Our more advanced civilization and truer democracy exhibit themselves
nowhere more strikingly, than in the way in which we have determined
the equal division of land interests. With our city of three hundred
thousand inhabitants, and its income during the same period of time
as yours of thirty-one million days’ labor, there is assessed by our
authorities about the sum as ground rent equivalent to eight million
average days’ pay of our workmen. For this amount in hand, our
government furnishes to its tenants, without further cost, perfected
streets in constant repair, abundance of water for household and other
purposes, lights both in houses and streets, heat by our system (to you
undiscovered), perfect drainage without cost or repair of conduits,
insurance against individual loss by fire or flood, free burial of the
dead, and a system of education bestowing upon every individual the
higher branches of study.
Besides this immense service, the government provides religious
edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and pleasure grounds.
And all this, you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our population
than your landlords exact of you for ground rent alone. Adding to this
four million days’ labor for rent, paid to private owners of buildings,
and we have left nineteen million days’ labor for living expenses not
provided by our government, and out of which come all the profit and
accumulations of capital, except those derived from rents of buildings.
You will see thereby, that with all the monopoly privileges that have
fastened themselves upon your system done away with, capital has yet
a full scope to exercise its legitimate functions in the fields of
production and distribution, apart from which it has no rights and is
entitled to no legislative consideration.
It is only by expunging the demands and profits of capital that the
government is enabled to furnish all these services mentioned at
so small a cost. We hold it to be a principle of justice, that the
natural elements should not be permitted to form the basis of corporate
management or monopoly control, and therefore instead of allowing
capital the fullest privilege to appropriate those bounties of nature
which are found ready for use, we have restricted its operations to a
mere partnership with labor, where it justly belongs. In our endeavors
to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we
have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities
of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are
required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of
production, should be provided for by the government. We remove the
burdens of labor, by relieving it of those large capital enterprises
which subsist on it, and which fail to share with it a reasonable
portion of earnings. The large sums of money and the special privileges
required in these operations of supply, of which your railroad,
telephone and telegraph lines are prominent examples, obstruct the
natural tendency of competition, and capital and wealth are thereby
permitted advantages over labor which they should not of right have.
The unlimited privilege of capital in these directions has been
defended on the ground that it greatly accelerates your material
progress; that in private hands these enterprises can be more
economically managed; and that the centralization of power in a
government would be dangerously increased by the proprietorship of such
large undertakings. All of these allegations except the first are
without foundation in fact. The growing political weight, especially
in your representative governments, of all monopoly combinations, by
reason of their wealth and large individual patronage, presents to you
the choice of either a government ruled by outside influences, which
cannot be held responsible for the evils it inadvertently inflicts by
the irresistible pressure from without, or a government entirely and
absolutely liable, and to be held to a strict accountability for all
encroachments upon the common welfare while handling these services
of supply. In the latter case your remedy is an easy one; and may be
readily applied; while in the former, nothing short of a political
convulsion will serve you. No advanced government upon your Earth has
ever undertaken a public service of any magnitude for a long term,
which has not been systematized and improved by all the available
knowledge and science of its time. The difference between a public and
a private supply of a common demand is, that to one is added the costs
and profits of capital; while the other, shorn of these oftentimes
excessive exactions, is furnished at the cheapest rate possible.
Any policy of your governments, no matter how unwisely adopted,
becomes in time a fixture which is difficult to remove. The abuses
which it may be known to produce are tolerated long after its evil is
understood. Yet, there is scarcely one of these which has not had its
active defenders. The able defense of measures which have long since
been expunged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of the most
striking examples of mental obliquity in your annals. No government of
the Earth, however, in its long legislative career, was ever known to
favor the laboring and landless over the interests of those holding
endowments of the Earth’s surface. What seems at a superficial glance
to be in your own country such a measure, in what may be generally
termed your land policy, with its homestead provisions, becomes upon a
closer examination delusive. Every one of your laws for the pretended
purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears the covert design
or connivance to further the opportunities of capital. From the
inauguration of your system, capital and wealth have been gradually
absorbing your lands, and the partnership of labor in them is as
transitory and accidental as the opportunities afforded in the early
stages of your city’s growth.
