“I tell you,” said he, “we must change it all. A man is only worth what he makes. They tell us society would be a chaos without private property; I tell them it is private property that makes a chaos of society. They talk about the law! the law! I tell them the world would be better without law. It is a bogey, invented to scare off us ignorant fellows from the plunder the rich have appropriated, just such a bogey as religion was, only religion has been exploded. It is the law’s turn to go next. All property is robbery; and it is only because land-owners are the worst thieves of all, that we feel differently about other things. The earth belongs to the human race; and no man can rightly own its surface, whether he got his title from a feudal baron or a Spanish general, any more than he can own the air of heaven. But property in other things is just as bad; and Jay Gould is a worse man than the Duke of Westminster, though he has ten million acres and Gould only a few hundred. How much of his wealth represents the honest labor of himself or his forefathers?” There was a murmur of applause at this. There were some half dozen men in the room, all sober and apparently intelligent, and all natural-born Americans. “But somebody must own things,” one of them remarked. “Somebody must own the mills, and the railroads, and the machinery. Why up to our works we’ve got a single engine that cost nigh unto eighty thousand dollars.” “We can all own them,” Starbuck went on earnestly, “just as we all made them. Who do you suppose made that eighty-thousand dollar machine--the banks with their money and so-called capital, or the men as put it together? A man is worth just what he makes, I tell you. Can Jay Gould make an engine? But because we’ve all got to have a little land, and a little plant and money, are those as have got it to take away from us ninety-nine per cent. of all we make? Yes--if we’re fools enough to stand it. A man can have what he can keep and use, what he can eat and what he can wear. If he chooses to store up his day’s labor, to set aside the bread and meat he earns, he can do so, and keep it till it spoils. But this dog-in-the-manger business ain’t to be carried no further; and if a feller squats down on land, and don’t use it, an’ another feller without no land comes along and wants it, that first feller has got to get up and git--that’s all. A man’s a man for what he is, for what he can do--not for what he owns.” “But who’s going to support the Government?”