Note Return to text — THE AUSTRIAN POSTAL BANKING SYSTEM.

Then there is the moral aspect of the case, so well expressed in an essay[22] by one of the soundest philosophical and political thinkers whom America has known, the late David Atwood Wasson. Said he: "At present the government permits itself to become indirectly,—or, if we speak of the State governments, worse, sometimes, than indirectly,—confederate with those who amass fortunes by making credit precarious, and forcing the hazards of the gaming-table into all the legitimate operations of business. The comptroller of the currency has publicly said that about one half, on an average, of the means of the national banks, in one chief city—institutions, observe, created by government, and charged, in effect, with one of its most distinctive functions, that of supplying a medium of exchange—are loaned to speculators; that is, to men who subsist largely on artificial disturbances of credit, upon corners in the stock market and money market, upon alternations of inflation and stringency, the ups and downs of a disordered constitution. Without going into the matter closely, which is aside from my present purpose, I leave before the reader the main facts of the case: that the system of credit centred in the modern banking system plays a vast and increasing role in our civilization; that while of a utility not easily overstated, it affords peculiar opportunities of fraud and exaction; that aside from these, its unregulated condition is dangerous, resulting in alternations of inflation and depression, like the alternate extremes of fever and ague; that vast and growing combinations exist for producing artificially this disorder; that those institutions which credit has created under the express sanction of government, at once to supply its necessities and hold it healthily in check, are managed only as private property; that much oppression, alike of labor and capital, and also, I fear, much demoralization—which is an interior and worse oppression—are suffered in consequence; and that hitherto our statesmanship wants the studious leisure, and our method of government the stability and precision of operation, which these exigencies demand."