A Study of the Origin of Certain Banking Practices, and of their effect on the events of Ancient History, written in the light of the Present Day.
by DAVID ASTLE
The intellectual faculties however are not of themselves sufficient to produce external action; they require the aid of physical force, the direction and combination of which are wholly at the disposal of money, that mighty spring by which the total force of human energies is set in motion.
Augustus Boeckh (Translated) The Public Economy of Athens, p. 7, Book I, London, 1828.
For money has been the ruin of many and has misled the minds of Kings. Ecclesiacticus 8, Verse 2.
When I originally approached my study as best as I might, dealing with the growth in pre-antiquity and antiquity of what is known as the International Money Power, and the particular derivative of the money creative activities of such International Money Power that might be defined as the Life Alternative Factor, I did so with some diffidence. Perhaps I was overly conscious of what seemed to be the in-adequateness of my preliminary training in these matters and that in no way could I describe myself as deeply conversant with the languages of ancient times, or, in the case of Mesopotamia, their scripts.
However, in my preliminary studies involving checking through the indices of a number of those standard books of reference dealing with the ancient civilizations, I soon found that any feelings of inferiority in so far as the adequacy of my scholarship relative to my particular subject was concerned were unwarranted, and that qualms in these respects were by no means justified…
In almost all of such books of reference, except those that classified themselves as economic or monetary histories, was practically no clear approach to the subject of money and finance, or to those exchange systems that must have existed in order that the so-called civilizations might come to be. In the odd case where the translations of the texts might reveal some key clue, no more special emphasis was placed herein than might have been placed on the mention of a gold cup, a ring, a seal, or some exquisite piece of stone work… read more
Every conclusion arrived at as a result of study of the fragments of information available in respect to money and its creators in the world of the Ancient Civilizations, indicates the existence of a far reaching conspiracy in respect to monetary issuance influencing the progression of man’s history in the earliest times of which written record exists. It is also outstandingly clear that it was parent to that acknowledged and most obvious conspiracy such as exists today.
According to the review of Tragedy and Hope by Dr. Carroll Quigley; (New York, 1966.), as contained in the Naked Capitalist published by W. Cleon Skousen, Salt Lake City, 1970.
The whole notion of the institution of precious metals by weight as common denominator of exchanges, internationally and nationally, cannot but have been disseminated by a conspiratorial organization fully aware of the extent of the power to which it would accede, could it but maintain control over bullion supplies and the mining which brought them into being in the first place. Clearly such notion had originally come into being during that historically distant period when first of all free silver began to be extensively used as a convenient and highly portable commodity in settlement of balances outstanding in foreign trade; certainly as far back as Neolithic times. This fact was indicated by the evidence existing that values (and by inference money) were already expressed in terms of silver by weight at the time of the Azag-Bau Dynasty at Kish in Mesopotamia (3268-2897 B.C.); although in a sense perhaps narrow and strictly national.
According to tablets unearthed recording a sale of land, the sellers were known as “The eaters of the silver of the field”. This expression clearly showed a connection between the conception of money as an abstract unit in circulation, and silver, the tangible material on which the symbols of this money were later recorded. Such silver would then be valued according to the ancient customs of the international trade routes which were manifested in the rules of the traveling merchants who controlled these routes; these rules being established towards the better regulation of exchanges between themselves… read more
The Temple and the Counting House
Out of those vague shadows of war and power and peace and settlement of ancient strife that drifted out of the faded memory of man’s former abiding on the Anatolian plateaus and throughout the Near East as it is so described by us, emerged that force known as Classical Greece; a force which may be said to principally derive from the union of the essential forward thrust of the re-vitalized energies of the god-ruled city, and the political structure by which the cattle raising men of the Indo-European warrior nations had been governed.
Much of the revitalization of such energies derived from increasing availability of silver as a result of the expansion of the mining industry due to the increasing use of tools of hardened iron, and the consequent expansion of the volume of money in circulation amongst the peoples, abstract, or as now obtained, of actual pieces of silver of known weight and fineness carrying the identifying mark of the emitter.
