When Congress passed the law authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to circulate the ten-dollar certificates bearing interest at four per cent, it was intended as a means of giving poor people an opportunity to invest their meager funds safely. It was assumed that capitalists would not care for these ten-dollar bills due to the small return. Yet, the moneyed interests acquired the bills of this denomination, as one could readily see at the Subtreasury last Saturday, when the sale of ten-dollar bills reached an unusual mark--fifteen thousand dollars. Whoever is at all familiar with local banks could see that the majority of the buyers were bank clerks, and that many of these clerks belonged to the same bank. As it is improbable that all these gentlemen acquired their savings on a single day, one reaches the conclusion that the ten-dollar bills are being secured for the banks. Inquiry verified this. The big capitalists also know how to make money out of these bills. The procedure is as follows:

No one can buy more than one hundred dollars' worth of the bills at a time; but if one sends ten young men and each one buys one hundred dollars' worth, then the total amount will be one thousand dollars. Accrued interest since April, which must also be paid, amounts to $2.74; this makes a total of $1002.74. Besides, one may also send one hundred certificates to Washington and exchange them into larger denominations--a procedure which entails no difficulty if the sender happens to represent a bank--of bonds bearing the same interest and of equal value. This involves an additional cost of $1.60, and thus the total now reaches $1004.34. But if the same banks intend to buy four per cent bonds (say a thousand dollars' worth) then the banks must pay to the syndicate which acquired the entire balance of the issue, a total sum of $1027.75; thus the banks earn the trifling sum of $13.41 on every thousand dollars, a very acceptable profit because it can be repeated time and again.

The question now arises whether this benefits the government, and what profit may be derived by the little man, now that the capitalists--regardless of all precautions on the part of the government--have eliminated even this refuge for safe investments.