THE SECRET EMPIRE.
"THE EMPIRE OF DEBT."
The whole world is in debt. National loans (like great monster millstones) are tied around the necks of all nations. The annual interest payments upon these vast international obligations is colossal. The tributes wrung by military conquerors from subjugated provinces in ancient or modern times is as nothing to it.
There is not less than 500,000,000 toiling men on this earth whose daily grind is garnisheed (as it were) by international usurers.
Two-thirds of taxation and tariffs goes directly into the vaults of the moneylender. All property is taxed until it is (in many places) practically confiscated, all lands and mines and ships are taxed. Everything we eat and wear and drink is taxed. Taxation is in fact the systematic ravaging of all the earth.
The very best of governments, (like those of Australia) are little more than tax collecting bureaus. Modern kings and kaisers and statesmen, are no longer the leaders and representatives of nations and peoples, but rather subservient agents of International Pawnbrokers.
Behind every taxgatherer stands the hidden forces of the great money power—the owners of the debt. They have the world in pawn.
Hence the International Usurers are the actual conquerors of all mankind. They are the rulers of the earth because they are its owners.
Thus the black terror leaps upon us, it has us by the throat. And year by year its exactions become more merciless. It is the great all devouring Dragon of Mythology brooding upon its hoards of stolen gold; and feasting, not in metaphor, but In actual fact upon the bodies and bones of obsequious and terrified population.