This flood of the precious metals to which the new methods of mining gave rise, with the consequent strengthening of the shift of money creative, or total power center, from the god and the temple, to what some might describe as the devil and the counting house, enabled those conspiratorial groups who undoubtedly controlled precious metal bullion supplies, perhaps at this stage alliance between the priesthood of certain cities whose god was not getting fair acknowledgment, and those mysterious people, the Apiru, who, concerned with the carrying trade between the cities as is clear,1) seemingly belonged to no city, yet were to be found in them all, to set up a supra-national god as the fount of their secret power. He would be a god who should be contemptuous of all other gods; living in no idols, he would be in all, and over all; unseen, but all pervading.
If the god of such secret society or confederacy controlled movements of silver bullion internationally, he well might be contemptuous of all city gods other than himself, for when money values were based on the exchange value of his silver in such international exchanges, then he and his acolytes, whoever they were, knew that all prosperity in the kingdoms of those most ancient times depended on him, and whether he ordained through his servants that silver should be plentiful or otherwise; whether indeed there should be no money and hardship, or plenty of money and prosperity… read more
The city states of the rulers of Troy, Orchomenos, Tyryns, Bog-Haz-Koi, Mycenae, Cnossos, and cities and states without number and of which not even the name or memory, now remains, too often, little expectant of calamity from without, from whatever cause, finally went down into smoking ruin before the deluge of wild men, who, with their reeking swords brought all those god-ordered ages of ancient time to a bloody close; men such as the wearer of the golden mask whose grave was opened by Heinrich Schlieman in his excavations at Mycenae, and who he believed to be Agamemnon sleeping his everlasting sleep.
Buried sword in one hand, with the other this giant amongst men still clutched in death as in life, those disks of gold which so obviously were storehouse of wealth and power. Thus it is clear that by permitting gold to be equated with wealth, or that which had been money, and forgetting thus the true nature of money as a thing apart, his law alone, merely a device of transferable numbers to assist and give order to the exchanges amongst his people, this god-king from whom descended the legend of that company on Olympus, was already surrendering his might, and the freedoms of his peoples, to those inscrutable shadows that lurked in the dimness of the distant Babylonian counting houses.
To these rulers, power was already in the merchant’s and master miner’s precious metal pieces… With such precious metals as they stripped from the bodies of living and dead in those cities they had so gleefully sacked and put to sword, when peace came again, they were able to purchase those items of luxury so much desired by their women, such as were manufactured in the cities of the Mesopotamian plain and Egypt,(1) if not further afield. More important still, they were thus able to obtain the finest of arms that skilled craftsmanship could fashion, such as the suit of bronze armour found at Medea in Greece (illustrated on Page 135 of Dawn of the Gods, by Jacquetta Hawkes); the very best of the master armourer’s trade.
Thus they readied themselves for the next slaughter. It may very well have been as in today, when the new aggressors, designated Communist as according to the meaning of that word, may very well be preparing for the destruction of those easy-going people of the Anglo-Saxon world from whose skill and technique derive those finest of arms through which their world could indeed be threatened with total obliteration. … read more
Both according to François Lenormant(1) and the Cambridge Ancient History,(2) cheques were in use in Babylonia from the earliest times. Such use of cheques has also been verified as having existed at Ur during the 3rd and 4th Millenniums B.C. by Sir Charles L. Woolley, and no doubt, by other archaeologists at other sites.
As the only clear meaning that can be given to the law No. 7 of Hammurabai, indicates that also were known in the 3rd Millennium or earlier, the principles of private money creation through the creation of receipts as against valuables on deposit with persons of “Repute,” the existence of all the abuses against the men of the city, deriving from the exercise of the principles of inflation and deflation of the total number of such receipts indicating given numbers of the unit of exchange, may be deemed to have existed. These inflations or deflations of the volume of the mass of abstract money, which indeed such false receipts may be called, and such as are particularly associated with the custom of making payments by cheque drawn on “deposits” created by such receipts as issued by such persons “of repute,” and which could be manipulated as suited themselves and their friends etc., were directed towards creation of total monopoly of wealth and industry.
Further, as according to Paul Einzig, “a credit system developed in Greece as in other parts of the ancient world long before the adoption of coinage,”(3) it may reasonably be supposed that well before the flood of refugees that must have poured out of Aram in the earlier days of the first millennium B.C. as a result of the Assyrian onslaught, Babylonian money power had already established branch agencies on the coast of Greece, and in the Mycenaean centres generally, from which they loaned their clay “promises to pay”, expressed in terms of silver no doubt, as against collateral. Such loans could be used to purchase those luxury goods and arms which were brought from the Syrian or Mesopotamian cities; but although the original loan had been but an entry in the ledger of the agent, probably, in the final analysis costing little more than the labour of slave scribe, the repayment demanded would be silver or slaves, or other equally desirable goods.
