Noticed by Stanley Dundee:

2020-07-02: Liberal Leader Mackenzie King Said in 1935, by Louis Even

Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation

Matthew Ehret quotes Mackenzie King in a recent Saker article:

Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes that nation's laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.

This a point that I have belabored generally in Getting Money Right and specifically in democratic sovereignty. King really nails it. But how reliable is the quote?

There's a similar, widely cited quote attributed to Mayer Rothschild, Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes it's laws. However, that attribution is highly suspect, according to History Stack Exchange and Wikiquote. So I had my suspicions about King's quote as well. Some internet research revealed numerous citations, but none of them seemed particularly reliable.

The best I found was a transcription of a 1946 book by Louis Even, In This Age of Plenty, on what appears to be a quaint Christian libertarian site. Thanks to Family Guardian for hosting this fascinating text! It's a real book, and apparently still in print. The King quote can be found in Chapter 24, which is the source for this notice. Even led with the quote, but he reports that King never got very far with his commitment to curb the dictatorship of finance.

Turns out Even was an evangelist for Social Credit, a coherent and cogent body of thought on social matters developed early in the twentieth century by Clifford Hugh Douglas, according to the C.H. Douglas Institute for the Study and Promotion of Social Credit. Possibly a worthy subject for a future enquiry.