THE GIFT OF 
 
 MAY TREAT MORRISON 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 ALEXANDER F MORRISON
 
 -J"
 
 GOVERNMENT AND CO. 
 
 LIMITED
 
 GOVERNMENT AND CO. 
 
 LIMITED 
 
 AN EXAMINATION OF THE TENDENCIES OF 
 PRIVILEGE IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 HORATIO W. SEYMOUR 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 
 
 1895
 
 COPYRIGHT 
 Bv A. C. McCLURG AND CO. 
 
 A. D. 1895
 
 55/3 
 
 t 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 I. Erring Democracies, - * 7 
 
 II. Monarchies and Democracies, - lo 
 
 III. Barons, New and Old - - 15 
 
 IV. Privilege Under Mask, - 18 
 V. What it Demands, - - - 21 
 
 VI. The Aberration of a People, - 25 
 
 VII. On a Low Plane, - - '30 
 
 VIII. A Question of Morals, - - 34 
 
 IX. Parties of Moral Ideas, - - 39 
 
 X. Oppressor and Oppressed, - 46 
 
 XI. The Price of Liberty, - - 50 
 
 XII. Two American Oligarchies, - 56 
 
 XIII. Sloth and Waste, - - - 61 
 
 XIV. Easy Infamy of Privilege, - 68 
 XV. Protectionism's Bribes, - - 73 
 
 XVI. American Pauper Labor, - 78 
 
 XVII. Privilege's Broken Promises, - 86 
 
 XVIII. Like the Thief in the Night, - 90 
 
 XIX. By Its Fruits, - - - - 95 
 
 XX. A Giant in Chains, - - 102 
 
 XXI. Americans with a Grievance, - 107 
 
 XXII. Our Dependent Classes, - 114 
 
 428539
 
 6 CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter. i'^se. 
 
 XXIII. On TO Washington, - - - 119 
 
 XXIV. A Fiery Path, - - - 124 
 XXV. Is It Well Enough ? - - - 132 
 
 XXVI. Where to Look for the Remedy, 137 
 
 XXVII. Desperate Rich and Desperate 
 
 Poor, - - -"144
 
 GOVERNMENT AND CO. 
 
 LIMITED. 
 
 I. 
 ERRING DEMOCRACIES. 
 
 IT has been said of republics that they 
 do not possess the power of self refor- 
 mation. There is no record of a corrupted 
 democracy reclaimed. 
 
 Monarchies have been enfeebled even to 
 the point of dissolution, and, by a happy 
 change of rulers or of dynasties, have reha- 
 bilitated themselves ; but misguided popular 
 governments, though their fate has been 
 foreseen and the causes impelling it have 
 been known, have gone irresistibly to extinc- 
 tion. 
 
 The explanation is obvious. Monarchies 
 may be debauched by a weak sovereign 
 and a corrupt court, but, if wiser and better 
 men succeed to power, remedial measures 
 promptly taken will correct the more glar- 
 7
 
 8 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 ing wrongs arid/rgFiTB^e: wholly the principal 
 causes of. po,pular dec£kdence. The evil 
 inllucncc. 61: a vitioiuS- jrwoharch, surrounded 
 by a profligate aristocracy, will soon com- 
 municate itself to the subjects. In like 
 manner the wholesome example of an 
 enlightened ruling class cannot fail to exert 
 a powerful effect for good, even upon a 
 populace long accustomed to the excesses 
 of a thoroughly despicable court. 
 
 While a democratic government may at 
 times be better or worse than the people 
 from whom it springs, sooner or later it will 
 reach the popular level and remain there. 
 
 The representative character of republics 
 is the one feature of popular government 
 that is not susceptible of change. The 
 people are the sole source of authority; and, 
 if government is not what it should be, it 
 is because the people are not what they 
 should be. If popular government descends 
 from one lower level to another there need 
 be no doubt that the people themselves 
 preceded it in the decline. 
 
 Whatever tends to weaken or to corrupt 
 individual character in a republic, there-
 
 ERRING DEMOCRACIES. 9 
 
 fore, operates unerringly upon the govern- 
 ment of that republic, and when the moral 
 fibre of a majority of the people has been 
 destroyed the possibility of reform is gone. 
 
 People who cannot or will not reform 
 themselves will not undertake to reform 
 their government. Its very vices commend 
 it to them. Its infamies do not displease 
 them, because they recognize them as their 
 own. They listen languidly to the exhorta- 
 tions of men who would awaken their pride 
 and virtue. They rush eagerly to the support 
 of leaders who excite their passions and play 
 upon their ignorance. They glory in their 
 delusions, and the hope of personal advan- 
 tage leads them on to destruction. 
 
 A corrupted democracy never has been 
 reformed : it is probable that a corrupted 
 democracy never will be reformed.
 
 II. 
 
 MONARCHIES AND DEMOCRACIES. 
 
 THE fundamental idea of a monarchy, the 
 principle that most sharply distinguishes 
 it from a democracy, is Privilege. The funda- 
 mental idea of a pure democracy, the prin- 
 ciple that distinguishes it most sharply from 
 a monarchy, is Equality. 
 
 Divested of all the eye-filling appurten- 
 ances of royalty, a constitutional monarchy 
 does not differ much from a republic, except 
 that it necessarily divides and separates its 
 subjects into various orders and estates, some 
 of them enjoying special privileges that are 
 denied to the others. That is the essence 
 of monarchy. The introduction and growth 
 of privilege in a republic can not fail to be a 
 menace to the government ; so also the intro- 
 duction and growth of equality in a monarchy 
 can not fail to be a menace to the govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The world is familiar with the assumption 
 on the part of citizens of republics that they 
 
 lO
 
 MONARCHIES AND DEMOCRACIES. 1 1 
 
 are superior to the subjects of monarchies. 
 In the best estate of a pure republic there is 
 reason for such a contention. The strong 
 and resourceful man who subscribes to the 
 doctrine of " Equal rights for all and special 
 privileges for none," is morally the superior of 
 the man of similar attainments who supports 
 and takes advantage of the monarchical idea, 
 that the classes best able to take care of 
 themselves must have the discriminating 
 favor of their government. 
 
 Citizens of a true republic, taken as a 
 whole, have a right to assume a superiority 
 to the subjects of a monarchy, for of their 
 number are hosts of men who have volun- 
 tarily surrendered advantages which, under a 
 less enlightened system, their natural power 
 and opportunities might easily have secured 
 for them. 
 
 The participation of an entire people, the 
 rich as well as the poor, the wise as well as 
 the ignorant, in the formation of a republic, 
 manifests at every step of the proceeding 
 many of the traits which in private life go to 
 make up the most elevated character. 
 
 Greed, pride, distrust, ambition, injustice
 
 12 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 and vainglory lie at the base of every dyn- 
 asty and of every aristocracy. There can be 
 no true democracy without self-abnegation, 
 mutual confidence and a desire for absolute 
 justice and equality, on the part of the very 
 class which in a monarchy displays propen- 
 sities exactly the reverse of these. 
 
 With this fact in view, the citizens of a 
 republic may be pardoned if they sometimes 
 extol their own institutions ; for the weakest 
 as well as the strongest among them knows 
 that, so far as human imperfections will 
 admit, the golden rule has been carried into 
 the state. They have practiced collectively 
 the virtues that everywhere are deemed 
 admirable in the individual. Deference to 
 the rights of others, a love of justice for 
 the sake of justice — that is the essence of 
 democracy. 
 
 No matter how enlightened a monarchy 
 may be, so long as it retains the customary 
 attachments of caste and privilege, it must 
 perpetuate more or less of barbarism. The 
 ostentation of royalty and aristocracy, devised 
 to impress the humble, only accentuates the 
 barriers raised by generations dead and gone
 
 MONARCHIES AND DEMOCRACIES. 13 
 
 against those who, while the institution lasts, 
 are to be its victims. One class may sympa- 
 thize with a lower class and may seek to 
 ameliorate its condition, but that which actu- 
 ates it is condescension and not justice. The 
 one great civilizing and humanizing idea, — 
 that of brotherhood, is absent. 
 
 Democracy carries into the state the equal- 
 ity, the trust, the fair play of a family. No 
 man who is a citizen is a stranger. There is 
 no tinsel to dazzle his eyes; there are no aw- 
 ful presences, no ponderous titles, to fill him 
 with dismay. There is no pomp to beguile 
 him, and there are no largesses to corrupt 
 him. More important than all else, there are 
 no laws and no " institutions " handed down 
 from a ravening ancestry to thwart his aspi- 
 rations and to deprive him of the opportuni- 
 ties for advancement which capacity and 
 industry may open to him. 
 
 To the extent that a republic fulfills the 
 promise of its founders, it removes from one 
 of the most important theaters of human ac- 
 tion — that of government — the baseness, the 
 selfishness, the wrong, against which every 
 moralist has most strenuously contended.
 
 H GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 To the extent that it departs from these high 
 ideals, it relapses toward an inferior civili- 
 zation, and, by retaining the forms of justice 
 without their substance, emphasizes the 
 mockery of all pretense and the danger of 
 every falsehood.
 
 III. 
 
 BARONS, NEW AND OLD. 
 
 THE first century of the American Consti- 
 tution terminated in 1887. Some of 
 the objects of that instrument, as set forth in 
 the preamble, are to establish justice, to pro- 
 mote the general welfare, and to secure the 
 blessings of liberty. 
 
 Justice was not established for a few, but 
 for all. It was not the welfare of a class that 
 was to be promoted ; it was the general 
 welfare. The blessings of liberty were to be 
 made secure, not for a season or for a 
 number, but forever and for all. 
 
 The first century of the American Consti- 
 tution closed with Privilege as well rooted in 
 the legislative practices of the country as the 
 most consistent monarchist could have wished. 
 If its approach had been stealthy, its growing 
 arrogance had made it careless of disguises 
 and reckless of danger. 
 
 Addressing itself to a government pledged 
 on every hand to justice and equality, it de- 
 15
 
 1 6 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 manded for itself, with magnificent impu- 
 dence, rights and opportunities which were 
 denied to others. Assuming feudal airs and 
 responsibilities, it exacted from the law-mak- 
 ing power of the republic concessions de- 
 signed for its own exclusive profit and neces- 
 sarily for the oppression of a more numerous 
 class equally entitled to the protecting favor 
 of government. 
 
 Having the opportunity and the power to 
 control public affairs, it improved the one 
 and exerted the other, in such a manner as 
 to reverse the beneficent policy of the repub- 
 lic, and to enter upon a retrogressive move- 
 ment unexampled in the history of modern 
 nations. 
 
 When the barons of King John's time 
 forced that representative of the absolutism 
 of the thirteenth century to surrender to 
 them some of the powers that he had arro- 
 gated to himself, there was a distinct gain 
 for liberty, though the idea of equality was 
 not recognized. 
 
 When the barons of America forced the 
 United States government to confer upon 
 themselves exclusively privileges sacredly
 
 BARONS, NEW AND OLD. 17 
 
 held in trust for all, there was a notable loss 
 of liberty, for a great and noble human aspi- 
 ration was perverted by the process. 
 
 Twenty-five nobles were appointed in 
 King John's time to see that the provisions 
 of Magna Charta were faithfully observed. 
 The barons of our own day have been spared 
 this exertion. The provisions of their great 
 charters of injustice are everywhere loyally 
 enforced by the official agents of the sover- 
 eigns whom they despoil. 
 
 The unequal laws and the dishonest poli- 
 cies which greed has devised bear the sig- 
 natures of presidents, governors and mayors; 
 and their proper formality is attested by 
 the speakers and presidents of the legislative 
 bodies, national and state, which have given 
 them their sanction. 
 
 They meet every requirement of the con- 
 stitution save one — they violate its spirit. 
 The bear the great seals of the republic and 
 of the commonwealth, but they are spotted 
 all over with evidences of triumphant avarice 
 and of trusts betrayed.
 
 IV. 
 
 PRIVILEGE UNDER MASK. 
 
 PRIVILEGE in a monarchy is a long 
 standing assumption. It has no apol- 
 ogies to offer; its candor is its chief virtue; 
 it stands forth in its proper person, with no 
 pretense of philanthropy and no claim to 
 unselfishness. It is so thoroughly consistent 
 that it adopts no disguises. It believes, and 
 it has taught most of the people whom it 
 oppresses to believe that, as the rich are the 
 wise and good, it is proper that the laws 
 should favor the rich and that the rich should 
 exercise a controlling influence in govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Privilege in the United States is a pretense 
 and an intrusion. It pretends to serve the 
 interests of all, while, as a matter of fact, it 
 has regard only for the welfare of the few ; 
 it is rooted in falsehood. It bribes some 
 men, it corrupts many men, and it deludes 
 millions of men; it never is honest; it never 
 avows its real purpose. It thrives only as it 
 i8
 
 PRIVILEGE UNDER MASK. 19 
 
 misleads the masses of the people and per- 
 verts such as cannot be deceived. 
 
 Privilege in America comprehends every 
 cunning subversion of law to the selfish pur- 
 poses of an individual. It is so well grounded 
 in the policies of the government and in the 
 habits of the people, that American political 
 contests now turn upon it almost exclusively, 
 and it is exerting an ever-widening influence 
 upon commercial and industrial affairs. 
 
 It is the organized greed of an era that 
 will be forever memorable for the remorse- 
 less aggrandizement of wealth. It is the 
 militant avarice of a class as shrewd, as 
 unprincipled, as daring, as cruel as the world 
 ever saw — as the imagination of man ever 
 delineated. It is the exaltation of all that is 
 sordid in humanity, all that is wolfish in the 
 powerful, all that is base in the ignorant and 
 weak. 
 
 Privilege in America stands at the doors 
 of Congress and demands laws which place 
 it on an equality with the government in the 
 receipt of moneys drawn from the people. 
 Privilege graciously permits the treasury to 
 have one dollar if it can have two dollars.
 
 20 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 Privilege asks in the name of labor, and 
 receives in the name of monopoly. Privilege 
 begs or bullies, whines or thunders, cajoles or 
 threatens, exactly as the case seems to war- 
 rant. 
 
 Privilege disavows every responsibility. 
 Because it can persuade the federal govern- 
 ment to betray its citizens, it is the more 
 vociferous in its demand that the state gov- 
 ernments shall do the same. It avoids state 
 and municipal taxation by the same methods 
 that it employs to secure an unjust partner- 
 ship in the imposition of federal taxation. 
 
 Privilege makes many solemn engage- 
 ments which it does not observe. Privilege 
 invents many plausible excuses for its de- 
 mands. Privilege is the prolific source of 
 most of the subtle and dangerous errors 
 which everywhere confront the American 
 people. Privilege has many agents — men 
 who speak in its name, who gorge its greed, 
 who secure its ends, and who assume to 
 pledge it to the fulfillment of its self-imposed 
 obligations; but, their work accomplished, 
 they are repudiated by their principals, and 
 nothing is left but the evidence of a colossal 
 infamy.
 
 WHAT IT DEMANDS. 
 
 TARIFFS and other taxes levied for pri- 
 vate rather than for public ends, boun- 
 ties of every style and description, subsidies 
 bestowed in many different ways for the pur- 
 pose of bolstering selfish interests, exclusive 
 grants of franchises by which opportunities 
 are monopolized, pensions to the extent that 
 they may have become mere largesses, unwise 
 and unnecessary legislative interference with 
 the natural rights of men, by means of which 
 some wicked advantage is conferred upon a 
 few for a time, and nearly all gifts of public 
 lands or moneys to corporations, are the basis 
 of Privilege as it exists in America to-day. 
 The recipients of all these favors stand 
 together. Singly they can accomplish little, 
 but united in a compact and resourceful 
 organization, representing what a president 
 of the United States has aptly termed the 
 " communism of pelf," they are all power- 
 ful in shaping the destiny of the nation.
 
 2 2 GO VERNMENT A ND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 This element lives and thrives on the 
 industry of the people. We greet its repre- 
 sentatives with smiles when they come beg- 
 ging or bullying for more. We dignify the 
 class into a national issue. We maintain a 
 great political party whose main object is to 
 sustain its impudence and to lend respecta- 
 bility to its greed. We make its covetous- 
 ness a matter of daily thought and of most 
 solicitous care. 
 
 We read its newspapers with patience 
 and we listen respectfully, sometimes 
 enthusiastically, to its orators, although from 
 neither of them comes an idea but plunder, 
 or an inspiration but selfishness. We submit 
 humbly to its reproaches and its impudence. 
 At its command we abdicate our reason and 
 our intelligence as well as our liberties. We 
 wink at its faintly disguised greed. We 
 accept its foolish assurance that it sustains 
 the people, and that the people do not sus- 
 tain it. We maintain a pretense of belief in 
 its patriotism. We march in its processions, 
 and we rend the air with our shouts as its 
 advocates, most of them ignorant and all of 
 them conscienceless, approach. We permit
 
 WHAT IT DEMANDS. 23 
 
 its agents and representatives to usurp the 
 places which statesmen should occupy, to 
 masquerade before the world as types of 
 American leadership, and to spread upon our 
 statute books in our name laws that some 
 day will bring down upon us the reproach 
 of mankind as surely as the earth shall 
 endure. 
 
