Part 02, Chapter 24 : A False Idea of Freedom

[Liberty, February 26, 1887.]

I must refer once more to the Winsted Press and its editor. It is lamentable to see so bright as Mr. Pinney wasting his nervous force in assaults on windmills. But it is his habit, whenever he finds it necessary or thinks it timely to say something in answer to free-money advocates, to set up a windmill, label it free money, and attack that. An instance of this occurs in a scolding article on the subject in his issue of February 17, as the following sentence shows: We had a little taste of this free currency in the days of State wildcat banking, when every little community had its State bank issues. The italics are mine,—used to emphasize the substitution of the windmill State for the giant Freedom. How could State bank issues be free money? Monopoly is monopoly, whether granted by the United States or by a single State, and the old State banking system was a thoroughly monopolistic system. The unfairness and absurdity of Mr. Pinney’s remark becomes apparent with the reflection that the principal English work relied upon by the friends of free money, Colonel Greene’s Mutual Banking, was written expressly in opposition to the then existing State banking system, years before the adoption of the national banking system. Mr. Pinney would not fall back upon this idiotic argument if he had a better one. That he has none is indicated by his saying of free money, as he says of free trade: In theory the scheme is plausible. In practice it would probably be an abomination. Mr. Pinney’s old conservative, cowardly, Calvinistic refuge! When driven into a corner on a question which turns on the principle of Liberty, he has but one resort, which amounts practically to this: Liberty is right in theory everywhere and always, but in certain cases it is not practical. In all cases where I want men to have it, it is practical; but in those cases where I do not want men to have it, it is not practical. What Mr. Pinney wants and does not want depends upon mental habits and opinions acquired prior to that theoretical assent to the principle of liberty which the arguments of the Anarchists have wrung from him.(76 ¶ 1)