The fact appears that, in your present development, the general sense
of individual acquisitiveness among your governing classes is too
great to deal fairly with the whole body of your people under such
seductive opportunities for self-gain. You cannot prevent, under
your present system of private ownership, the lands now held by your
people from drifting into a comparatively few hands. This process,
although going on for years, gradually accelerates, and will rapidly
become apparent when the last of your public territory shall have
passed out of the hands of your government. The owners of your lands
always have, and will continue to govern the countries of the Earth.
No representative government can exist long without a system which
prevents the monopoly of its territory by wealth.
No other idea appears to have been held by the founders of your nation,
but that your land was a chattel, to be disposed of for money, and
as much a subject of barter and speculation as merchandise, and like
it, liable to that depression in value which a superabundant supply
produces. Its unequalled advantages as a subject for speculation
became more and more apparent as your population increased. It is a
striking illustration of the irresistible influence of the mercenary
impulse on your planet, that those who were prominent in establishing
so many advances toward equalizing the conditions and privileges of
their fellow-men held, in the aggregate among themselves, the title
and possession of which they stood ready to defend, an area of the
Earth’s surface equal to about eight million of your acres, one
hundred thousand acres being in possession of him who became the first
presiding officer of your republic. I do not refer to these facts in
a spirit of censure to those men, so enlightened and liberty loving
beyond their times; but only to show that singular limit of vision
which sincerely proclaimed the equality of all men, which fostering a
political method which must in time enslave or pauperize the majority.
There can be no doubt but that the unlimited privileges of capital
in these directions have greatly accelerated your material progress.
The speedy utilization of the immense resources of your own republic
has hidden and disguised the evil it was gradually producing. The new
fields of labor opened by the many monopoly enterprises have satisfied
and quieted it; and the open invitation, for the time being, of a
partnership with capital in the occupancy of the soil for purposes of
cultivation, leaves no apparent ground of complaint among the masses
who toil. Thus have your demands for labor been so much greater than
the supply, that large accessions have been drawn from the older
countries of the Earth. These furnishing the bone and sinew for still
more rapid development, your progress has become the wonder of the
age. You will perceive, however, that the general prosperity among all
classes of your society, and the absence of any great public grievance,
is just that condition which render the incursions of capital and
wealth easy, so that during all your enormous accumulations by the
hands of your workers, out of which they have little to show of gain
besides their living expenses, the most stupendous moneyed fortunes
of history have fallen into the hands of the few. Unlike the older
countries of the Earth, where the increasing poverty of the masses
is a natural and unavoidable sequence of the large accumulations of
wealth in few hands, your poor do not grow sensibly poorer during
this unequal distribution. Your enormous resources hold up labor to
a condition of comparative prosperity during all these inroads upon
it. As a consequence, of the abundance which the bounties of nature
have supplied to you, and the stimulated energies which your rewarded
industries have induced, your labor unconsciously submits to the
extraction of an unfair portion of the wealth it produces without
individual suffering. The better condition of your workmen compared
with those of other lands should not disguise the fact, however, that
capital and wealth get new assurance, and encouraged to fresh demands
upon the industries on this account. Although your poor do not yet
grow sensibly poorer, your rich are getting immeasurably richer. The
better opportunities for labor have brought millions of workers from
abroad, who in their rapid development of the country have so immensely
appreciated land values that the bosom of the Earth has been converted
into a chattel for speculation, and the chief business of wealth has
been to pocket the increase which it has not earned.
You cannot fail to have observed, that to this period your money class
has had but little to do with land in your agricultural districts,
except to buy and sell it. Capital, other than that limited quantity
which has been created on the land, has not thus far been led into
the business of its cultivation, because from the abundance and
easy acquirement of land it must come, in so doing, in such direct
competition with labor as not to leave a satisfactory margin of
profit. When, however, your public lands shall have been all conveyed
to private hands, at which time the price of land products will not
be governed as now by the willingness of labor to make out of their
production a mere exchange for fair wages, then, and not till then,
will you find capital embarking to any great extent into the business
of agriculture.
