Overflight, 55

It is easily apprehended that the banking institutions alone, by the geometrical progression of accumulation of interest, dividends, and profits, would if left free to do so, take the most of our earnings and property holdings and utterly exhausting means.
… each separate trust by the geometrical progression in accumulated interest, dividends and profits, will require only time in which to consume our present property as well as our accruing earnings, and, if we allow it, force upon us a state of bankruptcy, because the geometrical progression is impossible to be carried out without so doing. … we still have the absurdity of our courts holding that a certain percentage should be a reasonable profit and anything less unfair. If this law were enforced it would ultimately create abject slaves and bankrupts of our children, and we, the parents, should be made to work toward that end. …
The several trusts cannot of course, absorb all, but after legally (and otherwise) seizing the principal part of our earnings, they swallow up the smaller of their own kind. The big fishes eat the little ones. As a result, the trusts become less and less in number, but their holdings become greater and greater, the same as the number and holdings of the English landowners. …
In 1829 the land in England was owned by 165,000 people. One−half of the land in the whole kingdom is now owned by less than fifteen persons. Less than a dozen persons in our own country dominate its finances. …
The Government has given its support to the banks by delegating to them the power to issue a substitute for money, and besides that advantage they are depositories for the cash of the people, with which they command a large credit. As a consequence, they have had the inside track in this unequal commercial struggle and they are now largely the masters of business, with the results which I have described.
That is why all of the great trust builders have themselves become bankers. …