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The Empty Treasury

The Empty Treasury image
Parent Issue
Day
9
Month
June
Year
1891
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

Czar Reed is in Europe, wandering from the Coliseum to the Are de Triomphe, from St. Paul's to Scho'enbrunn; McKinley is scheming to make himself Governor of Ohio; Cannon is lost somewhere in Illinois; Rowell has disappeared from memory; Lodge is hidden away in Massachusetts, but the Billion Dollar Congress whicli they helped so much to créate is still a tangible reality, and its full effects are just beginning to be feit. The Secretary of the Treasury is at his wits' ends for means to pay the bilis of the Government as they fall due. Some months ago when the Democrats asserted tha,t the annual expenditures of the Government, under the provisions of the Billion Dollar Congress, would exceed its revenue the statement was stigmatized as that of partisans, but the event has justified the Democratie charge. With $53,000,000 of of 4 1 2 per cent. [bonds, and the quarterly pension payments speedily falling due the Government finds itself destitute of the needed funds to pay them, and there is no possibility of obtaining such a sum. The Secretary of the Treasury is forced to declare that the nation is bankrupt and is reduced to the expedient of extendingthe bonds. The United States is taken out of the list of solvent nations and placed on the footing of Russia or Italy or Spain. Not before in many years has the United States been unable to make its payments, when the proper time arrived. Too little attention has been paid to the financial condition ofjjj the Government. It is natural that the expenses of a nation should grow as its population and wealth increase, for in those cases the requirements become larger, but it is contrary to reason and common sense that the annual expenditures should be augmented forty or fifty or sixty per cent, by a single Congress. Such action cannot be excused upon the plea of enterprise and efforts to advance the commercial interests of the nation, for these matters are best attended to by private individuals. But in this case the pension list more than any other one thing is responsible for the increase, and in order to dish out contributions to the large army of sufferers and alf leged sufferers in the war, largely the latter, the Treasury has become bare and bankrupt. The chief question with the Secretary of the Treasury will speedily become how to get money, not how to take care of it. Under Republican administration the surplus has disappeared with a celerity that confounds those who but a while ago were talking of the best manner of its