Confiscations; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
When the owning of 50,000 acres of land by one man is wrong, then it is
wrong to let him own it, and if there was one drop of the John Brown
blood in this crew of house-gown and plush-slipper reformers, they would
go into the enemy's camp, and never let up on their open warfare until
what belonged to the people was returned to them.
Taxing an enemy to make him give up his plunder!
When hunger and plenty is found side by side what solution can there be
but to set a limit to what the overendowed can tag with his name, and to
put his forfeited surplus where the underfed can, with reasonable labor,
get possession of it.
If the single taxer is given plenty of time, he will accomplish
something, undoubtedly, but the whole thing will be over long before
poor old Dobbin gets on to the scene.
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The millionaire land-owner and the millionaire capitalist are as much
out of place in a republic as is the man with a title; and the laws
which permitted the growth of the first two are the primary cause of the
disgraceful conditions that exist in this Republic to-day. When we know
that people in actual want are to be found in every section of the
United States, we ought to be able to say that it is Nature that has
failed us for the time being; but it is not Nature, but the wretched
laws of man's own making that are at fault. Had we the economic laws
that belong to a republic, instead of those that belong to a despotism,
the foreign markets could be entirely closed to us, and all our people
would still have enough of all things that are necessary to life. And
those able men who have gone into the domain of natural philosophy, to
see what they could find to advance and benefit the human race, have
found so much, and brought about such a change in the industrial world,
that they have completely bewildered our political philosophers, who
have been utterly unable to make room for the labor-saving inventions
and discoveries of those men, until the confusion and distress resulting
from the incompetence of our political philosophers to adjust the laws
to meet the changed conditions are beginning to make us look upon the
inventors as our enemies, instead of our benefactors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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