What is a monster? Here is the definition given by the Webster's Dictionary: "An animal, plant, or thing that departs from the customary course of nature." Or else: "A person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness, or cruelty."
We may call our monetary system, our system of money, a monster. It is not in conformity with the facts; it does not behave like a money system. It is unnatural in its results, nothing less, than a monster of cruelty.
These are serious accusations.
Here are three families. Family A is devoid of everything. It has nevermore than the strict necessities of life, and this is often long in coming. Parents and children suffer. The little ones vegetate, but the parents do all they can and, confronted with the situation, they are the first to deprive themselves.
Family B possesses a little more. Not in luxury, but a certain comfort. Children, like the parents, enjoy an honest living.
Family C draws permanent revenue, which allows to it an air-conditioned house, nutrition, varied to choice, modern furniture, spare-time activities, and tourist holidays. All of the family members take advantage of it, each one following his likings, which he moreover endeavors to guide by reason.
The three families are in very different situations. But we have nothing to reproach to the head of family A, nor to the head of family B, nor to the head of family C. In each one, the goods, scarce or abundant, are accessible to all of the family members, in the proportion to which the circumstances allow it.
But let's return to family C. Let's say that the parents put their revenue under lock and key, and that they leave their children in tattered garments, reduced to malnutrition of the last order, sick and without medical care, ignorant and deprived of the right to get instruction, except maybe for a privileged one in the family who, himself, will have a hundred times more than he is able to make use of.
In such a case, people will say that these parents are barbarous, that they let their children unjustifiably suffer. Their behavior, a monstrosity!
Now, we have a country, Canada, where workers and machines can bring into the world all that is needed in order that all the Canadians live in comfort. A regulation is made, by virtue of which, in order to draw on the wealth of Canada, a Canadian must have a permission that is called money.
Nothing bad, in itself, in this regulation which allows to establish a certain order in the distribution.
Besides, if money is at the level of production, seeing that the distribution is at the level of money, it happens that we live according to the possibilities of production, and it is in conformity with the facts.
But if, instead of using the regulation to establish order in the distribution, a few individuals are allowed to limit the quantity of permissions to their liking, to decrease the permissions when things are abundant. It is no longer a regulation, but a disorder. It is to subject the multitude to the will of some dictators.
These money dictators are acting in such a way that the wheat remains in the granaries when the families lack bread, that products of all kinds accumulate, that the production has to stop, when there are urgent needs everywhere. These dictators are literally barbarians, their behavior a monstrosity, and the governments'tolerance, a cowardice or a complicity.
One can say what he wants in favor or in defense of the money system; it does not function for the common good. It punishes the multitude, even though it suits some individuals.
Money is no longer in conformity with the facts. It does not act according to the end for which it has been invented. It does not distribute the production. It evades a function that it nevertheless reserved to itself.
"Those who control money and credit have become the masters of our lives," said Pope Pius XI. In regulating the level of money and credit, they regulate our level of life, and they regulate it very much below the possibilities of the country.
Therefore it is not necessary to leave Canada in order to find acts of barbarism – odious barbarisrn, even though it enjoys the governments'protection.
Whatever may be the power of the barbarians and their accomplices, let's have the courage, even if they hold the sword in hand, to shout to them, like John the Baptist: "It is not lawful!" (Mk 6:18: For John said to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.")
It is not lawful! You are not permitted to restrict the distribution of the abundant goods of the earth to human beings who are in deprivation.
It is not!awful! You are not permitted, you today's governments, to protect with your laws the monsters who remove blood from the economic body. The children, the women, the men, who suffer from needs in front of a paralyzed abundance, accuse you before mankind and before the Creator who gave the earth to all of the human species.
You can reduce to silence voices that should denounce you, in stuffing them with money or honors or in threatening them with your vengeance. All the same, there will remain some unmanageable souls to put before your eyes, in broad daylight, your infringements of human rights, and to repeat to you, even though you are shaking up with anger: It is not lawful! You had been made the guardians of a people. You are hand in glove with its executioners.
They and you will have to account one day for this — to the outraged public perhaps, to God surely.
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