Through centuries of legislation and usuage you have established various processes, by which wealth is enabled to extract an undue portion of the earnings of industry. Among these processes may be named rates of interest on money graded to the necessities of borrowers, rents gauged by the ability of tenants to pay, monopoly supplies with prices fixed just below the point of compelled abstinence, variations in the value of mediums of exchange, with other unsuppressed agencies promoting frequent change of values for the opportunities of capital and the distress of labor; stupendous aggregations of wealth reversing the laws of economy by advancing the price of necessities on the one hand and depressing the wages of labor on the other; and more successful than all, a system of land proprietorship which permits holders of the Earth’s surface, in addition to their privilege of exacting a large portion of the profits of industry in rent, a further right to pocket, in the form of appreciated values of their land, an unearned share of the collective fruits of the industries which surround them. Our divergent views of existence are exemplified in the care we have taken to provide for an evener division of the products of industry. With us, property is the means, and not the end, beyond which there are any number of attainments in life incomparably more desirable and beneficial to society, and our legislation has been directed chiefly to the care and cultivation of these. The great aim of our government has been to provide for the well-being of persons, while it may be said of yours that the most attention has been devoted to the welfare of property; by which is meant its protection and increase, regardless of the manner of its distribution, or the doubtful methods of its extraction from the energies of labor. In the pursuit of this policy you are only perpetuating, without much change, your primitive conditions, when the strong arm gathered the most of the wealth. Your early born instincts do not seem sufficiently evolutionized to co-operate in any undertaking which denies opportunities of the strong over the weak; and the unhappy consequence is a society so mercenary that the general estimate among you is not from any quality which indicates a nearness to the Deity, but principally from the cool numerical calculations of property attachments.