When this time arrives, a change in your economy will gradually take
place. The relations held by labor with capital, which have heretofore
been so modified by the easier conditions of the former, with its
abundance of free soil to absorb its surplus, will be driven back to
its old state of greater dependence. It will no longer experience the
great advantage it has held so long in its partnership with the fertile
earth. Its depression will reduce the earnings of innumerable monopoly
schemes, and the speculative opportunities of capital in the former
rapid rise of land values will be reduced to a minimum. The acquirement
of land for use and cultivation will then become one of the most
promising investments for capital extant. There will be a rise in the
price of food staples, and rent for the first time in your history will
enter into them as a large element of cost.
More than one easily recognized agency of your civilization will tend
to reduce the number of your small farms, and to throw the business of
food supply completely under the control of your wealthy and capital
class. Your small holders now occupying lands of the lower grades
of fertility, and who with their limited means but little more than
sustain themselves, will readily submit their titles to capitalists,
who with the advantage of costly labor saving machines, will find the
cultivation of a number of such tracts thrown into one of sufficient
profit to engage their means.
The labor saving contrivances which your ingenuity has devised for
agricultural pursuits will hasten the demand for larger holdings, and
although they greatly cheapen the expense of production, they will not
lower the market price of food. While machinery more than makes up for
its curtailment of the services of labor, by its cheaper supplies to it
in articles of manufacture, no such open and unrestricted competition
can exist in the supply of commodities which require, as a necessity of
their production, a natural agent whose possession is in every sense of
the word a monopoly.
Machinery has never cheapened the supply of raw materials which come
directly from the soil, because its use for cultivation has only been
exceptional, and it can never become general as long as land is held
in small tracts. This very condition is the one which will engage the
attention of investors in land for the profits of use, and at the first
permanent advance in the price of your food staples the operation of
turning small farms into large ones will begin.
The privilege and the hope of all to get possession of a large or small
portion of the earth’s surface, gives to your personal ownership system
an appearance of fairness not at variance with your popular aspirations
of equality, and the evil will not be generally admitted, until it gets
to be more seriously felt.
I am sorry to say of you that the principle of equality, as we
understand it, has never been sincerely considered or acted upon by any
of the governments of the earth. You have taken it for granted that a
serving and dependent class, composing four-fifths of your numbers,
must always assist to make up the sum of your population, and no
legislative measure can be found in your records which sustains this
large body of your people against the encroachments with which wealth
and capital are continually permitted to invade their interests.
Liberty itself is of but little value, when life becomes a forfeiture
of all the ways and means to improve it. There is, in fact, no liberty
in the correct sense, where all the moments of life must be bartered
for the means to live.
So far as your development has progressed, the sentiment of
brotherhood, as we know it, has never intruded itself into the spirit
of your legislation. The spectacle of four-fifths of your number
toiling from sun to sun to no purpose but that the balance may be
enriched has inspired no compassion, and evoked no measure of relief.
In the regions of your authority, where there should be some touch of
the fraternal instinct, nothing presides but the selfish and mercenary
genius of Mammon. The divine impulse for better things is among you,
but instead of laying out its work in the practical affair of life, it
has been diverted into the channels of your busy but unfruitful creeds.
You wear your religion like a holiday garment. We have learned to wear
ours as a common garb.
The past is burnt out, with a residue of but little value except as a
warning. The future is not ours, but of the universe with its hidden
and irrevocable destiny. The present belongs to us, and it is our
creed to be happy in its possession. We could have sown fears as you
have, and could have been as overwhelmed with their multiplied terrors.
We could have invented a circumstantial paradise like yours, with its
pathway of extinguished temporal hopes, and its discouragements of
the noblest ambitions to build out of the materials in sight; but to
what purpose except an unworthy one? The present is ours. Our field is
among the living things which surround us. The most of life to us is
its possibilities of happiness, and the opportunities it affords for
the enjoyment of our religious impulses to serve the Deity in advancing
ourselves and our society toward that state of perfection to which
under the supreme intelligence all things are seen to tend.