 Appealing to the ignorance as well as to 
 the immorality of a nation, this class has 
 acquired its present prestige, and it looks 
 forward to a future of increased security, by 
 the ease with which a people with somewhat 
 too keen an eye upon the main chance may 
 be deluded. The chief pity of it all, the 
 darkest side of it all, is that the American 
 republic, with ample opportunity to inform 
 itself as to the nature of this controversy, is 
 not even now discussing the right and wrong 
 of the matter. It is content, apparently, to 
 consider the question on the low plane which 
 Privilege itself has selected. It is satisfied to 
 let the argument rest on the purely commer- 
 cial lines of profit and loss. 
 
 The issue that confronts us is not: " Is 
 this policy right, or is it wrong?" It is the
 
 24 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 shameful truth that all contention, all investi- 
 gation, all prospect or possibility of what 
 we call a solution of the problem, is embod- 
 ied in the question: " Does it pay?"
 
 VI. 
 
 THE ABERRATION OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 ACTUATING the great pecuniary inter- 
 ests which have intrenched themselves 
 in the laws and policies of government in 
 this country, is a spirit of gain so eager and 
 reckless that, even in its effects upon men as 
 individuals, it long ago excited the condem- 
 nation of the world. It is a spirit which 
 fills our mad houses and other retreats with 
 wrecks and castaways ; which costs thou- 
 sands of lives annually ; which has tenanted 
 many a suicide's grave, and which has broken 
 down a host of men old before their time. 
 
 It is a spirit which hesitates at no sacri- 
 fice that promises gain. It is a spirit which 
 absorbs the energies, the soul, the heart of 
 men ; which makes them reckless of every 
 moral obligation, reckless of ease, reckless 
 of health and life, reckless even of the here- 
 after. 
 
 It is this feverish passion, this delirious 
 craze for wealth, which has laid hold of gov- 
 
 25
 
 26 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 ernment in this republic and has made Privi- 
 lege institutional. It is the aberration of a 
 people given up as no other people ever was 
 to the frenzy of acquisition, which has blinded 
 the eyes of millions to the wrong and the 
 danger of existing policies. 
 
 The spirit of trade, the spirit that is quick 
 to take advantage of the weak or the care- 
 less, the spirit that is ever on the alert for 
 profit, the spirit that scruples at no trickery 
 or deception promising an immediate return 
 in money, is the spirit that is lodged in our 
 laws to-day. 
 
 It is to this spirit that we owe the 
 prevalent idea, that the government supports 
 the people and that the people do not sup- 
 port the government. This spirit has 
 brought into life innumerable political indus- 
 tries, which, in turn, have invited to this 
 country some millions of working people 
 who would not and could not have come 
 here unassisted, and whose wretchedness has 
 become a national scandal. 
 
 This spirit has taxed all the people for 
 the benefit of a few of the people. This 
 spirit is accountable for the error so indus-
 
 THE ABERRA TION OF A PEOPLE 27 
 
 triously propagated, that it is the duty of 
 government to provide work and wages for 
 all. To this spirit is due the fact that the 
 political business man enters upon no new 
 venture until he has made sure of a favoring 
 law at Washington or at some state capital. 
 
 This spirit has developed our manufac- 
 turing industries at the expense of all other 
 industries, to an extent that enables them to 
 supply any and all markets now open to 
 them by working half time, their " pro- 
 tected" labor starving or tramping the other 
 half of the time. 
 
 This spirit has made it feasible for one 
 class to pay some wages by taking from 
 another class the ability to pay any wages. 
 This spirit has forced capital and labor out 
 of naturally productive industries into natur- 
 ally unproductive industries. 
 
 This spirit has made every legislative and 
 every executive officer of the government a 
 huckster, every foreign treaty a trade with 
 some domineering private interest, and many 
 a judgment of the departments or the courts 
 a mere registration of the will of some com- 
 mercial or industrial potentate who chances
 
 28 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 to be in a position to compel action advan- 
 tageous to himself. 
 
 This is the spirit of aggression, individual 
 as against individual, to curb which govern- 
 ments, particularly republican governments, 
 are instituted among men. When such gov- 
 ernments abdicate their true functions and 
 enlist on the side of the avaricious and pow- 
 erful to oppress the people who owe them 
 allegiance and who have a right to look to 
 them for protection from this very evil, the 
 rule of force and fraud is substituted for that 
 of justice and honesty. 
 
 Privilege thus gives a flavor of merchan- 
 dising to our politics, and carries all of the 
 petty and detestable methods of the money 
 grubber into the highest places of govern- 
 ment. Privilege in Europe sometimes con- 
 cerns itself with other things, but Privilege 
 in America never has a thought except as 
 to gain. Its party platforms, its political 
 speeches, its executive papers, its laws and 
 its maxims, support and lend color of 
 truth to the assertion of the distinguished 
 railroad president who declared recently in 
 an interview, that the dollar is the one thing
 
 THE ABERRA TION OF A PEOPLE. 29 
 
 sacred to Americans, Privilege pitches all 
 of our political contests and discussions in 
 this low key, from which there is rarely a 
 variation.
 
 VII. 
 ON A LOW PLANE. 
 
 THE fathers of the republic unhappily 
 sought to compromise the question of 
 human bondage; but, with that pitiful excep- 
 tion, they formed a government of justice, 
 equality and mutual confidence, which was to 
 stand forever above the strife and turmoil of 
 the people's lives, holding the scales with an 
 even hand, protecting and encouraging every 
 lawful enterprise and offering no advantage 
 to the great and the powerful that was not 
 open also to the humblest citizen in the land. 
 Privilege has changed all this. It estab- 
 lishes a system which meddles with and 
 oppresses industry, holds out false hopes of 
 gain to the many, and makes certain only 
 the profits of the few. By unexampled 
 abuses of the taxing power, by promises 
 never intended to be observed, by sophistries 
 and falsehoods so obvious that even their 
 repetition is a reflection on the intelligence 
 of the people, Privilege has convinced 
 30
 
 ON A LOW PLANE. 3^ 
 
 many of the American people that laws 
 designed to oppress most men for the benefit 
 of a few men are of greater value to a repub- 
 lic than the old principles of justice and 
 equality. By these means also Privilege has 
 convinced many of the American people that 
 a system which taxes one man for the bene- 
 fit of another man is to be credited with the 
 wealth of a bountiful nature, with the bless- 
 ings of providence and with the fruits of all 
 industry, in a nation more ambitious and 
 laborious than any other on earth. 
 
 Not every American who has subscribed 
 to this evil doctrine has been deluded ; 
 many are not deceived. The mass of its 
 supporters may be honest, but many — some 
 millions of them — are arrayed under the 
 banner of Privilege, not because they have 
 been misled, not because they are ignorant 
 of the injustice of the proposition, but because 
 they think that in one way or another they 
 are benefited by it, and because they do not 
 care whom or how many it may oppress, so 
 long as they can figure out a little gain for 
 themselves. 
 
 This is an unpalatable truth, but it is
 
 32 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 truth. Our political contests show it ; the 
 utterances of our party leaders show it ; the 
 actions of vast numbers of our voters show 
 it. Political battles in recent years have 
 been won and lost by the shifting of this ele- 
 ment from one side to the other. It is 
 ready to vote for Privilege if it can be con- 
 vinced that Privilege is able and willing to 
 do all that it promises. It has no higher 
 motive than this. It has no other concep- 
 tion, even of its own welfare. 
 
 Promises of dividends and fortunes to 
 one class are no more alluring, if they can 
 be fulfilled, than are promises of wages to 
 another class, if they can be fulfilled. There 
 are several millions of Americans, the 
 descendants and successors of the men who 
 established the doctrine of equal rights, who, 
 on more than one occasion, have demon- 
 strated their willingness to accept the bribe 
 of Privilege if, by any ingenuity of its own 
 or by any fortunate circumstance, Privilege 
 can make it appear that it has kept its part 
 of the bargain. 
 
 The party of Privilege bases its claim to 
 popular favor on such evidence as it can
 
 ON A LOW PL A NE. 33 
 
 bring to the support of its contention that it 
 divides the spoils fairly. The party nomin- 
 ally opposed to Privilege is content in most 
 places with the production of such proof as 
 it can find that the division is unfair. 
 
 On this low plane the discussion pro- 
 ceeds, while Privilege as such, making new 
 conquests of important outposts, menaces 
 the very citadel of liberty itself.
 
 H 
 
 VIII. 
 
 A QUESTION OF MORALS. 
 
 ERE is a question of morals that 
 demands the attention of every honest 
 man — a question that must be settled, and 
 settled right, at no distant day, if this country 
 is to remain a republic in anything but name. 
 With all men equal before the law we are 
 already divided into two classes, one that 
 oppresses and one that is oppressed. Because 
 this infamy has been successfully practiced 
 for a generation, is there an American infat- 
 uated enough to suppose that it can last for- 
 ever? Do the intelligent and patriotic citi- 
 zens of the republic, who, for one reason or 
 another, have winked at this atrocity, imag- 
 ine that it can end in anything but disaster ? 
 With such an example as Privilege thus 
 sets before the young, no one need be sur- 
 prised if the coming generation of Ameri- 
 cans shall develop the most colossal scoun- 
 drelism that the world ever has known. All 
 the landmarks are down ; all the guide posts 
 34
 
 A QUESTION OF MORALS. 35 
 
 removed. We now are teaching inequality 
 and not equality ; we are showing how 
 much better it is to be unjust and rich than 
 it is to be just and poor ; we are holding 
 up the government as a victim to be robbed 
 or a robber to be enlisted on our side when 
 we set out on our forays against our fellow 
 men. 
 
 We no longer draw inspiration from the 
 heroes who taught equal and exact justice 
 and who bequeathed to us a republic that was 
 to be always the best hope of mankind. The 
 constitution we have flouted, the golden rule 
 we have forgotten, the decalogue we have 
 relegated to the garret, as we have turned 
 lightly in pursuit of the golden bait offered 
 by men who have made Privilege and plun- 
 der their watchwords. 
 
 What do we say to the youth aoout to 
 enter upon the serious business of life ? Do 
 we assure him that success is to be reached 
 only by industry, frugality and honesty ? 
 Not at all. We point to a shorter cut. By 
 our example we tell him to go to Congress 
 and beg or buy a law that will enable him to 
 tax his neighbor. Do we say to the aspir-
 
 3^ GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 ing boy that to succeed he must deserve suc- 
 cess ? We do not. We point to the men 
 whom Privilege has made powerful, and we 
 say to him, Get a bounty, or a subsidy or 
 an appropriation. 
 
 Do we hold up scrupulous honesty and 
 undeviating justice as the things most to be 
 desired and most likely to lead to fortune ? 
 Never. We say to the lads of our day, 
 Seek out some unfair advantage by means 
 of a wicked law and then get rich quickly. 
 No matter if you do have to bribe and bully 
 your way to success. Wlio cares ? You will 
 have plenty of company, and if you are a 
 smart rogue 3'ou will find numerous dull but 
 influential rogues who will assist you. 
 
 Do we refer the young man who aspires 
 to political honors to the lives and precepts 
 of the stalwart heroes who made the repub- 
 lic known and honored around the world ? 
 No. Our present system says to him as 
 plainly as words can frame a thought : 
 Never mind the old men ; they were anti- 
 quated and slow. Take off your hat to some 
 selfish interest ; prove your capacity to 
 serve King Iron, King Coal, King Silver,
 
 A QUESTION OF MORALS. 37 
 
 King Copper, King Glass, King Sugar, King 
 Tin, King Salt, King Wool and King Lum- 
 ber ; and then, with their money in your 
 pocket and a He upon your lips, go before 
 the people whom you are to delude and 
 betray ! 
 
 That is the lesson that America is teach- 
 mg to-day while our politicians are discuss- 
 ing the profit and loss of crime ; while 
 our newspapers are marshaling statistical 
 tables on either side of immorality; while 
 good men are footing up columns and mak- 
 ing laborious comparisons between the vary- 
 ing results of dishonesty ; while learned 
 economists are toiling through dismal pages 
 and chapters of useless books, called forth 
 by the pros and cons of oppression ; and 
 while even the most courageous reformers 
 are adjusting their scales with the nicety of 
 an apothecary, to measure the possible dif- 
 ference between policies that they know to 
 be wrong and policies that they know to be 
 far enough from right. 
 
 That is the lesson that Americans are 
 teaching while the dreary contest, in many 
 respects a sham battle, goes stupidly on, 
 
 428539
 
 3^ GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 with no prospect in sight but disaster, and 
 no certainty that complications here or there 
 may not arise any day and compel for 
 another generation an abandonment of the 
 entire discussion.
 
 IX. 
 
 PARTIES OF MORAL IDEAS. 
 
 WE have a great political party nomin- 
 ally arrayed against Privilege, which 
 does not fully represent the real sentiment 
 of those people who are uncompromisingly 
 hostile to the idea. It has enjoyed the sup- 
 port of this element in the past, for the hope 
 has prevailed that eventually- it would rise to 
 the emergency and constitute itself the 
 champion of popular rights. 
 
 It will not be denied that it has done 
 much, but it has not done enough ; it has 
 yet to prove its capacity to adopt a moral 
 idea and carry it to a triumphant issue. Its 
 counsels are divided ; it speaks in equivo- 
 cal tones. It has stood resolutely for a cur- 
 tailment of the pretensions of Privilege, and, 
 at no little cost to itself, it has fought a good 
 fight for popular rights on grounds of expedi- 
 ency. It has yet to demonstrate its ability 
 to take higher ground and to pursue the 
 contest on the broader plane of good morals. 
 39
 
 40 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 It has carried the contest to a point 
 where its own dishonest and self-seeking 
 members have been forced to reveal their 
 treachery and take sides openly with the 
 enemy. It remains to be seen whether it 
 has the virtue and the courage to cast out 
 these false friends, and by the pursuit of jus- 
 tice for the sake of justice, keep in its ranks 
 the great hosts of honest men already there, 
 and win from the thoughtless or the doubt- 
 ing recruits enough to make certain the ulti- 
 mate triumph of the right. 
 
 It was the boast of the political organiza- 
 tion which brought about the destruction of 
 slavery, that it was a party of great moral 
 ideas. A remnant of another and an earlier 
 political organization styled itself the con- 
 science Whigs. There was a good deal of 
 cant and humbug about both of these claims, 
 but for each there was a certain basis in fact. 
 One of them, at least, had this foundation, 
 that the party making it took for its chief 
 object the destruction of an immoral idea. 
 
 When a true party of anti- Privilege takes 
 the field in this country it will have a better 
 claim to the title of a party of great moral
 
 PARTIES OF MORAL IDEAS. 4^ 
 
 ideas than any other that ever existed. The 
 anti-slavery party was a sectional organiza- 
 tion, made up of men who had no possible 
 pecuniary, social, personal or even senti- 
 mental interest in the institution whose 
 destruction it sought. It did not prescribe 
 morals for itself; it prescribed them for other 
 people. In all this land there were not a 
 dozen abolitionists who were to lose a far- 
 thing by abolition, while there were thou- 
 sands of abolitionists who hoped to profit by 
 it in one way or another. 
 
 The abolitionists called themselves a 
 party of moral ideas, but they lacked a great 
 deal of that morality which first conquers 
 self and which subdues the profitable vices 
 which we ourselves practice. They may be 
 likened to persons zealous in the prosecution 
 of foreign missions, except that they prose- 
 lyted by force and not by persuasion, and 
 that they hated the people whom they 
 were to reform. They were separated from 
 them by almost impassable barriers; they 
 had no possible sympathy with them; they 
 were not similarly situated. By accident 
 slavery was a southern and not a northern
 
 42 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 institution. The anti-slavery party of the 
 north was accidentally right, as the pro- 
 slavery party of the south was accidentally 
 wrong. 
 
 It is vastly different with the party that 
 is opposed to Privilege. This organization 
 is not sectional; it is national. It embraces 
 within its membership thousands of men 
 who at one time or another have believed, or 
 who may now believe, that they are in a 
 position to profit by the unjust system whose 
 overthrow they seek. Its members inhabit 
 every county and township in America. 
 They have supporters of Privilege for neigh- 
 bors and associates; they meet them every- 
 where, and, in the main, they respect them. 
 
