THE STATE’S VOICE
0. j. PETERSON, Editor and Publisher
Published Twice-a-Month at Dunn, N. ('.
FOR STATE-WIDE circulation
SUBSCRIPTION PRICE: $1 a Tear; 3 Years 5^5
Entered at the Postoffice at Dunn, North Carolina,
as Second-Class Matter.__
Attention, Subscribers, Please.
Look at your label for date of expiration of
subscription, and if you find yourself in ar
rears please send renewal or communicate with
us if only by postal card.
.Occasionally one of the best of men has di
rected the, paper sent to him with the assurance
tliat he would hand in th£' subscription price
when he saw a representative sometime or
woulrt mail it. That was exactly the case of ,
Marshal W. T. Dowd. Turn to the personal
paragraphs and see what he says about it. But j
Mr. Dowd remembered well that he had given
the order. Some may have forgotten. On the
other hand, we may have made errors in some
subscription accounts.
This is the first time the dates have been car
ried"'on the labels.. We haven’t particularly
needed them so long as a representative of the
paper was visiting the towns close upon the
heels of the expiration s dates of the group in
each town. But some would always be absent;
if the visit was late and a bunch of new sub
scribers was added, it made_another expiration
date for the town.
It has been found cheaper and more conven
ient^ in case of a semi-monthly paper, to type
write the lists for mailing than to have them
set in type with thq considerable work attend
ing keeping tjie list in metal revised. But ad
ding the da);es makes it a different proposition,
and only occasionally will the dates be written,
attention each time being called to the fact.
In the issue of April 1 was explained the
situation in which the limitation of the editor s
activities by the coq^iticn of his health, con
firmed by the order of*the physician, had left
him. Your prompt compliance with this re
quest will help us very much in adapting the
subscription work to the new conditions. We
would like to clear tlie list of all those who
really do not care to renew, and thus be in a
situation in which whatever personal work is
done on the fields may be done in securing
i new subscriptions in areas which have not yet
been entered by a representative of the paper.
There are propably hundreds' of subscribers
' who will find insufficient interest in a paper of
The Voice's type to renew by mail, and those
would be a burden to the paper in the long run.
Yet very few fail to respond to a personal
solicitation for a renewal and only three have
taken the suggestion of the article in the last
issue and reported that their names should be
dropped.
I can hardly accredit that meager response
1 as the expression of the true situation. The
| Voice is either much appreciated generally or
not at all. I can expect no help from the lat
ter group in getting the sheep divided from
the goats, or vice versa,. Some of the disinter
ested will no more see this notice than they
would find a thousand-dollar bill covering the
Sermon on the Mount in their Bible. To get
clear of that group while retaining all of the
desirable type is my problem—and it arises
when i. must work and think less than at any
other time in many years.
Please see the label and promptly communi
cate with us.. It is not so important that you
send' the renewal now (though that is impor
tant) as it is that we be aided in saving a de
pendable subscription list without deadwood.
Excuse us for taking up this space on shop
business, but a one-man paper and the man are
in a different condition when the staff has a
sick man on it than is the paper with scores
on its staff.
Respectfully,
O. J. PETERSON.
The Omitted Number of April 15
As stated in fhe tardy issue of The State’s
Voice for April 1, the scheduled issue for April
15 was omitted because of the illness of the edi
tor. It was fortunate that the statement was
made, as the attempt to get out the issue of April
1 completely consumed the strength of the editor,
who had not fully realibed his weakness. For
eight days he lay and rested. By taking it grad
ually, the copy for this issue has been prepared
ABOUT CARET GARRETT’S “PIECES OF MONEY”
In the Personal Paragraphs appearing on
other pages of this paper the reader will find
noted a request of Rev. Jonas Barclay s for the
editor’s “re-action” to “Pieces of Money” by
Garett Garrett in the Saturday Evening Post ot
ApIt happens that I published, in The State’s
Voice of November 15, 1933, an answer to an
article by the same gentleman in the Post
of November 4, 1933, on “Inflation.’ That
article remains yet a fair answer to Mr. Garrett s
later article—so much so indeed that I am tempt
ed to republish it. Yet that decision of the Su
preme Court in which were confirmed the de
valuation of the dollar in terms of gold and the
refusal of the Government to allow any group to
dictate permanently the kind of money it should
iSSUe_even to pay the impossible, or at least in
judicious, pledges made by its former unwise
agents—was not discussed in the 1933 articles.
