The Wichita City Eagle

For the Eagle.

Another Financial Bubble Pricked.

W. C. Woodman Answers the Threat of Eastern Capitalists that they Will Loan no More Money to the West.

Hon. M. M. Murdock:

My Dear Sir:-Having received by post from Philadelphia friends the inclosed publication from the Philadelphia Public Ledger of January 4, 1878, which paper is edited by Geo. W. Childs, an English millionaire, backed by large foreign capitalists, and reads thus:

The instances of wholesome discipline for the western silver maniacs continue. The Controller of the city of Chicago is sadly in need of a loan to meet interest and other obligations of that city maturing January 1, but thus far has been unable to get it, although as high as 7 per cent. was offered. Application was made to the United States Trust Company in New York for $200,000 for Chicago, but declined unless the bonds were issued on a gold basis. Application was then made to the American Exchange Bank in New York and declined for similar reasons. Another western city has been endeavoring to get $1,500,000 in New York, but it was declined by the bank that has been its fiscal agent for many years, unless the promise was made to pay in gold. Cleveland has also unsuccessfully asked for a loan with similar refusals. The New York, Boston and Philadelphia banks are believed to have generally adopted the rule of only making future western loans on a gold basis. In Philadelphia no loans are being made on western real estate, that not being legitimate banking. Bank and trust company officers generally express themselves as desirous of teaching the West a lesson in this matter, as the financial morals of that section do not commend their securities in this part of the country, and a very good way to fight western silver-paying debtors is to cut off their supplies.-Philadelphia Public Ledger.

Now this sensational assertion rises so far above a menace as to become a threat, and justifies in our mind an affirmative western reply.

The people of the West hold sacred and inviolable every national contract, and do loyal homage to the currency of the Government they so eminently shared in saving. We reply to New York and the satellite Ledger.

Why are these moneys of New York offered to the West? We answer, because you of the East by a triumph of sharp practice, to a great extent have run into classes. Your patricians are bandits, and your poor plebeians are slaves. The first hold with iron grasp your colossal millions of gold, whilst the second are bonded and re-bonded, mortgaged and re-mortgaged, hypothecated and re-hypothecated to the extent of every marginal security on which to place a remunerative loan.

Hence this surplus capital has sought the West: the broad bosom of the Mississippi valley has been thrown open to it, and it has entered, (shall we say as a viper, which being therein warmed into vigorous life, comes thus with grinning fangs of menace to frown her into contrite submission to such despotism. Will they arrogate all the gold and all the brains too? If the West knows not the East she knows herself, and that is the high degree in wisdom.

New York will teach the West a lesson.

Not loan Chicago your money? Not many months ago you smothered her with supplications to borrow. Not loan that city of less than half a century of life: that already thrice-built wonder and admiration of the world, at whose door your supplicating commercial vassals have ever camped: that young phoenix whose energy has contributed more than any other people or city of the globe to build your palaces of splendor and your tabernacles of gold. Would you thus publicly insult and menace her character and credit in the face of the world, that you may consecrate your unhallowed designs in the shivering want of an oppressed but energetic people? Designs conceived in corruption, that you would born in villainy, and rear in legislative seduction, that you may make gold and destroy silver. And for what purpose do you do this?

Please give the world an honest, intelligent reason why you want specie payment when you ask it with one hand and destroy it with the other.

When you strike Chicago you strike the heart of the mighty west, the Jove of the Mississippi Valley, whose pulsations throb to the mountain tops, to the frozen north and the jetties' mouth a world responds to your challenge "that would teach the West a lesson."

In the arrogance of patrician wealth do you assume to owe the West nothing? Who purchases your iron, your coal, your oil, your glass, your cotton and woolen fabrics, your boots, your shoes, your hats, and the many things that are yours? Who pours into your sea ports the millions of tonnage that freights your ships with cargoes, that brings back to you millions of foreign gold? Who dig from the bowels of their mountains and sends you greeting millions of their untold silver and gold? Who buy most liberally of your foreign imports from which springs the coin revenue that pays the principal and interest of our nation's debt? Where do your largest commercial houses flee for refuge from the squalid misery your unhallowed financial policies have entailed upon your plebeian people? It is to the mighty West and you know it.

Nor is this all. When the nation's life was in peril, who gave you a Lincoln as a redeemer? Who, when your boys were rotting in the swamps of the Chickahominy, and your pet General was swapping nosegays with fair women in Washington, demanding more victims for his inglorious field of death, gave you a U. S. Grant to lead your vanquished army to victory? Who commanded the fall of Atlanta? Who led the bold march to the sea? Who drove Johnston to surrender and Lee to evacuation? It was the brain, and the arm, and the courage of the mighty West that taught you these lessons. The men to whom you say to-day, "Bank and trust company officers generally express themselves as desirous of teaching the West a lesson in this matter, as the financial morals of that section do not commend their securities in this part of the country, and a very good way to fight western silver-paying debtors is cut off their supplies."

Yes, that's the way Wall street fought, behind her bags of gold and silver at $2.90, whilst you were burying your army ingloriously on the Chickahominy, and where, if you could have kept gold (at $2.90), and could have found the victims, you would have kept them yet. Swapping New York Worlds and Philadelphia Ledgers with the enemy, but for a man from the West who set your noble boys on their feet, bid them "on to Richmond,"
and said to Wall street, "We'll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

This West demands honest, honorable payment of every anything of the debt, as contracted and written in the bond, and they also demand all the fair and honest facilities with which God and nature have endowed them to honestly accomplish this purpose and they expect to have it too.

When you thus presume to threaten the West, don't forget to remember that we have an Eads, jetties, a Mississippi river, and a Pacific coast, and an internal maritime harbor for twenty-feet draft vessels preparing, of 1,500 miles into the very heart of this great world of commonwealths, which offers to us, free as your wind-beaten coast does to you, every crystal wave of the broad Atlantic, and says to us, without you desire you need not wipe your feet on the threshold of an Atlantic State. Hence our noble statesmen will not quail, intimidated by your threats, in as much as they generally descend from sires whose genealogy traces back to that colonial age which fought an arrogant foreign domination for 163 years to an independence, and since then ever an audacious presumption of British diplomacy and English gold. And we believe we speak for the American masses, certainly of the mighty West, that if this gold bandit autocracy shall, by their designing oppression of the masses, emulate a popular confusion, the swords that fought the rebellion on either side, would rust in their scabbards whilst the wrongs of the multitude were asserting their equitable rights. If you force it, we that have built your fortunes can despise your gold.

Your humble servant,

W. C. Woodman.