Translated by G. H. A. Meyer and J. Henry Wiggin, from the manuscript of Camille Flammarion. Return to text

Thousands of the women toiling in the cities on starving wages, might be given in the Southern States pleasant employment in fruit culture, and other light agricultural labors. Return to text

A year after this was written, the following advanced sentiment was uttered by Rabbi Schindler: “Have the dead the right of imposing laws upon the living, of making contracts of which future generations ought to bear the burden?” Return to text

It is necessary to illustrate this by a few decisive facts which have not been made familiar to the majority of readers, as farmers’ interests have received very little consideration in the East. The financial policy of the general government ever controlled by capital against labor, has been the most gigantic imposition by financial jugglery that history has recorded, and has been effected chiefly by manipulation and contraction of the currency to make debts more oppressive, and during the war by depreciating the people’s money. After the war when $500,000,000 were needed to compensate the destruction of confederate money, a criminal contraction of $500,000,000 dealt a crushing blow to the South, and to the whole country. Let us look at it from the standpoint of the largest body of laborers, the farmers. A very intelligent Illinois farmer, Bert Stewart, presents the case as follows, and if his data are all correct, he has demonstrated a wholesale robbery: The national debt at the end of the war was about $2,800,000,000. What would it then have cost the farmers to pay this debt? He estimates that it could have been paid by 996,000,000 bushels of wheat; or 1,380,000,000 bushels of corn; or 10,000,000 bales of cotton. But financial legislation has increased the value of money (magnifying the debt), and decreased the value of the products of labor, so that practically, the debt has been increasing faster than it has been paid; and, after paying nearly $2,000,000,000 of the principal, and over $2,000,000,000 of interest, it will cost more to pay the remaining third of the debt than to have paid the whole at first. It would require to-day, instead of 1,380,000,000, over 4,000,000,000 bushels of corn to pay the remaining third. This being the case, it would seem that the payment of about four thousand millions during the last twenty-six years, leaving the debt substantially unpaid, was virtually a robbery of the commonwealth by corrupt or ignorant legislation. Mr. Stewart mentions also, that in one year the binding twine trust, by raising prices, drew $21,000,000 “from the farmers of the West to the sharpers of the East.” The reports of the State Board of Agriculture of Illinois show (what is a fair statement for the whole country) that during the last thirty years the corn crops of Illinois have for more than half the time brought less than the cost of their production; and taking the entire thirty years together, the losses so nearly balanced the profits that the average net profit of the thirty years has not exceeded seventeen cents an acre for each year, in the cultivation of over six millions of acres of corn. In the official report of Iowa also, it is stated “the general range of farm products have sold below cost of production, since 1885.” The official “Farm Statistics of Michigan,” just issued, tell the same sad story. It shows that the wheat crop of 1889 cost more than it sold for, the loss being $1,471,515. The entire loss on wheat, corn, and oats amounted to $9,226,510. Thus is agricultural labor crushed that millionnaires may grow. Hence it is that farmers are sinking under their burdens of mortgage indebtedness, paying seven per cent. or more, losing their farms, and often compelled to mortgage crops, tools, and stock. In the single year, 1887, 35,334 farm mortgages were recorded in Illinois, amounting to $37,040,770, and “nine million mortgaged homes” is the war-cry of the Farmers’ Alliance.

Thus the independent farmer is disappearing, and although there was scarcely a tenant farmer in Illinois in 1840, there are more than 110,000 tenant farmers now; and we have a vast increase of large farms. But while the farmer sinks into poverty, those who handle his products grow rich. The Chicago Stock Yard that was started with a million of capital has grown so prosperously that its stock now amounts to $23,000,000. The monetary interests control all things, and Mr. Stewart forcibly says: “The time has come, gentlemen, when the government must run the railroads, or the railroads will run the government. In Pennsylvania to-day two roads own the State, its legislature, its governor, its courts, its people, own them body and soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them with. You elect men to positions and pay them salaries, and then the railroads buy them and make you pay for bribing your own officers, in the freight rates they charge you. The net income of the railroads of the United States is three times that of the entire revenue of the government.” Return to text

Parker Pillsbury mentions a Governor of Maine, who owns in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and Canada, 691,000 acres. Return to text

As a single specimen of this, I would mention that those eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H. English, of Indiana, under the laws engineered by cunning and accepted by ignorance, invested $200,000 in a national bank scheme when greenbacks had been knocked down to forty cents, and in thirteen years from 1864 to 1877 they made a clear profit of $2,133,000—more than ten for one of their investment. But this is very moderate in comparison with land speculation. The Elyton Land Company at Birmingham, Alabama, with a cash capital of $100,000, has declared in five years, ending in 1888, dividends amounting to $5,570,000, and is believed to own property still that will amount to $5,000,000, a return of more than a hundred dollars for every one invested—a clear profit absorbed of over ten millions—the gift of law to monopoly. Will this ever return to the commonwealth? The robbery of the commonwealth goes on in every direction. Shall we continue the present system under which, while the nation is losing its inheritance daily, one man in Chicago tied up the wheat crop of the United States, and one man also tied up or cornered pork, and both levied millions on the people? Return to text

To save the nation we must reform and stop the production of 60,000 boy tramps and the half million of paupers and criminals which our horrible system has produced, which at the present rate of increase will, in fifty years, be a million and a quarter, and in a hundred years will probably exceed FOUR MILLIONS. I see no measures but those I propose that will save us from this terrible condition. They will not be adopted in time to prevent civil war, but they must be adopted afterwards. Return to text