 It was practically impossible for a north- 
 ern man to become a slave owner; he 
 could have moved to the south, as a few did, 
 but the cost of the change was too great for 
 many to meet. There is nothing to prevent 
 the average member of the party of anti- 
 Privilege from availing himself of the unjust 
 privileges enjo3'ed by his op})onents, if he 
 be so disposed. If he is a capitalist and the 
 present tariff laws do not suit his purpose,
 
 PARTIES OF MORAL IDEAS. 43 
 
 the way to Congress is open to him. If he 
 is a working man, he may easily enlist in the 
 ranks of protected labor and delude himself 
 with the idea that he is receiving, or may 
 sometime receive, some of the plunder. 
 
 Because one-half of the American people 
 have resolutely put behind them all the 
 bribes which Privilege offers, it may be said 
 with truth that their party, deficient as it is 
 in many respects, is the moral party of the 
 day, for it has staked its existence upon the 
 one question here involved. It lives or dies 
 by that issue. 
 
 The party of anti-Privilege is arrayed 
 against selfishness and injustice which have 
 become national, if not dynastic. To achieve 
 success it must resist all the allurements 
 of wealth and power; it must maintain its 
 strength through good report and through 
 ill report ; it must inspire its members not 
 only with the zeal of converts, but with the 
 certain knowledge of right which belongs 
 usually only to the tried soldiers of faith. 
 It must not be dismayed by defeat, or by 
 the treachery of pretended friends, or by the 
 desertion of troops of supporters who have
 
 44 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 not the character to endure privation for 
 the rewards which conscience alone can be- 
 stow. In a word, it must carry through 
 every level of politics, from the lowest to the 
 highest, the doctrine that, no matter who 
 may profit by it, the practice of taxing one 
 man for the benefit of another man is wrong 
 — wrong in morals, wrong in politics, wrong 
 in business, wrong in government. 
 
 This wrong, which makes evil its good 
 and which proclaims iniquity as its highest 
 and noblest aspiration, has invited destruc- 
 tion. It will not fall if it be attacked merely 
 on grounds of expediency, or of policy, or of 
 convenience. It must go down, like any other 
 immorality, in shame and disgrace, van- 
 quished by the righteous, and detested in its 
 ruin even by its own authors and dupes. 
 
 It cannot be overthrown by counter 
 appeals to the selfishness of men. Its foes 
 must recognize it as it is — the most formid- 
 able enemy that the republic has yet en- 
 countered, an enemy stronger and more to 
 be dreaded than any of the invading hosts 
 of Britain or of the Confederacy. Its attract- 
 iveness must not be underestimated or
 
 PARTIES OF MORAL IDEAS. 45 
 
 denied. Its ability and its willingness to 
 improve the worldly condition of some men 
 must not be belittled. 
 
 Repulsive morally, its blandishments are 
 too numerous, and its capacity to reward good 
 service and to punish opposition is too easily 
 demonstrated, to make it worth while for any 
 antagonist to misrepresent its power or to 
 minimize its fascination. It must be assailed 
 on higher ground and with higher motives. 
 The moral sense of the nation alone will 
 prevail against it.
 
 OPPRESSOR AND OPPRESSED. 
 
 ONCE enlisted in the struggle against 
 slavery, the moral forces of the republic 
 demonstrated the inherent weakness of all 
 error and the invincible power of the right. 
 There are many reasons to suppose that, if 
 summoned now to another contest possess- 
 ing many characteristics in common with the 
 one that led to the extinction of human bond- 
 age on this continent, they would respond 
 with equal spirit and energy. 
 
 Appeals to the American conscience that 
 proceed from the timorous or the doubtful 
 will fall upon dull ears; there have been 
 too many such already. The call must come 
 with emphasis from men who neither know 
 nor care what effect the utter destruction of 
 a great wrong will have upon individuals, 
 interests, or localities, but who will be filled 
 with a splendid confidence that right-doing 
 will bring its sure reward. Even-handed 
 justice can inflict no injury upon honest men; 
 46
 
 OPPRESSOR AND OPPRESSED. 47 
 
 and if hardship result to those who have 
 profited by injustice, it will be insignificant 
 in comparison with that which they have 
 visited upon the people at large. 
 
 It took time and suffering to convince the 
 American people that slavery had to go. 
 They had juggled with the question and 
 compromised with wrong for so long a period 
 that millions of them, although entirely con- 
 scious of the error, were nevertheless incapa- 
 ble of supporting a policy that looked to its 
 complete extermination. A hundred consid- 
 erations were urged against precipitate 
 action. But there came a time when it was 
 apparent to all that a long step forward must 
 be taken, and when that hour struck a 
 man was found who had the wisdom correctly 
 to interpret the popular will, and the firmness 
 properly to execute it. 
 
 There were no more refinements of vil- 
 lainy after that. From that moment on 
 until the last shackle was broken, no man 
 weighed words in characterizing slavery, nor 
 with nicely selected phrases attempted to 
 bewilder the people as to the fate that was 
 reserved for it; plain speech was all suffi-
 
 4S GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 cient then. The doom of slavery was written 
 on every starry banner and was echoed 
 around the earth from the smoking muzzles 
 of a thousand guns. 
 
 When Mr. Lincoln came to deal with 
 slavery as slavery, there were men who had 
 followed him as far as that, who then turned 
 back. They were willing to check slavery; 
 they were willing to cripple it; they were 
 willing to strip it of some of its power; but 
 they were not willing to have it destroyed. 
 
 So now the earnest men who come to deal 
 with the kindred crime of Privilege may 
 expect that, when their serious purpose to 
 tear down and to exterminate is made 
 plain, many people who have followed them 
 to that point will turn back in affright. 
 They will be ready to compromise; they 
 will agree to cripple or to check Privilege; 
 they will propose lower percentages of theft; 
 but they will not consent to the destruction 
 of the principle itself. 
 
 The error of Privilege in America is 
 inherent and fundamental, as the error of 
 slavery was. It cannot be tolerated even in 
 a small way, A small robbery is as obnox-
 
 OPPRESSOR AND OPPRESSED. 49 
 
 ious in principle as a large robbery. If one 
 man may be taxed a small amount for the 
 benefit of another man, the motive and the 
 excuse will be always at hand to increase 
 the imposition. If slavery had been left 
 untouched in some districts, or if the blacks 
 had been retained in bondage a part of the 
 time and left free a part of the time, the 
 latent spirit of injustice would have asserted 
 itself in a demand for more territory and for 
 longer periods of serfdom. 
 
 As these states could not remain half free 
 and half slave, so now the people, all equal 
 before the law, cannot much longer maintain 
 toward each other the relationship of oppres- 
 sors and oppressed. Privilege must go. It 
 is not enough that some of it shall go; it 
 must go to the remotest fibre; and the prin- 
 ciple itself must be made hateful to the 
 people whom it has deceived and plundered.
 
 T 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. 
 
 HAT the prodigious material develop- 
 ment of the American people has been 
 attended by some loss of character, will 
 hardly be denied by any one familiar with 
 public affairs. 
 
 It is not surprising that the reclamation 
 of wildernesses, the conquest of savage 
 aborigines, the prosecution of wars at home 
 and abroad, the upbuilding of states, and the 
 countless activities and aspirations of a peo- 
 ple of unparalleled energy and ambition, 
 absorbed public attention for many years, 
 almost to the exclusion of everything else. 
 
 The American of fifty years ago might 
 doubt many things which were self-evident, 
 but his faith in his government amounted to 
 a passion. He had been well taught, prob- 
 ably over-taught, on that point in an era 
 when patriotism and egotism were in some 
 respects interchangeable terms, and when no 
 fact and no argument could convince him that 
 50
 
 THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. 5^ 
 
 the sum of all the wisdom of the ages was 
 not comprised in the institutions which he 
 revered. All else might change or vanish, 
 but of his liberty, of the beneficence of his 
 government and of the equality of the laws 
 he was sure. 
 
 The difference between this too confiding 
 man and the American of to-day, who gen- 
 erally is distrustful and dissatisfied, is too 
 remarkable to escape notice. The change 
 was not wrought in a day or in a year ; it 
 came gradually and almost imperceptibly. 
 In fancied security as to the undeviating 
 justice of his government, the American's 
 intense party spirit, his natural buoyancy, 
 and his disposition to regard favorably and 
 not to scrutinize too closely new projects 
 for achieving wealth easily and speedily, made 
 him a particularly gullible victim of the 
 self-seeker and wonder-worker when they 
 appeared on the scene. He had learned the 
 story of liberty, and his all-pervading faith 
 was well grounded, but he had forgotten — - 
 what the fathers had not failed to teach — 
 that eternal vigilance is the price of it all. 
 Thus preoccupied, thus torn by rancorous
 
 52 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 partisanship, thus lulled into fancied security 
 by the sonorous oratory of the period, which 
 he accepted without qualification, he did not 
 heed, and he certainly did not fear, the 
 stealthy approach of Privilege. It came to 
 him under high-sounding phrases and with a 
 patriotic garniture; it came craftily and 
 persuasively. It did not avow its real pur- 
 pose; it flattered and cajoled its intended 
 victim; it asked little and it promised 
 much. It did not awaken the spirit of greed 
 with a rude shock or a loud cry; it touched 
 the pocket nerve of the alert and crafty 
 American with a deft hand, reserving for the 
 enthusiastic and unthinking disciple of 
 equality and fraternity the noisier manifesta- 
 tions with which the new departure was 
 attended. 
 
 Privilege gained a foothold in America 
 by false pretenses of patriotism for the edi- 
 fication of the masses and by cunningly 
 devised suggestions of opportunity to indi- 
 viduals of nimbler wit. It was not until 
 another generation appeared upon the stage, 
 a generation that was confronted by the 
 momentous consequences of the errors of
 
 THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. 53 
 
 the fathers, and by which their mistakes 
 were atoned for in blood and agony, that 
 Privilege ventured to assert itself. The sav- 
 age greed of a class long tolerated and 
 pampered through a misapprehension of its 
 real purpose, was shamelessly avowed at a 
 time when all that was heroic and unselfish 
 in the American character was arrayed in 
 defense of the republic. Under the stress 
 of war the government delivered into the 
 hands of Privilege the people to whom it 
 had appealed in the first alarm of avowed 
 treason and rebellion. 
 
 It was then that fifty years of guarded 
 instruction in the art of perverting public 
 laws to private ends brought forth a swarm- 
 ing host, every member of which had some 
 project for his own enrichment that depended 
 upon the oppression of his fellow men. 
 
 Privilege's first sweeping triumph in 
 America was the passage of the protective 
 tariff bill of 1862. That was the summer 
 of Fair Oaks, Mechanicsville, the Chicka- 
 hominy Marshes, Chantilly, Malvern Hill, 
 and the second Manassas; the summer also 
 of Lexington, Donelson, Henry and Shiloh.
 
 54 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 A million of men were in arms contending 
 against the idea, then struggling for recog- 
 nition, that it was right for one man to 
 deprive many men of the fruits of their toil. 
 
 A hundred thousand new-made graves, 
 stretching in yellow lines from the Lower 
 Mississippi to the Potomac, attested the de- 
 votion of a great people. The sword ruled 
 the land. Every hamlet was a camp, and 
 the drum beat became a monotony as the 
 tramping hundreds and thousands hurried 
 away. Surely, if the mighty spirit thus en- 
 listed on the side of right could be caught 
 and tamed to the will of a master in chicane, 
 it were well worth while ! 
 
 The protective tariff bill of 1864 was 
 passed without debate in either house of 
 congress, and almost without amendment. 
 It embodied every selfish device that the 
 human mind could suggest. It was the most 
 stupendous measure of taxation ever known 
 on this planet. Justified at the time only 
 by the existence of war, it nevertheless made 
 public revenue a secondary object and, in 
 some notorious respects, was wholly for 
 plunder.
 
 THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. 55 
 
 It had been concocted in committee ex- 
 actly as the bill of 1862 had been concocted. 
 The people were not heard; no man ap- 
 peared in their interest. The man who 
 wanted to tax his fellow citizens had but to 
 signify the desire. No avarice was too great 
 to meet instant indorsement; whatever tax 
 this man or that man had the hardihood to 
 demand, that tax was laid by a body that 
 was quick to do the bidding of Privilege, 
 
 Thus constructed, the bill was presented 
 to Congress by a man who, ashamed of his 
 own work, apologized for it, pronouncing it 
 the most cruel burden ever inflicted upon a 
 nation, and pledged his own and his party's 
 faith that the increased taxes, public and 
 private, should be remitted as soon as the 
 war should cease. 
 
 That was a generation ago, and substan- 
 tially this same tariff was in force in 1890, 
 when another congress given over wholly to 
 the service of Privilege, added 5, 10, 20 and 
 50 per cent to schedules that had been con- 
 sidered crushing in time of war.
 
 XII. 
 
 TWO AMERICAN OLIGARCHIES. 
 
 WHEN the question of human slavery 
 had been discussed in every conceiv- 
 able phase for more than a generation, as the 
 question of Privilege now has been discussed, 
 it was found that the monstrous error was 
 incurable. It could not be reformed; it could 
 not be circumscribed; it could not be rend- 
 ered harmless; it could not be modified; it 
 could not be concealed. Convicted in the 
 high court of reason, it sought refuge in one 
 falsehood after another until at last, with 
 desperate obstinacy, it threw off all disguises, 
 and, appealing to the sword, perished by the 
 sword. 
 
 Slavery was a hereditary wrong; so is 
 protection. The generation that now is 
 oppressing the American people under cover 
 of the tariff and kindred abuses was reared 
 to injustice. The right to rob has been 
 handed down from fathers who had shame- 
 faced excuses for their system, to sons who 
 56
 
 nVO AMERICAN OLIGARCHIES. 57 
 
 never knew anything else and who believe 
 that it is right for one man to tax other 
 men. 
 
 It is idle to suppose that these hereditary 
 beneficiaries of wrong-doing can be won over 
 by argument, or by appeals to reason and 
 conscience. Their point of view is not that 
 of their victims. They cannot be made to 
 yield by persuasion or by threats. They 
 will argue the matter gladly at any length; 
 and, if they weary of the iteration of false- 
 hood and folly, they have money wrung from 
 the people with which to hire attorneys and 
 newspapers to take up the strain where they 
 leave off. While argument is prolonged the 
 oppression continues. They do not fear 
 abstractions; they do fear action. They 
 will remit no tax; they will relinquish no 
 plunder ; they will abolish no abuse. There 
 can be no relief from their exactions that is 
 not extorted from them by their victims. 
 
 Things came to such a pass in the days 
 of slavery that no legislation on any subject 
 could be entered upon unless the slave oli- 
 garchy were taken into account. It had 
 established a power that was co-equal in
 
 58 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 some respects with that of the government 
 itself. So now the tariff oligarchy rules, and 
 Americans who go to Washington and with 
 uplifted hand swear solemnly to support the 
 republic and its laws, hasten to make their 
 peace with this despotic power and straight- 
 way enter into its service and forget their 
 oaths. 
 
 The tariff oligarchy rules this land. At 
 its order taxes, prices, industries, wages, 
 politicians, rise or fall. At its command 
 public expenditures increase or decrease; it 
 fills the treasury or it empties it; it 
 employs labor or it starves it, as political 
 exigencies demand. Its interests determine 
 every policy that is adopted. Few bills of 
 any importance ever reach the president for 
 signature that have not at some stage received 
 the approval of this odious power. Pen- 
 sions, public improvements, silver and other 
 financial legislation, bounties, subsidies, trea- 
 ties, appropriations of every description — 
 all the things with which Congress con- 
 cerns itself — represent no longer the ascer- 
 tained will or the undoubted interests of the 
 people; they indicate and measure the bar-
 
 Tiro AMERICAN OLIGARCHIES. 59 
 
 gains and bribes that Tariff has been able to 
 effectuate. 
 
 The tariff oligarchy, like the slave oli- 
 garchy, is a compact power that is formidable 
 because of the numbers that it deludes, the 
 numbers that it silences and the numbers 
 that it involves with itself in crime. Men 
 having wicked schemes to promote reckon no 
 more with the people, but with Tariff. If 
 Tariff finds in it an opportunity to attach a 
 congressional district or a state to its follow- 
 ing. Tariff assents and the bill becomes a law. 
 If there is no advantage for Tariff in a mea- 
 sure it dies, no matter how meritorious it 
 may be, because Tariff rules this land. Its 
 voice is the voice of authority to-day. 
 
