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In Minnesota (see p. 7) there were in force, Jan. 1st, 1890, nearly three years before Cleveland became president, 195,580 mortgages to secure a total mortgage indebtedness of $197,745,989!! This at an average interest of ten cent represented an annual charge of nearly twenty millions of dollars. Counting four persons to a family it represented a debt of $608 against each family in our state. Now if this was not ruin what was it? And as the result of thirty-three years of Republican rule the people were so impoverished, SO despoiled, SO robbed of their property, by one device or another, that the wealth of the country had been concentrated in a few hands. One per cent of the people owned one-fifth of all the real and 4,047 personal families estate owned of twelve the country: billion dollars of property; thirty thousand families owned one-half the national wealth; nine per cent of the population owned seventy-one per cent of the property of the entire land. And all this was before Cleveland's election in 1892. We are not defending the Democrats, but we do not propose that the Republicans shall carry this state by false pretences. In the REPRESENTATIVE of May 17, 1893, one month and thirteen days after Cleveland took his seat, and long before any legislation upon the tariff was attempted, we read: "All Europe and America are suffering from discontent and turbulence; all enterprize is crippled; commerce is largely bankrupt: Russia is honeycombed with nihilism; in Germany the radical elements have defeated the government on the army bill; in Belgium the laboring men have by insurrection, forced universal suffrage from the hands of the ruling class; in the United States the red-lights of danger blaze at a thousand points; millions are unemployed; another Black Friday culminated the other day in Wall street, and stocks fell about 75 per cent.' " In the same issue, May 17, 1893, we said: "It is with profound regret that we announce that the wings of the great black tempest of Rothschildian misgovernment have at length struck the highest heads in Minneapolis. The Farmers and Merchants Bank has gone by the board; there is a great run on the Farmers and Mechanics Bank: and that gigantic institution, the Northwestern Guarantee Loan Company, is practically swamped. The latter institution had $1,250,000 of capital, and had endorsed commercial paper to the amount of $3,000,000. Thomas Lowry has been in New York, trying to tide it over the flood, but he gives it up. "We are sorry for all of these people, and yet they have been the defenders of the shallow rascality which has terminated so terribly for them. Let them nail on the door of theirshattered enterprizes: "Died of demonetization of silver and permitting the money-power to run the government.' Will anybody pretend that Cleve-
