Thirty-six million dollars for _one honest day's labor_! Thirty-six million dollars--and Alaska cost us but seven millions and Spain relinquished to us her claims on the Philippines for only twenty millions. Thirty-six million dollars!--more than a hundred times as much as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and "Abe" Lincoln together secured for the patriotic labors of their lifetimes. And this vast sum was taken from the people to enrich men whose coffers were already, as the results of similar operations, so full of dollars that neither they nor their children, nor their children's children could count them--as the people count their savings, a dollar at a time--as thoughtlessly taken as are the apples that the school-boy steals after he has eaten so many that he can eat no more. A thousand times have I tried to figure out in my mind what worlds of misery such a sum of millions might allay if issued by a government and intelligently distributed among a people--and do my readers know that never in the world's recorded history has any nation felt itself rich enough to devote thirty-six millions to the cause of charity--even in the midst of the most awful calamities of fire, flood, war, or pestilence? On the other hand, I have had to know about the horrors, the misfortunes, the earthly hell, which were the awful consequences of the appropriation of this vast amount. I have had to know about the convicts, the suicides, the broken hearts, the starvation and wretchedness, the ruined bodies and lost souls which strewed the fields of the "System's" harvest. Pondering all these things, I have ceased to wonder at the deep murmurs of discontent that are rising, rising to my ears from all parts of the continent. Can it be that a just God suffers the sons and daughters of some of us to eke out a bare existence as the best reward of earnest effort and sterling worth, and at the same time rewards these other men with $36,000,000 for one day's labor? Is this the freedom which our fathers and our sons died on many a bloody, hard-fought field to preserve? I am conscious of a haunting fear that these men and women may not always be patient, may not always be put off with skilled evasion or slippery subterfuge, and for one brief moment I see visions of a marching people, bearing aloft grisly heads on gory poles, and hear above the low, bestial murmur of the mob the cry for bread and for revenge. And then I remember that this is _America_, not France; that our laws are strong--if but the people are aroused to see them obeyed; that our prisons are ample, even though they be for the present filled with petty rascals who can do but little harm though turned loose to make room for the real scoundrels who are undermining the foundations of our Republic. FOOTNOTES: