The Financial Question.
By Editor
On page 15 of this issue will be found an advertisement headed "Wanted." It calls attention to a treatise entitled "Money Monopoly," by F. E. Belden. Advance sheets have been sent us by the author and compiler, of that portion relating to the "Bond and the Dollar," by Professor Ridpath, which sets before the reader in clear, incisive, vigorous English just how the bonded debt of the United States began, and, in the writer's mind, just what has come of it. Here is a striking sentence: "The 'rights of man,' so much in vogue in the great epoch of regeneration at the close of the eighteenth century, are, at the close of the nineteenth, positively under the ban in every civilized state of the world." We are sure that the pamphlet will be interesting reading, not only to those who are interested in finance from the view point of politics, but to those who have an interest in watching the signs of the times. The things for which the lover and champion of liberty has ever striven are the rights of men, the protection of mankind. That was the cry of the latter half of the last century. The same language is now used by the latter-day "national reformers," only the term "institutions" has been substituted for that of "men." Laws are demanded to protect the "American Sabbath," and nobody knows what all. Laws for the equal protection and defense of humanity without regard to race or creed, always mean liberty and progress. Laws for the protection of institutions or days are, at the best, opening wedges of tyranny and oppression.