Therefore, the article mentioned is not a complete
answer to the most recent Garrett disquisition.
However, I am sending Mr. Barclay a copy of
the 1933 paper that he may refresh his memory
if he happened to read the article on its publica
lion.
The Letter of the Contract.
As far as the letter of the contract is con
cerned, Mr. Garrett is justified in crying 'fraud.'
Yet it is not assumable upon any.,reasonable
grounds that a government of to-day mil# suffer
itself to be bound to a ruinous course by tracts
of earlier agents. The right of revolution -any
degree is inherent in the people of any govern
ment. Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, was
fully justified in nullifying the letter of; the con
tract for the pound of flesh next to the fieart by
making the accomplishment of the devilish pur
pose impossible. Government agents, had been as
reckless with the pledge of the government as
Antonio was with his pledge to the fiendish Shy
lock, The latter might readily have had the just
return for his loan, yet a decent soul can but
echo the gleeful mockery of “A Daniel come to
judgment” when he reache? the climax of the
drama. • *5
The bond holders have, it is true, the letter of
a ruinous contract upon their side, but a Daniel
more concerned with the safety of the nation
than with the collection of the ghastly forfeits de
manded by a group as reckless of the people’s
safety as was the vengeful Jew of his supposed
victim’s, happily arrived for judgment and has
replaced the letter of an impossible, an uttely in
Did John Rob Baggett Chuckle?
One can imagine that John Rob Baggett, if in
terested enough in mundane affairs to peep down
from the battlements of heaven upon the proce
dure of the senate some days ago, could but
chuckle at seeing Senator W. P. Horton and
Senator Rivers Johnson voting together for the
sales tax—and Senator Horton out-doing the
Duplin senator by voting against the Weathers
amendment to except five basic foods.
As the need for such a tax is less now, when
uie oia a a valorem cow is coming [jacK 10 hui
milk, it should be gratifying to ail John Rob’s
friends to .see the Chatham senator joining the
chorus of the former Harnett senator’s bull
frogs, which, according to John Rob in that fa
mous fight of 1931, persistently bellowed “sales
tax.” Certainly, it is gratifying tc know that
Mr. Horton has at last agreed with, or even gone
beyond, this writer’s contention of 1931—for
then, and certainly; ?iow, the writer did and does
not desire to see the people’s bread and meat
taxed, d should have preferred a five percent
sales tax' on articles other than basic foods in or
der to avoid placing a five percent tax upon meat,
bread, and lard bought in quantities priced at less
than a dollar—for that is about what the average
tax is on small quantities. Yet we accept Mr.
Horton’s support of the sales tax under condi
tions less compelling a resort to it than those of
1931 as ample acknowledgement on his part that
our judgment was good in those dire days when
scarcely a. home or a farm could meet its tax bill
and when tens of thousands were getting good
salaries or wages who have barely eked out a liv
ing during the period of the sales tax levy.
There is no criticism of Senator Horton’s
change of front—on the other hand it is always
gratifying to see a conversion. Yet some new
converts can be very extreme. Never heless, here
is our hand of fellowship, Senator W. P.
on time, and it is hoped that it will not be neces
sary to omit any other issue. But the task this
issue would have been much more difficult if it
had not been for the several contributions, which
you should find of real interest.
equitable, contract with iair and just, also read
ily fulfilled, terms. This nation needs feel no
compunction over the substitution of terms
Sanity was only denying the responsibility for ^
act of a former insanity, yet denying no one a
just quid-pro-quo instead of his fiendishly de
manded pound of flesh.
