y may bear its curses. Man is essentially a selfish
animal. Self-preservation is the very first law which he learns to
observe and to practice. That he may get on top of the social ladder
and remain there, he will sacrifice family, common humanity and
patriotism. Naturally, Moloch-self is the god he serves. To enjoy a
little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and
declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and
libertinism, "all is vanity"--emptiness! Thus, it is dangerous to
confide in the humanity of man. To place in his hands a weapon so
all-powerful as land, is to place him upon a pinnacle from whose vast
altitude he can, will, and does crush his unfortunate fellowman.

Like the small stream which gathers volume and momentum in its
wanderings from the small lake to the gulf, into which it debouches as
a mighty river like the "Father of Waters," so the first encroachments
of the land shark are small, and hardly felt; but give him time, let
him grow from the Norman soldier of fortune into the English nobility
of to-day, and you have a monster whose proportions and rapacity
stagger the imagination to fully apprehend. What the common soldier of
fortune received as reward for his valor eight hundred years ago, and
which he held subject to confiscation to his prince if he failed to
render him service in person and with retainers, has developed into a
huge monopoly which appropriates in rental more than the tenant can
pay, with the added necessary subsistence required to sustain him.
There are also the imposition of direct taxes by the government and
indirect taxes upon all implements and other articles of manufacture,
occasioned by the division of labor, which he must use; all of which
taxes the land monopolists have managed to shift upon the tenant and
wage-laborer. Time augments the evil. So that, to-day, in Great
Britain, a man cannot purchase land, except in rare cases, and then
the purchaser must pay a fortune for the privilege. The poor farmer,
the wage-laborer, the common man, has not and cannot have any grip
upon the soil, but must come into the world a slave, and go down to
his grave after a life of toil and self-denial, a slave, with the
tormenting consciousness that as he was, so must the unfortunate
offspring of his loins be!

If this be the tendency of organized society--if the tendency be to
enslave mankind, place a premium upon human woe and crime--then
organized so