Financial Relief by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 8, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 26.

Financial Relief

By Editor

THE President, in a terse, clear message which he read himself, urges Congress to early action at this session on currency reform. He says:

"Do we not know how to act upon it? "If a man can not make his assets available at pleasure, his assets of capacity and character and of resource, what satisfaction is it to him to see opportunity beckoning to him on every hand, when others have the keys of credit in their pockets and treat them as all but their own private possession? "It is perfectly clear that it is our duty to supply the new banking and currency system the country needs, and that it will immediately need it more than ever." "We must have a currency, not rigid as now, but readily, elastically responsive to sound credit, the expanding and contracting credits of every-day transactions, the normal ebb and flow of personal and corporate dealings. "Our banking laws must mobilize reserves; must not permit the concentration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary resources of the country

or their use for speculative purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruitful uses. "And the control of the system of banking and of issue which our new laws are to set up must be public, not private, must be vested in the government itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative."