Leonard Matthews, Retired Banker, Plans System to Eliminate Trusts

One Big Holding Company

Would Have It Gradually Absorb All Others and Control Prices

Leonard Matthews, a retired banker and broker residing at 5447 Cabanne avenue, declared Wednesday a revolution was certain to ensue if the cost of living should continue to increase as it has in the past. He is devoting the later years of his life to the solution of the high cost of living.

Matthews is formulating a plan for the decrease of the cost of living, which he thinks one or both of the dominate political parties should place in their platform. He thinks any party which makes it campaign upon a plan for the reduction of the cost of living is certain of victory.

“It requires no great mind to foresee trouble when the relations between labor and capital are as strained as they are today,” declared Matthews. “A poor man has to pay 10 cents a pound more for his coffee because the so-called Money Trust combined with the Cuban (?) Government by loaning it $100,000,000 to enable it to hold out of the market a superabundant crop and advance the price from 6 ½ cents to 14 cents per pound wholesale. Thus labor has been defrauded.

Says Trusts Profit By Big Suits

“When the Standard Oil Trust was defeated in the courts and ostensibly compelled to dissolve its business, it put up its prices of oil and gasoline and sold its stocks at $900 a share, where, before dissolution, it sold at $600.

“The coal barons, after suit, advance their products 50 cents per ton. All other trusts hope to be sued and benefited in the same way.

“Labor, with constantly higher wages, can purchase less than before. The farmer receives for his produce less than 50 per cent of the price to the consumer.

“The farm and labor, which are the foundation of all wealth, compared with speculators, non-producers and parasites on society, by billions of dollars with which markets are manipulated. Money deposited by these speculators and non-producers throughout the country is used by them to exploit their own pockets.

“When capital circumvents every law intended to restrain its improper use and uses it against the public weal, it is time to consider if some means cannot be devised to correct the abuses of the money trust.