A satiri- cal portrait of
industrial
nations controlled by financial syndicates was the subject of his
L'ile des Pengouins in which Professor Obnubile is amazed to find that prosperous nations do not promote peace.
L'ile des Pengouins in which Professor Obnubile is amazed to find that prosperous nations do not promote peace.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
86 near Rome.
Adopted by Hadrian, he became his succes- sor.
During his moderate reign he cut taxes, decreased the public debt, left a surplus in the treasury [42:4; 46:42], and lowered in- terest rates [78:56].
37. "Trying", he said: The "he" is Thad- deus Coleman Pound, who said this in 1878 [cf. 26 above]. But Pound suggests Antoni? nus had similar policies.
38. Mencius: [87:80]. Tithing every year so that the good years would prepare for the bad years was better than taxing, according to Mencius.
43. Carolus Calvus: Charles the Bald, 823- 877, holy Roman emperor, who died the same year believed to be the year of Eri- gena's death [74: 103].
44. "Captans . . . sit! ": L, "Hoggers of har- vest, cursed among the people. " So Pound translates the phrase of St. Ambrose [GK, 45, 47]. He associates him with the age-old fight against usury and monopoly.
45. Ambrose: St. A. (3407-397), bishop of Milan, doctor of the church, popular with the people, known for his eloquent preach- ing. Said Pound: "St Ambrose didn't rise suddenly and without forebears. A transition from self-centered lust after eternal salvation into a sense of public order occurred some- where and sometime" [GK, 43]. Pound sees St. Ambrose as one of a number of great leaders from Antoninus Pius [cf. 36 above] on who were concerned with justice, the just
price, and the welfare of the people.
46. DeIcroix: Carlo D. A veteran, blinded in the Fascist revolution, who was admired by Mussolini. Describing a time of violence in 1925, Mussolini wrote: "Finally on June 6th Delcroix with his lyric speech, full of life and passion, broke that storm-charged ten- sion" [Auto, 228]. Later Delcroix became president of the Association of War Wounded and Invalids [92:49; 95:12; 98/690]. Pound said that De1croix thought poets should be concerned with "credit, the nature of money, monetary issue etc. " [GK, 249]. The problem, from Antoninus Pius to the present, is thus "always the same. "
47. Get . . .
the Analects, we read: "He [Confucius] said: Problems of style? Get the meaning across and then STOP" [CON, 269].
continuous, renewable resource, which is dif- ferent from nonproduc! ive gold.
SO. saecular: Derived from L, saeculum, "long period of time. " Thus, "going. an from age to age. "
51. ad majorem: L, "to the greater. "
52. Dum . . . scandet: L, "Now to Ambrosia [Ambrose? ] he ascends. " Perhaps Pound is recalling Baccin walking up the salita ("hill? side") to Sant' Ambrogio, the place above Rapallo where Pound lived with Dorothy, Olga Rudge, and his daughter Mary during
the last part of WWII.
53. sacro nemori: L, "to the sacred grove. "
54. aItro che tacita: I, "another who quiets. "
55. iY. rppf! rwp . . . : H, "Without brother- hood, lawless, hearthless. " A luminous detail of Homer's "Out of all brotherhood, out- lawed, homeless shall be that man who longs for all the horror of fighting among his own people" [Iliad IX, 63].
56. To . . . Emperor: The end of the passage Pound often cited from the Great Digest reads: "From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root"
[CON, 27? 33].
57. Antoninus: [cf. 36 above]. In his own time Antoninus was a model for humane and reasoned action.
. . .
59. Estlin: Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894- 1963. His poem 14 of "1 xl" has these lines: "pity this busy monster, manunkind, /
intelligence that enables grass seed to grow grass; the cherry-stone to make cherries" [CON, 193]. Hence "respect the vegetal
powers" [85:167].