 Tariff stands, as slavery stood, ever with 
 a bribe in one hand to entice w'cak and cor- 
 rupt men to its side. Tariff stands, as slav- 
 ery stood, ever with a bludgeon in the other 
 hand to intimidate cowardly men into its 
 service. It is not a thing that the masses of 
 the people are attached to. A few hundred 
 lawless men are the chief beneficiaries of the 
 system, exactly as a few hundred desperate 
 men were the chief beneficiaries of the
 
 6o GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 slavery system. The one coterie holds the 
 honor and safety of the republic as lightly 
 as did the other. When slavery could not 
 rule it sought to destroy. Tariff has mani- 
 fested the same malignant spirit, and only 
 awaits a better opportunity to outdo slavery 
 itself in the most tragic of its roles.
 
 XIII. 
 
 SLOTH AND WASTE. 
 
 'T^HE enormous waste of the protective 
 ■^ tariff is not the least of the objections 
 that may be urged against it. It took four 
 years of war and a political and social revolu- 
 tion to convince the slave owners of the 
 wastefulness of the system to which they 
 clung with so much tenacity. The two wrongs 
 bear as striking a resemblance to each other 
 in this respect as they do in many others. 
 
 Slavery was wasteful because it estab- 
 lished a patriarchal society not in keeping 
 with modern ideas ; because it necessitated 
 large expenditures of time and money for 
 political purposes ; because its effect upon 
 free labor was injurious ; because it deprived 
 many people of an incentive to thrift; be- 
 cause it was less productive than the expense 
 of maintaining it demanded, and because 
 it retarded the general development of the 
 country in which it prevailed. 
 
 Protection is wasteful for nearly the same 
 6i
 
 Cz GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 reasons. It teaches labor of the most 
 degraded type to look for its reward to leg- 
 islation rather than to industry and frugality. 
 It causes thousands of manufacturers to 
 devote to political manipulation time and 
 money which might much more profitably 
 be devoted to business. It leads to the estab- 
 lishment of unproductive industries in places 
 where the conditions are unfavorable to their 
 success. It is a prodigious burden on the 
 consumer ; and, as it is more and more in 
 need of defense, it calls for constantly 
 increasing contributions from its dupes as 
 well as from its beneficiaries, to be used in 
 controlling elections and in bribing con- 
 gresses. 
 
 The few great slave owners who managed 
 to control the business, politics, society and 
 religion of the south, were loyally assisted 
 by a great host of smaller slave owners who 
 were almost as much afflicted by the system 
 as the slaves themselves. They thought 
 they were benefitted, but, as a matter of fact, 
 they were injured, as they now see plainly 
 enough. The great mass of small manufac- 
 turers in America, many of them the most
 
 SLOTH AND WASTE. 63 
 
 intolerant supporters of protectionism, are 
 victimized by the institution which they 
 defend with so much vehemence. The 
 planter who boasted the possession of two, 
 three or five slaves, was likely to be most 
 bitter in persecution of his opponents, just 
 as to-day we find that the small manufac- 
 turer in many places exercises the most 
 exasperating terrorism over the few poorly 
 paid men that he employs, and is most intol- 
 erant of any interference with the privilege 
 which he enjoys. As the chief profits of 
 slavery lay in the social and political power 
 that it gave to a few men, so the greatest 
 advantage that protection confers upon its 
 supporters is monopolized by the compara- 
 tively few who are thus enabled not only to 
 control many lines of business but to dom- 
 inate the government of a great nation. 
 
 The effect of protection is to discourage 
 enterprise of every legitimate sort ; the 
 effect of slavery was the same. Protec- 
 tionism puts a premium upon sloth and 
 ignorance ; so did slavery. Protectionism 
 says to the manufacturer: "Here is a corn- 
 ered market, whose victims must buy of you.
 
 64 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 Your customers and your profits are assured ; 
 you have no occasion to try new processes, 
 to invest in new machines or to pay atten- 
 tion to the progress of the age. If foreign- 
 ers take advantage of important discoveries 
 in science and mechanics, and at length are 
 able to compete with you in spite of the 
 tariff, we will add twenty per cent or forty 
 per cent to your protection." 
 
 Slavery said the same thing to the 
 planter, in a different way. It told him to 
 raise but one crop, to resist to the utmost 
 the mighty pressure of civilization and 
 humanity, and to give no heed to men who 
 suggested new ideas in production or in 
 mechanics. But, as improvements come in 
 spite of protection, improvements came in 
 spite of slavery. The cotton gin, invented 
 by a New Englander, quadrupled the wealth 
 of the south in a year. Slavery could not 
 have produced it ; yet slavery stole it, and, 
 besides refusing to pay its inventor for his 
 discovery, it used the wonderful instrument 
 to fortify with wealth and respectability its 
 own thieving institution. 
 
 Slavery could have exchanged every
 
 SLOTH AND WASTE. 65 
 
 negro in the south for Whitney's machine 
 and made money by the operation. There 
 have been inventions since that day that 
 would have justified protected manufactur- 
 ers in remitting every cent of their wicked 
 impositions upon the people, but they have 
 coolly appropriated the discoveries, employ- 
 ing women and children, as the labor of men 
 has been displaced by machinery, and have 
 eagerly sought new fields for plunder. 
 
 Protection invents nothing, as slavery 
 invented nothing. The minds of many 
 sagacious men are continually employed 
 devising ways and means of overcoming the 
 unjust advantages which protection confers 
 upon its beneficiaries ; and when success 
 crowns their efforts and by new methods 
 production is cheapened, protectionism seizes 
 upon the invention and claims that the 
 cheapness thus obtained was what it was 
 striving for all the time. 
 
 Slavery was wasteful also because it was 
 carried as a political issue at great expense 
 into regions where it could not possibly exist 
 as an industrial system. Protection is sim- 
 ilarly wasteful, because, by appealing to the 
 5
 
 66 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 cupidity and prejudice of men, it leads to 
 the establishment of hot house industries in 
 sections where they cannot naturally be con- 
 ducted at a profit, and then points to their 
 languishing condition as a sufficient reason 
 why the people should be taxed at an 
 increased rate for their maintenance. 
 
 It is a fact that must be apparent to any 
 reflective mind that, if the manufacturers of 
 this country had expended in efforts to 
 improve their processes and widen their mar- 
 kets the time and money that they have 
 devoted to the beguilement and corruption of 
 the people, they would have been more self- 
 reliant, their prosperity would have been 
 more substantial, and a false system, ever in 
 danger of tottering to destruction, would not 
 have been brought into existence. 
 
 So long as the south leaned upon slavery 
 the comparatively few great beneficiaries of 
 that institution persuaded all the people, 
 whether slave owners or not, that without 
 slavery they could not exist. Slavery was 
 the tyrant of politics, the patron of industry, 
 the ruler of society, the arbiter of commerce, 
 and the supreme authority in the church.
 
 SLOTH AND WASTE. 67 
 
 To-day it is a memory only, and there are 
 in the southern states more enlightened 
 politics, more productive industry, a more 
 wholesome society, a wider commerce and a 
 more perfect religion.
 
 XIV. 
 
 EASY INFAMY OF PRIVILEGE. 
 
 THERE was a time when, if the slave 
 owners of the south had been willing 
 to admit that their system was wrong and 
 that it was an affront to nineteenth century 
 civilization, they might have procured a 
 hundred years' lease of life for it by keeping 
 its infamies within bounds and sparing man- 
 kind the infliction of its intolerable encroach- 
 ments. But such a thing came at last to be 
 impossible. Led on by audacious men 
 filled with the lust of power, hosts of the 
 smaller slave owners and multitudes who 
 owned no slaves at all, were hurried into a 
 position from which nothing but a successful 
 war could rescue them and their cause. 
 Their war did not succeed, and their cause 
 perished. 
 
 Time was when the protected interests in 
 this country, with a few reasonable conces- 
 sions to public opinion, might have ordered 
 matters so that they could have retained 
 68
 
 EASY INFAMY OF PRIVILEGE. 69 
 
 their peculiar abuse for a generation longer. 
 But the spirit of concession was not in them. 
 The same consuming greed, the same burn- 
 ing desire for political and commercial 
 power, that lured the slave owners to ruin, 
 beckons them also to destruction. The time 
 came when the assumptions of the slave 
 owners were not compatible with American 
 freedom and self-respect — when they 
 became a menace to society at large — and 
 from that day compromises with slavery 
 were impossible. The institution was 
 doomed. The time is at hand when the 
 claims of the beneficiaries of Privilege are 
 not to be entertained by Americans who 
 value the title of freemen, for they are at 
 war with the fundamentals of liberty, and 
 their further extension can be accomplished 
 only by the sacrifice of principles dear to 
 every loyal heart. That institution likewise 
 is doomed. 
 
 In the original scheme of protectionism, 
 as in that of slavery, no account was taken 
 of its victims. As slavery ignored the 
 human chattel, so protectionism ignored the 
 consumer. The slavery question was dis-
 
 7o GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 cussed for many years without taking the 
 slave into consideration at all. What he 
 thought about it was not to the point. 
 When, finally, as a last resort of desperate 
 men, it was maintained by the slave owner 
 that slavery was best for the victim, the 
 proposition was not made to the slave him- 
 self but to free men hundreds of miles away 
 whose votes were sought. 
 
 No one presumed to ask the slave's opin- 
 ion of that idea. He was unheard ; it was 
 a crime to teach him to read ; his word was 
 not good in a court of law ; he was not a 
 party to the contest, although, in one view 
 of the case, it concerned him alone. In like 
 manner Privilege has ignored its victims for 
 many years. 
 
 In such miserable tracts, pamphlets or 
 apologies as have been published in the in- 
 terest of protectionism the consumer never 
 is mentioned, and the aim of the proposed 
 beneficiaries is to convince the world that 
 there is no such person. Of late the con- 
 sumer has come into court, where it has been 
 found that he reads and writes, that he is a 
 competent witness, and that he also votes.
 
 EASY INFAMY OF PRIVILEGE. 7 1 
 
 In his indignant presence Privilege has awak- 
 ened to the fact that its victims must be 
 taken into account, and, with unparalleled 
 impudence, it has done a thing that slavery 
 never did — it has gone before the men whom 
 it has oppressed and, with the older slavery's 
 wicked lie on its lips, it has told these plun- 
 dered millions that the system is really main- 
 tained for their benefit; that, instead of being 
 for a few, it is for all! 
 
 Privilege is at the bar of public opinion 
 on trial for its life ; it is to be judged and 
 punished for what it tried to do, as well as 
 for what it has done. It started out defi- 
 antly to subject the great mass of the people 
 to the oppression of a few. When first chal- 
 lenged it admitted its purpose and justified 
 it. It now crawls and cringes before the 
 men whom it sought to enslave and asks 
 them in God's name to sustain it, for it was 
 designed for their benefit. 
 
 Slavery had many sins to answer for, but 
 it spared the world an exhibition of such 
 scoundrelism as this. Slavery did not go 
 down on its knees and, with tears in its eyes, 
 entreat the victims of the lash and the blood-
 
 72 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 hounds to join its legions and fight for an- 
 other cycle of servitude. The point at which 
 slavery stopped without resource has been 
 clearly overreached by the easy infamy of 
 Privilege.
 
 XV. 
 
 PROTECTIONISM'S BRIBES. 
 
 PROTECTIONISM proceeds on the the- 
 ory that every man has his price. It 
 buys industries; it buys individuals; it buys 
 states; it buys congresses. Vote-buying is 
 the natural and necessary result of a policy 
 that begins with bribery, is sustained by 
 bribery, and reaches its most notable tri- 
 umphs through bribery. 
 
 Protection itself is but a monstrous bribe. 
 It was demanded by and paid to certain in- 
 terests in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in 
 i860 as the price of their support of a new 
 and at that time a virtuous party. Perceiv- 
 ing the necessity of having reinforcements. 
 Privilege thus intrenched, bribed lumber and 
 salt, copper and glass, crockery and cutlery, 
 wool and sugar. Recognizing also the im- 
 portance of fortifying its injustice still fur- 
 ther, it offered a colossal bribe to labor and 
 another to agriculture, well knowing that it 
 could not pay, but hoping to secure by de- 
 73
 
 74 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 ception what it could not otherwise obtain 
 at all. 
 
 Protectionism said to labor : "Vote my 
 ticket and I will raise your wages out of the 
 plunder which unjust laws enable me to take 
 from agriculture." For a time agriculture 
 was appeased by railroad building at the ex- 
 pense of public funds and public lands; and 
 when it became restive, protectionism said 
 to the farmer : " I perceive that all this 
 time you have been overlooked. Singularly 
 enough, nobody has thought of applying our 
 admirable system to you. Manufacturers 
 and their employes are protected and pros- 
 perous. You are poor. If you will vote my 
 ticket I will lay a tariff on wheat, and corn, 
 and rye, and barley, and eggs. The tariff 
 has made us rich, we admit. It will do the 
 same by you." 
 
 Wherever an industry or an individual is 
 found clinging to protectionism for profit, 
 that industry or that individual has been 
 bribed. Wherever an industry or an indi- 
 vidual is found clinging to protectionism for 
 imaginary profit, that industry or that indi- 
 vidual has been duped.
 
 PROTECTIONISM'S BRIBES. 75 
 
 Protectionism buys the great and the 
 small. It scorns nothing but justice and 
 honesty. The giants of iron and steel, 
 lumber and copper, coal and glass, make 
 common cause with the midgets of pearl 
 buttons and tin cups. Nothing that will 
 steal and will help it to steal, be its power 
 ever so puny, is too insignificant to be bar- 
 gained with. 
 
 Every selfish interest, every corrupt 
 scheme, every cozening industry, every ag- 
 gregation of capital, that can carry into poli- 
 tics any contribution of votes or money in 
 return for an unjust law, allies itself with pro- 
 tectionism naturally and easily. 
 
 When a hostile interest, such as silver 
 mining, becomes troublesome, it is bribed by 
 a special law regardless of its effect upon the 
 country, and in return for the favor thus ex- 
 tended, its representatives are expected to 
 indorse with their votes the whole fabric of 
 Privilege. 
 
 As it is becoming more and more difficult 
 to hold the silver producing states of the far 
 west in line in support of a system that bears 
 upon them with particular hardship, we may
 
 76 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 look for a more than ordinarily desperate 
 bargain soon, for the silver party is not be 
 trifled with, and if Privilege gains its support 
 it will be at the sacrifice on its part of every 
 principle of sound finance that it ever has 
 entertained. 
 
 There is a prospect also that other west- 
 ern interests naturally oppressed by the pol- 
 icy of Privilege will soon be afforded an 
 opportunity to consider a bribe in the form 
 of a great national irrigation scheme, by 
 means of which it is expected that both their 
 morality and their self-interest will be ap- 
 peased. 
 
 From the bribery and attempted bribery of 
 whole industries, trades and occupations, of 
 districts, states and sections, to the purchase of 
 the votes of needy or depraved Americans, is a 
 step that offers no obstacle to the promoters 
 of Privilege. The bait that this system holds 
 out to capital is unfair laws. The bait that 
 it offers its deluded victim is a bank note. 
 At one end of the scale of bribery is the man 
 of means considering the question, "Will 
 this wrong-doing pay ?" At the other end 
 is the wretch in whose mind may linger some
 
 PROTECTIONISM'S BRIBES. 77 
 
 memory of a better citizenship, considering 
 the question as he fingers the miserable bribe 
 offered for his vote, " Does it pay? " 
 
 We need not wonder at the great corrup- 
 tion funds employed by protectionism in the 
 so-called doubtful states, for an institution 
 born in the greed of a class and nurtured in 
 bribery must at the last, where universal 
 suffrage prevails, depend for its life upon its 
 ability to purchase the support of the indi- 
 vidual.
 
 XVI. 
 
 AMERICAN PAUPER LABOR. 
 
 THE relation that Privilege bears to labor 
 has been greatly obscured by the pal- 
 pable dishonesty and timidity with which the 
 politicians of the country have treated the 
 question. 
 
 According to the defenders of the protec- 
 tive tariff system, Privilege bestows every 
 blessing that American labor enjoys. With- 
 out Privilege for others, labor starves : with 
 Privilege for others, labor is employed and 
 contented. On the other hand, too many 
 of the opponents of the protective system 
 deny that Privilege exercises any influence 
 whatever upon labor. They hold that Priv- 
 ilege is a burden resting upon all the peo- 
 ple and that its benefits are enjoyed only by 
 the few employers of labor who are able to 
 take advantage of it — which is true as far 
 as it goes, but it does not go far enough. 
 The deeper and more far-reaching effects of 
 the system usually are lost sight of. 
 78
 
 AMERICAN PA UPER LABOR. 79 
 
 It may as well be admitted that Privilege 
 exerts a very powerful influence upon labor. 
 It would be amazing, indeed, if a system 
 costing the American people so much in 
 money and self respect operated only to the 
 advantage of the capitalist and had no effect 
 upon the lives of the masses. Whether the 
 fruits of the system so far as labor is con- 
 cerned are worth what they cost, and whether 
 they are such as the republic can afford to 
 encourage much longer, are another matter. 
 
