To think of carrying such a load and remain free is madness.

We are contending that the country is already crushed with debt; that
she is saddled with such a tremendous load, that, like the mortgaged
farm, improvement and progress is utterly out of the question. We have
the resources for any and every improvement that the country needs, but
they are wasted and squandered paying interest to foreign capitalists,
and supporting our mushroom growth of millionaire parasites, who are the
cause of our poverty of capital, and the foreigners' ability to lend us
money.

Do away with interest paying and the millionaire, and the required roads
could be commenced at once, and as for the Nicaragua canal, we would
make as light of it as does the farmer in hoeing a hill of beans.



XII.

The silver interest asserts that we will never stop our headlong rush to
the devil if we do not get free coinage of silver. Silver, like pork or
potatoes, is something for sale, and its owners have given up their
whole attention to finding it a market. Whoever heard of J. P. Jones
interesting himself in anything except silver. Never in all of his
twenty years of public life did he show that he was anything more than
"a man from one of the Silver States." Ever and always whenever he fills
the air with his noise, you have only to look and there you will find
him still knocking at the public treasury for a customer that already
has had enough of him.