We doubt if there be a single recorded instance in the whole history of civilized society of any king, ruler, statesman, legislator, prophet, philosopher, orator, or other public man, seeking honestly, and with probabilities of success, the reign of justice, humanity, and fraternity for his fellow-countrymen, that was not overwhelmed with calumny, overpowered by faction, and ultimately either put to death or forced to fly for his life and bury himself in poverty and obscurity to escape the malice of the oppressors of his country. But who were those oppressors? The same everywhere--the same now as ever--the idle rich, who prey on their industrious fellow-creatures through the inventions of rents, profits, interest of money, dividends, taxes, and so forth--all arising out of usurpations of the soil, and making money grow money. The ancient prophets and apostles suffered for causes not essentially different from those which destroyed the Gracchi at Rome and Agis and Cleomenes of Sparta. Romulus and Julius Cæsar were victims of the same spirit that beheaded Paul and sawed Isaiah asunder. Heraclides and Hippo of Sicily perished through landlordism and profitmongering, in no other sense than did John the Baptist under Herod; St. Stephen, by the Jewish rabble, let loose upon him by the middle-class Pharisees; and Socrates, by the hypocritical “property” classes of Athens; nay, the Saviour himself, whose crucifixion was perpetrated by like influences on behalf of like interests. All honest reformers, spiritual or temporal, must necessarily be foes to landlordism and usury, though not to the persons of landlords and usurers. The latter, however, have ever considered attacks upon their system to be attacks upon themselves: and, accordingly, they have crushed or murdered every honest reformer whose influence has hitherto threatened to supplant their own with the millions. And so it ever will be--until the millions shall become wise enough, and moral enough, to be able to dispose summarily of landlordism and usury without further preaching or teaching. Any one who will take the trouble to read over a list of the laws proposed by Julius Cæsar, in any book of Roman antiquities (say Adams’s “Antiquities”), will see by their titles that they were all essentially popular, and designed to protect the citizens from the cupidity of land-monopolists, usurers, and dilapidators of the public revenue. In this we have the true _secret_ of his murder by the patrician conspirators, headed by Brutus, who, with all the stoic virtues attributed to him, was a rank aristocrat in grain, and a usurer to boot; for, according to the testimony of his friend Cicero, he used to charge interest for his money at the rate of 48 per cent., and gather it in, too, with the sabre’s edge when necessary.