all will agree has been countless ages in forming for the great ultimate purpose of supporting human life for an indefinite period? Civilized society pronounces against cruelty to animals, and has organizations with funds to protect the poor creatures. But the brute is only for a day, while the land was for all time, and for the sustenance of millions upon millions successively forever. Decreasing the productive capacity of the soil robs the generations to come of the right to live. It is not self-preservation in the broad sense. It is its opposite. It is the destruction of the race. It is a base violation of the first law of nature, upon which all government should rest. We lay it down as an axiom in political economy, that every generation should leave the soil in as good a condition as when taken, and improve its productive capacity if possible. We say no society, no government, is mindful of its first duty, that does not have this provident care of the future in view. The practice of the world is abortion, Restellism, a "slaughter of the innocents" on a terrible scale. It is a bare-faced robbery of the coming ages of their patrimony; a merciless deprivation of generations of the right to appear and live. Malthus has shown that mankind increase in a geometrical ratio, while the ratio of the productive capacity of the earth is only arithmetical. Hence, it follows the time must come when procreation must be repressed, while the soil is stimulated to produce its utmost. Man, by his improvidence, selfishness, and thoughtlessness, hastens the day, by reducing the soil to barrenness, and making a country a dreary irredeemable desert.

What follows but that the principle should obtain, that, as the soil was made for the many, the voice of the many should be heard in its defense? Earth, water, and air belong to all, and absolute ownership or fee simple pertains no more to one than to the other. Absolute

ownership of land is claimed under our style of civilization; by which is meant the right to ruin it, if the person chooses so to do. We have men in California who individually own 100,000, 200,000, and 250,000 acres each. There are hundreds of men in this State whose individual possessions would support fifty families with every luxury. When we take into consideration the enormous wealth accumulating here in the hands of a few, it is easy to see that every arable acre in the whole State could soon be owned by them. Yea, there is wealth enough already in the possession of fifty men in California, which if invested in land would virtually make all other landholders tributaries, and the landless but little better than peons. Have the people, for whom the soil was formed, nothing to say while this wholesale disinheritance is going on? When poverty, slavery, and extermination stare a thousand generations in the face, are they powerless against selfishness and greed? Land and water are sought to be controlled, and the air would be monopolized if it could be dominated by the few. Legislation is called in to preserve the air and the water from poison. Why should not the people in their sovereign capacity protect the land from barbaric hands as well?

The effect of absolute ownership in land is seen in the decreasing productiveness of the soil in all parts of the country where greed, ignorance, and unthrift go together. Lands in the Eastern States that formerly produced thirty and forty bushels of wheat to the acre, are unable to yield more than fifteen bushels, even less, and sometimes nothing at all. It is a patent fact that the production of wheat travels westward, the new States taking the lead in the growth of this cereal. California and Nebraska take the front rank in this business, and, looking at California, we can see the ruinous effect of the con

stant cropping of lands. Sixty bushels to the acre were once usually harvested. Even volunteer crops of forty and fifty bushels were not uncommon. The same lands can make no such showing now, after the lapse of but the life-time of half a generation. It is not so in England, where cultivators realize the insular character of the country, restricted by the surrounding seas. There is no wide expanse of virgin territory to which to wander and spoil when the ancestral homestead is ruined, and necessity compels the preservation of the soil, with the alternatives of emigration or death. It is not so in Japan and China, those half-civilized countries on whose frugal people we look with contempt, where a superabundant population teaches the sacredness of the soil's fertility. No right in the soil in those countries exists but that based on good conduct toward it. The land belongs to all in their collective capacity, but the right of possession is maintained so long as no abuse is practiced on the patrimony of the many, of which each individual possession is a part. Are there not lessons to be learned from nations we may deem lower in the scale of civilization than ourselves?

But the injury to the intrinsic value of the land is not the only difficulty of which we can complain. Extensive possessions cheat multitudes of their natural rights. Should the laws of a people regard more the accidents of man than the man himself? A foreigner just landed upon our shores, with no affinities it may be with our institutions, by chance falls upon a rich mine. He appropriates the millions therein, and, seeing thousands of acres of land that can be purchased for a trifle, and having fixed in his own mind how aristocratic and lordly the possessor of land is in the country from which he came, he appropriates to himself with the gold he has found by accident vast tracts, enough to make an

VOL. 15.-29.

