish, like Rothschild, there are thousands of minnows. These make play and find food chiefly in Amsterdam, London, Frankfort, Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg. Paris and Brussels, and, as a general thing, loans are distributed among them in the following proportion:

Amsterdam, say....$25,000.000 | Berlin...............$10.000.000
London..... ....... 150,000.000| Hamburg. ......... 5.000.000
Frankfort.......... 150,000.000| Paris... ............ 5.000.000
Vienos............. 10,000.000 | Brassels............ 5.000.000

Total...................................................100.000.000

Beside the regular agents every one of those

places swarms with Jews who aid in placing the stock. All over Germany and Holland, in Haver, Brunswick, Cassel, Carlerahe, Mannheim, Cologne, Rotterdam, the Hague, Antwerp, and again in Poland and the adjoining counties, in Breslau, Cracow, Warsaw, and so almost through out Europe, there are to be found in almost every town a handful of Jews who deem it sa honor to take a little of the new stock on speculation if the Rothschilds or any other of the great Jewish houses are connected with the negotiation. It is this business Free Masonry among the Jewish bankers which has brought the barter trade in Government securities to its present hight.

It remains to be seen, and the time is not diatant, how the chief houses connected with this barter trade will stand when distrust makes their customers disgorge the securities which have been forced down their throats and the markets become over-glutted with unsalable bonds. Bearing in mind the havoc which the first Napoleon's wars created among these loan-mongers, we have heretofore pointed out the smash, which from a knowledge of their financial position and connections we have no hesitation in predicting as sure to happen as a consequence of the present war to the representatives of this particular race.

That very compset machinery which is their greatest power of success in times of prosperity is their greatest caure of danger in time of adversity. Let the confidence in the Rothschilds be only once slightly shaken, and the confidence in the Foulds, the Richschoffsheims, the Stieglitzs, the Arnsteins and Eskeles is gone. The results of despotism and monopolism are precisely similar. Let Louis Napoleon be chopped off, as he may be any moment by some elever Pianori, and France is in confusion. Let Lionel Rothseniid of London or James of Paris stagger under any clever combination of disasters, and the whole loan-mongering fabric of Europe will perish. The history of one of these loans is the history cf all. But, strange to say, an apparently trivial circumstance contributes to the popularity of the Dutch, Russian and Austrian securities over all other. The fact that they are certificates, and not, like the English and Fresch, inscriptions, makes them stand far higher with capitalists, who love to have the papers in their own safe and cut off the dividend-sheets with their own scissors. Just as amenity of manner often contributes to the popularity of a very naughty Bolingbroke or Chesterfield, so does their handiness of arrange. ment contribute to the popularity of these very naughty bonds. But let the war be protracted but for another year or so, and the already shaken power which thus comes up to the help of every despotism of Europe will pass away. The catastrophe will doubtless for a time greatly disturb the affairs of individuals and nationa. But the world will be better and the masses of men far happler when such things are at an end.