61. Hindoustani: The Hindu practice of nur- turing all living things, including vermin as well as the sacred cows.
62. Make . . . springs": Early Chinese gious rites for the burial of the dead involved making figures of straw to place with the corpse. In the Chou dynasty, the straw fig? ures were replaced by more and more sophis- ticated humanoid figures, a practice Kung was against for good reason. In Mencius 1,1, iv, 6, we read that Chung-ne said: "Was he not without posterity who first made wood- en images to bury with the dead? " Legge's note reads in part: "In ancient times bundles of straw were made to represent men imper- fectly . . . and carried to the grave, and bur- ied with the dead, as attendants upon them. In middle antiquity . . . for those bundles of straw, wooden figures of men were used, having springs in them, by which they could move. . . . By and by, came the practice of burying living persons with the dead, which Confucius thought was an effect of this in- vention, and therefore he branded the inven- tor as in the text" [Legge, 442]. (During the time this canto was being written, Pound was working with David Gordon on a trans- lation of B. I of Mencius. This item pro- voked lively discussion at St. Elizabeths. DG's work was copyright Harvard in 1954 and published in a limited edition copyright David Gordon in 1964. )
63. Ideogram: A composite character in- vented by Pound from elements of shih, p
[M5756], and yin, 1" [M7439]. ln a discus? sion of whether more reverence is due to a near relation or to someone who is "person- ating a dead ancestor," a conflict of rules developed. Thus, some disciples went to Mencius for the answer; he said, in effect, although more respect is ordinarily given to the elder, it would be given to one younger, or even a villager, during the season in which he is personating the dead [Mencius VI, I, v, 4]. Legge has a note: "In sacrificing to the departed, some one-a certain one of the
39. Perenne . . . everlastingly. "
: L,
"Everlastingly.
I sing
58. slavery and
actions were counterbalanced in his time by inhumane and destructive practices: "By great wisdom sodomy and usury were seen coupled together" [SP, 265]. [14:3; In! XI, 46-66].
40. Dai Gaku: J, "The Great Digest. " Japa? nese name for the Confucian text Ta Hsio. In "Date Line" Pound said: "as to what I believe: 1 believe the Ta Hio" [LE,86].
41. Belascio: 1, "balascio. " A kind of ruby [36:8]. A leitmotif linking the paradisal theme of love in Canto 36 and the major theme of thrones as justice in Cantos 96-109
[104: 116].
42. Erigena: Johannes Scotus Erigena, or Eriugina, 815? -877? , medieval theologian
[36:9].
quit: In
Pound's translation
of
[79:40; HK, Era, 13]. 48. Baccin: [87:90].
49. Under the olives
"Happy the man born to rich acres, a saecu- lar vine bearing good grapes, olive trees spreading with years" [GK, 243]. Such a man's wealth is based (as with the grasslands of the Sienese Bank [42, 43:passim]) on a
. . . :
not. Progress is a comfortable
[Collected Poems, 397].
clisease:
. . .
"
Pound
wrote:
bhoogery:
Antoninus's
60. ching . . . : [MI138]. "To reverence; to respect; to honour. " In the Analects Pound defines chinr as "respect for the kind of
reli-
? 506
88/582
88/583
507
descendants, if possible,-was made the j J , or 'corpse,' into whose body the spirit of the other was supposed to descend to receive the worship" [Legge, 858].
64. Pere Henri Jacques: A ]esuit missionary [4:35].
65. Sennin: J, "genies or spirits" [4:36]. ["Sennin Poem," P, 139-140].
66. Rokku: J, "a mountain" [4:37]. Not a translation but a phonetic transcription.
67. Mr Tcheou: An Oriental Poond once knew. In "A Visiting Card" he wrote: "The Counsellor Tehau said to me 'These peoples (the Chinese and Japanese) should be like brothers. They read the same books"
[SP ,313].
68. Marse Adams: President John Adams [31:15].
69. The Major: C. H. Douglas, the author of Economic Democracy (1920) and Social Credit (1932) [38:49].
70. First Folio (Shx): Prob. Shakespeare. Perhaps Major Douglas had such a valuable item, but no evidence of it has been found.
71. "Every . . . corruption": JA wrote to Benjamin Rush [65:56], "every bank of dis- count, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent, is downright corruption" [SP, 313].
