While riding into Montreal on a bus one day not long ago, our attention was caught by a poster appealing to citizens to donate money to a local campaign which was seeking to provide free milk for needy and undernourished children. The placard featured a youngster holding a bottle of milk and smiling gratefully. Beneath the picture were these words in bold lettering: "Your dollar will buy him 8 quarts of milk!"
The poster was sponsored by one of the country's leading banks.
Now, obviously there was a large number of children who needed milk badly and were unable to come by it. Otherwise there would be no widespread campaign with the advertising being sponsored by a great banking institution. But why do the children not have milk? Because there is a shortage of milk? Not at all. For the poster explicitly states that your dollar will buy milk.
No, there is not a shortage of milk. The dairy cows and the dairy farmers of the land are all doing their part magnificently. Canada is capable of producing — and does in fact produce — some 18,000,000,000 lbs of milk a year. We stand open to correction, but that seems to us to be very close to 6,000,000,000 quarts of milk. Which is a very respectable amount of milk for a nation of 17,000,000 people.
So naturally the question arises, how does it happen that with all this milk being produced (and the government putting away heaven only knows how much of it into surplus stocks as powdered milk) a campaign must be waged to get citizens to donate money to buy milk for children who are undernourished for lack of it? And that, here in Canada!
The answer is simple. The parents of these children haven't the money with which to buy milk for their kiddies.
There is a desperate need for milk. There is milk in abundance. The land is flowing with it. The government doesn't know what to do with the surpluses. And yet this superfluity of milk can't be used to meet this crying need for it simply because of a shortage of a man-made thing (which doesn't depend upon either the workings of Providence or the vagaries of Mother Nature) which we call money or credit.
And what is true of milk is equally true of many other of the staple products, which are needed by man to keep life in his body. Not only here in Canada, but all over the world witness the Asiatic countries — multitudes are actually starving to death or dying of malnutrition while certain countries are storing away billions of tons of powdered milk, eggs, butter, wheat, etc., to a point where it is actually costing billions every year just for the storage-problem!
God, through nature, gives us all the meat, bread, milk and other materials which we need to live comfortably. There is enough for everyone. The statistics bear this out. But men, through the existing financial system, choke off the flow of money and credit which are the only means whereby this abundance of nature can be distributed to those who need them.
"Is there a manufacturer in this country, or for that matter in any other, who is not clamouring to turn out more goods if someone will give him orders for them? Is there a farmer who is complaining that his land and his stock are unable to cope with the demands for agricultural produce which pour in upon him? If so, an explanation as to why nearly three million acres of arable land have gone back to pasture in the last twelve years would be interesting. (Major Douglas was writing about England after the First World War. — Ed.)
On the other hand, it is patent, that in spite of this enormous and potential reservoir of the goods for which mankind has a use, a large proportion of the population is unable to get at them. What is it, then, which stands in between this enormous reservoir of supply and the increasing clamour of the multitudes, able to voice, but unable to satisfy their demand? The answer is so short as to be almost banal. It is Money. And, as we shall see, the position into which money and the methods by which it is controlled and manipulated have brought the world, arises, not from any defect or vice inseparable from money (which is probably one of the most marvelous and perfect agencies for enabling co-operation that the world has ever conceived), but because of the subordination of this powerful tool to the objective of what it is not unfair to call a hidden government."
Major Douglas in Social Credit, Pp. 24-25
If there is a shortage of money with which to nourish our children with the superfluity of food which exists it is because finance prevents money from reaching the pocketbooks of fathers of families.
This "hidden government", this dictatorship of the powers of finance is so powerful that mere governments cannot stand up to it. Only the power of an enlightened and determined people, working through their representatives in the government, can ever hope to bring an end to its tyranny.
The Union of Electors, through its publications, this paper and the French-language Vers Demain, are striving to educate the people to true principles of government and finance, the principles of Social Credit. It is working to enlighten the people, to arouse the people, to train the people how to act in order to make their wishes known effectively to the government in order that a Social Credit Society might be brought into being. Through it financial proposals of credit without interest charges for production, and a just sharing of purchasing power to consumers through the dividend, it hopes to bring to an end such absurdities as campaigns to bring charitable donations of milk to undernourished children in a land where mik is so abundant.