 When the powerful assistance of the 
 United States government is extended to a 
 private enterprise, we may be sure that a 
 partnership so radically at variance with our 
 earlier conceptions of the republic will affect 
 nearly or remotely the lives of a great many 
 men. With this assistance Privilege has 
 established here a government by manufac- 
 turers and, at the expense of the whole peo- 
 ple, has stimulated manufacturing enterprises 
 vastly beyond the needs of the country. It 
 has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars 
 from other and naturally more profitable uses, 
 and concentrated them in industries, many 
 of which are unneeded and most of which
 
 So GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 are at times feverishly stimulated to activity 
 that has no health, and therefore no perma- 
 nency. In like manner it has attracted 
 toward the manufacturing centers hundreds 
 of thousands of working men, who have been 
 eager to secure their share of the plunder 
 which they have not failed to perceive is 
 conferred by unjust laws and often secured 
 in their name. Not a few of these men have 
 been drawn from other American industries, 
 but by far the greater number of them have 
 come from abroad. 
 
 Immigration to the United States during 
 the last twenty years has amounted to more 
 than ten millions. While many of the new 
 arrivals have been desirable, most of them of 
 late have been of a type which cannot be 
 regarded with much favor. Demanding 
 special advantages for itself in the name of 
 labor, Privilege has crowded the steerages 
 of steamships with the cheapest labor of 
 Europe and placed it in direct competition 
 with the very American labor which it has 
 professed to befriend. 
 
 It is not possible to ascertain the propor- 
 tion of immigrants to the United States in
 
 AMERICAN PA UPER LABOR. S i 
 
 the last twenty years that came here on the 
 invitation of Privilege ; but, judging from the 
 character of the new arrivals, it is evident 
 that several millions would not have reached 
 these shores without some special induce- 
 ments, such as prepaid passage, free lands or 
 assurances of employment on their arrival. 
 
 Privilege has glutted the labor market 
 of America with the dregs of European 
 labor, as all our protected labor camps 
 to-day attest. Privilege has seen to it that 
 there is protection for its products. It has 
 taken care also that there should be absolute 
 free trade in labor. With every levy that 
 Privilege has made on European brawn, 
 hosts of true Americans, despairing of the 
 ever-increasing hardship of competition with 
 labor of lower and lower types, have been 
 driven from the protected industries into 
 other pursuits. 
 
 True American labor is the cheapest labor 
 on earth to-day. It is the most intelligent, 
 the most industrious, the most aspiring. 
 American labor is high priced because it is 
 productive. It has been sadly debauched 
 by wretched importations in the interest of 
 6
 
 82 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 the protected employers, but, all things con- 
 sidered, it is still the best and the cheapest 
 labor in the world. In the days of African 
 slavery it was supposed that the southern 
 states had cheap labor, but the survivors of 
 the war do not need to be told that this was 
 a mistake. Slave labor was expensive. 
 Free labor is cheaper, though nominally 
 dearer, because it is more productive. 
 
 American working men have been intim- 
 idated for many years by dismal warnings 
 against the pauper labor of Europe. It is 
 not the pauper labor of Europe, but the 
 pauper labor drawn from Europe and now 
 in America that American working men have 
 to fear. In times of depression and idle- 
 ness, when mills and factories are closing 
 and the masters of industry in all lines are 
 reducing their working forces, the American 
 out of employment does not come into com- 
 petition with the pauper labor of Europe. 
 That labor is far away. 
 
 It is the pauper labor of America, the 
 labor that reaches out with bony fingers for 
 any pittance, that can live and does live as 
 no born American can live, which confronts
 
 AMERICAN PA UPER LABOR. 83 
 
 him in the labor market. He must meet it 
 on equal terms or starve. It is here to stay. 
 It was brought here unnaturally by Privilege, 
 which recognizes no obligation to keep it 
 employed, and which, when its regular 
 periods of starvation ensue, does not hesi- 
 tate to make heavy drafts upon the charity 
 of a people whom, in good times, it plunders. 
 
 Besides stimulating this inferior immigra- 
 tion and drawing many Americans away 
 from legitimate pursuits by delusive prom- 
 ises of gain. Privilege exercises a further 
 injurious influence upon labor. As a result 
 of the unjust partiality of government, man- 
 ufacturing enterprises have been over-stim- 
 ulated, and, in some cases, have been estab- 
 lished where they cannot be conducted 
 profitably even with an ever-increasing sub- 
 sidy. The promise of large returns on cap- 
 ital thus invested has led to many unwise 
 enterprises and to many industrial failures. 
 In every case of this description labor is the 
 chief sufferer. 
 
 The excessive development of manufac- 
 turing has compelled also, even in the most 
 prosperous times, a system of agreements as
 
 84 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 to the limitation of production, which has 
 operated to the injury of labor. The pro- 
 tected industry that is in progress continu- 
 ously is almost unknown. So far as any 
 possible market is concerned, American 
 manufacturers can supply it by working 
 half time. These long periods of idleness 
 follow seasons of the wildest activity, often 
 seasons when the largest available number 
 of hands is employed over-hours or in double 
 shifts. There is economy in the operation 
 of a great plant to its full capacity. From 
 the standpoint of capital there is economy 
 in absolutely closing a great plant as soon 
 as the product has accumulated beyond the 
 ability of the market to absorb it. 
 
 In these protracted seasons of non pro- 
 duction, often extending over months of 
 time, the labor unnaturally drawn together 
 must and does separate, and, appearing in 
 other places in search of employment, easily 
 accounts for our armies of tramps and our 
 pitiful assemblages of the unemployed. 
 
 Such are some of the more important 
 effects of Privilege upon labor. So far as 
 concerns the preposterous delusion that
 
 AMERICAN PA UPER LABOR. S5 
 
 labor as a whole is benefitted by the system, 
 the men who are employed in the pro- 
 tected industries as well as those who are en- 
 gaged in the victimized industries, have only 
 to consider the fact that one section of the 
 people cannot be taxed to enable another 
 section to pay high wages or any wages at 
 all, — even if the wages really are paid — 
 without to that extent impairing the ability 
 of the oppressed section to pay high wages. 
 
 These unjust laws create no wealth. 
 Government creates no wealth. It has no 
 money of its own ; it can give nothing to 
 one man except as it takes from another 
 man. The protected classes can have no 
 more wages than the ruling rate except as 
 they deprive other men of the ability to pay 
 even that rate. 
 
 In spite of the promises made in its 
 behalf, there can be no profit for labor as a 
 whole in such a system. If some labor is 
 benefitted by it occasionally in localities, its 
 advantages are gained at the expense of 
 other labor, and at a sacrifice of self respect 
 of which no man worthy of American citi- 
 zenship would be guilty.
 
 XVII. 
 
 PRIVILEGE'S BROKEN PROMISES. 
 
 UNDER the protective tariff certain 
 industries have been made the recip- 
 ients of governmental bounty. They have 
 been selected through no virtue of their own ; 
 their proprietors are no better than other 
 men ; their products are no more necessary 
 to the welfare of Americans than are the 
 products of other industries. They and 
 their employes do not constitute one tenth 
 of the people of the United States who are 
 engaged in gainful occupations. 
 
 It is imperatively necessary to the suc- 
 cess of such a system of rapine that the 
 beneficiaries shall be less numerous than the 
 victims. One in ten is a liberal estimate of 
 the proportion of possible tariff proteges to 
 undoubted tariff victims. 
 
 If the utter destruction of Privilege were 
 to bring instantly to an end all these pam- 
 pered industries, and if no new enterprises 
 were to take their places, — which will hardly 
 86
 
 PRIVILEGE'S BROKEN PROMISES. 87 
 
 be claimed by anybody — the worst that 
 could befall the people would be the com- 
 petition to which this unemployed element 
 would immediately subject other labor. If 
 these industries cannot exist without the 
 tariff, the labor displaced by the abolition of 
 the tariff would have to find occupation in 
 other pursuits. 
 
 But is it conceivable that the removal of 
 monopoly taxes would end every American 
 industry which has profited by them ? We 
 know better. There would be some losses : 
 there would be many and mighty gains. 
 
 Industries unfavorably situated with ref- 
 erence to raw materials, fuel and markets 
 would die out, as they always have done, 
 and be succeeded in more favorable locali- 
 ties by more deserving enterprises. The 
 premiums so long put upon sloth, ignorance 
 and extravagance would be withdrawn ; and 
 with a free field and a fair chance, human 
 sagacity and energy would be compelled no 
 longer to stand abashed in the presence of 
 greed and power. Industry would be 
 natural ; not forced and unnatural. It would 
 leave some of the haunts made odious by the
 
 88 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 predominating influence of monopoly, but it 
 would reappear in greater vigor, in fresher 
 and fairer scenes that were prepared for it 
 from the beginning. 
 
 For every weak, unhealthy or dishonest 
 industry that passed away, because it had 
 depended like a mendicant on politics for 
 sustenance, a dozen honest and vigorous in- 
 dustries would spring into existence. 
 
 Admitting all that can be claimed for 
 protectionism, it is of value only to a small 
 minority of the people. How far short it 
 falls of what is claimed for it, how unmind- 
 ful it is of its promises to labor, is shown by 
 an examination and a comparison of the 
 condition of working men in what are called 
 hard times in protected and in unprotected 
 industries. Suspend work in one of these 
 protected labor camps to-day, and starvation 
 begins to-morrow. Nowhere else in America 
 is the margin so narrow. 
 
 Protectionism demands much from the 
 American people and gives little or nothing 
 in return, exactly as it pleases. It demands 
 as a right the privilege of taxing all for the 
 benefit of a few. It makes certain promises
 
 PRIVILEGE'S BROKEN PROMISES. 89 
 
 of generosity toward labor, but they are for- 
 gotten as soon as its own point is gained. 
 Putting the best possible face upon its posi- 
 tion, it has been seen that protectionism, in 
 spite of the advantages conferred upon it, is 
 at liberty to ignore every engagement and 
 that there is no way by which it can be 
 compelled to live up to its part of the con- 
 tract.
 
 XVIII. 
 LIKE THE THIEF IN THE NIGHT. 
 
 PROTECTIONISM is the only Ameri- 
 can employer having a legal and pub- 
 lic as well as a moral and private obligation 
 to deal generously with labor. It asks and 
 receives public assistance on that very 
 ground ; it agrees to share its plunder with 
 labor; it proclaims its disinterestedness and 
 its philanthropy. Yet the publicly expressed 
 "regret" of a recent president of the United 
 States committed to this detestable policy, 
 is a notice to every American that, in spite 
 of the millions contributed to monopoly 
 under protection laws, the payment of living 
 wages depends wholly upon the will of the 
 employer. Like the slave owner, he is mas- 
 ter. He recognizes no contract, written or 
 implied; he begs or bullies legislative 
 favors for himself ; his employes receive 
 from him in wages what they can extort by 
 strikes and riots, and no more. 
 
 The employer, whether protected or not, 
 
 go
 
 LIKE THE THIEF IN THE NIGHT 9^ 
 
 pays such wages as he pleases or as he must. 
 If he can find men who will work cheaper 
 than those in his service at the time, he may 
 and usually he will dismiss the old and 
 employ the new ; and the law will sustain 
 him in his purpose and in the execution of 
 it, no matter to what extremity he may go. 
 That is law which is necessary to the preser- 
 vation of society ; it is law which nobody 
 except the beneficiaries of Privilege attempts 
 to deny or to set aside ; it is the law to 
 which protectionists themselves appeal 
 when — all their falsehoods exposed and 
 all their promises broken — they run to 
 cover to escape the fury of their unhappy 
 dupes. 
 
 The bad faith with which Privilege treats 
 labor is shown in many other ways. It is 
 the protected employer and not the unpro- 
 tected employer against whom run all the 
 modern factory laws for the enforcement 
 of decency and humanity. It is only in the 
 protected industries that the state must ap- 
 pear with a strong arm to prevent shocking 
 outrages upon womanhood and childhood. 
 It is in the protected industries that the
 
 92 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 "truck store" flourishes. Industries which, 
 if let alone, would brutalize women and 
 drag little children into early graves, are 
 the ones, almost without exception, which 
 pose before the American people as humane 
 and disinterested supporters of the protect- 
 ive tariff. 
 
 We may judge from these evidences of 
 the heartlessness of protected capital, how 
 insincere and how dangerous is the claim 
 that Privilege looks first to the welfare of 
 labor. Nothing but state laws, passed by 
 men whose hearts and consciences have been 
 touched by the misery resulting from the 
 avarice of protected manufacturers and pro- 
 ducers, prevents these pharisees and hypo- 
 crites to-day from sending women under 
 ground in their protected mines, from hud- 
 dling girls and men indiscriminately in small 
 rooms in their protected factories, and from 
 confining little children for long hours amid 
 the thundering machinery of their protected 
 mills. 
 
 With evidences of such greed written all 
 over the land, how is it that men can be per- 
 suaded that a system so shrewdly designed
 
 LIKE THE THIEF IN THE NIGHT. 93 
 
 in the interest of a few can be made of ser- 
 vice to all? 
 
 This vein of dissimulation runs through 
 every protectionist argument or assertion. 
 In the beginning no man denied that tariffs 
 increased the price, not only of the imported 
 goods on which they were laid, but of do- 
 mestic products that came into competition 
 with them. Now it is held that they 
 cheapen all prices. When complaint was 
 made that prices had not been lowered, it 
 was said that prices were high because wages 
 were high. When it was shown that wages 
 in protected industries were no higher and 
 in many of them were lower than in unpro- 
 tected industries, it was denied that the tariff 
 was a tax at all. When the farmer com- 
 plained that the manufacturer was taking 
 advantage of him, a pretense of putting a 
 protective tariff on farm products was made, 
 and the doctrine was then daringly pro- 
 claimed that tariffs cheapen the prices of 
 manufactured goods, but increase the prices 
 of everything that the agriculturists have to 
 sell. 
 
 These are not clever falsehoods ; they
 
 94 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 are outrageously clumsy. They are first 
 uttered with a suspicion that they will be 
 drowned in a chorus of jeers, and are re- 
 peated only when it becomes evident that 
 the capacity of men to accept them has been 
 underestimated. The hopes of their authors 
 hang all the time on the success of this or 
 that desperate expedient. Like the cheaper 
 offenders known to the police magistrates of 
 our cities, they always are on the defensive, 
 and base their hopes of escape on the inspi- 
 ration that the hour or the occasion may 
 give to nimble wits. 
 
 No beneficiary of Privilege expects that 
 his system will live. It has lasted much 
 longer than he ever imagined it could last ; 
 but, like the thief in the night, he takes his 
 life in his hand and goes forth, expecting and 
 prepared for the worst, and yet hoping by 
 wit or by trick to gain one more day, or 
 month, or year of plunder.
 
 XIX. 
 
 BY ITS FRUITS. 
 
 PRIVILEGE is destroying the self-reli- 
 ance of the American people as surely 
 as it is corrupting our youth, exasperating 
 our labor, and polluting our politics. We 
 not only receive hundreds of thousands of 
 immigrants each year, but we maintain an 
 institution which teaches these newcomers 
 immediately on their arrival, that they are to 
 receive work and wages because the govern- 
 ment taxes other workingmen, most of them 
 born here, for their support. The helpless 
 children of oppression at home, they gladly 
 accept this condition of pauperism here ; and 
 if the man who stands between them and the 
 government fulfilled his part of the agree- 
 ment, there would be no complaint from the 
 people thus pauperized. It is not until they 
 discover that he does not bestow upon them 
 in alms the plunder that he takes from 
 American citizens that they revolt. 
 
 In the self-respecting days of American 
 95
 
 9^ GOVERNMENT AND CO., Limited. 
 
 labor, how many workingmen could have 
 been obtained for service in a shop or mill 
 whose owner announced his incapacity to pay 
 the ruling rate of wages unless he were given 
 the privilege of taxing the people at large 
 for the purpose? What proud-spirited Amer- 
 ican mechanic would have taken the money 
 that any mendicant of this description might 
 have offered him? 
 
 Let the answer be read in the protected 
 labor camps of this country to-day, where 
 "American workingmen " are known, not by 
 name, but by number, and where a man with 
 a pronounceable name or an English tongue 
 is so rare an object as to occasion remark. 
 
