ON PICKET DUTY.
The outcry against middlemen is senseless. As E. H. Heywood puts it, "Middlemen are as important as end men." And they are as truly producers. Distribution is a part of production. Nothing is wholly produced until it is ready for use, and nothing is ready for use until it has reached the place where it is to be used. Whoever brings it to that place is a producer, and as such entitled to charge for his work. The trouble with middlemen is that they charge consumers not only for their work, but for the use of their invested capital. As it is, they are useful members of society. Eliminate usury from their methods, and they will become respectable members also.—Liberty, October 1, 1881.
Those who would have the usurer rewarded for rendering a service always find it convenient to forget that the usurer's victims would not need his service were it not that the laws made at his bidding prevent them from serving themselves.—Liberty, October 15, 1881.
Of the absolute correctness of the principle, and advisability of the policy, of free trade there can be no reasonable doubt; but it must be thorough-going free trade,—no such half-way arrangement as that which the so-called "free traders" would have us adopt. David A. Wells, Professor Perry, and all the economists of the Manchester school are fond of clamoring for "free trade"; but an examination of their position always shows them the most ardent advocates of monopoly in the manufacture of money,—the bitterest opponents of free trade in credit. They agree and insist that it is nothing less than tyranny for the government to clip a large slice out of the foreign product which any one choses to import, but are unable to detect any violation of freedom in the exclusive license given by the government to a conspiracy of note-shaving corporations called national banks, which are enabled by this monopoly to clip anywhere from three to fifteen per cent. out of the credit which the people are compelled to buy of them. Such "free trade" as this is the most palpable sham to any one who really looks into it. It makes gold a privileged product, the king of commodities. And as long as this royal of gold exists, the protectionists who make so much of the theory