The brilliance of the Roosevelt strategy will be
one of the-glories of his administration among
generation's who shall at last have solved the
problem of money.
The Garrett Fallacies.
It- being granted that there can be no fraud ac
complished so long as adequate quid-pro-quo’s are
rendered all creditors, even if they be denied the
pounds of flesh specified in the letter of the con
tract, it remains only to point out the fallacies in
the Garrett diatribe.
First, Garrett and his ilk lalsely assume that
gold is an invariable measure of value. It can
not be, since the value of any commodity varies
with its demand-.- Yet the demand for gold, un
like that of any other commodity, is 90 percent
an artificial demand, produced and producible
by its monetization, since the demand for money ,
is a most variable one* growing constantly with '
the increase of population, of production of all
exchangeable commodities, of the standard of liv
ing, involving increased wages and higher prices,.
more numerous purchases, etc., etc.
With no adequate steady increase in the gold
supply, the tendency would be for gold to in
crease in value relatively with the factors men
tioned above. But there is another artificial fac
tor that depresses or raises the value of gold ac
cording to circumstances. I refer to the inven
tion of the currency scheme which results in a
hundred-fold multiplicity of mortgages upon the
available monetary gold, which currency hazard
ously assumes to represent the value of the gold
itself in exchange relations, and not only does the
currency do so but the dozen-fold greater volume
of “credit money/' bonds, etc., all of which in a
gold-standard country are theoretically exchange
able for gold and actually so to a limited extent.
. The Status of Business) Affects Value.
. The effect of the multiplicity of mortgages,
theoretically of the value of gold, varies not
merely with their number or face value but with
the quantity of “credit money” based upon them.
During 1918 and 1919, something like 20 bil
lions of European vouchers came into this coun
try and became the basis for several times their
face value in credit money during the period of
Ivild-cat speculation. • Theoretically every dollar
»f bankable securities was of equal value with
the gold dollars in the government vaults.—Yes,
those unpaid French and English billions.—The
consequence of this enormous inflation, terribly
emphasized by the speed of exchange, was a rise
in wages, prices, etc., that deflated the value of
the gold itself so long as it was supposedly of the
same value as the currency or multiplied mor;
gages upon it.
±ne real value oi goia ax tnax xime was ns
placement value, as it always is with gold or any
other commodity or object, provided replacement
is desirable at all, as it is not in the case of many
burned houses. In 1919,1 am confident, it would
have taken three dollars, and gold dollars at that,
to pay a miner for producing the amount of golu.
contained in a dollar. The gold dollar had fic
titiously assumed, under the redemption feature
of the currency, the actual value of an amount of
gold by monetary standards worth only, say,. 3a
or 40 cents: Then was the time for monopolists
to drain the reserve, as did money lenders in
Cleveland’s day. But it was already under theii
control.
In 1933 there was no considerable volume of
“credit money” and the speed of circulation of
the currency had become a snail’s pace. Mind voa,
the purchasing value of money is in reverse ratio
to its quantity and its speed of circulation. And
both the quantity, counting “credit money,” and
the speed of circulation had been so diminished
by 1933 that a dollar in currency would mine fine
weight of gold in a dollar even in the abandoned
mines of Randolph county and from the rubbish
heaps of the once prolific California mines. An
that dollar in currency would buy a wheelbarrow
load of commodities, against an overcoat.pocket
ful in 1919, or 1926.
Those whose observation is alert and memory
good can but consent that the gold dollar wnicli
might have been secured for any dollar of cut
rency in 1919 or 1932 underwent during those M
years'at least a six-fold increase in value, as
measured in wages or in the prices of commodi
ties in general. Yet Mr. Garrett is crym&
“fraud,” because the dollar has ,been reduced hj
terms of gold by 41 percent, though it will stM
(Continued on Page Five)