. . .
[SP, 176; see also Hollis, The Two Nations, 213-216].
73. Anatole: A. France, 1844-1924.
A satiri- cal portrait of industrial nations controlled by financial syndicates was the subject of his
L'ile des Pengouins in which Professor Obnubile is amazed to find that prosperous nations do not promote peace. After listen- ing to a parliamentary debate about wars that had been promoted, he asked, "Have I heard aright? . . . you an industrial people engaged in all these wars! )' His interpreter explained that they were industrial wars: "Peoples who have neither commerce nor industry are not obliged to make war, but a business people is forced to adopt a policy of conquest. The number of wars necessarily increases with our productive activity" [Pen- guin Island, 145? 149; See Pound's comment, IMP, 196]. For rhyming refrains, "done tal' 'em," see e. e. Cummings, poem 13 of "1 x
1," Collected Poems, 396.
74. Perry: Matthew C. Perry, 1794? 1858, who as a naval captain ~'opened" Japan. His squadron entered Yedda Bay July 8, 1853: "Terror reigned on shore. The people of Yedda prepared for defense. " Eventually, "the Shogun fell. . . . The immediate effect was war" [Brooks Adams, The New Empire, 186-189]. Adams shows in his early chapters that the need to export to new markets led to this result.
75. foreign coin: Benton, in describing the efforts to create a U. S. coinage, traces the history of attempts to exclude foreign coin- age [89:68]. He wrote: "which brought the period for the actual and final cessation of the circulation of foreign coins, to the month of November, 1819. . . . An excep-
be kept in use. "Yet that currency is sup- pressed; a currency of intrinsic value, for which they paid interest to nobody, is sup- pressed; and a currency without intrinsic val- ue, a currency of paper subject to every fluctuation, and for the supply of which corporate bodies receive interest, is substi- tuted in its place" [ibid. ].
79. this country: "Since that law took ef- fect, the United States had only been a thor- oughfare for foreign coins to pass through"
[ibid. ].
80. Benton: Thomas Hart B. , 1782-1858, American statesman who entered the U. S. Senate from Missouri in 1821, where he served five terms to 1851. He became a powerful force in the Jackson-Van Buren war against the Bank of the United States. His Thirty Years' View, written 1854-1856, is one of the major historical documents of the period.
8! . OBEUNT . . . : L, "They die. " Benton wrote: "This gives me a right to head a chapter with the names of Mr. John Adams and Mr. Jefferson . . . who, entering public life together, died on the same day,-July 4th, 1826-exactly fifty years after they had both put their hands to that Declaration of Independence" [TYV, I, 87].
82. Not battlements: Benton long protested the sale of lands to settlers and preferred that the land be given. In one or'ation he waxed lyrical and even seemed to break out into verse: "What constitutes a State? / Not high-rais'd battlements, nor labored mound, / Thick wall, nor moated gate," etc. , for 9 lines [TYV, I, 104; 89: 11].
83. Tariff: Benton often derides Tocqueville [cf. 84 below] for his inaccuracies. T be- lieved the tariff was essential to America's
continued existence.
84. Monsieur de Tocqueville: Alexis de T. , 1805-1859, French liberal politician and writer who visited the U. S. to study the penal system. His work, which appeared in France in 1835, and in the U. S. asDemocra- cy in America, 4 vols. , 1835-1840, showed
he studied the penal system a little but everything else a lot more.
85. Macon: [cf. 15 above]. In a description of Nathaniel Macon's heroism in the army and his further service in the General Assem- bly, Benton shows how Cornwallis was final- ly turned back by Greene at the battle of Guilford [TYV, I, 115].
86. Renewal: President Jackson in talking about the renewal of the bank charter said that it had failed to achieve its proper end: "a uniform and sound currency" [TYV, I, 123-124].
87. salt tax: In his efforts to defeat a salt tax proposed for the U. S. , Benton said that in England, "the salt tax has been overthrown by the labors of plain men" [TYV, I, 144].