 In the offscourings of the old world the 
 lords of Privilege in America found exactly 
 the material that they wanted, out of which 
 to constitute a pauper labor class, and which 
 they could fashion into voters who would 
 assist them in fastening their detestable sys- 
 tem upon better men. Accustomed to caste 
 and Privilege and snobbery and injustice at 
 home, and unacquainted with the independ- 
 ence that once characterized American work- 
 ingmen, these wretches fell easily into the
 
 BY ITS FRUITS. 97 
 
 trap that was set for them, and voting pro- 
 tection ballots that they could not read, 
 they became instruments in the hands of 
 their employers to extend the accursed op- 
 pression of mediaeval Europe over a people 
 who had once been virtuous enough to throw 
 it off. 
 
 American labor has been driven in despair 
 from the shops and mines to the farms and 
 to other unprotected industries ; there it is 
 defiantly taxed ostensibly to enable Privi- 
 lege to pay high wages, but really to ag- 
 grandize its wealth and enable it to astonish 
 both hemispheres with the prodigality of its 
 expenditure. That is where true American 
 labor is, and that is what it is doing. 
 
 The more highly protected an industry 
 may be, the fewer Americans will be found 
 in it. The employer who professes the most 
 unselfish interest in the welfare of American 
 labor will be found to have the closest rela- 
 tions with the swarming thousands at quar- 
 antine. The interest that pretends to enter- 
 tain the gravest fears of a " flood of pauper- 
 made goods " is most likely to preside over 
 a starvation camp, where no English is 
 7
 
 9^ GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 spoken, where human beings live like sav- 
 ages, and where no American idea save that 
 of taxing one man for the benefit of another 
 man ever takes root. 
 
 This redundant " protected" labor, which 
 is taught to depend upon government for 
 its support, is the true pauper labor of the 
 world, and it is positively the only pauper 
 labor to be found anywhere on earth outside 
 of the almshouse. 
 
 Privilege rarely concerns itself with the 
 hardships of the people whom it has assem- 
 bled in the neighborhoods of its mills and 
 factories. The long periods of idleness, 
 caused by overproduction and the glutting 
 of insufficient markets, are seasons of destitu- 
 tion to the labor thus abandoned and of 
 holidays and foreign travel to the benefi- 
 ciaries of the system. 
 
 Labor has starved in this country every 
 winter for a generation, under laws ostensibly 
 enacted in its behalf ; but it was not until 
 these measures were assailed by a congress 
 elected to repeal them that Privilege discov- 
 ered that want and famine existed. In the 
 face of a possible loss of its advantages,
 
 BY ITS FRUITS. 99 
 
 Privilege made the most of the distress occa- 
 sioned by its own excesses ; and by enlisting 
 the support of society, it brought forth a 
 charitable movement so broad and so gener- 
 ous that men and women long accustomed 
 to work in that field were amazed at what 
 appeared to be the spontaneous liberality of 
 the people. 
 
 Politics had accomplished in a month 
 what years of exhortation in behalf of reli- 
 gion and humanity had failed to bring about. 
 The hungry were fed, the naked were 
 clothed, the sick were visited ; not because 
 the hungry and naked and sick had not been 
 with us always, but because Privilege, dom- 
 inating society, had decided that the " object 
 lesson" of the disaster surely to be experi- 
 enced if its system were attacked, must be 
 made as impressive as possible. 
 
 Embittering every morsel of food re- 
 ceived by the really necessitous at that time 
 was the not always spoken but the well- 
 understood threat of the ruling class: "You 
 shall have bread now, but the next time you 
 vote against us you shall starve! " 
 
 Privilege teaches the most ignorant, the
 
 loo GOVERNMENT AND CO,, LIMITED. 
 
 most immoral and the most completely for- 
 eignized section of the American people — 
 the ones most sorely in need of instruction in 
 the fundamentals of our civilization — that 
 industry and thrift are not of prime import- 
 ance, but that government assistance is ab- 
 solutely necessary to their welfare. Having 
 unsettled labor with these shameful precepts 
 and delusive promises, Privilege withholds 
 the expected plunder and shows in its own 
 ostentation what unjust laws do for man. 
 Goaded to exasperation, the workingman 
 sometimes strikes and riots, and perhaps in 
 defeat he is starved and driven from home a 
 vagabond ; but he goes forth — a dupe no 
 more — sullenly to join the great army which, 
 officered by exiles from despotic Europe, 
 nurses here the hatred of wealth and author- 
 ity that was engendered there. 
 
 This is a matter which Americans will 
 have to consider some time. Why not now? 
 It is a question which may yet be settled, and 
 settled right. Delay is dangerous. A repub- 
 lic in which all men are supposed to be equal 
 cannot with safety to itself habituate millions 
 in this way to scmi-dependance. A republic
 
 BY ITS FRUITS. loi 
 
 cannot afford to accustom a great class to 
 the idea that it is righ4. ^c prey upon another 
 class. A republic cannot with impuriity per- 
 mit one class of men tc: deludte ?nd exisp- 
 erate another class of men. A republic is 
 for all, or it is a mockery. 
 
 A republic which develops in the minds 
 of a considerable number of its citizens the 
 idea that government is a thing to be plun- 
 dered, or a plunderer itself ever ready to 
 bestow upon them money or property taken 
 unjustly from other men, is producing at 
 both extremities of the social scale the very 
 elements which have destroyed more than 
 one civilization, and which on several occa- 
 sions have menaced our own.
 
 XX, 
 
 A GIANT IN CHAINS. 
 
 THIRTY years of protective tariff taxation 
 have reduced American agriculture to 
 a position so ignoble that in some places it 
 does not even retain its self-respect. A gen- 
 eration ago the American farmer was the 
 proudest and most independent workingman 
 on earth. To-day he cannot persuade his 
 own son to remain on the farm. Thirty years 
 of unjust laws have made the farmer the 
 sport of the cities, the butt of all the cheap 
 wits and the hoped-for victim of every swind- 
 ler in the land. 
 
 In the thirty years of protectionism, the 
 typical American farmer with whom we have 
 been and are familiar has been changed from 
 a well-dressed, well-read, independent and 
 spirited man to a scare-crow, with vacant 
 eyes and gaping mouth, with the inevitable 
 confidence man near at hand. We do not 
 deceive and oppress a man and retain our 
 respect for him. The contempt with which 
 
 I02
 
 A GIANT IN CHAINS. 103 
 
 the privileged classes in America regard 
 the farmer whom they plunder has been 
 communicated to the whole body of the 
 people. 
 
 It was the prosperity and independence 
 of the American farmer that first excited the 
 cupidity of the protectionists. They coveted 
 his possessions, and they proposed class leg- 
 islation as a subterfuge, under cover of 
 which they were to plunder him. They told 
 him that he needed a home market and that 
 they would give it to him in return for the 
 privilege of taxing him. 
 
 When the home market swindle was ex- 
 posed they beguiled him with the idea that 
 they could and would share their protective 
 tariff with him ; and, while going through the 
 mockery of putting a tax on foreign agri- 
 cultural products, they took occasion to in- 
 crease their own share of the spoils. 
 
 The protective tariff rests upon nearly 
 everything that the farmer uses or wears. It 
 enhances the price of nearly everything that 
 he buys. It does not add a farthing to the 
 value of anything that he has to sell. On 
 the other hand, its burdens fall so heavily
 
 104 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 upon almost all other Americans that their 
 capacity to buy of his product is diminished, 
 and on frequent occasions is entirely de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 The hope held out to him that the mock 
 tariff on agricultural products which we do 
 not import can in any manner benefit him, is 
 shown by steadily declining prices to be de- 
 lusive. It was a bribe which could not be 
 paid. If it could have been paid it would 
 have bankrupted and impoverished the re- 
 mainder of the people. 
 
 Everybody cannot be the gainer by class 
 taxation ; somebody must suffer. Speaking 
 in general terms, the farmer is more particu- 
 larly the victim than any other man in the 
 United States; on his bent back the great 
 monopoly burden rests. American agricul- 
 ture comes into competition with the cheap- 
 est peasant labor on earth; yet but for the 
 inflictions put upon it by the craft of a class, 
 it would be amply able to take care of itself. 
 Its splendid surpluses are disposed of in the 
 remotest lands, and the returns serve to 
 quicken every pulsation of trade and com- 
 merce throughout the country.
 
 A GIANT IN CHAINS. 105 
 
 American agriculture is a giant in chains. 
 It is capable of showering blessings upon the 
 people with such lavish prodigality, that 
 every other interest and industry must re- 
 joice in its strength and share in its abund- 
 ance. Exposed as it is to the shackles of a 
 mercenary class at home ; hedged about as it 
 is by laws designed to cripple and oppress it 
 abroad ; and humiliated as it is by systems 
 and policies cunningly devised to bring 
 reproach and ridicule upon it everywhere, it 
 nevertheless sustains by its toil and privation 
 the great weight of injustice that rests upon 
 the country. 
 
 It shares none of the luxury of a land 
 which it has enriched. It is poorly clothed, 
 poorly housed, and poorly fed. The small 
 economies which it submissively practices 
 will not in a year compensate for the wicked 
 impositions which it suffers in a month at the 
 hands of Privilege. Embraced within its 
 ranks are a majority of the people. Its pa- 
 tience under injustice, its hopefulness under 
 adversity, its courage in the presence of dis- 
 aster, its meekness under tyranny, and its 
 humility under the scorn of a class whom it
 
 io6 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 has made powerful, and whom it can, if it 
 will, sweep away with a breath, are among 
 the most amazing exhibitions that the world 
 ever has seen.
 
 XXI. 
 
 AMERICANS WITH A GRIEVANCE. 
 
 PRIVILEGE appears to cherish many 
 illusions, but it may be assured of one 
 momentous fact — a majority of the Ameri- 
 can people are fully awake to the enormity 
 of the injustice that lurks in the laws of this 
 country. They do not as yet agree as to the 
 remedy to be applied, but they are agreed 
 as to the evil complained of. 
 ' The feverish unrest of the masses, the 
 angry outbreaks of turbulent and desperate 
 men, the sullen mutterings of discontent, all 
 indicate a keen popular appreciation of the 
 situation, if they do not presage violence and 
 revolution. 
 
 Sweeping and even cyclonic victories for 
 one political party or another at short inter- 
 vals, signify not so much the fickleness of 
 public opinion, as the lack of popular confi- 
 dence in the leadership of all parties. These 
 whirlwind votes, first in one direction and 
 soon with even greater fury in another direc- 
 107
 
 I o8 GO VERNMENT A ND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 tion, do not measure the calm and settled 
 judgment of the people, nor do they hold out 
 a promise of a speedy improvement in exist- 
 ing conditions. They are indicative, rather, 
 of popular demoralization, if not of despera- 
 tion and despair. 
 
 The importance of awakening patriotic 
 Americans to a serious realization of the fact 
 that destructive forces are at work among 
 them, ought not to be underestimated. The 
 plundered farmer of the western plains, the 
 misguided workingman of the cities, the 
 duped immigrant languishing in the pro- 
 tected camps, the battalions of tramps on 
 our highways, the homeless and destitute of 
 every kindred and clime, to whom false 
 hopes have been held out and whose concep- 
 tions of the duty of government have been 
 perverted, must be saved from themselves. 
 
 They have been taught and are now taught 
 falsely ; and in their efforts to escape from 
 the misfortunes that overwhelm them, it is 
 not surprising that they have become the 
 victims of the most visionary fanatics of the 
 day, — rushing madly one year to the sup- 
 port of the wildest dreamers, and the next
 
 AMERICANS WITH A GRIEVANCE. 109 
 
 year, in sheer abandonment precipitating 
 themselves under the wheels of the monop- 
 olistic Juggernaut. 
 
 The violence of far western legislation on 
 the subjects of finance, capital and taxation, 
 is the expression in one locality of the utter 
 despair of the agricultual population, — as 
 the equally menacing growth of violence in 
 strikes, in speech, and in the socialistic prop- 
 aganda in the cities, is the manifestation of 
 the hopelessness of large masses of the work- 
 ing population in other localities. 
 
 In the face of such indubitable proofs of 
 popular discontent as these, it is idle and 
 worse, for the agents of Privilege to recite 
 their well-learned harangues about universal 
 prosperity. The prosperity of which they 
 boast has been confined to a class. The 
 victims of that prosperity, the men whose 
 toil has set forth the feast, deny before 
 heaven that they have shared in it, and their 
 word is entitled to consideration. 
 
 These farmers, miners and workingmen 
 are not inexcusably vicious. They are not 
 anarchists. In the main they are native 
 Americans. They have been ridiculed and
 
 no GO VERNMENT A ND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 misrepresented until it is the fashion to dis- 
 miss them with a smile or a sneer ; but no 
 man, — certainly no beneficiary of Privilege, 
 — who can read, should forget that they 
 come of a race that pulls down tyrants and 
 destroys tyranny. They are of the blood 
 that has been tested in the battles of liberty 
 in the Old World as well as in the New. 
 They are not aliens ; they are not cranks ; 
 they are Americans with a grievance, and 
 they will be heard. 
 
 These elements have been irritated by 
 distress, by deception and by false doctrine. 
 They have been misled by Privilege and 
 they may be misled again ; they have fallen 
 i/ito social, financial and economic errors, 
 partly of their own contrivance, and they 
 may be beguiled in the same way for 
 another season ; but the time is approaching 
 when the promises of Privilege will not avail. 
 
 They know that somebody profits by the 
 system which they have supported and, in 
 a fashion, attempted to imitate. They 
 will not much longer be deceived by assur- 
 ances that they are to share in the proceeds. 
 When that time comes, — when neither the
 
 AMERICANS WITH A GRIEVANCE, m 
 
 voice of reason and justice nor the honeyed 
 words of the discredited agent of Privilege 
 shall be heard above the tumult of angry 
 cries for vengeance and reprisal, — the true 
 American may well tremble for his country. 
 
 Whether they appreciate it or not, the 
 men who profit financially and politically by 
 this detestable system are playing with fire. 
 They are goading to fury a people whom 
 they have instructed in the methods of injus- 
 tice. They have prepared a powder maga- 
 zine, at the doors of which faggots are 
 already in full glow. If they cannot or will 
 not of their own volition abandon their peril- 
 ous adventures, the honest men of the coun- 
 try, regardless of past party affiliations, must 
 speak and act in behalf of their menaced 
 institutions. Present social conditions can- 
 not last ; they must be made better or 
 they will become worse. 
 
 The unwisdom of temporizing with such 
 an evil as this may be seen in every chapter 
 of the history of progress and freedom.. 
 Nearly all the great battles for liberty 
 have been fought on questions of taxation. 
 The English revolution grew out of a ques-
 
 113 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 tion of taxation involving an important prin- 
 ciple but a small amount of money. The 
 American revolution was precipitated by a 
 question of taxation. The French revolu- 
 tion grew out of long continued abuse of the 
 taxing power by kings and nobles. 
 
 In all lands and in all times, wherever 
 and whenever a substantial gain has been 
 made on the side of human rights and con- 
 stitutional liberty, it has been, as a rule, the 
 direct result of popular uprisings against 
 unjust taxation. 
 
 The fiery spirit that sustained Simon de 
 Montfort's first house of burgesses in Eng- 
 land ; that inspired the followers of John 
 Hampden in their rebellion against the ship 
 tax ; that actuated the Continental Congress 
 in America and the States General in 
 France, was awakened by the oppression of 
 class by class under the forms of taxation. 
 
 That is the spirit with which Privilege is 
 trifling in the United States to-day. It is 
 true that it maintains, with diminishing evi- 
 dences of sincerity, that it seeks the good of 
 all ; but it will not be possible much longer 
 to deceive many people on that point.
 
 AMERICANS WITH A GRIEVANCE. 113 
 
 Did Dubarry and Pompadour take into 
 account the starving peasants of the Rhone, 
 the Loire or the Garonne ? Does the tariff- 
 enriched lumber baron give a thought to the 
 pinched farmers on the treeless plains of 
 Nebraska, Kansas or Dakota ? Did Louis's 
 brilliant court know of the wretches who 
 haunted the garrets of Paris and Lyons ? 
 How many dividends have the protected 
 industries of America paid out of the " cut 
 wages " of their working men ? 
 
 Successful tyranny in France bred a gen- 
 eration of voluptuaries and aristocrats who 
 forgot, if they ever knew, that it was neces- 
 sary to apologize for oppression. The 
 United States have not quite reached that 
 level as yet, but they are approaching it. A 
 few more triumphs, and Privilege will become 
 an institution whose supporters will accept 
 their "hereditary rights" as a matter of 
 course, and, instead of wasting time in 
 an effort to convince the people that the 
 system is of value to them, will set about 
 the pleasant task of hanging men who dare 
 assail such "vested rights." That is the 
 solemn prospect ahead of us.
 
 XXII. 
 
 OUR DEPENDENT CLASSES. 
 