Clear evidence of the existence of this Babylonian force in the Mycenaean cities was yielded by verification of the fact of the existence of the mythological Cadmus of Grecian Thebes, reputedly Phoenician (Phoenician being simply a word used by the Greeks to describe those people that came to trade from the ports of Syria and Canaan), having probably been reality. This historical fact was revealed by the discovery in modern day Thebes in the area that in ancient times must have been the national storehouses, of cylinders containing seals of a high dignitary of the court of King Burraburias who reigned in the city of Babylon in the first half of the 14th Century B.C.
The growth during the early years of the first Millennium B.C. of the use of hardened iron tools in the mining industry and the development of a highly efficient system by the Phoenicians, for smelting calamine and other silver bearing ores, as shown by the almost complete absence of silver in the slags or scoria left by their mining operations at Laureion, released a heavy flow of silver on to the bullion markets of the Near East; with the consequence that silver, further than being a standard for money accounting between merchants and also the temples “in relation to staples, other metals, and customary services…” became an actual means of payment ”… and as currency of all levels of transaction.” This practice, with all the possibilities inherent therein towards the virtually unlimited private creation of money in opposition to that money which had originated as entry in the temple ledger, spread westward with all its attendant evils during the first half of the first millennium B.C., as already pointed out in respect to Greece.
While certain temple organizations still survived as previously mentioned and were strongly maintained, the instances quoted being those of the temples of Sippur and Uruk (Oppenheim; P.46), the flood of privately issued and controlled money which in reality was this new silver in circulation, together with the pyramid of ledger credit page entry money raised thereon, had almost completely effaced even the memory of that law in relation to exchanges, that was the word and order of the god of the city himself, and that had been the issue of kings and priesthood of former times… These kings may have been aware that the source of all their powers was the power inherent m the creation and emission of the units of exchange, which was the power to discriminate, the power to reject or prefer from amongst their subjects; and of course they may not have been so aware.
Of the evidence revealing the steps by which this god-power was undermined, the first and most important was the establishment of internal values in the exchanges within any state to the same standard as the value of silver in the international exchanges, which did not happen overnight as it were, and may have slowly taken place over several thousand years; for at least 1500 years before what was supposed to be the invention of coined money in Lydia, silver ingots already circulated in Babylonia bearing the stamp of the issuing and guaranteeing authority, whether temple, state, or merchant… Before this time “Silver was used in many instances as a standard of value even though it was not actually employed in payments.”
It is not until the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian eras that clear evidence can be traced of the total degeneration of kingly power and of kings and so-called emperors as quite often being little more than gloriously be-medalled front men for private money creative power striving to create world-wide hegemony … They still continued to be needed principally as a point towards which the eyes of the people might be diverted in order that the people might not realize that all was not well in that direction towards which their loyalties naturally leaned, nor glimpse the destructive forces that were gnawing at the roots of the Tree of Life itself. Even as far back as 2500 B.C. Sargon of Akkad proceeded into Anatolia to chastise the city of Ganes on account of the commercial community of Mesopotamia; probably to enforce payment of interest on loans, or repayment of principal…
Without a doubt, the ramifications of Babylonian banking as operated from Nineveh during the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., extended in more or less degree over that total area from Tartessus to India,(1) and from the gold washings of that great bend in the Nile in Nubia known as the Bisharee, to the mines of Cornwall ; and of all such area it was the focus of land and sea routes . In absolute degree during the first millennium, it extended as far afield as there is evidence of Aramaic as language of official and merchant classes ; that is to say from Peshawar to Greece.(2) In Greece the evidence however is not so much from Aramaic as language, as from the fact that the Greek alphabet derives from Aramaic,(3) and therefore may be assumed to be the design of refugee Arameans of the period after 933 B.C., when Assyrian policy after forty years of unremitting pressure from the Arameans, became the extirpation of the Aramean, achievable from much strengthened military resources.
Accolytes of the bankers of Babylonia, whether from Nineveh, Carchemish, or the Babylonian cities themselves, who sought their own fields abroad, or prominent but unsuspecting natives of the area chosen for penetration, were selected as “suitable” to open the trade in a given area ; “suitability”, as in today, being advanced training in money worship, basic lack of integrity, and preferably some black mark in their secret past making them amenable to pressure and willing to grind down their own kind, or sell them to the slave trader without the gate, and without mercy and without compunction.
Those refugees skilled in money, from the cities of Aram in particular, though perhaps not qualifying in every specific trait detailed above, being dispossessed, and with therefore bitterness in their hearts, would have served best . They would have considered that alignment with the Babylonian banking houses would be alignment with enemy and destroyer of that which had destroyed them . Such silver money as they later minted and circulated from Aegina and Argos, appears, as is explained below, to have been of the same weight and fineness as the Babylonian shekel, being that it was eighty-five grains to the drachma . Thus it is evident that the financial organization these Arameans created in Greece previous to Solon was outright extension of the Babylonian ; in a way it might have been the instrument of Babylonian imperialism, just as was the entry on the tablet of the traveling agent of the Temple of Ur, recording loans made to enable purchase, instrument, two thousand years before, of that imperialism of Ur(4).. . Thus the coinage as used at Athens at this time, wherever minted, could be exported and circulated in Babylonia or other cities of this common money market ; and while it could be profitably used in settlement of unfavourable Indian trade balances, it could also be returned to Athens without loss or remitting.
Phrygia, Finance, and Front Man
The Assyrian conquests must have released a very flood of bullion on to the markets of the Middle East. Steeply rising prices that would have followed must have made it more profitable for bankers and money lenders and manufacturers from this most ancient area to look further afield for lands where money as denoted by treasure was not so plentiful, and therefore wherein such treasure might serve them best. The gold, silver, and electrum bullion with which, after 671 B.C. and the Assyrian thrust into Egypt during the second phase of Assyrian conquest, their store houses and strong rooms were overflowing, could be put to better use than lying inactive in these same store houses or strong rooms, at Nineveh, Babylon, Lagash, or Ur or wherever they were situated.
The privately issued electrum staters of Lydia of the seventh and sixth century B.C. denoted a highly significant possibility… Lydia was the source of something Assyria badly needed. The first thing such military organization such as existed in Assyria would need, would be financial organization, and secondly, stemming from its financial organization, organization above all towards the purpose of the purchase of the best of arms… Phrygia was famous throughout the ancient world for its arms.(1) Lydia bordered on and indeed may very well have been part of Phrygia in earlier times. Hence the secret of the electrum staters. Assyria needed Phrygian arms and at the same time had to accept such financial terns as the suppliers of such arms decreed, and it may safely be assured that such terms stipulated payment was to be made in gold, silver, or electrum.
The extraordinary treasure of such as Sadyattes, latter dispossessed and executed by Croesus, cannot be explained any other way. It had to derive from the plunder gathered up by Assyria from all its conquests, as much as from the river washings of Lydia. The evidence of the gold artifacts, of the ancient civilizations of Anatolia of thousands of years previous to this time, such as Hacilar, Catal Huyuk, Dorak,(2) would indicate that the Anatolian rivers had been well washed for gold many ages before(3)… Although according to the Guide to the principal coins of the Greeks published by the British Museum, pages 12-13, electrum for the Lydian coinages came from the Pactolus river, the question still stands: “what happened to the enormous gold, silver, and electrum plunder, of Assyria; that had been taken from Aram, Israel, Arabia, and above all from Egypt?”
