Confiscations; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
And do not plague yourselves about the numerosity of the new settler,
and where the whole of him is to find a market. We are trying to get rid
of the pauper, and whoever heard of a farm, free of the 8 per cent.
night-mare, being the breeding place of such as he? Whatever else
happens to the farmer he at least is sure of enough to eat. Wheat may be
down; cattle without buyers; eggs a drug; potatoes left to rot in the
ground, milk wasting like water, and not ten cents in money on the
premises, but the owner is not starving. The dude may not see a brother
in him, and he will be denied entrance to the Inner Circle when Major
domo McAllister sees him in the rear. But he has weight, and looks as if
trying to get away with this year's crop, to make room for the next,
agrees with him; and if he thinks now and again of the days of the
hungry tramp it must be that the undertaking has proportions he little
dreamed of.
But he will have a market. What causes him to need one? This. That he
may be able to get that which he does not produce or make himself. And
is there not some one else producing or making those very things, and
who needs what the farmer alone produces or makes? If yes, then we have
found the whole secret of what we call business - two producers or
makers of different articles making an exchange one with the other. Stop
that exchange, and there would be no manufacturing; we would all be
living off raw nature once more, and our ball-games would give way to
the pelting of cocoanuts and hanging by our tails.
XI.
The opening of these forfeited lands would be the salvation of that
pitiable creature, the victim of the 8 per cent. grind. The homeless
wanderer can get shade and shelter from the burning sun and driving
storm, and with these is content, for he has long since resigned
ambition to those who are willing to continue the hopeless struggle; but
the man, on the 8 per cent. treadmill, who has not yet acknowledged
defeat, has no way of escape from the glare of the master's eye, except
by self-murder or the pauper's grave. There is nothing that excites our
hatred against the infamous laws of our times as much as does the sight
of this brave man struggling against the fate that is crushing him, and
whose patriotism will soon be kindred to that of the Russian serfs, if
it does not go to the other extreme and make him a nihilist or some
other brand of the political desperado. It was from this quarter, forget
it not, that the old flint locks came, "whose report was heard around
the world," and the serf will never be his model, for the old spirit has
still enough of life left for another blaze, as these new oppressors
will find to their awful cost.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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