earldom or principality in Europe. He and a few more parvenus like himself gobble up by land-warrants, half-breed and university scrip, and other processes, all the productive soil and timbered land in a dozen counties, and hold it to the detriment of thousands of families whose right to live is just as sacred as that of the persons who stand in their way and virtually dispute that sacred right. The land is held, perhaps to sell at enormous profits, perhaps to rent, and thus to control the labor of generations, to fatten a few whose only merit is a fortunate circumstance to which neither industry nor genius contributed. When the nature of mankind is studied, when history is consulted, and when it is plain that the domination of a landed aristocracy is productive of disorder and bloodshed, is it not equally plain that an ounce of prevention should be prescribed for a threatened malady? In our own country, what troubles have resulted from the large landed estates under rent, called the Livingston and Van Rensselaer manors? Who has not heard of and sympathized with the poor tenantry of Ireland? What but similar causes have twice drenched France in blood, by uprisings of a furious people intent on bettering their unequal lot? Under existing civilizations there is a constant antagonism between artificial or acquired and natural rights; while, as the Californian Bancroft says, "one of the greatest objects of civilization is to distribute among men more equally the benefits of this world." What higher object can a republic have than this? When great inequality begets discontent and is the parent of revolutions, the doctrine of self-preservation or the greatest good to the greatest number comes in, and natural rights rise paramount to pampered greed.

Let us further see how our laws relative to ownership in land work in other ways. In cities a person of supera

bundant wealth buys a large tract in the heart of what is soon to be a great commercial emporium. All others perhaps see the future of the city as plainly as he, but he has the advantage of accidental wealth, dropped upon or inherited, which he can use, while the others have it to earn in a hard but honorable manner-in the only way that wealth was designed to come to the majority in this world. The new owner does nothing upon his possessions, waiting for the industrious and producing classes to build up homesteads and a city all around his property. He compels the active citizen to go farther away from his business to find a home for his family, thereby consuming two or more hours a day going to and from his place of occupation for the balance of his life, and for years paying more for car- tickets by half than would be necessary if the routes were shorter, as they would be if the city were more compactly built, or if there were more passengers to carry, as there would be if the whole area of the city were occupied. The scattered condition of the city entails additional expense in the way of more policemen, gas-light, paving, and sewerage. The man driven away into the sand-hills is compelled to put up barricades at considerable cost, as in San Francisco, against the drifting sand from the landholders' acres of waste, and to sweep his sidewalks daily to get rid of piling dunes before his door. And then he has the consolation to remember that, during a pitiless war waged for the protection of our nationality, he was compelled to pay an income-tax on a wellknown salary, and perhaps take service, too, under the flag; while the accident of being in possession of a large tract of land gave the greedy possessor an immunity from military duty, and, not selling any lots, which were rapidly, year by year, advancing in value, he

claimed to have no income, and escaped the income-tax as well. More than this, by the influence his capital wields, he manipulates assessors and saves himself from paying his share to the support of either the local, State, or national government. This is no overdrawn picture, but is seen on every hand in hateful colors.

Is it not plain that under our system industry and enterprise are taxed ?—that the industrial classes are made to support the governments, and pay heavily from their purses, as well as make enormous draughts upon their time and patience, that the unproductive may grow like drones larger than the workers in the hive, and like drones be worthless?

The common idea to rectify such wrongs as these is to continue the system, but to tax the unoccupied lots and acres in such a way as to compel a sale. That may be one of the best modes after a system is established, to get once more upon a tolerable basis. It may do to ameliorate conditions; but we submit that the system is not founded in nature and needs to be overthrown. Suppose a city in its incipiency should have the right to grant lands for occupancy by the payment of a small sum for the support of a municipal government, to lay out and grade streets, and to be expended for the general good, and that such lands should be allowed to individuals restricted to the amount required for reasonable uses without allowing any to remain unoccupied for speculative purposes? Homes might, under such a system, be possible to the many, and good citizenship be secured, with that equality that comports so well with republican institutions.

The fact is not denied that a country is most prosperous and productive that is parceled out into small farms. For like reasons it can not be denied that the happiness and well-being of the residents of a metropolis are best secured,

the more universal is the ownership of houses. To that end, then, should the laws be made; the wise legislator should always have the first and greatest object in view.

There is no more common saying than "a man has a right to do what he pleases with his own," and yet there is none more untrue. Civilization says we shall not abuse our horses, or give unnecessary pain or torture to any living animal. We can not burn our houses when life or property is thereby endangered. Our right to do with our own is limited by the common conscience of the community in which we live. The standard of right changes with the progression of mankind; and, with this change, who shall say that the public will not soon determine how far the power of the individual to vandalize against nature shall extend, and where the great rights of humanity begin? That Roman law was declared by some infamous which forbade the sending of one's slave to the amphitheatre and the beasts. It was said, by those who could not come up to the advancing humanitarian standard, to interfere with the rights of property and the manly amusements of the people. The right to curse a whole land with slavery, or, in other language, to take one's property anywhere in our republic, was the prime cause of a rebellion more costly in blood and treasure than any in modern times. In Rome and in the United States the nobler sentiments of the people prevailed, and so will it be in all time. What is to-day regarded as right may not be so in the years to come. In the centuries gone the aged and the weak were left to die. Only the strong could live. So is it now with savages. But with the growth of ideas, with the elevation of soul in man, the affections gained the mastery, human rights came to be considered; until now, instead of selfishness and brute force, the common conscience of civilized man has deemed

the virtues of self-denial, care for the infirm and the aged, meekness, patience, and forbearance, fit to be perpetuated.