 THE dependent classes in this country 
 are becoming too numerous and too 
 clamorous. They not only crowd each 
 other, but they press too closely upon peo- 
 ple who are struggling to maintain their 
 own independence. They take up too much 
 room ; they fill too large a space in the 
 public eye ; their intolerable quarrels over 
 the division of their plunder demand too 
 much attention. They cost too much. It 
 is becoming more and more difficult to sup- 
 port the burden. It cannot be borne much 
 longer. 
 
 Too many people in the United States 
 demand a livelihood from the proceeds of 
 inflated stocks and bonds, from vast or petty 
 impositions on the masses, from conspiracies 
 in production or in distribution, or from the 
 tribute that unjust laws enable them to wring 
 from industry. 
 
 Too many people in the United States 
 114
 
 O UR DEPENDENT CLA SSES. i ■ 5 
 
 live by their wits ; too many people in the 
 United States are seeking to live by their 
 wits ; too many people in the United States 
 with a capital of a few thousand dollars, or 
 with no capital at all, are attempting to live 
 without work. 
 
 This unworthy ambition affects all sorts 
 and conditions of men ; it blunts their sen- 
 sibilities ; it leads them into shameful com- 
 plications and not infrequently into crime. 
 It causes men holding high public stations to 
 pass upon matters involving their own finan- 
 cial interests. It taints many acts of legis- 
 lation and some of the judgments of our 
 courts. It enables United States senators 
 to vote tariffs and subsidies into their own 
 pockets, and to face with calm indifference 
 such angry popular protests as may reach 
 their ears. It has degraded our state and 
 municipal legislatures, until men of first class 
 character and ability are, as a rule, no longer 
 to be found in them. It has made the man- 
 agement of many of our corporations the 
 subject of world-wide scandals. It has 
 encouraged pauperism among the poor and 
 stimulated sharp practice among the vicious.
 
 ii6 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 As the well dressed rogues and depend- 
 ants have multiplied, there has been natur- 
 ally and unavoidably a corresponding 
 increase in the ranks of the ragged rogues 
 and dependants. The example of the rich 
 has not been lost upon the poor. 
 
 For every great scheme of Privilege on 
 the part of the well-to-do, there have been 
 scores of small projects in mendicancy on 
 the part of the less favored. A society 
 which applauds undeserved subsidies and 
 bounties will not severely judge the recipi- 
 ents of dishonest pensions or the holders of 
 cheap political sinecures. 
 
 Where so many are looking to govern- 
 ment for assistance or advantage, we need 
 not be surprised to find a marked increase in 
 common pauperism. The idea is contagious. 
 Workingmen who are taught that in times of 
 prosperity their wages are conferred by a 
 system which taxes other men for their ben- 
 efit, do not hesitate when the inevitable day 
 of adversity arrives to demand and accept 
 alms of the people. Their condition is 
 one of perpetual dependence. When the 
 processes of Privilege fail them, they are
 
 OUR DEPENDENT CLASSES. 117 
 
 conscious of no humiliation by discarding 
 the agency of the protected wage payer, 
 and accepting directly from the community 
 in personal contributions the bounty which 
 even a false system cannot always provide. 
 
 The self-reliance of our people was once 
 the boast of the republic. They would en- 
 dure privation and hunger, but they would 
 not beg. Among the poor there was a sense 
 of equality with the richest, a true pride 
 which ill fortune and hardship could not 
 subdue, and a hope for better things to be 
 honorably won, that was unconquerable. 
 Among the rich there was a consciousness of 
 responsibility, a pride in the security of our 
 institutions and in the justice of our laws, that 
 helped many a struggling wayfarer over the 
 thorny paths leading to fame and fortune. 
 
 It was a helpful and generous society such 
 as this that made real pauperism terrible ; for 
 it was held that a man who had to beg 
 had no friends, and to have no friends was 
 to be an outcast for cause. We have re- 
 tained the ethics of that day as to the 
 genuine pauper, the man who has gone down 
 under accumulated misfortune ; but we have
 
 iiS GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 brought forth a troop of beggars on horse- 
 back, who are riding rough-shod over what- 
 ever there is of patience, and decency, and 
 industry in the land.
 
 XXIII. 
 ON TO WASHINGTON. 
 
 RECENTLY great bodies of men have 
 moved on Washington with the avowed 
 purpose of demanding legislation in the in- 
 terest of the poor. Participated in chiefly 
 by native born Americans, these demonstra- 
 tions deserve attention, not so much because 
 they are a new manifestation of the growing 
 idea that government is to support the peo- 
 ple, as because they prove that conditions of 
 pauperism are no longer hateful to all Amer- 
 icans. These vagabonds lived on the coun- 
 try like a raiding army. Partly through ter- 
 rorism, partly through sympathy, and largely 
 through policy, they were fed and clothed 
 by the communities through which they 
 passed ; and not one of these recipients of 
 alms has yet been able to perceive that he 
 lost anything in character or self-respect by 
 the experience. 
 
 But if millions of dollars can go to Wash- 
 ington and demand legislation, why shall not 
 119
 
 I20 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 millions of men do the same? Is there 
 really greater danger to the republic in the 
 presence at the capital of a mob a million 
 strong than there is in the presence there of 
 the agents and attorneys of selfish interests, 
 who do not hesitate to bribe those whom 
 they cannot intimidate or deceive? Capital 
 has cried " On to Washington!" for thirty 
 years, and no serious alarm has been felt 
 anywhere. If labor now takes up the re- 
 frain, it is following a distinguished prece- 
 dent. The republic still lives, and what is 
 lawful for one class cannot be unlawful 
 for another. 
 
 The seat of government was located on 
 the banks of the Potomac far away from the 
 great cities, for the reason that it was feared 
 that Congress and the executive departments, 
 if nearer the populous towns, might be sub- 
 jected to intimidation by the people. Old 
 world experiences show the wisdom of this 
 policy so far as monarchies are concerned, 
 but it is doubtful if a republic of the magni- 
 tude and intelligence of the United States 
 can hope to profit much by it. Destroy the 
 confidence of the American people in their
 
 O.V TO IVA SHING TON. 1 2 1 
 
 representatives, and if they conclude to 
 march on the capital, its distance from the 
 centers of j^opulation will not appall them. 
 
 Great pecuniary interests have intrenched 
 themselves at Washington in such a manner 
 as to defy any ordinary expression of dis- 
 pleasure on the part of the people. They 
 have complete possession of one political 
 party, and they have had sufficient influence 
 with the other to cloud its utterances and to 
 paralyze its arm. Their agents come and go 
 noiselessly, attracting no attention and ex- 
 citing no sense of danger. 
 
 If the victims of these laws — who are 
 many — were to follow the example thus set 
 for them, the capital of the United States 
 would be speedily transformed from a peer- 
 less winter resort, a favorite place of resi- 
 dence for persons of wealth and fashion, into 
 a teeming camp of forlorn and desperate 
 men. 
 
 If the American workingman ever be 
 moved to assert himself at the capital ; if 
 after a generation of false teaching he shall 
 appear there to demand for himself the 
 relief which others have not failed to secure,
 
 122 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 he will not be bound by the rules that obtain 
 in polite society, nor will he follow the pre- 
 cedents, established by the lobby. The work- 
 ingman who, through delusion or otherwise, 
 concludes to visit the scat of government to 
 demand what he conceives to be his rights, 
 is sure to be an object of much concern, not 
 only to the people of Washington, but to 
 the whole body of thoughtful Americans. 
 
 Probably it is not unreasonable to assume 
 that the danger signal has sounded. We 
 have seen two movements on Washington 
 representing the extremes of American soci- 
 ity. One was of wealth, the other was of 
 poverty ; both were wholly selfish, both 
 were predatory. One had as much right and 
 justice on its side as the other, which was 
 none at all. Both mistook the nature of 
 the government. Both assumed that its 
 province was to take care of the people like 
 a wise father — to regulate their business for 
 them, to direct them where and when and 
 with whom to trade, to coddle this industry 
 and to destroy that, and to provide work and 
 wages for everybody. 
 
 It will not be possible much longer to
 
 ON TO WASHINGTON. 123 
 
 confine these forays to a single class. The 
 degradation of the wealthy has found its 
 counterpart in the degradation of the im- 
 poverished. Lazarus will stoop as low as 
 Dives ; the tramp will jostle the millionaire 
 on Pennsylvania avenue and in the corridors 
 of the capitol. Hereafter, if the ways and 
 means committee is to hold inquiries on the 
 lines with which it has familiarized the 
 people, the poor and wretched will crowd 
 the witness stand along with the rich and 
 proud. If congress may legislate money 
 into the rich man's pocket it may do the same 
 for the poor man. We need not marvel if 
 labor shall repudiate all intermediaries and 
 demand hereafter that every largess intended 
 for itself shall be paid directly into hand. In 
 a land nine-tenths of whose voters may be ar- 
 rayed on the side of toil, it will not long be 
 possible to persuade a majority of the peo- 
 ple that millionaires and corporations are 
 the only proper almoners of the govern- 
 ment's bounty.
 
 XXIV. 
 
 A FIERY PATH. 
 
 THE dangerous propensities of Privilege 
 should receive tiie most solemn con- 
 sideration at the hands of that large and in- 
 fluential element which has achieved fortune 
 through its own industry and sagacity, and 
 without the assistance of unjust laws. 
 
 It is possible that the natural tendency 
 of men enjoying the same conditions of 
 wealth and power to come together in a 
 common interest, has made the honest riches 
 of this country too careless of the methods 
 by which dishonest riches have been amassed. 
 If so, the possessors of great fortunes hon- 
 orably won cannot be warned with too much 
 emphasis, that the security which they enjoy 
 and the conditions which make the prizes 
 they have gained worth having, rest alone 
 upon the public sense of the wisdom and 
 justice of our laws. The honest wealth of 
 the country, in a word, cannot afford to make 
 common cause with the wealth that has been 
 1-4
 
 A FIERY PATH. 125 
 
 accumulated by the deception and oppression 
 of labor, and by the operation of laws so 
 shamefully unjust that a self-respecting 
 American cannot witness their effects with- 
 out feeling the spirit of rebellion rising 
 within him. 
 
 In its best possible phase protectionism 
 is the most pronounced form of socialism 
 that America ever has known. When the 
 hollow-eyed inhabitants of our garrets and 
 cellars meet to demand that the rich shall 
 share their luxury with them, we do not 
 hesitate to denominate that manifestation of 
 socialism "anarchy." When a few men who 
 live by their wits assemble to demand that 
 everybody, rich and poor, shall contribute to 
 them, we are in the habit of calling that 
 manifestation of socialism "protection." 
 
 Protection has brazenly seized upon every 
 business interest and endeavored bv threats 
 and falsehoods to persuade honest men to 
 make common cause with it against its pro- 
 testing victims. It has arrayed labor against 
 capital in countless places and with increas- 
 ing vehemence, because it has flagrantly 
 broken its promises and boldly engaged in
 
 126 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 oppressions unknown in America before its 
 day. 
 
 It is based on a grotesque disregard of 
 human nature, and is the discredited expo- 
 nent of a theory exploded in history and 
 against which popular government is a stand- 
 ing protest — that the rich should and will 
 take care of the poor. It has deceived, 
 robbed and exasperated labor, until it has 
 embittered the needy and spread desperation 
 among the wretched. It has emphasized the 
 class idea in a republic where all are equal, 
 and on more than one occasion it has pre- 
 cipitated strife that has amounted to civil 
 war. It is as much the foe of honest wealth 
 as it is the foe of honest toil and the worst 
 enemy of honest government. 
 
 No privileged class ever yet mounted to 
 luxury and ease without carrying with it 
 more or less of the respect which success, 
 even of the dubious sort, usually commands. 
 The tariff lords of America are no exception 
 to the rule. The ties of society, of good 
 fellowship, and of party are strong, and po- 
 litical action that is calculated to disturb 
 them is likely to be condemned by men who
 
 A FIER V PA TH. 1 27 
 
 may have nothing to fear from it. In every 
 society also, there is an element that stands 
 in dread of change; that is timid almost to 
 the point of cowardice ; and that is forever 
 expostulating with the sincere, restraining 
 the courageous, rebuking the bold, and en- 
 treating the determined to be cautious. 
 
 Every moral revolution of which we have 
 any record has had first to deal with this re- 
 pressive influence on the part of good men, 
 to say nothing of the more brutal manifesta- 
 tions of dislike on the part of the ignorant 
 and the vicious. 
 
 •' Business interests," many of them hav- 
 ing no affiliation whatever with slavery, were 
 intolerant of all agitation of that question, 
 and they spoke practically with one voice in 
 favor of peace on any terms until the flag fell 
 at Sumter. Compromises are satisfactory to 
 business interests ; every surrender of a 
 principle is applauded in business circles ; 
 every standard that comes down, every flag 
 that is struck for the sake only of peace, 
 brings security and confidence to business 
 interests. Consult business interests, and 
 there is no wrong too offensive to be borne
 
 1 2 S GO VERNMENT A ND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 in behalf of peace. Left to the sagacious 
 men who speak for business interests, every 
 great evil would be permitted to cover the 
 land with infamy and to involve a nation in 
 ruin, before they would risk a dollar of trade 
 in an attack upon it. Business interests have 
 been known to commit suicide, but they 
 never yet have turned their backs upon an 
 interest, good or bad, that had money to 
 spend. 
 
 Business interests to-day are opposed to 
 further agitation of the tariff question. The 
 right and wrong of it — even the possibilities 
 of infinite mischief that lie in the contention, 
 do not concern them. They will cheerfully 
 submit to any injustice, any abuse, any 
 wrong, any danger, if by that means appar- 
 ent stability can be gained and buying and 
 selling promoted. Business interests do 
 not give expression to the conscience or to 
 the nobler aspirations of a nation ; they 
 voice the timidity of capital and the concen- 
 trated selfishness of men. American busi- 
 ness interests opposed and repressed the 
 patriots of '76; they resisted the men who 
 fought the war of 1812; they held the anti-
 
 A FIER Y PATH, 129 
 
 slavery leaders at bay for a generation, and 
 they now almost solidly confront the men 
 who refuse to accept a partial victory over 
 Privilege as a final settlement of the con- 
 test. 
 
 "What man is there that knoweth not how 
 that the city of the Ephesians is a worshiper 
 of the great goddess Diana and of the image 
 which fell down from Jupiter?" The temple 
 of Diana was one of the wonders of the an- 
 cient world. The worship there carried on 
 and the lucrative manufacture and sale of 
 shrines for the great goddess were not to be 
 lightly assailed, even by the apostle to 
 the gentiles. These things " could not be 
 spoken against." Yet Diana is in the dust, 
 her shrines have vanished, the artificers who 
 thrived on the delusion of the people have 
 left no trace, and even the place where 
 the hopes and interests of the pious and 
 the selfish centered is known no more of 
 men. 
 
 We have in the United States to-day a 
 
 legislative fetich which a privileged class, 
 
 assisted by business interests, has sought to 
 
 guard as sacredly from the inquiring eyes of 
 
 9
 
 130 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 unbelievers as the Ephesians protected the 
 image that fell down from Juj:)itcr. This class 
 teaches that the American idolatry cannot 
 be discussed with safety; that any modifica- 
 tion of it must be attended by the gravest 
 danger; and that, in spite of known imper- 
 fections, it must be applauded at all times, 
 and particularly so when an uproar takes 
 place as a result of the preaching of truth 
 and liberty, which always have been at war 
 with false gods and false doctrines. 
 
 No doubt business interests have suffered 
 and are to suffer still more as a result of 
 tariff agitation and uncertainty. Men can 
 no more escape the penalty of collective 
 Wrong-doing than they can escape the pen- 
 alty of individual wrong-doing. We sought 
 in many ways to avoid the consequences of 
 the slavery sin, but the expiation came at 
 last. We shall not escape the penalty of 
 the great transgression which now confronts 
 us. The civil war continued " until all the 
 Wealth piled up by the bondman's two hun- 
 dred and fifty years of unrequited toil was 
 sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 
 with the lash was paid by another drawn
 
 A FIERY PATH. 131 
 
 with the sword." " The judgments of the 
 Lord are true and righteous altogether." 
 Business interests can hope for no real sta- 
 bility so long as this great wrong, behind 
 which many of them are intrenched, shall 
 endure. 
 
 If it be urged that this is a fiery path, it 
 may be said that the feet of millions, for 
 whom business interests do not speak, have 
 pressed it uncomplainingly for years. It is 
 a fiery path, indeed, but it leads to justice; 
 and without justice there can be no peace.
 
 XXV. 
 
 IS IT WELL ENOUGH? 
 
 THREAD of change is the sentiment which 
 -' — the disreputable rich employ to intim- 
 idate the reputable riches of the land. When 
 all other " arguments " fail, the man of plun- 
 der and privilege asks the man whose fortune 
 comprehends no stolen dollars, if it is not 
 wise to let well enough alone? 
 