88. Andy vetoed: Henry Clay sponsored a bill to give funds to the Maysville Turnpike Company, which meant public money would go to a privately owned commercial toll road. President Jackson vetoed it on consti- tutional grounds.
89. unconvertable paper: A central issue in the question of whether or not to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States was that it would be entitled to issue paper mon- ey that could not be converted to its value in gold or silver. Benton, in arguing against renewal, praised France when it stuck to precious metals, but "England, with her overgrown bank, was a prey to all the evils of uncovertible paper" [TYV, I, 187].
90. mines: "The United States possess gold mines, now yielding half a million per an- num, with every prospect of equalling those of Peru. . . . We have what is superior to mines, namely, the exports which command the money of the world; that is to say, the food which sustains life, and the raw materi- als which sustain manufactures" [ibid]. Note that this concept is a central premise of Social Credit.
91. Geryon: The loathsome creature in Dante's Hell which Pound uses as the image of fraud, financial corruption, and the fount
72. Waal
abundance that could replenish itself; but predatory exploitation wasted it. They got their capital from Europe and bled the land to pay it off. "The American tragedy is a continuous history of waste-waste of the natural abundance first, then waste of the new abundance offered by the machine, and then by machines. . . . The usurers now called financiers, plotted against abundance"
tion was continued . . . in favor milled dollars" [TYV,446].
Europe:
America had
natural
of Spanish
76. every dealer . . . : The effect
was to reduce the value of the Spanish coin- age below its value as metal. Thus, "Every money dealer is employed in buying, selling, and exporting them" [ibid. ].
77. exclusion: "At the head of these injuries he was bound to place the violation of the constitution . . . . He denounced this exclu- sion of foreign coins as fraud" [ibid. ].
78. intrinsic values: The states in giving power over the coinage to Congress clearly implied that currency in foreign coins was to
of the
laws
? 508
88/583-584
88/584-585
509
of usury [46:51; 51:16]. The phrase "prize pup" is not in Benton, but a descdption of the bank as monster is: "the great monster, in going down, had carried many others along with her; and . . . slew more in her death than in her life. Vast was her field of destruction-extending all over the United States and reaching to Europe" [TYV, II, 365].
92. Nicholas Biddle: President Jackson's prime opponent in fighting for renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States
[34:70].
93. An amendment . . . murdered indigo: These 21 lines are all taken from a chapter entitled "Revision of the Tariff": "Mr. Ben? ton then proposed an amendment, to impose a duty of 25 cents per pound on imported indigo. . . . He stated his object to be two- fold . . . first, to place the American System beyond the reach of its enemies, by procur- ing a home supply of an article indispensable to its existence; and next, to benefit the South by reviving the cultivation of one of its ancient and valuable staples. Indigo was first planted in the Carolinas and Georgia about the year 1740. . . . An act was passed for the encouragement of its production . . . in the reign of George the Second. . . . At
the breaking out of the Revolution [the ex- port of] it amounted to 1,100,000 Ibs. . . . After the Revolution. . . the British . . . looked to India. . . . The export of American indigo rapidly declined. In 1800 it had fallen to 400,000 Ibs. ; in 1814 to 40,000 Ibs. ; and in the last few years to 6 or 8,000 Ibs. In the meantime our manufactories were growing up; and having no supply of indigo at home, they had to import from abroad. . . . Our manufacturers now paid a high price for fine indigo, no less than $2. 50 per pound. " What's more, "it had to be paid for almost entirely in ready money. " Bad federal legis- lation had drained money from the South to the North, "and this in the midst of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, in cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo . . . had ex- ported produce since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars,
and the North had exported comparatively nothing. This sum was prodigious; it was nearly equal to half the coinage of the mint of Mexico since the conquest by Cortez . . . The Tariff of 1816 contributed to destroy the cultivation of indigo; sunk the duty on the foreign article, from twenty-five to fif- teen cents per pound" [TYV, 1,19-99].
