CHAPTER XI.

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[Pg 200] 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,[Pg 201] 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[Pg 202] 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[Pg 203] 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[Pg 204] 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[Pg 205] 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.[Pg 206] 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[Pg 207] 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[Pg 208] 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[Pg 209] 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[Pg 210] 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.[Pg 211] 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[Pg 212] 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.