Image provided by: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, NE
About The Conservative (Nebraska City, Neb.) 1898-1902 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 28, 1899)
f Che Conservative. If' If'M * VOL. II. NEBRASKA CITY , NEB. , THURSDAY , SEPTEMBER 28 , 1899. NO. 12. . } ( 1V. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. OFFICES : OVERLAND THEATRE BLOCK. , T. STERLING MORTON , EDITOU. A JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE DISCUSSION OF POLITICAL , ECONOMIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL QUESTIONS. CIRCULATION THIS WEEK 6,680 COPIES. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. One dollar and a half per year , in advance , postpaid , to any part of the United States or Canada. Remittances made payable to The Morton Printing Company. Address , TUB CONSERVATIVE , Nebraska City , Neb. Advertising Rates made known upon appli cation. Entered at the postoflice at Nebraska City , Neb. , as Second Class matter , July 20th , 1808. The is A PKOPIIETIC joined LETTISH , from a letter writ ten November 8th , 1896 , by a very practical and highly esteemed friend of THE CONSERVATIVE and is reproduced because it has been largely verified by events. November 8 , 1896. MY DEAR MORTON : | j " Economists and statesmen are fond of calling gold a commodity and looking , , , for higher prices J i Gold. . with the increase of metallic money ; but to niy mind the oppo site is the fact. We cannot eat gold or dress our children with it. It remains what it is , the most persistent beggar for investment. It can only draw interest , is only a tool. It buys laud nnd pays labor in the farthest corners of the earth. It opens up the primeval forests and the bowels of the earth , builds new machin ery and pays for new inventions in- creasps production of everything ( except children ) and cheapens every produo tiou , food , comfort or luxury ( except man ) . In the desert of Sahara you might give a bag of gold for a dish of ham and eggs , but in the garden of Paradise they I would pave the streets with it. Your friend P. D. might serve for illustration of how gold and its func tions cheapen commodities. Who has , more than he , raised the value of the hog and cheapened the rasher of bacon at'the same time ? I could wish for a fairy to strike him 80 years younger , with a fancy for putting a bakery along side each of his pork and beef shops. Don't you think he could .pay more for wheat in the sheaf and sell bread at least at the London price , besides paying good wages to bakers , who occasionally fail in business on their own hook ( un less they were more useful for "shoe makers , " as Noisy Morris would say ) . It is only when you haven't the right stuff to put up that you pay 100 per cenc per annum So the Cheapening . , . . 011 th ° St ° ck eX' Goes On. change. The gold was not swallowed up. It is only while there is too little gold in that particular ly remote locality that Jews and Chris tians got three per cent per month from cattle farmers , who would tax banks to death 1 Silver could advance values temporarily arily by arresting ; progress aiid increas ing the cost of production. But the same would happen teLroorarily if the anarchists should kill P..JJ. , Vanderbilt , Rockefeller , Havemeye : : and others. Under less production values of com modities would rise aud the value of labor decline. Then like the French revolution had to kill Robespierre when things went too far , our anarchists would hang Altgeld and Herr Most with a few senators in the same tree because children were crying for food. I don't know why I write all this , but it is possibly because I am started on this mental process through reading some of the late election rot about bimetallism and Bryan's promise to con tinue the struggle. This silver idiocy is a sad responsibility of the republican leaders themselves and perhaps it is the best thing that could happen , that they have to cure the mental disease aud thus convince themselves of their error. They have duped others , as they were duped themselves. Sherman should know pretty well if it , had been possible to convert all our bonds into four per cents if wo had nor , previously dropped the silver dollar , aud the great bankers of Europe , who in those days talked owlishly about bi metallism , knew a thiug or two when they contracted these loans in gold at the same time as they tried their -best to get a fair price for the silver which the great banks of Germany aud France were loaded down with. When the dear public could take no more silver , the United States might , bo educated up to paying a good price for it , and did bite the hook to the tunegf live hundred millions. Meantime the fading repub lican statesmen got rich and so did the silver senators and the homo and foreign stockholders in the Colorado mines. There is a pertinent - STUMP SPEAKERS. nent proverb among the French people which THE CONSERVATIVE dusts up and burnishes for the instruction of all the stump speakers now swarming in the United States. It is : "A wise man thinks before he speaks. But a fool speaks and then thinks and talks of what ho has boon saying. " The world i s SMITHS. pretty well pep pered with Smiths in trade. There are goldsmiths , silversmiths , locksmiths , blacksmiths and John Smiths without number. But Nebraska has a word- smith. He is an attorney-general , and to distinguish himself from the black smiths and John Smiths he writes his patronymic Smyth ! This word-smith has recently attacked The Standard Oil Company with words. This Smyth fuses words into great gobs of gush and slings them at trusts with a fervor and z < al similar to that whinh animated David in his duel with Goliah. Smyth should read Isaac Walton who remarks : "Words are men's daughters ; but God's sons are things. " "Words are wise men's counters , but they are the money of fools , " saith Hobbes. Aristotle- his ARISTOTLE ON DEMOCRACY. day and generation - tion was con sidered a marvel in the art of logical thought. Ho was strong in his power of analysis. Ho never compiled a dictionary though he evolved some fair ly accurate definitions Among them THE CONSERVATIVE finds that of "democ racy. " ' / Aristotle says : "Democracy is an aristocracy of orators , sometimes inter rupted by the monarchy of a single orator. " Whether Cockran or Bryan is to "interrupt" and nssume the month monarchy of the United States will not be determined until after a single com bat in phrase hurling has been umpired by a trust conference and an award made to the victor ,