Of the tyrants of Greece and Asia Minor in ancient times, the learned Professor Heichelheim wrote :(1)
“ These tyrants were for the most part members of the nobility themselves who had made the grade using the new political and economic possibilities of their time to overthrow their own equals and to subdue their whole home state temporarily. The tyrants were often compelled to introduce the coin economy pattern into the area over which they ruled, or at least to promote its development officially, in order to gain the upper hand over their enemies … To stabilize the position of the peasantry on the land, and to expand and rebuild state economy, a central distribution of money and goods in kind partly directed towards mercenaries, bodyguards and various political friends, and partly indirectly to the masses of poor people in the form of wages paid for extensive building operations and improvements, is characteristic of tyrant economy…”
The above remarks of Professor Heichelheim indicate there were “new political and economic possibilities” in that period 650-500 B.C. when the tyrannies most of all flourished … The question then becomes, what were these “new political and economic possibilities ?” … The answer is arrived at readily ; they derived from the activities of the agents of the international silver bullion brokers, who, from ports such as Argos, Athens, and Aegina where King Pheidon struck the first Greek silver coinage c.680 BC., promoted the luxury traders who sold their wares from wigs to harlots as against the new silver coinage or promise thereof. The opportunities clearly were for those who assisted in the monetization of the city, and all its activities and possessions, and its population, man, woman, and child, and their possessions too, and thereby assisted in the firm establishment of the rule of bankers, trade, and traders, as against the gods ruling over mankind living in his natural order.
“The aristocracies refused political equality to the landless traders and manufacturers, the peasants were oppressed by the rich and encouraged to get into debt and then were reduced to slavery and exile ; slaves began to compete with free labour. Ambitious individuals capitalized this discontent to overthrow the constituted government and establish themselves as tyrants in all the Greek cities with the notable exception of Sparta …”
The glimpse at these cataclysmic events of relatively modern times, as in the previous chapter, will assist towards understanding of the implications of similar events in ancient times of which but the most fragmentary information exists. As was written three thousand years ago:
“Is there anything whereof it may be said; See this is new ? it hath been already of old time which was before us.”(1)
So returning to that smaller world of ancient days, the theme of this book, it may safely be said that similar conspiracy and secret manoeuvre led up to all that fast changing sequence of social events that clearly followed a definite design, in Attica; particularly from the collapse of hereditary kingship in 683 B.C.; which date marks, it most reasonably may be assumed, the commencement of rule by Money Creative Power either international or home grown… A king created annually by vote has even less chance of ruling effectively than the so-called presidents of today, elective kings as they really are, though sorry enough spectacles some of them may be, and who have as much as five years to serve the purposes of whoever they front for…
Some writers dismiss the idea of a capitalism in antiquity, but accepting definition of capitalism as the condition of the unrestricted promotion of human activity through the instrument of the driving force of that power of creation, and loan against collateral, and at interest, of the unit of exchange, or of promises of the unit of exchange as denoted by Ledger Credit Page Entry, and which function as the same thing in exchanges between persons dealing with the same banker or interlocked system of banks, very little analysis of the circumstances that gave rise to the tyrants will show that a form of “capitalism” did exist, even if more local in character, and restricted to the individual city, or state, as a rule. The tyrant was front man towards the total monetization of the state, the land and its labour, and towards the transfer of that independent labour formerly firmly placed in the Natural Order of God-Life, to a condition of dependence on a wage of money, directed towards being able to keep on living as with the notion of being a free man.
Aristotle, author of some lucid thinking on the subject of money, if not ruthlessly penetrative, was himself married to the niece of a banker installed as co-tyrant (or “Front Man”) with another such tyrant-banker… ”(Hermias the Tyrant of Assos and Atarneus) was a eunuch slave of a certain banker: he went to Athens and attended the lectures of Plato and Aristotle, and returning, he shared the tyranny of his master who had previously secured the places around Atarneus and Assos. Subsequently he succeeded him and sent for Aristotle and married his niece to him…(1)
…In this slave, banker, philosopher and despot Leaf (2) sees a tyrant who owed his position to his wealth. He quotes Euaion, the pupil of Plato, who, not far to the North at Lampsacus 'lent money to the city on security of the Acropolis, and when the city defaulted, wanted to become a tyrant'…”(3)
While bankers in the present dream of entrapping the whole world via their “United Nations”, in the past they contented themselves with the entrapping of a city! … Just as in the present they create an entirely false picture of the nature of their operations and carefully promote the legend they are lending the public's money, so they did in antiquity, we may rest assured. No doubt they spread exactly the same story in the time of the tyrants, and people in that day, understanding no more about money than they do today, believed it(4)… The following may be accepted as instance of their activities in ancient times.
