Exhibition—Annual Addresses. 
little short of starvation. Eight hundred men were each thus com¬ 
pelled to make one barrel of flour go as far as two, or four, or six 
had gone before; the grocer and dry-goods merchant, deprived of 
the custom of these people, were compelled to add another regiment 
of useless clerks to the army of unemployed, and the loss of their 
patronage to others produced a like result, and a large amount of 
pauperism, flowing directly from the locking up of only $5,000,000, 
is reasonably supposable. But $5,000,000 is only the tiniest speck 
in the ocean. Hundreds of millions have for the last ten years 
been thus locked in the musty vaults of capital, feeding upon our 
crippled industries, and an unemployed, hungry multitude have 
been starving in the midst of our wheat-fields and our bakeries. 
But the payment of interest upon such capital is what more inti¬ 
mately concerns us. 
OUR NATIONAL BONDED DEBT. 
bearing interest is about $1,800,000,000. Upon $1,096,000,000, of 
this we are paying interest at the rate of 6.75 per cent., or an an¬ 
nual total of $74,000,000; upon $613,000,000 we are paying interest at 
the rate of five and sixty hundredths per cent., or an annual total of 
$40,000,000. Our bonded debt, therefore, is costing us directly in inter¬ 
est $114,000,000. Add to this the tax exemption, probably $30,000,000, 
which is an interest our producers have to pay, and we have a sum 
total of $144,000,000, or an annual per capita tax upon our entire 
population of something over $3. This begins to look a little start¬ 
ling, but we have scarcely begun the investigation. There are over 
$3,300,000,000 in railroad, State, and other bonds, bearing an inter¬ 
est of seven per cent, and amounting annually to $220,000,000. 
Then it is estimated that the individual indebtedness of the country 
will amount to the enormous sum of $12,000,000,000, which at the 
estimated rate of interest, ten and one-half per cent.., would yield 
nearly $1,800,000,000. Now you have something worth being star¬ 
tled at. And mind you, I have not included in this estimate the inter¬ 
est on the government certificates of indebtedness, the interest on 
the navy pension fund, nor that on the Pacific Railroad bonds. In 
fact, I have not much heart to follow this matter in all of its de¬ 
tails—it is too prophetic of ultimate general bankruptcy—too sug¬ 
gestive of unpardonable injustice to the producing population of 
America. We have gone far enough, however, to learn that we are 
