er can reclaim it; and there is
another mountain mass of wealth not quite expended yet, which came
from corrupt financial monopoly, which has sometimes generated
financial lords more rapidly than land monopoly. Upon questions of
finance and political economy, our people have been as blind as they
have upon the land question, and our entire financial legislation has
been but a trap to catch the commonwealth and rob it, and the
commonwealth has been caught, and robbed of far more than two thousand
millions.[6]

[6] As a single specimen of this, I would mention that
those eminent politicians, John C. New, and Wm. H.
English, of Indiana, under the laws engineered by
cunning and accepted by ignorance, invested $200,000 in
a national bank scheme when greenbacks had been knocked
down to forty cents, and in thirteen years from 1864 to
1877 they made a clear profit of $2,133,000--more than
ten for one of their investment. But this is very
moderate in comparison with land speculation. The
Elyton Land Company at Birmingham, Alabama, with a cash
capital of $100,000, has declared in five years, ending
in 1888, dividends amounting to $5,570,000, and is
believed to own property still that will amount to
$5,000,000, a return of more than a hundred dollars for
every one invested--a clear profit absorbed of over ten
millions--_the gift of law to monopoly_. Will this ever
return to the commonwealth? The robbery of the
commonwealth goes on in every direction. Shall we
continue the present system under which, while the
nation is losing its inheritance daily, one man in
Chicago tied up the wheat crop of the United States,
and one man also tied up or cornered pork, and both
levied millions on the people?

The follies and crimes of the past cannot be readjusted--but its
legacy of robbery to the present must submit to the arbitration of
justice, and the demands of philanthropy. The millions exacted from
the tenants of England and Ireland by the descendants of the robber
barons and brigand soldiers, who took the soil by the sword, still cry
aloud for justice.

If we grant that an individual may by his own exertions justly acquire
a hundred thousand dollars, which is an ample competence, and that as
an encouragement an