“Suppose one of our Indian nations should now agree to form a civil society. Each individual would bring into the stock of the society little more property than his gun and his blanket, for at present he has no other. We know that when one of them has attempted to keep a few swine he has not been able to maintain a property in them, his neighbors thinking they have a right to kill and eat them whenever they want provisions, it being one of their maxims that hunting is free for all. The accumulation of property in such a society, and its security to individuals in every society, must be an effect of the protection afforded to it by the joint strength of the society in the execution of its laws. “Private property is, therefore, a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society whenever its necessities require it, _even to the last farthing_.” But one need quote only the law of self-preservation to prove that if any people shall ever become convinced that their lives depend upon the confiscation of the trusts that such confiscation will be justified. When men reach a certain stage of hunger and wretchedness they pay scant attention to every law except the higher law that says they have a right to live. I believe that most Socialists twenty years ago, were in favor of confiscation. The trend now is all toward compensation. Not that Socialists have changed their minds at all about the equities of the matter. They have not. But they are coming to see that compensation is the easier and quicker way. Victor Berger, the first Socialist congressman, introduced in the House of Representatives an anti-trust bill in which he proposed that the government should buy all of the trusts that control more than forty per cent. of the business in their respective lines, and pay therefor their full cash values—minus, of course, wind, water and all forms of speculative inflation. In short the differences in the Socialist party upon the question of compensation are not unlike the differences which once existed with regard to the best means by which the negroes might be emancipated. Years before the Civil War, Henry Clay proposed that the government should buy the negroes at double their market price and set them free. He said this would be the cheapest and quickest way of settling the troubles between the North and the South. The slave owners would not consent, and, eventually Lincoln freed their slaves without paying for them.