The unlimited privilege of capital in these directions has been defended on the ground that it greatly accelerates your material progress; that in private hands these enterprises can be more economically managed; and that the centralization of power in a government would be dangerously increased by the proprietorship of such large undertakings. All of these allegations except the first are without foundation in fact. The growing political weight, especially in your representative governments, of all monopoly combinations, by reason of their wealth and large individual patronage, presents to you the choice of either a government ruled by outside influences, which cannot be held responsible for the evils it inadvertently inflicts by the irresistible pressure from without, or a government entirely and absolutely liable, and to be held to a strict accountability for all encroachments upon the common welfare while handling these services of supply. In the latter case your remedy is an easy one; and may be readily applied; while in the former, nothing short of a political convulsion will serve you. No advanced government upon your Earth has ever undertaken a public service of any magnitude for a long term, which has not been systematized and improved by all the available knowledge and science of its time. The difference between a public and a private supply of a common demand is, that to one is added the costs and profits of capital; while the other, shorn of these oftentimes excessive exactions, is furnished at the cheapest rate possible. Any policy of your governments, no matter how unwisely adopted, becomes in time a fixture which is difficult to remove. The abuses which it may be known to produce are tolerated long after its evil is understood. Yet, there is scarcely one of these which has not had its active defenders. The able defense of measures which have long since been expunged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of the most striking examples of mental obliquity in your annals. No government of the Earth, however, in its long legislative career, was ever known to favor the laboring and landless over the interests of those holding endowments of the Earth’s surface. What seems at a superficial glance to be in your own country such a measure, in what may be generally termed your land policy, with its homestead provisions, becomes upon a closer examination delusive. Every one of your laws for the pretended purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears the covert design or connivance to further the opportunities of capital. From the inauguration of your system, capital and wealth have been gradually absorbing your lands, and the partnership of labor in them is as transitory and accidental as the opportunities afforded in the early stages of your city’s growth.