He has only
to let a certain selected pair of these clutch him tight, if he is
rich enough to make his personality a luring prize. Often his morals
are unsavory, but these prove no impediment. The great point with
plutocracy and snobbery is to perpetuate themselves--to go on
producing scions who will uphold for them future generations of
selfishness and arrogance. One sees the same sort of procreative
tendency in certain of our hardiest and coarsest weeds. Sometimes a
gardener comes along, with hoe, spade, and a strong uprooting animus.
In human life that kind of gardener goes by the ugly name of
Revolution. But we are dealing with neither parables nor allegories.
Those are for the modish clergymen of the select and exclusive
churches, and are administered in the form of dainty little religious
pills which these gentlemen have great art in knowing how to palatably
sugar.

"SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?"

BY C. WOOD DAVIS.

PART I.--OBJECTIONS TO NATIONAL OWNERSHIP CONSIDERED.

When the paper published in the February ARENA, entitled "The Farmer,
the Investor, and the Railway," was written, the writer was not ready
to accept national ownership as a solution of the railway problem; but
the occurrences attending the flurries of last autumn in the money
markets, when half a dozen men, in order to obtain control of certain
railways, entered into a conspiracy that came near wrecking the entire
industrial and commercial interests of the country, having shed a
lurid light upon the enormous and baleful power which the corporate
control of the railways places in the hands of what Theodore Roosevelt
aptly termed "the dangerous wealthy classes," has had the effect of
converting to the advocacy of national ownership not only the writer
but vast numbers of conservative people of the central, western, and
southern States to whom the question now assumes this form: "Which is
to be preferred: a master in the shape of a political party that it is
possible to dislodge by the use of the ballot, or one in the shape of
ten or twenty Goulds, Vanderbilts, Huntingtons, Rockefellers, Sages,
Dillons, and Brices who never die and whom it will be impossible to
dislodge by the use of the ballot?" The particular Gould or Vanderbilt
may die, as did that Vanderbilt to whom was ascribed the aphorism "The
public be damned," but the spirit and power of the Goulds and
Vanderbilts never dies.

OBJECTIONS TO NATIONAL OWNERSHIP.

The