“ Go back over these figures, all taken from official records—all undenied and undeniable—and ask yourself if ever before in human history the industries and credit of a successful nation and successful in the greatest War ever waged, too, were so butchered? These figures indict and convict the Federal Reserve System, as it has been maladministered, as the arch betrayer of a people's trust. It indicts and convicts them as juggling with the symbols of value to the destruction of real values. No sane man can read this record, frozen into Government statistics, and defend the oligarchs who made it. ”

“ It isn't banking, it's banditry. It isn't business, it's pillage. The dirty paws of predacity are encased in the white gloves of officialdom and constantly dry-cleaned in propagandized hot air! Here follow some of the records—every figure in them taken from official reports—carefully concealed from your view by the money masters and by their lackeys who fatten and batten on the lootage.
And as you look over this record don't overlook this fact. No bank or no system of banks ever really makes or produces one copper cent in industry. They take toll from industry. ”

“ It was the very core and center of their scheme to dominate American industry. But to "get it across" or to "put it over" they must re-christen the monster. Twice the people had violently repudiated the Central Bank banditry. Hence in the fertile brainery of predacity was born the idea of the Federal Reserve System—a camouflage, a deception and a mere cloak of Pecksniffian hypocrisy. A clever nation-wide propaganda was at once instituted with every "prop" put under it that wily astuteness could suggest. A subsidized press ballyhooed, touted and paeanized the proposed Federal Reserve System. ”

“ HE Federal Reserve System is the visible hand of the Invisible Empire picking the pockets of the producers of real wealth. It is the most leviathan parasite engrafted upon—and grafting on—production in the world's history. It is an industrial vampire sucking industry's life blood down its bottomless maw. Its greed is fathomless, its rule is ruthless and its lust for power is insatiate. ”

“ It is obsessed by a squandermaniac prodigality for speculation and by a niggardly parsimony for real production of real wealth. It exalts the tokens of wealth and the jugglers of it far, far above its real producers. It reaches out almost limitless largess to the pinnacles of parasitism while practically starving the real makers of real wealth on whose shoulders parasitism gaily rides. It shovels out hundreds of millions for speculation and serves with an eye-dropper tens of millions for production. ”

“ Why should they be restricted to a 6 per cent dividend when these Federal Reserve Banks "earned" 160 per cent or over 25 times as much? How do you like to have your money comman [Pg 39] deered for capital and get for one year less than one dollar out of twenty-five dollars made? Is that "democratizing" banking or is it bourbonizing banking? Is that "emancipating credit" or is it shackling it with you wearing the shackles? Can any sane or honest man—outside the ranks of its lolling beneficiaries—defend any such division of profits as fair or just or equitable? ”

“ That volume of deposits must be obtained, retained and increased in the face of the hottest kind of hot competition. It is the absolute ability and integrity meter of a successful banker. There is no other. Are these strutting, preening, vociferating and vociferous Federal Reserve bankers measured—or measurable—by that standard? Do they battle for their deposits and by those deposits and the volume of them win their spurs? They do not. Their mass of deposits—the largest on earth—are dumped into their banks by law, conscripted into their coffers. They are not won in competition. ”

“ But hang your cap of admiration on either horn of the dilemma which you choose you find the mightiest single mass of money on this planet swept into Federal Reserve coffers without toil, without effort, without one penny of capital contributed by them and without one scintilla of ability proven by them—except the ability of accomplished and astute lobbyists! ”

“ Dividends to the people who provided the capital, i.e., the scores of thousands of member bank stockholders, amounted to just a pitiful 6 per cent or $5,654,018 out of $151,408,031, or about one-thirtieth of the amount! Ought the real providers of the real capital, upon which stupendous profits were made, to be fobbed off with one-thirtieth of its real earnings? Ought their money to be commandeered at 6 per cent, profiteered upon at 160 per cent and they be practically sandbagged out of 154 per cent? ”

“ It was destruction to scores of thousands and to hundreds of thousands of the real producers of real wealth. Billions of dollars of real values were annihilated, not by the trend [Pg 66] of the markets, but by artificial "bear" markets artificially created by the throttling of credit. You can't withdraw literally billions of credit and currency—almost three billions of them—the very life-blood of commerce from industry and have it thrive any more than you can tap a man's jugular vein and have him live! ”

“ Read first these quotations from their own lips and from their own pens which prove that these Federal Reserve oligarchs deliberately staged the greatest financial debacle in all human history. Nothing in human history approaches it for cold-blooded, wanton, ruthless slaughter of values. ”

“ Not much competition for Federal Reserve bankers there, is there? Peg that proposition and look at the next one.
Here it is. The loans of a bank are the life of a bank. From the interest upon them comes practically the sole earnings of a bank and upon their repayment depends the solvency of a bank. The credit department of a bank is its solar plexus. Loans must be successfully made to men engaged in every variety of industry, some secured, some unsecured and in amounts varying from a few hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. ”

“ Visibility would defeat its object. The Money Masters had read history and knew that the American people stood four square against a Central Bank. If their monster of pillage were called a Central Bank they knew it would die in the legislative womb. ”

“ By merely a Federal Reserve ukase or decree or resolution or order an Aladdin's Palace arises like magic—paid for by your money. No such squandermaniac obsession has ever before been seen in this country in prodigality of buildings, in luxuriance of equipment or in splendor of quarters. ”

