erial grants. I fear that it will
be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very
foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested
so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will be no
more. Gentlemen should not forget that the wrong that has
been done to laboring men and their children by giving over
their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in
due time be considered by the most intelligent body of
laboring men who ever debated a public wrong--men fully
aware of their rights and capable of asserting them.

But the foreign land-shark, and the corporate land-shark, dwindle into
insignificance by the side of the individual land-shark. Every hamlet,
town, city, and state in the Union is in the grasp of the individual
land holder. Starting with his fellows as a pioneer two hundred and
fifty years ago, with his pickaxe on his shoulder, he has steadily
grown in size and importance, so that today he holds in his hands the
destinies of the Republic and the life of his fellow citizens. His
bulk has become mastodonian in proportions and his influence has
shrivelled up the energies of the people. More absolute than the Iron
Prince of Germany, he pays no taxes; he limits production, not to the
requirements of the population but to the demand of the market, at
such figures as he can extort from the crying necessities of the
people through the operations of "corners;" he regulates the wheels of
government, State and Federal, and dictates to the people by making
them hungry and naked.

We stand only upon the threshold of governmental existence; the
nation, in comparison to the hoary-handed commonwealths of Europe, was
born but yesterday; but, having adopted at the beginning the system
which hastened the downfall of Rome after she had spread her authority
over the known world, we are already weak and exhausted. Monopoly has
stunted the people, and they stagger to the grave, starved to death by
a system of robbery almost too transparent to require minute
elucidation at the hand of the conscientious writer upon economic
questions. The suppressed groans of the toiling masses are echoed and
reechoed from every corner of the land, and burst forth in mobocratic
fury that the entire police authority finds it almost impossible to
stay. The newspapers are a daily chronicle of the desperate condition
to which the country has been brought by the rapacity and ig