Before ever the lust seized the Greeks for the precious metal pieces on which were recorded their laws in respect to the unit of exchange ; that is, before Greece became completely thrall to the international bullion and slave interests, money had existed among them in various forms for a long time previously.(1) Little knowledge remains of such systems of exchange as existed prior to the assumption of international bullion and slave interests of total hegemony over a great deal of Greece, but exist such systems did, and the significance of its monetary units issued against state expenses, and as opposed to issue by private persons as against collateral security, was understood, as the evidence of the Sparta of Lycurgus indicates…
On this subject Babelon, French Numismatist of the 19th Century says : …“ Having established the existence of these salmons or spits of iron that were the circulating money of the Peloponnese, it will be easy for us to define clearly the part played by this prince (Pheidon) . He was not inventor of money, but the same as Servius Tullius, a reformer . He introduced into the Peloponnese a definite system of weights and measures, instead of the numerous systems that had thrown confusion and disorder into commercial relations ; he adapted the weight of the new money to the new system of weights, and he officially abolished the old and cumbersome iron money, of which he consecrated several samples in the Temple at Argos …”(2)
Numismatists airily dismiss the suggestions of the symbols of money as being indicated in ancient times on leather, wood, or baked clay, which are found in both Cedrenus, Suidas, and Seneca,(3) but study of so-called primitive currencies of today, such as the shell moneys of Oceania, leave little doubt that our forefathers, fully understanding of the true philosophy of money, may very well have used such intrinsically valueless materials to record the values of their tangible money, prior to the commencement of precious metal coinage ; in the same way as the Melanesians and Micronesians have used shells for such purpose, from time immemorial.(4)
Sparta, The Pelanors, Wealth, and Women
Sparta, of all the Greek States, is one that resisted most of all, in ancient times, the encroachments of international money power, and the circulation of precious metals, and all those demoralizing factors deriving therefrom. However, from those laws promulgated by Lycurgus in Sparta, reputedly during the ninth Century B.C., but, as according to the archaeologists, the early sixth century B.C.,(1) it would seem that all those evils deriving from giving such international money power free rein, had already been experienced, and had brought about that reaction amongst the people generally that enabled Lycurgus to take those measures by which he expunged forever the main causes of the sickness of greed and self-interest which ate at the heart of the Doric overlord class of the Peloponnese. To him(2) are ascribed those laws directed towards this purpose such as are described by Plutarch:
“Not contented with this (redistribution of land) he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left among them; but finding it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was very little worth. So that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds, there was required a pretty large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedaemon for who would rob another of such coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force or accept as a bribe, a thing which was not easy to hide or a credit to have, or indeed of any use to cut in pieces. For when it was red-hot they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it and made it almost incapable of being worked. In the next place he declared an outlawry of all superfluous arts; but here he might have spared his proclamation; for they of themselves would have gone after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work, for being iron it was scarcely portable, neither if they should take the means to export it, would it pass among the other Greeks who ridiculed it. So now there was no means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares, no itinerate fortune teller, no harlot monger, or gold or silver smith, engraver or jeweller set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and died away of itself. For the rich had no advantage here over the poor as their wealth and abundance had no road to come abroad by, but were shut up at home doing nothing.”(3)
Money Creators and the Political Control
In their inception, so-called political parties were other expression of the principle of rule of tyrant or dictator . Though apparently instituted in opposition to each other, such societies, or groups, or even persons, representing such seemingly conflicting political interests, were the very natural outcome of complete usurpation of the essence of sovereign power, the god-force from on high that gave life to a people or state, through conspiracy in respect to interference with the issue of the unit of exchange . Such front organizations are the natural result of the existence in any such state or people, of semi-secret societies in one form or the other, religious or racial, alien by origin or otherwise, arrogating to themselves that privilege which formerly belonged to the god alone, of the creation of exchange units, abstract or otherwise . The only limit to the amount of such private issue, especially if abstract, i.e., as by transferable ledger credit page entry (indicated by the use of assignments or cheques) would be the limit dictated by caution against over-saturation of that money market, national or international being interfered with. Naturally it was usually born in mind that the (silly)goose that laid the golden eggs, must not be altogether destroyed, and care was taken that the real meaning of these activities(1) was deeply concealed for fear that ruler and people might come to realize the true nature of the forces at work in their midst.. . Each of these groups of persons in the case of so called political parties, or each of these persons in the case of tyrants or dictators, could not but be instrument for private money creative power .