“ LICKER than an eel in a bucket of soap suds" is a fair description of the accomplished financial accoucheurs who ushered this monster into legal existence. You must understand that the real object was to establish what was in truth and fact a Central Bank which would dominate and control currency issues and bank credits in the United States. To weld those chains upon American industry without appearing to do it was the object in view. It could be done only by encasing dirty hands of real pillage in the white gloves of a "Reserve System." The Invisible Empire must remain invisible. ”

“ For reasons best known to themselves Federal Reserve Oligarchs penalize production and favor parasitism. Who are really entitled to the largest loans from the huge storage or reservoir of Federal Reserve money? Why, the real producers of the real wealth, the agricultural interests in the U.S.A. Have they had it? They have not. ”

“ They told you that "men will not be thrown out of employment wholesale throughout the country by the fright of financial and commercial panic, but finance and commerce will be steady. Hundreds and thousands of men will not suddenly be thrown out of employment during these national waves of depression nor undue feverish buoyancy." Peg these specious promises in your brainery and compare them later on with the actual performances of this monster of depression with the Federal Reserve Board at Washington really functioning as a Central Bank. ”

“ Most rights are qualified. A man has at least as absolute a right to give his own money as he has to demand money from a party that has made no promise to him; yet if he gives it to induce another to steal or murder the purpose of the act makes it a crime.
"A bank that receives deposits to be drawn upon by check of course authorizes its depositors to draw checks against their accounts and holders of such checks to present them for payment. When we think of the ordinary case the right of the holder is so unimpeded that it seems to us absolute. ”

“ They wager their own money that they are good bankers. They have initiative and confidence in their own ability and they prove that they have by putting up their own money before they ask you to entrust yours to their keeping. The officers of the Federal Reserve Banks don't put up a copper cent, a plugged nickel, or a thin dime of capital. The capital which they manipulate is commandeered by law for their use at a petty six per cent rate. ”

“ For the three years of 1919, 1920 and 1921 the average net profits of the Federal Reserve System were 116 per cent and the real owners of the capital were gypped legally—but none the less gypped—out of an average of 110 [Pg 90] per cent for each of those three years. Do you suppose that officers of any bank not legally so buttressed could "get away" with any such proposition? You know they couldn't—and hold their jobs. No body of stockholders in the U.S.A., unless legally chained, would endure a profit of 116 per cent and a dividend of but 6 per cent! ”

“ If without a word of falsehood but acting from what we have called disinterested malevolence a man by persuasion should organize and carry into effect a run upon a bank and ruin it, we cannot doubt that an action would lie. ”

“ There are just two ways to collect money on checks, one by presenting them at the counter of the bank on which they are drawn and getting the cash and the other by sending them through the mail for remittance by draft drawn on some large city depository. The latter method obtains in 99 per cent of the hundreds of millions of checks drawn. The bank upon which the check is drawn makes a small charge of one tenth of one per cent to compensate for clerk hire, postage, stationery and the like. It is a perfectly legitimate charge in vogue and practiced for generations in banking circles. ”

“ Why, it's enough to make Shylock and Pecksniff rend their cerements and jump from their graves and have another try at extortion and at applied hypocrisy. A difference of eighty per cent per annum between New York City—where nothing but parasitism is grown—and Alabama—where real wealth of real cotton grows—is some difference, isn't it? ”

“ WHAT THE MONSTER DOES WITH ITS LOOT
HIS chapter is going to be like a tack—short but pointed. Federal Reserve apologists—on and off the floor of Congress—when driven into their last retreat always take their final stand and make their last play in the "franchise tax" stronghold. Their assertion is in effect that no matter what may be the abuses and sandbaggeries and extravagances of this system the "big money" gets back to the Government in the shape of the mythical "franchise tax." ”

“ Every agent of the Federal Reserve Bank that has been here has advised us in substance that they were spending the Government's money like drunken sailors and will not stop at any expense to force us to join the system. ”

“ The second attempt to engraft a Central Bank on American industry was the Second Bank of the United States. It was chartered on April 10, 1816, and was a stormy petrel of finance. About it waged a running battle. It was from birth to death the center of a conflict. Against its domination American industry rebelled. Real producers of real wealth constantly fought this parasite of finance. ”

“ Farmers, planters, merchants—and in short, all industry in its territory including its own salvation—depended on the moving and on the marketing of the cotton crop. It was "root hog or die" and this little bank rooted and was looted precisely in this wise: It had to borrow from the Federal Reserve Super-Shylockery at Atlanta. It had no other house of refuge. It had to borrow something over $100,000 from the Federal Reserve [Pg 43] Bank at Atlanta and for the week's period ending on July 31, 1920, it was charged and it paid as high as thirty-one per cent per annum interest! ”

“ It has a cynical contempt for the public—whom it ruthlessly plunders. It believes—and practices the belief—that it was instituted for the promotion and protection of superior privileges; that wealth is produced for its exploitation; that production of values exists for its parasitical plunder; [Pg 2] that Shylockery is a virtue and that the fruits of industry belong not to its producers but to its despoilers. ”

“ A man has a right to give advice but advice given for the sole purpose of injuring another's business and effective on a large scale, might create a cause of action. Banks as we know them could not exist if they could not rely upon averages and lend a large part of the money that they receive from their depositors on the assumption that not more than a certain fraction of it will be demanded on any one day. ”

“ Ask yourself if this enormous net earning percentage, made out of commandeered capital and out of conscripted deposits, isn't outside the realm of banking and in the realm of unconscionable vampire pawnbrokery? Ask yourself—in a land where pawnbrokers are licensed and restricted to two to three per cent a month or 24 to 36 per cent per year—if 79.56 per cent per year [Pg 47] doesn't brand such a system as outrageous Shylockery? ”