Mr. Jefferson foresaw this danger and he sought to avert it. When Virginia ceded the vast Northwest to the government—before the Constitution was written—Mr. Jefferson in the second clause of the articles of cession prohibited forever the right of primogeniture. Virginia then nobly said, and Georgia in the cession of her territory repeated: “In granting this domain to the government and dedicating it to freedom, we prescribe that there shall be no classes in the family—no child set up at the expense of the others, no feudal estates established—but what a man hath shall be divided equally among his children.” We see this feudal tendency, swept away by Mr. Jefferson, revived by the conditions of our time, aided by the government with its grant of enormous powers and its amazing class legislation. It has given the corporation more power than Mr. Jefferson stripped from the individual, and has set up a creature without soul or conscience or limit of human life to establish an oligarchy, unrelieved by human charity and unsteadied by human responsibility. The syndicate, the trust, the corporation—these are the eldest sons of the Republic for whom the feudal right of primogeniture is revived, and who inherit its estate to the impoverishment of their brothers. Let it be noted that the alliance between those who would centralize the government and the consolidated money power is not only close but essential. The one is the necessity of the other. Establish the money power and there is universal clamor for strong government. The weak will demand it for protection against the people restless under oppression—the patriotic for protection against the plutocracy that scourges and robs—the corrupt hoping to buy of one central body distant from local influences what they could not buy from the legislatures of the States sitting at their homes—the oligarchs will demand it—as the privileged few have always demanded it—for the protection of their privileges and the perpetuity of their bounty. Thus, hand in hand, will walk—as they have always walked—the federalist and the capitalist, the centralist and the monopolist—the strong government protecting the money power, and the money power the political standing army of the government. Hand in hand, compact and organized, one creating the necessity, the other meeting it; consolidated wealth and centralizing government; stripping the many of their rights and aggrandizing the few; distrusting the people but in touch with the plutocrats; striking down local self-government and dwarfing the citizens—and at last confronting the people in the market, in the courts, at the ballot box—everywhere—with the infamous challenge: “What are you going to do about it?” And so the government protects and the barons oppress, and the people suffer and grow strong. And when the battle for liberty is joined—the centralist and the plutocrat, entrenched behind the deepening powers of the government, and the