 Honest wealth should weigh this imperti- 
 nent question well. Is it well enough, that 
 the government of the United States is in 
 the hands of a rapacious combination which 
 is at war with every legitimate business in- 
 terest? 
 
 Is it well enough, that a great political 
 party has become the creature of these self- 
 seekers, using its power to further their 
 greed? 
 
 Is it well enough, that through the terror- 
 ism of Privilege no man in that party dare 
 raise his voice in protest against the de- 
 grading doctrines which it upholds? 
 132
 
 IS IT WELL ENOUGH? i33 
 
 Is it well enough, that the ignorant and 
 thoughtless have been educated to the belief 
 that an intolerable system of economy cannot 
 be discussed, criticized or qualified, without 
 disaster to business and industry? 
 
 Is it well enough, that organized labor is 
 already on a war footing in many places, 
 and that strikes are developing as much sav- 
 agery in our cities as was once witnessed on 
 the frontier? 
 
 Is it well enough, that employers enjoying 
 public bounty have engaged in conspiracies 
 to intensify periods of depression, by closing 
 their works and leaving labor in distress — 
 the better to enforce the idea that interfer- 
 ence with Privilege is dangerous? 
 
 Is it well enough, that all over the coun- 
 try there are political mills, the owners of 
 which can be persuaded by their confeder- 
 ates in the management of the party that 
 bestows legislative favors upon them, to op- 
 erate or to close their establishments accord- 
 ingly as the necessities of that party may 
 dictate? 
 
 Is it well enough, that every consideration 
 of civilization and humanity, of progress and
 
 134 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 justice, so far as this great American party 
 is concerned, should be made to depend upon 
 the lust of this one swollen and conscience- 
 less class? 
 
 Is it well enough, that in a republic where 
 equality used to be taught, every member of 
 this party, from highest to lowest, — thewisest 
 as well as the dullest, — now insists that it is 
 the legitimate province of political organiza- 
 tions and governments to increase wages and 
 to provide work for everybody? 
 
 Is it well enough, that the men who profit 
 by this system are relentlessly impoverishing 
 American labor tjy importations of inferior 
 races, and filling tiie breasts of hundreds of 
 thousands of workingmen with the convic- 
 tion that they are suffering from injustice, 
 with which it is not in their ])ower lawfully 
 to contend? 
 
 Is it well enough, that there is growing up 
 all over the country a belief that ])lunder and 
 not justice is the controlling s]jirit of govern- 
 ment? 
 
 Is it well enough, finally, that these mis- 
 creants should couple themselves with all 
 other men of wealth, and with matchless inso-
 
 IS IT WELL ENOUGH? i35 
 
 lence proclaim the falsehood that attacks upon 
 their laws and their riches are a menace to 
 all laws and all riches? 
 
 There need be no dread of any change 
 that promises to strip these men of their 
 power and pretensions. Properly enough, 
 there may be the gravest reasons for dread- 
 ing the final consequences of apparently in- 
 vincible injustice and oppression. 
 
 There is security in impartial government; 
 there is danger in every departure from it. 
 We have had sufficient notice of the progress 
 and the motive of this agitation for the 
 restoration of the constitution and the laws 
 to their original purpose. The movement 
 proceeds on lines of peace, justice and truth. 
 No man can foretell the hour when, bursting 
 the restraints that now govern it, it may 
 leap in maddened fury beyond the control of 
 reason or of right. 
 
 This is not a despotism, with a great 
 standing army ready to do the bidding of a 
 king whose will is law. It is a republic, the 
 government of which derives all its pow- 
 ers from the governed. The men of wealth 
 are comparatively few; the men who have
 
 J 3^ GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 no wealth are numerous. If the few rich 
 may now oppress the many poor, what guar- 
 anty have we that presently the tables may 
 not be turned? 
 
 This is a government of law. The dis- 
 honest rich have made these unequal laws. 
 If in some dark and desperate hour the dis- 
 honest poor shall band together to glut their 
 money hunger on the wealth of the land, as 
 the dishonest wealth has been banded to- 
 gether for years to devour the fruits of a na- 
 tion's industry, we maybe sure that they will 
 not lack the power to crystallize their ideas 
 into law and that they will not discriminate as 
 between individuals. 
 
 If the motive to despoil the many is 
 strong in the breasts of the few, what will it 
 be in the bosoms of the many when they 
 come to apply the same savage doctrine to 
 the fcv.'? The men who have accumulated 
 fortunes honestly, and the men who hope to 
 accumulate anything honestly, may be as- 
 sured tliat the pendulum of injustice is 
 likely to go as far in one direction as it has 
 gone in another. That is a change which 
 they well may dread.
 
 XXVI. 
 WHERE TO LOOK FOR THE REMEDY. 
 
 THE way out of this labyrinth of error 
 and mischief is straight out. Devious 
 courses have been attempted in vain; modi- 
 fications of injustice will bring no permanent 
 relief. While the principle remains; while 
 wicked laws and practices prevail; while it is 
 possible for one interest to prey upon an- 
 other interest; while the forms of justice are 
 invoked to promote injustice, class must be 
 pitted against class, misunderstandings must 
 increase, violent measures must be resorted 
 to on occasion by both sides, and the turmoil 
 must continue. Privilege of every descrip- 
 tion — Privilege in the nation, Privilege in the 
 states, Privilege in municipalities, cannot be 
 tolerated in any degree. Privilege in a re- 
 public is everywhere and forever wrongs 
 
 The great middle class of the country, 
 
 which unfortunately has allied itself thus 
 
 far with the supporters of these abuses, must 
 
 be looked to for the remedy. The rich who 
 
 137
 
 138 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 bribe and the poor who are bribed may as 
 well be eliminated from the discussion. Nat- 
 ural distrust of the party which has timor- 
 ously assailed one, and perhaps the greatest, 
 of the strongholds of Privilege, has deterred 
 many members of the middle class from join- 
 ing in the reform movement; but social 
 allurements, a growing subserviency to 
 wealth, an increasing aversion on the part of 
 many well-dressed people to association with 
 the working classes, and an almost invincible 
 determination on the part of thousands of peo- 
 ple who work for salaries, to misunderstand 
 and view with suspicion the millions who 
 work for wages, are chiefly responsible for 
 the fact that the gulf between our "upper" 
 and "middle" and "lower" classes has be- 
 come well nigh impassable. 
 
 The middle class of to-day is as profoundly 
 interested in the abolition of Privilege as, 
 in the days of slavery, the middle class of 
 that period was interested in the abolition of 
 that institution. While it maintains quasi 
 social and political relations with the great 
 freebooters of the period, it is being ground 
 to powder between the millstones of insa-
 
 WHERE TO LOOK FOR THE REMEDY. I39 
 
 tiable avarice on one side and of hopeless 
 and desperate poverty on the other. 
 
 No doubt the large and ignorant labor 
 element which is under the influence of Priv- 
 ilege, a part of the time quieted by promises 
 of booty and a part of the time inflamed to 
 madness by disappointment and thirst for 
 revenge, will concern itself for some years to 
 come with the wages dispute; but the great 
 mass of the American people — the men and 
 women who live in well-ordered houses, who 
 aim to keep up appearances, who go to 
 church and whose children go to school, can- 
 not intelligently consider this question with- 
 out perceiving that they have a prodigious 
 interest in a change. 
 
 The protected labor camps have intro- 
 duced to the people of this country a scale 
 of living so low, so wretched, so abhorrent, 
 that the problem as to how few household 
 articles, how scant a wardrobe, and how lean 
 a diet can be made to suffice for human be- 
 ings, may be said to have been solved; but 
 the great element between the extreme of 
 poverty and the extreme of wealth, which 
 does not yet despair, but which finds it
 
 140 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 harder every year to provide the necessaries, 
 nearly all of them taxed in the interest 
 of Privilege, must eventually bury partisan- 
 ship and examine into the causes of their 
 hardships with the gravity that they de- 
 serve. 
 
 The average members of the middle class 
 who do not and cannot receive any benefits 
 from the protective tariff pay as roundly 
 under the system of taxation on consump- 
 tion as the richest men in the country. They 
 and their wives and families may wear and 
 use as many things as millionaires and their 
 wives and families. Their houses must be 
 furnished; they must be decently clothed; 
 they must have wholesome food in variety. 
 Except for certain luxuries, which are not so 
 heavily taxed as the necessaries, the family 
 of the preacher, lawyer, architect, doctor, 
 railroad employe, merchant, or farmer, who 
 earns one thousand or two thousand dollars 
 a year, may consume as much and pay as 
 much in federal taxes as the family of the 
 capitalist whose income is a hundred thou- 
 sand or a million dollars. Can we wonder 
 that the hard conditions of American life
 
 WHERE TO LOOK FOR THE REMEDY. 141 
 
 have excited the amazement and the com- 
 miseration of all our foreign visitors? 
 
 It is folly to delude one's self with the 
 idea that this system of taxation is the result 
 of accident or of unintentional error. It is 
 the deliberate, well-calculated, and coolly 
 predetermined method by which wealth gains 
 unfair advantages for itself and shirks public 
 burdens. It is a part of the great edifice of 
 fraud that has been built up around the cen- 
 tral idea of Privilege. It is one phase of 
 the great public wrong that has produced 
 the American millionaire and the American 
 tramp in such numbers that they occupy 
 separate divisions in our censuses, and that 
 has all but exhausted the wealth-producing 
 people who may be found between the 
 two. 
 
 Multitudes of business men and working- 
 men who have no direct interest in the pro- 
 tective tariff are nevertheless made to suffer 
 by the periods of contraction and inflation 
 which inevitably follow the buffeting of this 
 question in politics. The daring gamblers 
 of the protected class can take their chances. 
 They win or lose heavily. It is their trade.
 
 142 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 They are prepared for the casualties of the 
 war in which they arc engaged. 
 
 It is not so with the legitimate commerce 
 and industry of the land. They find them- 
 selves disorganized by circumstances over 
 which they have no control. They are sub- 
 jected to all manner of alarms and conjec- 
 tures, to every variety of doubt and panic. 
 They seek no favors; they will quietly sub- 
 mit to no imposition; they merely ask to 
 be let alone and to know that the future 
 has no surprises in store for them in the way 
 of dishonest and meddlesome legislation. 
 But they can be sure of nothing so long as 
 this question remains the football of parties. 
 
 While men are free, and speech is free, 
 and presses are free, the supporters of Priv- 
 ilege must be on the defensive. There will 
 be no peace while this error lasts. So long 
 as one true American voice or pen endures, 
 there will be no ground for hope that the 
 taxation of all men for the benefit of a few 
 men will become the settled and accepted 
 policy of the nation. 
 
 Privilege may continue in one form or 
 another for years; it may even extend its
 
 WHERE TO LOOK FOR THE REMEDY. 143 
 
 lines and gain strength at times. It may 
 blacken the reputations of its foes, and with 
 the assistance of a corrupt society, it may 
 fortify with seeming respectability its own 
 detestable leaders; but its victories will be 
 unsatisfying and temporar}', bringing no set- 
 tlement and justifying no reduction in the 
 numbers necessary for the defense of an in- 
 stitution which, in the nature of things, can- 
 not be at peace with its victims. In the hour 
 of its mightiest triumphs it will be in the 
 gravest danger, for in the presence of glori- 
 fied wrong new moral forces in opposition 
 will spring into being on every hand. 
 
 This is the prospect that confronts the 
 honest wealth and the legitimate business 
 and industry of the country. They can make 
 the struggle short or long, as they please. 
 They can do away with Privilege in a single 
 campaign, if they will. Their power is not 
 in question; their virtue is in question.
 
 XXVII. 
 DESPERATE RICH AND DESPERATE POOR. 
 
 WITH both protected capital and pro- 
 tected labor becoming more arrogant 
 every day, and with every new dispute de- 
 veloping novel elements of ferocity and reck- 
 lessness, he need not be looked upon as an 
 alarmist who invites the attention of the 
 plain people of America to these unhappy 
 conditions. 
 
 The desperate rich and the desperate poor 
 may be content to pursue their quarrel as to 
 work and wages and plunder, to the end; 
 but the millions who have no selfish interest 
 in the dispute, who have wearied of the tire- 
 some contentions and the audacious assump- 
 tions of both extremes, and who now and 
 then experience a sensation of alarm in the 
 presence of some new expression of violence, 
 cannot much longer escape the conclusion 
 that they have a duty in the premises. 
 
 Already we have seen virtually the en- 
 tire army of the United States engaged for 
 144
 
 DESPERATE RICH AND POOR. MS 
 
 the maintenance of peace as between these 
 two factions. Already we are familiarizing 
 ourselves with the strike leader's flippant use 
 of the word "revolution." Already we have 
 seen our transcontinental railways picketed 
 by troops as are the thoroughfares in Russia 
 when the czar rides forth. Already portions 
 of the militia of more than one American 
 state have mutinied against the authority to 
 which it has sworn obedience. Already 
 there have come threatenings of rebellion 
 from states that had not yet been carved out 
 of the wilderness when the scene at Ap- 
 pomattox was enacted. Already the rich 
 man is revolving in his mind the problem 
 and the possibility of "strong government." 
 Already multitudes of Americans are dem- 
 onstrating their lack of faith in their own in- 
 stitutions, by the eagerness with which they 
 seize upon and indorse the dreams of state 
 socialists and the visions of the poorly dis- 
 ciplined intellects of the wretched. 
 
 There is nothing in the situation or in 
 the half-hearted and tentative measures of 
 relief that have been proposed, to reassure 
 the man who is in earnest in his belief that
 
 146 GOVERNMENT AND CO., LIMITED. 
 
 Privilege is morally wrong, and that the se- 
 curity of free government demands its utter 
 and immediate extirpation. 
 
 Many of the ideas on which the repub- 
 lic was based have become inoperative. 
 Through the aggressions of a class we have 
 been led away from the safe and simple rule 
 bequeathed to us by immortal patriots, and 
 have taken on ourselves the injustices and 
 discriminations which scandalize the worn- 
 out despotisms of Europe. The only prac- 
 ticable and prudent course open to the peo- 
 ple is to return to first principles, and with 
 uncompromising firmness cut away every 
 new growth that does not harmonize with 
 their everlasting truths. 
 
 The way out is straight out to the higher 
 ground of honesty and to the purer air of 
 truth. The men who linger hesitatingly over 
 the well-worn columns of figures and the 
 fumbled tables of statistics, from which they 
 have been accustomed to elucidate the eco- 
 nomic value of robbery, may as well be left 
 to the congenial society of the great plun- 
 derers and the degraded paupers which the 
 system has produced. To no member of
 
 DESPERA TE RICH AND POOR. H? 
 
 this objectionable trinity will a moral ques- 
 tion appeal. Faith must be had in the great 
 body of the people, for in spite of many pre- 
 judices and great preoccupation, they may 
 yet be depended upon when properly ap- 
 proached, to dispose of this question cor- 
 rectly and for all time. 
 
 With the issue once presented as it should 
 be, and as it will be before much progress can 
 be hoped for, there will be for a season but 
 two political parties in this country — one of 
 honesty and the other of dishonesty; one of 
 morality and the other of immorality. 
 
 Those American people who ask as a 
 right for themselves more than they are will- 
 ing to accord to others do not constitute the 
 majority; they are an insignificant minority; 
 their plague spots of avarice, disorder and 
 woe do not characterize the republic. If 
 they did, the case would be desperate indeed. 
 The profounder currents of national life, 
 often vexed and impeded by the follies and 
 vices of these interests, are not seriously 
 contaminated as yet by the excesses which 
 they have encouraged. The recuperative and 
 reformatory power of the masses living far
 
 hS government and CO., Limited. 
 
 from the scenes of these injustices has not 
 been impaired. It may need direction, it 
 may need education, it may require disci- 
 pline; but it does not lack virtue or energy. 
 
 To that uncorrupted democracy which 
 has viewed with patience, if not with indiffer- 
 ence, the vicious systems and policies de- 
 signed for its own spoliation, which asks no 
 injustice, and which, at no distant day, will 
 demand and accept nothing but justice, the 
 appeal in behalf of good morals and good 
 government must be made. It has not failed 
 the republic in the past; it will not fail it 
 now. 
 
 Thoughtful men do not need to be told 
 that the next great struggle of civilization is 
 to turn upon the relations between capital 
 and labor. They know that portents of this 
 momentous conflict are visible even now in 
 every enlightened nation. Whether it is to 
 be a battle of ideas alone, or one in which 
 rivers of blood shall flow, they cannot tell, 
 but of one thing they may be certain: The 
 rage of that conflict will beat fiercest upon 
 the nation that has most to answer for in the 
 way of injustice and oppression.
 
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