Understanding the principle of Confiscation, it will be easily seen how
it must work in every individual case; and, therefore, it is needless to
dwell on or elaborate its workings when it is applied to banks,
breweries, sugar refineries, water works, gas works, street railways,
etc.
It will not destroy capital or business. It may lessen the value of real
estate on the principal streets in large cities, and fall in values is
not certain even there. It will trouble no one, however, if it does; not
the present owner, even, for the value of property in favored localities
is so great now that, however much one man can own now, he can own but a
fraction of it under the proposed change. The owner of, say, a $400,000
building and lot on such a street as we are now considering may find a
shrinkage of $100,000. This will give him two partners instead of three.
The shrinkage, therefore, will be to his liking; for, be it known, the
aristocrat is a proud bird, and likes to flock by itself. And any
designs against these two partners will be so fruitless of results to
himself that a word in his ear now and then by his friends and
well-wishers, about the public treasury, will end in his cultivating,
such a lamblike submission to the new dispensation that his eloquence,
born of the new light and an awakened conscience, will make his titled
sister over the way give up her bauble when he shows her the cost of its
pomp to the struggling poor.
Such will be the effect of the change on a man who now carries the law
in his pocket, when he hasn't it under his feet.
Moving the laborer so far away from the centre of the city, and where
there is room to build habitable homes, will be a serious objection, it
will be urged. They cannot get to their work on time without getting up
at all hours. They can just have time to snatch a bite and be away
again. And the whole of Sunday must be given to sleep they cannot get at
any other time.
They will be strangers in the near-by theatre, and the near-by library
will be given up to the spider and his web, and the little garden of
flowers that the once half-starved women have made a delight will be
unknown to the worn out bread-winner, who will be the same old slave we
premised to unshackle. Better clothes surely, and his home shows what it
is to be a citizen of a republic that is a republic in fact as well as
in name; but he has only time to snatch a bite and be away again.
Will it never occur to those critics that we are here dealing with the
greatest creation of the Almighty, and of all time - civilized man; and
that we must make the conditions fit him, and not he the the conditions.
Everything he eats, wears, and uses in twelve months can be produced in
two. Why, then, should he be compelled to labor twelve months for that
which can be produced or made in one-sixth of that time? The reason is
plain. When two laborers make an exchange there is wholesale robbery
committed by the non-producing and idle parasites, while the fruits of
Labor are on the way to those who alone are entitled to the whole. "And
I," says the millionaire, "say this robbery must go on, for I am an
impossibility without it." That gnawing canker never had any doubts as
to where his surfeit comes from. And now that it has become a question
of life and death with those he has been plundering, he should be
dragged to the bar of justice and compelled to disgorge. And then labor,
too, can come in on the eight and nine o'clock train, and be no later
for its work than is the banker and the rest of his class that have had
Labor under their heels so long.
The capacity of the modern world to produce has entirely outstripped her
capacity to consume, and trying to solve the economic problems of the
day, by further denial or ignoring of this fact, that should be
self-evident, will be to build a structure with only half the foundation
laid, and the inevitable collapse is bound to follow.
There will always he plenty of room in the heart of a city for those who
must live close to their work.
But the inventor has made night work, except by the parasitical leeches,
unnecessary to the masses, a few hours of daylight being more than
sufficient to supply all the needs of the country. We are not insisting,
be it understood, on a four-hour or eight-hour system of labor. No
industry or occupation will be hampered or meddled with by doing justice
to the laborer in the way proposed. The railroad employee, printer,
baker, factory hand, etc., can work on as now, but they must be
compensated with just wages for the labor done. This will enable them to
retire before decrepitude comes on, and orders are left for the
poorhouse ambulance to call on its way out.
If every city occupied three times the ground they now do, they would be
gainers in all ways, and the moral degradation into which large sections
of them have sunk would disappear with the conditions that produced
them.
The capacity of Europe to feed her people is being crowded, we are told,
and then our flag is again run-up, and during the whole exhibition the
Chinese system of bunking is quietly fastening itself in every city of
consequence in the country. When those sorely pressed people, whose very
existence is being threatened by these foreigners of a degraded
civilization, awaken to the extremity of their danger, the bunking
system and its introducers will find perjury and the habeus corpus mill
powerless to save them. Mark this, however. The big capitalist imported
the Chinaman, and his powerful influence has defeated all attempts to
remove him. It follows, then, that we must break up the big capitalist,
if we ever expect to get at the thing behind him.
We are not indifferent to the hardships of the oppressed of other
nations, but we cannot get out of our own perplexities by saying that we
are more favored in some way than are others. There are rocks ahead of
ourselves, and watching others going to pieces and firing congratulatory
guns will not help them or save us from, a like fate.
Whatever is in the near future for Europe, we, at least, have nothing to
fear as to the capacity of our country to support all her people. And as
it is with room for producing, so it is with room in which to live.
There is plenty of both, and we should show ourselves worthy of the
legacy left us by that handful of brave men who established liberty in
our country, and insist on getting plenty of both before the armed
hireling appears and it is too late.