It is unpleasant to look upon the dark side of any question, and especially that of our lovely country, and still go on ignoring the lessons given us by the fathers of the nation. When we compare the administrations of Washington, Adams, and others, with the present ravening greed for place by those who look upon official position as the gateway to sudden wealth, the inquiry suggests itself, and the desire to know the points of compass the nation is drifting, and at what _port_ the ship of state is expected to enter if continued on the dark lines of the present chart? History is full of object-lessons--storms, wrecks and disasters that have ended all attempts to perpetuate a republican form of government by the power of organized wealth. Money is powerful, and may govern for a season. But legislation that concentrates the wealth of the nation into the hands of a privileged few causes the government to rest upon a sandy foundation. The common people will eventually tire, become restless and revengeful. The money interests of the United States and those of Europe are the same. And when the accumulation becomes so great it can not satisfy personal greed for gain, it finds its way into landed investments, chiefly in the United States. At the present rate of concentration and transfer into realty, the period can not be far in the future when all the valuable lands in the United States will be owned and controlled by a few immensely wealthy families in this country and in Europe. The “money power,” with its “trusts,” “combines,” high fences, barb-wired, armed police on the outside and bulldogs within, may smile at the success giving financial control of the profits of all kinds of labor necessary in the development and manufacture of the resources of nature. Still, the aristocratic pyramid is incomplete until the soil and profits from cultivation are owned and controlled by the “systematic and satisfactory management of a ‘_land trust_.’”