Succession and income taxes are now beginning to be considered. Two very feeble propositions have been brought forward. The Massachusetts Legislative Committee, on probate, reported a bill well adapted to be worthless—to discourage benevolence and keep property in the family by imposing a tax of five per cent. on property left by will, except when going to relatives or connections. Congressman Hall, of Minnesota, introduced a bill in the last Congress for an income tax, a fourth of one per cent. on incomes between two and three thousand rising gradually to one per cent. on incomes over $10,000. This very small business is not what was demanded by “The Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union” in the Ocala convention, which demanded the abolition of national banks and “the passage of a graduated income tax law.” These demands were reiterated by the last legislature of Missouri, in a resolution calling upon Congress to act upon them, and pledging the legislature to enforce the farmers’ demand as far as in their power. North Carolina, too, has adopted the Alliance principles. The income tax will probably be a growing one—one per cent. will not be its maximum. The British income tax under Mr. Gladstone in 1885 was three and a third per cent. But this is mere child’s play, being about equivalent to a property tax of one seventh of one per cent. When seriously considered, the question will be between five, ten, twenty, and thirty per cent. Return to text

The United Presbyterian in a recent issue says, “It appears that Dr. Briggs does not stand alone in the theological seminaries of the Presbyterian Church as a teacher of dangerous views of inspiration. Four of the professors of Lane Seminary have declared themselves as equally radical.” The Interior says, “The paper of Prof. Smith, of Lane, published in a pamphlet with that of Prof. Evans, goes much beyond anything that has appeared on the subject from Presbyterian authorship in this country.”

At the meeting of the Alumni of the Union Theological Seminary, on the eighteenth of May, the newly elected professor of systematic theology, the brilliant Rev. Henry J. Van Dyke, D. D. (since deceased) made the following bold remark while defending Dr. Briggs: “If we cannot have orthodoxy and liberty, let orthodoxy go and let us have liberty. Liberty has always produced progress.”

In his sermon on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. It smells of roasting flesh.

On the same Sunday the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, of New York, quoted the ringing words given above by Dr. Van Dyke, with his cordial indorsement. He continued to thus severely arraign the Orthodox brethren in the Presbyterian Church:

“This question of inerrancy is not new. Calvin, Luther, and many others did not believe in the Bible’s inerrancy. If this is not according to the confession of faith—I don’t know whether it is or not—we had better square the confession with the truth rather than the truth with the confession. Let those who would prove that there are no mistakes in the Bible produce a cud-chewing coney, and then we will consider the question of inerrancy.

If the Church is to go on in the way that some are trying to persuade us it ought to go, the sooner it gives up the ghost the better, to save the medical expense.” Return to text

Dr. Philip Schaff, than whom there is no abler or more renowned biblical scholar in the New World, has in a recent paper in the New York Herald defended Dr. Briggs. That journal aptly says: In his paper, he defines in the most trenchant language, the apparent inconsistency of the New York Presbytery in practically avowing, eighteen months ago, the same principle for which Dr. Briggs, it declares, must now stand trial. He declares that the American Presbyterian Church has herself materially changed the Westminster Confession of a hundred years ago, and that this spirit of revision pervades the whole Christian world. Finally, he asserts that, as the theory of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is not in the Westminster Confession of Faith, it cannot be demanded from any Presbyterian minister or professor, and warns churchmen that any attempt by the General Assembly to enforce an extra Scriptural and extra Confessional theory upon the Church will create a split worse than that of 1837. The Herald observes that:—

“Dr. Schaff’s international fame as a church historian and theologian will compel the greatest respect from not alone the ministers of the Presbyterian church, but also from the clergy of all Christian churches.

As early as 1845, he was tried for heresy in this country, and acquitted. In 1854, he represented the American German churches at the Ecclesiastical Diet at Frankfort, and received the degree of D. D. from the University at Berlin. In 1870, he accepted the chair of sacred literature in the Union Theological Seminary of this city. He is a member of the Leipsic Historical, the Netherland, and other historical and literary societies in this country and in Europe, and is one of the founders and honorary secretary of the American Branch of the Evangelical Alliance. In 1871, he was one of the Alliance delegates to the Emperor of Russia to plead for the religious liberty of his subjects in the Baltic Provinces.

He was president of the American Bible Revision Committee, which was appointed in 1871 at the request of the English committee, and in 1875 was sent to England to arrange for the co-operation and publication of the Anglo-American edition. The same year he attended officially the conferences of the Old Catholics, Greeks and Protestants at Bonn, to promote Christian unity.

Dr. Schaff was first president of the American Society of Church History, and is the author of a great number of historical and exegetical works, both in English and German, the latter having been translated into English.” Return to text

Since writing the above the Assembly at Detroit has voted against the confirmation of Dr. Briggs by 440 against 59; thus, from a numerical point of view, Dr. Briggs is in the minority. This is by no means surprising, and I regard it greatly to the credit of the Assembly that, while they hold to the severe doctrines popularly known as Calvinism, they repudiate all the great liberal scholars who refuse to believe and teach conceptions of God which were unquestioningly accepted in a former age, but which the enlightenment of the present century shrinks from with unutterable horror. Unless Dr. Briggs proves a dishonest man and recants he must leave Union Theological Seminary, if that institution remains in the Presbyterian fellowship. Return to text