Besides this immense service, the government provides religious edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and pleasure grounds. And all this, you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our population than your landlords exact of you for ground rent alone. Adding to this four million days’ labor for rent, paid to private owners of buildings, and we have left nineteen million days’ labor for living expenses not provided by our government, and out of which come all the profit and accumulations of capital, except those derived from rents of buildings. You will see thereby, that with all the monopoly privileges that have fastened themselves upon your system done away with, capital has yet a full scope to exercise its legitimate functions in the fields of production and distribution, apart from which it has no rights and is entitled to no legislative consideration. It is only by expunging the demands and profits of capital that the government is enabled to furnish all these services mentioned at so small a cost. We hold it to be a principle of justice, that the natural elements should not be permitted to form the basis of corporate management or monopoly control, and therefore instead of allowing capital the fullest privilege to appropriate those bounties of nature which are found ready for use, we have restricted its operations to a mere partnership with labor, where it justly belongs. In our endeavors to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of production, should be provided for by the government. We remove the burdens of labor, by relieving it of those large capital enterprises which subsist on it, and which fail to share with it a reasonable portion of earnings. The large sums of money and the special privileges required in these operations of supply, of which your railroad, telephone and telegraph lines are prominent examples, obstruct the natural tendency of competition, and capital and wealth are thereby permitted advantages over labor which they should not of right have.