Such establishment of conflicting groups, each claiming to have the answer towards perfect government, and, in the case of a constitutional monarchy, each swearing allegiance to the monarch, now but paid servant of money power, or in the case of a republic, each swearing allegiance to a president, in reality an elective king raised up from the “People”, was a very efficient device of such private money creative power towards the maintenance of its own hegemony . . . Herein was venality and corruption enthroned.. . Such “Politicians” as turned to look a little too closely at the hand that fed them, promptly found their “Perks”,(2) or “Political Rewards”, cut off .
Should any government begin to be restless, and unwilling to accept the axiom that it should have no real say in that most serious matter of all, monetary emission, the line of communication from the god in heaven to the people, then it would be but a short time before private money creative power transferred its favours to the so-called opposition . Funds would be made available sufficient to guarantee under normal circumstances their winning the “Election” and their consequent assumption of the government . At the same time funds would be withdrawn from the “Political Party” previously in control of the “government” ; which would very likely mean that, in the following confusion, men more “suitable” and “pliable” would force their way to the top ; so that even if that particular government was reelected, private money creative power would have no further fears . The price was always continuance of those policies most needed by such private money creative power necessary for its own real purposes, and therefore the continuance of its hegemony. . .
. . . So speaking of one world and of World Rule, a vision stirs of a distant past, and of efforts towards World Rule in a smaller world of another day ; a past of which so little remains other than shattered columns, cracked vases, a few precious metal coins and baked clay facsimiles thereof, and the writings of relatively a handful of the best of a former day, amongst which, strangely enough, still exist the works of the propagandists for money power such as Xenophon, and, as some say, Thucydides.
Behind these scattered fragments and the unseen but still existing remains of millions of dead that lie beneath land and sea, consumed in the constant wars of those ancient days, is the enigmatic vision of those half-Greek men amongst their records in the counting houses of Athens and the Piraeus, and the clear picture of them and their “Boy”, Pericles, scion of that line of the shifty Alkmeonidae, preparing under their guidance, plans for that “Great War” which would extend their financial hegemony across the whole Grecian world . If events proceeded along those lines in which they would see to it that they were guided, then, who knows ? perhaps as a consequence, their financial hegemony might in time be brought to spread across the whole world . one world might, as a result of the scheming of their fevered brains, be brought to reality . . .
This empire was now completely controlled by them . After Klearchos, and the edict of 432 B.C. in which the Athenian allies were forbidden to use any standard other than that of Attica, followed by the edict of 415 B.C. in which the minting of silver was altogether forbidden them, the Athenian Empire must have fallen totally under the control of the banks . The edict ordering the subject allies to contribute money instead of ships, meant that they were to be drained of silver . When the silver was gone, they would be obliged to come hat in hand to the Piraeus for that which the “Great” Bankers were now lending as money against real collateral ; entries in the credit page of their ledger, or clay facsimiles of silver and gold money which once had been…
This war would give the bankers complete control of Greece and all that such could bring about through their financial guidance . None would flourish from Colchis(1) to Illyria except they so willed it . The instrument which was Athens and its allies would finally and forever destroy that Spartan hegemony in the Peloponnese that had so long denied them entry, and had refused to accept their terms, and permit the circulation of that which they through trade and money . All that proud Dorian aristocracy of the Peloponnese would be exterminated, as these bankers had arranged long since for the aristocracy of so many other states and cities of the world . . . Their own future as a people destined to be lord over all, would be secure, except those wretched political hacks of Athens could be called their peers . . . Gone forever would be the iron and leather money of the Lacedaemonians, over whose issues they had no control, no foreign pedlars being permitted, no “Businessmen”, nor trade in imported luxuries . . .
So with this vision before them, the war would commence, and from that blood and fire that they the bankers would see to it would sweep the land, could come nothing but good for them as they planned in the shadows in the inner chambers of the counting houses of the Piraeus . These men knew that whatever happened, and the result was certain so they estimated, finally their agents would be permitted that which they wanted above all : permanent residence in Sparta, and time consequently to spread the poison amongst the people of Sparta which only they knew the brewing of to such perfection, the poison of moral decay . Under the stress of war, Sparta, through the agency of its ageing king Archidamos, who was privately friend of the banker's “Boy”, Pericles, would secretly accept their terms, and permit the circulation of that which they loaned as money, and permit private persons to possess and hoard silver and gold, which, through the “Principles of Banking” would soon be theirs in any case . . .