94. Sardegna: Prob. a press release of 1954 suggested a parallel, but it has not been identified.
95. Freemen . . . : The tariff on indigo did not prevail. A spokesman for the South de- plored the fact that the Congfess controlled by the North would not pass legislation that would enable them, not to look for bounty, but to rely on themselves: "He is not in fact a freeman, who habitually looks to the gov?
37. "Trying", he said: The "he" is Thad- deus Coleman Pound, who said this in 1878 [cf. 26 above]. But Pound suggests Antoni? nus had similar policies.
38. Mencius: [87:80]. Tithing every year so that the good years would prepare for the bad years was better than taxing, according to Mencius.
43. Carolus Calvus: Charles the Bald, 823- 877, holy Roman emperor, who died the same year believed to be the year of Eri- gena's death [74: 103].
44. "Captans . . . sit! ": L, "Hoggers of har- vest, cursed among the people. " So Pound translates the phrase of St. Ambrose [GK, 45, 47]. He associates him with the age-old fight against usury and monopoly.
45. Ambrose: St. A. (3407-397), bishop of Milan, doctor of the church, popular with the people, known for his eloquent preach- ing. Said Pound: "St Ambrose didn't rise suddenly and without forebears. A transition from self-centered lust after eternal salvation into a sense of public order occurred some- where and sometime" [GK, 43]. Pound sees St. Ambrose as one of a number of great leaders from Antoninus Pius [cf. 36 above] on who were concerned with justice, the just
price, and the welfare of the people.
46. DeIcroix: Carlo D. A veteran, blinded in the Fascist revolution, who was admired by Mussolini. Describing a time of violence in 1925, Mussolini wrote: "Finally on June 6th Delcroix with his lyric speech, full of life and passion, broke that storm-charged ten- sion" [Auto, 228]. Later Delcroix became president of the Association of War Wounded and Invalids [92:49; 95:12; 98/690]. Pound said that De1croix thought poets should be concerned with "credit, the nature of money, monetary issue etc. " [GK, 249]. The problem, from Antoninus Pius to the present, is thus "always the same. "
47. Get . . .
the Analects, we read: "He [Confucius] said: Problems of style? Get the meaning across and then STOP" [CON, 269].
continuous, renewable resource, which is dif- ferent from nonproduc! ive gold.
SO. saecular: Derived from L, saeculum, "long period of time. " Thus, "going. an from age to age. "
51. ad majorem: L, "to the greater. "
52. Dum . . . scandet: L, "Now to Ambrosia [Ambrose? ] he ascends. " Perhaps Pound is recalling Baccin walking up the salita ("hill? side") to Sant' Ambrogio, the place above Rapallo where Pound lived with Dorothy, Olga Rudge, and his daughter Mary during
the last part of WWII.
53. sacro nemori: L, "to the sacred grove. "
54. aItro che tacita: I, "another who quiets. "
55. iY. rppf! rwp . . . : H, "Without brother- hood, lawless, hearthless. " A luminous detail of Homer's "Out of all brotherhood, out- lawed, homeless shall be that man who longs for all the horror of fighting among his own people" [Iliad IX, 63].
56. To . . . Emperor: The end of the passage Pound often cited from the Great Digest reads: "From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root"
[CON, 27? 33].
57. Antoninus: [cf. 36 above]. In his own time Antoninus was a model for humane and reasoned action.
. . .
59. Estlin: Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894- 1963. His poem 14 of "1 xl" has these lines: "pity this busy monster, manunkind, /
intelligence that enables grass seed to grow grass; the cherry-stone to make cherries" [CON, 193]. Hence "respect the vegetal
powers" [85:167].
