Monopolies -- United States; Railroads and state -- United States
The operatives and mechanics are banding together for the same purpose.
They are all seeking, in the same degree, to counteract the evil effects
of the grants and privileges conferred upon monopolies. The farmers,
who, as a class, have always been deemed the most independent in the
country, are so impoverished by these monopolies that they have been
compelled to band together for mutual protection. No choice was left
them. The bestowal of such great powers and special privileges upon
corporations presented the alternative of utter financial ruin, or
united and combined efforts on the part of the people, to check the
great and growing power which now is fattening upon their toil and
industry. While under ordinary circumstances, all class organizations
are attended with some bad results, yet when any interest becomes so
powerful as to oppress all others, when it has such strength that it can
defy all ordinary attempts at reform, then any and all organizations
having for their object the correction of abuses, the restoration of the
rights of the people, the destruction of an oligarchy that has already
obtained such power in the land as to subvert the very nature of free
institutions, is not only right, but its objects are patriotic. Though
the organization may have for its object the protection of a single
interest, the correction of a single abuse, the restoration of a single
right, it benefits all classes who suffer like oppressions. It is
fortunate that while the grants of great bounties and special privileges
to corporations have resulted in great wrongs and oppressions to the
people generally, they have also been the means of effecting
organizations that will eventually restore to the people those rights
which in our government are considered as inalienable. When the
agriculturalists of the whole country become united in their demands for
redress, neither the state legislatures, the congress of the nation, or
the courts, will dare to disregard their demands. Numbering more than
all who are engaged in other pursuits, being a majority of the whole
people, when their united voice is heard it will not be an "uncertain
sound." It will command obedience. Grants of bounties and privileges to
corporations have depressed and sometimes destroyed other great
interests to the injury of the people, and divided the people into
classes, one class representing the capital and corporate interests of
the country, and the other, comprised of the laboring and producing
classes; but this special legislation has also resulted in bringing to
the front the great agricultural population, who possess the power, by
united action, of restoring to the people their lost rights, while
corporations shall enjoy equal rights with other interests, shorn of
their power granted to them by corrupt and interested legislation and
partial decisions of courts. This legislation and these decisions we
have reviewed in preceding pages. It now remains for us to express our
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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