private individuals of such amounts as each could actually cultivate to advantage. As the population and demand for land increased, the amounts allotted to individuals was to be cut down proportionally, and a grade or standard of cultivation and quantity of production was to be exacted, and the state was to fix the prices at which the products were to be sold. Eventually it was proposed that the state should be the purchaser and distributor of these products so that speculation in them should be prevented. The advantage possessed by some on account of their nearness to market would be equalized by the state paying a less rate for their products than for those further away. “Taxes for revenue were then to be levied upon every piece of personal property that could be found of every sort whatever including buildings. In the cities a graded rent for lots was to be assessed according to locality, beginning at zero in the vacant suburbs and increasing toward the center of greatest activity and demand. A thoroughness in assessment and the employment of methods that were called by their critics, “odiously inquisitorial,” were to be adopted, but the fact was the mass of the people were drifting rapidly toward socialism in their ideas, and they asserted that the “inquisitorial methods” were alright. They said, it was high time to know how much wealth people had and how they came by it, and that reluctance to tell on the part of the possessors of it indicated that either they had acquired it by questionable methods, or wished to avoid the fair responsibility, that its ownership entailed. They went further and declared it was high time that more scientific processes were discovered and put into practice for the equitable distribution of wealth. A thousand men contribute to the production of $1,000,000 of wealth, all of which is gobbled up in a few weeks or months by the scheming of a single “financier.” The board of directors of a railroad, a mining company or a manufacturing company, may issue to themselves certificates of watered stock for which they pay not a cent, and which represent wealth having no existence, but which they are in a position to compel the public to make good. A gang of speculators may get up a corner on wheat or cotton or stocks of some sort and artificially raise the price while they unload at the advanced rate thereby securing wealth they never earned. Combinations and trusts in oil or sugar, screws, nails, coal, whisky, gas-pipes or binding twine, arbitrarily advance the price of the articles whenever they want more money, and thus take as many thousands or millions from that patient ass, the public, as they see fit without a pretense of returning an equivalent. All these things the politicians of the new school declared must be stopped. They said people should not be allowed to secure wealth without in some way earning it, and if they had managed to secure it without rendering an