Various

“ Where does he find anybody calling honest accumulation a crime? Men indeed stigmatize the maintenance of this odious money system as a crime, but only because of the things they claim it to be guilty of. Why does he not join issue on these? He knows that nowhere in all this world is there, or has there ever been, a more honest body of citizenship than the millions of Americans who to-day are toiling on the farms and in the workshops of the country and who demand from the laws they obey nothing but equity and justice. ”

“ The more tears the richer the yield. The more war the more debt. The more depression of the national credit the more cheaply we shall be able to gather it up! The more grape-vine despatches the more distraction and the better opportunity for us. The more death the more millions. The more horror and devastation the heavier will be our coffers. The more the people groan the more we will shout. The more they die the more we will live. ”

“ Wall Street has become one of the most conspicuous features in our national life. Knowing that it is challenged by public opinion—knowing indeed that it is already under the ban and condemnation of the American people—it now seeks, after the manner of its kind, to save itself alive. It would go further than mere salvation; it would make mankind believe that it is a reputable part of the universal swim. Aye more; it seeks to ingratiate itself, sometimes by force and sometimes by gentle craft and stratagem, into the good graces of that civilization which it has so mortally offended. ”

“ I cannot recall another conspiracy in the history of mankind quite equal in colossal and criminal splendor to the profound and universal plot of Wall Street to make perpetual the national debt, to keep that debt the bottom fact in the banking system of the United States, and to bull the unit of money and account until it shall be worth four times as much, or perhaps ten times as much, as it was when the bulk of the debt was contracted. ”

“ If all people were out of debt, falling prices might not work so great injustice. But when a vast majority of the people are in debt, and heavily in debt, and when a man talks of the blessings that fall from falling prices, the conviction is forced upon us that the killer of fools in his annual round has missed one conspicuous example. The trouble is, our dollar of debt, instead of decreasing, has more than doubled in its power as compared with labor and the products of labor. ”

“ They know that they exist by sufferance—by sufferance of a mightier than themselves. In proportion as they know themselves to be aggressors and spoliators their anxiety increases. Every abusive power in the world is thus driven to adopt schemes and devices—some dangerous and some merely ludicrous—to keep a footing at that silent bar of opinion before which all wrong must, sooner or later, quail and slink away.
The great concern called Wall Street is such an organized power in society. It exists as a fact in our American system, and would fain conciliate the favor of the public. ”

“ It is now ready to offer inducements to our fourteen millions of voters to sell themselves into another twenty-year cycle of bondage. If they will only be gentle and not interrupt us; if they will give us a true death-grip on themselves, on all they possess, and all they ever hope to possess, we will lend back to them a part of the very money which we have sucked up from their wheat fields and pastures, from their barns and potato patches, from their humble stores and markets, from their mills and their mines, and we will thus expedite them on the way to serfdom. ”

“ As much charity as you choose, but no justice. ‘Nay,’ you will say, ‘charity is greater than justice.’ Yes, it is greater; it is the summit of justice; it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you can’t have the top without the bottom; you cannot build upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all you have got to begin with begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself. ”

“ It is not an unworthy thing that an American professor, at the seat of an American university, turning his energies to this great task, has succeeded in making a well-nigh final record of the life and work of that unequalled organizer, that sublime dissembler, that cruel reformer, that heartless philanthropist, who, for half a lifetime, converted old Europe into a mire of murder and desolation, for the ultimate good of man. ”

“ No other power in human society to so great a degree and in so subtle a manner exploits its own virtues. Taking advantage of the well-known carelessness of American readers, and knowing full well how easily they are duped—how easily they are cozened out of their senses and led into false beliefs with mere plausibilities and sophisms—this imperial and far-reaching Wall Street, this elephantine fox of the world, takes possession of American journalism—owns it, controls it. ”

“ There are always two factions in the stock market: the bulls, who want stocks to rise in price in order that they may sell out; and the bears, who want stocks to fall in price so that they can buy in. Contrary to the superficial belief of the public, the bulls are sellers and the bears are buyers. But in order to sell a commodity you must buy or borrow it; and in order to buy at a future date you must sell at a previous date; and thus the bull buys for the purpose of selling at a profit, and the bear sells something which he doesn’t own for the purpose of buying it at a lower price. ”

“ I, therefore, conclude that money, and money only, acts on the general level of prices, and that credit does not and cannot act on prices except only as it may increase the rapidity of the circulation of money; and even then it is the greater efficiency of the money, and not the credit, that stimulates prices. Credit may temporarily stimulate the price of the product of some particular industry, but to do this it must attract money from some other industry, and the stimulation will be at the expense of a corresponding depression in prices in the industry from which the money is attracted. ”

