norance of
legislators and the parasitical manipulations of the gang which has
rooted itself in the soil of the country.

The fires of revolution are incorporated into the _Magna Charta_ of
our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which
will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon
Herculaneum and Pompeii. It is too late for America to be wise in
time. "_The die is cast._"

CHAPTER XVI

_Conclusion_

I know it is not fashionable for writers on economic questions to tell
the truth, but the truth should be told, though it kill. When the wail
of distress encircles the world, the man who is linked by "the touch
of nature" which "makes the whole world kin" to the common destiny of
the race universal; who hates injustice wherever it lifts up its head;
who sympathizes with the distressed, the weak, and the friendless in
every corner of the globe, such a man is morally bound to tell the
truth as he conceives it to be the truth.

In these times, when the law-making and enforcing authority is leagued
against the people; when great periodicals--monthly, weekly and
daily--echo the mandates or anticipate the wishes of the powerful men
who produce our social demoralization, it becomes necessary for the
few men who do not agree to the arguments advanced or the interests
sought to be bolstered up, to "cry aloud and spare not." The man who
with the truth in his possession flatters with lies, that "thrift may
follow fawning" is too vile to merit the contempt of honest men.

The government of the United States confiscated as "contraband of war"
the slave population of the South, but it left to the portion of the
unrepentant rebel a far more valuable species of property. The slave,
the perishable wealth, was confiscated to the government and then
manumitted; but property in land, the wealth which perishes not nor
can fly away, and which had made the institution of slavery possible,
was left as the heritage of the robber who had not hesitated to lift
his iconoclastic hand against the liberties of his country. The baron
of feudal Europe would have been paralyzed with astonishment at the
leniency of the conquering invader who should take from him his slave,
subject to mutation, and leave him his landed possessions which are as
fixed as the Universe of Nature. He would ask no more advantageous
concession. But the United States took the slave and left the thing
which gave birth to _chatte