61. Hindoustani: The Hindu practice of nur- turing all living things, including vermin as well as the sacred cows.
62. Make . . . springs": Early Chinese gious rites for the burial of the dead involved making figures of straw to place with the corpse. In the Chou dynasty, the straw fig? ures were replaced by more and more sophis- ticated humanoid figures, a practice Kung was against for good reason. In Mencius 1,1, iv, 6, we read that Chung-ne said: "Was he not without posterity who first made wood- en images to bury with the dead? " Legge's note reads in part: "In ancient times bundles of straw were made to represent men imper- fectly . . . and carried to the grave, and bur- ied with the dead, as attendants upon them. In middle antiquity . . . for those bundles of straw, wooden figures of men were used, having springs in them, by which they could move. . . . By and by, came the practice of burying living persons with the dead, which Confucius thought was an effect of this in- vention, and therefore he branded the inven- tor as in the text" [Legge, 442]. (During the time this canto was being written, Pound was working with David Gordon on a trans- lation of B. I of Mencius. This item pro- voked lively discussion at St. Elizabeths. DG's work was copyright Harvard in 1954 and published in a limited edition copyright David Gordon in 1964. )
63. Ideogram: A composite character in- vented by Pound from elements of shih, p
[M5756], and yin, 1" [M7439]. ln a discus? sion of whether more reverence is due to a near relation or to someone who is "person- ating a dead ancestor," a conflict of rules developed. Thus, some disciples went to Mencius for the answer; he said, in effect, although more respect is ordinarily given to the elder, it would be given to one younger, or even a villager, during the season in which he is personating the dead [Mencius VI, I, v, 4]. Legge has a note: "In sacrificing to the departed, some one-a certain one of the
39. Perenne . . . everlastingly. "
: L,
"Everlastingly.
I sing
58. slavery and
actions were counterbalanced in his time by inhumane and destructive practices: "By great wisdom sodomy and usury were seen coupled together" [SP, 265]. [14:3; In! XI, 46-66].
40. Dai Gaku: J, "The Great Digest. " Japa? nese name for the Confucian text Ta Hsio. In "Date Line" Pound said: "as to what I believe: 1 believe the Ta Hio" [LE,86].
41. Belascio: 1, "balascio. " A kind of ruby [36:8]. A leitmotif linking the paradisal theme of love in Canto 36 and the major theme of thrones as justice in Cantos 96-109
[104: 116].
42. Erigena: Johannes Scotus Erigena, or Eriugina, 815? -877? , medieval theologian
[36:9].
quit: In
Pound's translation
of
[79:40; HK, Era, 13]. 48. Baccin: [87:90].
49. Under the olives
"Happy the man born to rich acres, a saecu- lar vine bearing good grapes, olive trees spreading with years" [GK, 243]. Such a man's wealth is based (as with the grasslands of the Sienese Bank [42, 43:passim]) on a
. . . :
not. Progress is a comfortable
[Collected Poems, 397].
clisease:
. . .
"
Pound
wrote:
bhoogery:
Antoninus's
60. ching . . . : [MI138]. "To reverence; to respect; to honour. " In the Analects Pound defines chinr as "respect for the kind of
reli-
? 506
88/582
88/583
507
descendants, if possible,-was made the j J , or 'corpse,' into whose body the spirit of the other was supposed to descend to receive the worship" [Legge, 858].
64. Pere Henri Jacques: A ]esuit missionary [4:35].
65. Sennin: J, "genies or spirits" [4:36]. ["Sennin Poem," P, 139-140].
66. Rokku: J, "a mountain" [4:37]. Not a translation but a phonetic transcription.
67. Mr Tcheou: An Oriental Poond once knew. In "A Visiting Card" he wrote: "The Counsellor Tehau said to me 'These peoples (the Chinese and Japanese) should be like brothers. They read the same books"
[SP ,313].
68. Marse Adams: President John Adams [31:15].
69. The Major: C. H. Douglas, the author of Economic Democracy (1920) and Social Credit (1932) [38:49].
70. First Folio (Shx): Prob. Shakespeare. Perhaps Major Douglas had such a valuable item, but no evidence of it has been found.
71. "Every . . . corruption": JA wrote to Benjamin Rush [65:56], "every bank of dis- count, every bank by which interest is to be paid or profit of any kind made by the deponent, is downright corruption" [SP, 313].
. . .
[SP, 176; see also Hollis, The Two Nations, 213-216].