Germane to the subject of extensive ownership in land is that of piling up colossal fortunes in the hands of the few. Wendell Phillips struck the keynote when he said he had no patience with a civilization which allowed one man to accumulate and hold $50,000,ooo. It was a sentiment to arouse the antagonism of wealth and all who are slavish to the rich. That conservatism that believes, or affects to believe, in the traditions of the past, or that nothing new can be tolerated without danger, is shocked. Yet other men of thought and conscience have given to the world similar opinions. Many have said wealth beyond need is generally a curse to the possessor. Gerritt Smith inherited a large estate in land, and after a few years spent in an attempt to manage it, he found it absorbed all his time and left him no chance to keep pace with the progressive ideas of the age, and he gave it away to those of industrious habits who had the least opportunity to accumulate a competence. He claimed no great merit for so doing, it being the best thing he could do, in his judgment, for his own highest good. Human nature is the same in all parts of the world. While the love of money is a ruling passion, and great fortunes are in few hands, which must guarantee all the more hardship and poverty to the many, the inequality is antagonism war. Capital must be aggressive, continually using its great power to maintain its supremacy, or it must be constantly on the defensive, because of the jealousy and consequent enmity of the multitudinous poor, until that time when revolution has restored the many to more nearly their equal rights, or the sentiment of human liberty and equality is extinguished from the people, as was done in India. Buckle has given us some

idea of the debasing effect of huge fortunes in that country. The dominant classes had unbounded wealth; and the more colossal the fortunes, the more abject and miserable in consequence were the laborers. According to the splendor of one was the pitiful condition of the other. As one went up, just so far the other went down. Interest was exacted on the lender's own terms, and ranged from fifteen to sixty-five per cent. per annum. The result of such a state of affairs was seen in a thousand lamentable forms. Fortunes grew, and with fortunes power, absolute and uncontrollable. The laboring classes multiplied, but were nothing but slaves. A few bags of rice was the compensation for the labor of a year. Ignorance with poverty, of course, went hand in hand, and with ignorance went superstition also. The religion of the Hindoos became admirably adapted to perpetuate the unequal condition of society, if that could be called society which separated men into castes and kept them as inseparably asunder as man is separated from the inferior animals. That religion taught abstinence from animal food, thus depriving the votaries of a great source of physical strength and repressing the passions, cheapening the cost of living, saving the more the earnings for the masters, and so, as by a fiat of the Almighty, reducing the masses to a helpless and hopeless condition of religious, mental, and physical bondage. No wonder that in such a people the sentiment of human liberty was utterly crushed out, was wholly extinct; no wonder that the nirwana (the heaven) of the toiling Hindoo was not one of joy or emotionwhen all his life he had felt or known no such luxuries—but a state of absolute eternal rest!

The effect of immense fortunes in the control of the few-in other words, of extreme unequal distribution—is seriously felt to-day even in this young republic

of but a hundred years. It is notorious that the rich do not contribute their proportion toward the support of the governments. Their power is seen everywhere in the administration of the gov ernments and the laws. They impress themselves upon congresses and legislatures, upon sheriffs, district attorneys, assessors, and grand juries. They act upon the dogma of Webster, that "the great object of government is the protection of property"—that is, to save as much as possible to those who have, and take as much as is necessary from those who have not. They paid comparatively no income-tax when the country was in need during the late war. They kept out of harm's way in the field, and took the advantages that great convulsions always bring of doubling and quadru pling capital. A bachelor of $10,000,ooo to-day may escape paying as much to extinguish the debt of the nation, under our system of tariff, as a soldier with his family is obliged to contribute who has periled his life and left a leg or an arm on the field of battle. Is this right? Who pretends that it is? Let the minions who cursed Canaan a few years ago and defended the right of the White race to his earnings, answer. Let him who arrogates to himself the right to hold that which makes a slave of himself, in derogation of the interests of thousands and what would give happiness to the many now pressed by the deprivation, answer. Let sycophants and the hunkers of society, that seek privileges for the few against the rights of the multitude, answer.

Nor is the effect of vast inequality in the distribution of wealth seen in this generation alone. Its baleful influence tells upon the generations to come. The rich, the pampered, the selfish, and ungenerous are in a condition to raise families. To them the future is assured. There are no carking cares about the maintenance of a family in store for