We will now show how the principle of Confiscation should work in the case of railroads. This class of property, by the way, should never have been given over to private ownership to begin with. They are for the convenience of the public, just as much as any harbor or navigation ever was. And if it was right that the founders of the Republic should, in the interests of the country's commerce, deny the right of private ownership in our navigable waters, then it was wrong to concede the right of private ownership in railroads. As for the capital to build them with, it was just as easy to get it for that purpose as it was to get capital to dredge harbors, build lighthouses, build forts or the Stanford University. The first railroad, or even the twentieth, never suggested to the leaders of those times any idea of what this rival of the winds and tides would develop into in a few short years. Individual greed has so little time, to spare from the building of its own nest that politics in the United States, where the common good should be the aim of all legislation, has become a hand-to-mouth affair, and the morrow must shift for itself. Busy hunting for spoil, like our own incompetents of to-day, the legislators of the past cared nothing for the morrow; and, without knowing what they were doing really, surrendered a principle to the railroad projectors that was but a spark at the time, but which has spread until we find the blaze devouring us to-day. The statecraft that never found time to look beyond the ringing of the curfew bells would have starved to death had it to compete with those who were then working the lobby, while it was splitting hairs over the Constitution and accepting the "stuff" that would do it "the most good." No class of property shows the justice, and therefore the need, of Confiscation as much as railroads. No class of property has done as much toward absorbing and transferring the whole country into the hands of a comparatively few men as railroads. But when Confiscation gets through with these monarchs of all they survey, the town or section through which these railroads run will not find themselves like a sucked orange by the wayside. Taking the Southern Pacific Railroad, we find that it runs through Madera County, California, but it is doubtful if ten cents worth of its securities are owned there. Madera County, then, has property within her borders that earns an income, not one cent of which goes to the county where it was earned.[1] The property is there, but the income from it is taken elsewhere. This is the one great flaw in our present economic life, and is the very root of our present troubles.