73. Anatole: A. France, 1844-1924.
A satiri- cal portrait of industrial nations controlled by financial syndicates was the subject of his
L'ile des Pengouins in which Professor Obnubile is amazed to find that prosperous nations do not promote peace. After listen- ing to a parliamentary debate about wars that had been promoted, he asked, "Have I heard aright? . . . you an industrial people engaged in all these wars! )' His interpreter explained that they were industrial wars: "Peoples who have neither commerce nor industry are not obliged to make war, but a business people is forced to adopt a policy of conquest. The number of wars necessarily increases with our productive activity" [Pen- guin Island, 145? 149; See Pound's comment, IMP, 196]. For rhyming refrains, "done tal' 'em," see e. e. Cummings, poem 13 of "1 x
1," Collected Poems, 396.
74. Perry: Matthew C. Perry, 1794? 1858, who as a naval captain ~'opened" Japan. His squadron entered Yedda Bay July 8, 1853: "Terror reigned on shore. The people of Yedda prepared for defense. " Eventually, "the Shogun fell. . . . The immediate effect was war" [Brooks Adams, The New Empire, 186-189]. Adams shows in his early chapters that the need to export to new markets led to this result.
75. foreign coin: Benton, in describing the efforts to create a U. S. coinage, traces the history of attempts to exclude foreign coin- age [89:68]. He wrote: "which brought the period for the actual and final cessation of the circulation of foreign coins, to the month of November, 1819. . . . An excep-
be kept in use. "Yet that currency is sup- pressed; a currency of intrinsic value, for which they paid interest to nobody, is sup- pressed; and a currency without intrinsic val- ue, a currency of paper subject to every fluctuation, and for the supply of which corporate bodies receive interest, is substi- tuted in its place" [ibid. ].
79. this country: "Since that law took ef- fect, the United States had only been a thor- oughfare for foreign coins to pass through"
[ibid. ].
80. Benton: Thomas Hart B. , 1782-1858, American statesman who entered the U. S. Senate from Missouri in 1821, where he served five terms to 1851. He became a powerful force in the Jackson-Van Buren war against the Bank of the United States. His Thirty Years' View, written 1854-1856, is one of the major historical documents of the period.
8! . OBEUNT . . . : L, "They die. " Benton wrote: "This gives me a right to head a chapter with the names of Mr. John Adams and Mr. Jefferson . . . who, entering public life together, died on the same day,-July 4th, 1826-exactly fifty years after they had both put their hands to that Declaration of Independence" [TYV, I, 87].
82. Not battlements: Benton long protested the sale of lands to settlers and preferred that the land be given. In one or'ation he waxed lyrical and even seemed to break out into verse: "What constitutes a State? / Not high-rais'd battlements, nor labored mound, / Thick wall, nor moated gate," etc. , for 9 lines [TYV, I, 104; 89: 11].
83. Tariff: Benton often derides Tocqueville [cf. 84 below] for his inaccuracies. T be- lieved the tariff was essential to America's
continued existence.
84. Monsieur de Tocqueville: Alexis de T. , 1805-1859, French liberal politician and writer who visited the U. S. to study the penal system. His work, which appeared in France in 1835, and in the U. S. asDemocra- cy in America, 4 vols. , 1835-1840, showed
he studied the penal system a little but everything else a lot more.
85. Macon: [cf. 15 above]. In a description of Nathaniel Macon's heroism in the army and his further service in the General Assem- bly, Benton shows how Cornwallis was final- ly turned back by Greene at the battle of Guilford [TYV, I, 115].
86. Renewal: President Jackson in talking about the renewal of the bank charter said that it had failed to achieve its proper end: "a uniform and sound currency" [TYV, I, 123-124].
87. salt tax: In his efforts to defeat a salt tax proposed for the U. S. , Benton said that in England, "the salt tax has been overthrown by the labors of plain men" [TYV, I, 144].
88. Andy vetoed: Henry Clay sponsored a bill to give funds to the Maysville Turnpike Company, which meant public money would go to a privately owned commercial toll road. President Jackson vetoed it on consti- tutional grounds.