“ With the mere mention of national prosperity Wall Street raises a shout of sympathetic enthusiasm which reverberates from Passamaquoddy to San Diego, and from the Florida everglades to the snow-capped shoulders of Shasta!
Let me, however, explain to Mr. Clews one thing, and that is that the blessed condition of universal society in which Wall Street, having absorbed Lombard and Threadneedle, shall be supreme over the nations will occur only when our free American institutions shall be crushed into fragments and when civil liberty shall lie bleeding among the ruins. ”

“ Measured by this test of creative power and its persistency, how variable is the duration of human life! Sometimes the creative power appears in early youth; but when that happens there is generally an early surcease. Sometimes the power comes late and remains long. Sometimes it flashes forth in the early morning and remains in the after twilight. Estimated by years this productive power (which goes by the name of genius) sometimes reaches only to a few score moons. ”

“ They are, however, merely spots on the sun, which do not appear frequently enough to seriously dim the splendor of a critical work which in my judgment surpasses in real value that of any English scholar of the century. “Modern Painters,” “The Stones of Venice,” “The Seven Lamps,” and his other works dealing with art are far more than criticisms; they touch the sleeping soul, they fire the spirit and awaken the conscience. They make the reader feel a new love for nature and art alike, and with this pure and inspiring love comes the desire for more knowledge. ”

“ Trailing clouds of glory accompany me across and into the barriers of time and sense, and when the sharp contrast is over—which the guide ever prevents from being too sudden—I realize the great sweetness of the gardens of paradise by the fragrance that is filling the earthly dwelling, and I know that being aware of the visitations of angels, and of somewhat of the light which is theirs, does not hinder, but helps human endeavor and accomplishment. ”

“ It was not easy for a venerable European nation, intrenched within its own regal institutions, in shaking off the past to begin a future of popular sovereignty. Much was gained by sweeping away the worst abuses of the past, but reaction came, succeeded, after a long lapse of time, by a second attempt to establish a republic, again to fail, until the collapse of the power of the adventurer whose election to the presidency was the beginning of the end of the republic of 1848, led to the third experiment, the permanent success of which we all hope for. ”

“ Indeed, just here we find the chief reason why the finest natures suffer so keenly in this age of heartless greed, self-absorption, and gold madness, of wanton extravagance and biting poverty, of widespread misery and growing discontent. Sensitive natures who are spiritually alive to the misery around them must suffer while they sow the seed-thoughts of a new day—suffer uncomplainingly until the waiting-time of this great transition period has passed. ”

“ The only function of gold and silver in a monetary system is to limit the volume of the money, either by their scarcity when freely coined, or by the laws limiting their coinage. And as this limitation of the supply bears no definite relation to the demand for money, the value of the money necessarily fluctuates. Our industrial system is constantly growing more sensitive to even slight changes in money value, owing to the greater diversification of industries and the greater division of labor, and the need for preventing such changes is constantly growing more imperative. ”

“ Now as it continually takes more products to get a given quantity of gold, is it not clear that the producer who becomes liable for taxes and gets into debt must constantly bear an increasing burden of taxation, and that his debt, payable in more commodities than it represented when he incurred it, needs only to run long enough to grow beyond the hope of his ability to pay it? Such a policy cannot but be fraught with certain ruin to producers. It is causing in the United States a condition frightful to contemplate. ”

“ The realm of philosophy, traced to its primal sources, reveals the truths concerning universal knowledge, often perceived by the great teachers, but dimly stated by minds enshrouded by the environments of earth.
The realm of religion,—the ineffable meaning of the All-Love and Wisdom; the nearness, the perfectness, the absoluteness of the Divine; the kinship of souls, the fraternity of spirits,—never in all this realm was there a thought, or teaching of thought, separate from a conscious individual entity. ”

“ Social evolution is therefore the evolution of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and personality, on the other. Without freedom and security there can be no free will and moral character. Without exalted personality there can be no enduring freedom. The educational environment, therefore, which develops personality must itself develop with freedom. The ruling ideas of justice, integrity, morality, must move in advance, else the personality of individuals will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent, therefore, can education modify the individual? ”

“ Because business men are men who do business, or at any rate who want to do business; and all legitimate business consists in the performance of some appropriate function in connection with the production or the exchange of commodities. It is apparent to even the dullest apprehension that whatever prevents or discourages production is destructive of business, and that a money system which provides a measuring unit that constantly demands, as an equivalent, an increasing quantity of everything produced, is the greatest burden on production that could possibly be devised. ”