s. If they shall sink to that
point, if they so far cease to be men, thinking men, intelligent men, as
to yield to such pretences and such clamor, they will be slaves already;
slaves to their own passions, slaves to the fraud and knavery of
pretended friends. They will deserve to be blotted out of all the
records of freedom; they ought not to dishonor the cause of
self-government, by attempting any longer to exercise it; they ought to
keep their unworthy hands entirely off from the cause of republican
liberty, if they are capable of being the victims of artifices so
shallow, of tricks so stale, so threadbare, so often practised, so much
worn out, on serfs and slaves.

"The natural hatred of the poor against the rich!" "The danger of a
moneyed aristocracy!" "A power as great and dangerous as that resisted
by the Revolution!" "A call to a new declaration of independence!" Sir,
I admonish the people against the object of outcries like these. I
admonish every industrious laborer in the country to be on his guard
against such delusion. I tell him the attempt is to play off his
passions against his interests, and to prevail on him, in the name of
liberty, to destroy all the fruits of liberty; in the name of
patriotism, to injure and afflict his country; and in the name of his
own independence, to destroy that very independence, and make him a
beggar and a slave. Has he a dollar? He is advised to do that which will
destroy half its value. Has he hands to labor? Let him rather fold them,
and sit still, than be pushed on, by fraud and artifice, to support
measures which will render his labor useless and hopeless.

Sir, the very man, of all others, who has the deepest interest in a
sound currency, and who suffers most by mischievous legislation in money
matters, is the man who earns his daily bread by his daily toil. A
depreciated currency, sudden changes of prices, paper money, falling
between morning and noon, and falling still lower between noon and
night,--these things constitute the very harvest-time of speculators,
and of the whole race of those who are at once idle and crafty; and of
that other race, too, the Catilines of all times, marked, so as to be
known for ever by one stroke of the historian's pen, _those greedy of
other men's property and prodigal of their own_. Capitalists, too, may
outlive such times. They may either prey on the earnings of labor, by
their _cent. per cent._, or they may hoard. But the laboring ma