89. unconvertable paper: A central issue in the question of whether or not to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States was that it would be entitled to issue paper mon- ey that could not be converted to its value in gold or silver. Benton, in arguing against renewal, praised France when it stuck to precious metals, but "England, with her overgrown bank, was a prey to all the evils of uncovertible paper" [TYV, I, 187].
90. mines: "The United States possess gold mines, now yielding half a million per an- num, with every prospect of equalling those of Peru. . . . We have what is superior to mines, namely, the exports which command the money of the world; that is to say, the food which sustains life, and the raw materi- als which sustain manufactures" [ibid]. Note that this concept is a central premise of Social Credit.
91. Geryon: The loathsome creature in Dante's Hell which Pound uses as the image of fraud, financial corruption, and the fount
72. Waal
abundance that could replenish itself; but predatory exploitation wasted it. They got their capital from Europe and bled the land to pay it off. "The American tragedy is a continuous history of waste-waste of the natural abundance first, then waste of the new abundance offered by the machine, and then by machines. . . . The usurers now called financiers, plotted against abundance"
tion was continued . . . in favor milled dollars" [TYV,446].
Europe:
America had
natural
of Spanish
76. every dealer . . . : The effect
was to reduce the value of the Spanish coin- age below its value as metal. Thus, "Every money dealer is employed in buying, selling, and exporting them" [ibid. ].
77. exclusion: "At the head of these injuries he was bound to place the violation of the constitution . . . . He denounced this exclu- sion of foreign coins as fraud" [ibid. ].
78. intrinsic values: The states in giving power over the coinage to Congress clearly implied that currency in foreign coins was to
of the
laws
? 508
88/583-584
88/584-585
509
of usury [46:51; 51:16]. The phrase "prize pup" is not in Benton, but a descdption of the bank as monster is: "the great monster, in going down, had carried many others along with her; and . . . slew more in her death than in her life. Vast was her field of destruction-extending all over the United States and reaching to Europe" [TYV, II, 365].
92. Nicholas Biddle: President Jackson's prime opponent in fighting for renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States
[34:70].
93. An amendment . . . murdered indigo: These 21 lines are all taken from a chapter entitled "Revision of the Tariff": "Mr. Ben? ton then proposed an amendment, to impose a duty of 25 cents per pound on imported indigo. . . . He stated his object to be two- fold . . . first, to place the American System beyond the reach of its enemies, by procur- ing a home supply of an article indispensable to its existence; and next, to benefit the South by reviving the cultivation of one of its ancient and valuable staples. Indigo was first planted in the Carolinas and Georgia about the year 1740. . . . An act was passed for the encouragement of its production . . . in the reign of George the Second. . . . At
the breaking out of the Revolution [the ex- port of] it amounted to 1,100,000 Ibs. . . . After the Revolution. . . the British . . . looked to India. . . . The export of American indigo rapidly declined. In 1800 it had fallen to 400,000 Ibs. ; in 1814 to 40,000 Ibs. ; and in the last few years to 6 or 8,000 Ibs. In the meantime our manufactories were growing up; and having no supply of indigo at home, they had to import from abroad. . . . Our manufacturers now paid a high price for fine indigo, no less than $2. 50 per pound. " What's more, "it had to be paid for almost entirely in ready money. " Bad federal legis- lation had drained money from the South to the North, "and this in the midst of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, in cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo . . . had ex- ported produce since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars,
and the North had exported comparatively nothing. This sum was prodigious; it was nearly equal to half the coinage of the mint of Mexico since the conquest by Cortez . . . The Tariff of 1816 contributed to destroy the cultivation of indigo; sunk the duty on the foreign article, from twenty-five to fif- teen cents per pound" [TYV, 1,19-99].
94. Sardegna: Prob. a press release of 1954 suggested a parallel, but it has not been identified.
95. Freemen . . . : The tariff on indigo did not prevail. A spokesman for the South de- plored the fact that the Congfess controlled by the North would not pass legislation that would enable them, not to look for bounty, but to rely on themselves: "He is not in fact a freeman, who habitually looks to the gov?
