“And now the descendants of those beautiful buccaneers, too proud to mine or farm, but not ashamed to fall upon a poor farmer’s homestead and confiscate his last horse! Not too dignified to hold up a crippled huckster and collar two-thirds of his hard earned pennies. Too sensitive to work the windlass of a silvermine, but rough-handed enough to wring silver from a consumptive shopkeeper. Our grandiose rulers, I should say, are in small business when they break in to snatch a widow’s kettle and cot-bed. “Yet that’s done every day in the year. Statistics claim that somewhere on earth a child is born every second. And at least every minute sees the birth of a child that will have to die of hunger, because its mother’s bread has been filched by tax-collectors. “Have Governments a right to supply their needs at the expense of widows and orphans, while thousands of able-bodied young men stand ready to earn revenue for them?” High tariff bullies, says the Russian reformer, are marine highway robbers. At first sight, the burden of spoliation seems shifted to the shoulders of foreigners, but, look closer, and you find natives obliged to buy imports at extortion rates. Passengers, waiting to be examined by custom-house officers, says Bakunin, always remind him of travelers, lined up to be searched by footpads. “How commerce revives,” he says, “wherever those shackles are partly removed! How would it flourish if they were altogether abolished? Traffic that now obliges skippers to starve their sailors could be made abundantly profitable.” A hundred years before the birth of Henry George, a revenue system, closely resembling the “Single Tax” plan, was recommended by the father of Gabriel Mirabeau, and by the Roget School of French Communists. “It _would_ relieve some classes of our wage-earners,” says Bakunin, “but would burden others, and why harass them, if we can undoubtedly find ways to get along without direct taxation?” Why make land the scapegoat of a sin that might be avoided? In 1849 the Russian Government got its clutches on the bold reformer, and silenced him by the usual argument of despots. The voice that had entranced mass-meetings in a hundred cities of southern and western Europe was stifled in the catacombs of Schlüsselburg. But Time, the All-Avenger, has made the martyr’s name a rallying cry of East-European reformers, and America should honor the memory of Mikal Bakunin as that of a hero and pioneer of reform—a man whose marvelous gift of intuition had recognized all the ideals of Populism, all its principles and promises, but who succumbed to the superhuman task of effecting its progress under the handicap of a monarchical government. _Naturally_ KNICKER—There goes a man who would rather fight than eat. BOCKER—Soldier? KNICKER—No, dyspeptic. [Illustration: LUCIANNA’S KEEP BY ELLIOT WALKER.]