Our more advanced civilization and truer democracy exhibit themselves nowhere more strikingly, than in the way in which we have determined the equal division of land interests. With our city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, and its income during the same period of time as yours of thirty-one million days’ labor, there is assessed by our authorities about the sum as ground rent equivalent to eight million average days’ pay of our workmen. For this amount in hand, our government furnishes to its tenants, without further cost, perfected streets in constant repair, abundance of water for household and other purposes, lights both in houses and streets, heat by our system (to you undiscovered), perfect drainage without cost or repair of conduits, insurance against individual loss by fire or flood, free burial of the dead, and a system of education bestowing upon every individual the higher branches of study.

Besides this immense service, the government provides religious edifices, buildings for public entertainment, and[Pg 200] pleasure grounds. And all this, you will bear in mind, at a less cost to our population than your landlords exact of you for ground rent alone. Adding to this four million days’ labor for rent, paid to private owners of buildings, and we have left nineteen million days’ labor for living expenses not provided by our government, and out of which come all the profit and accumulations of capital, except those derived from rents of buildings. You will see thereby, that with all the monopoly privileges that have fastened themselves upon your system done away with, capital has yet a full scope to exercise its legitimate functions in the fields of production and distribution, apart from which it has no rights and is entitled to no legislative consideration.

It is only by expunging the demands and profits of capital that the government is enabled to furnish all these services mentioned at so small a cost. We hold it to be a principle of justice, that the natural elements should not be permitted to form the basis of corporate management or monopoly control, and therefore instead of allowing capital the fullest privilege to appropriate those bounties of nature which are found ready for use, we have restricted its operations to a mere partnership with labor,[Pg 201] where it justly belongs. In our endeavors to sustain labor, and equalize its opportunities with capital, we have gone much further than this. We hold that all public necessities of general demand, in the supplying of which large expenditures are required in fixed capital, and which are not strictly in the line of production, should be provided for by the government. We remove the burdens of labor, by relieving it of those large capital enterprises which subsist on it, and which fail to share with it a reasonable portion of earnings. The large sums of money and the special privileges required in these operations of supply, of which your railroad, telephone and telegraph lines are prominent examples, obstruct the natural tendency of competition, and capital and wealth are thereby permitted advantages over labor which they should not of right have.

The unlimited privilege of capital in these directions has been defended on the ground that it greatly accelerates your material progress; that in private hands these enterprises can be more economically managed; and that the centralization of power in a government would be dangerously increased by the proprietorship of such large undertakings. All of these allegations except the[Pg 202] first are without foundation in fact. The growing political weight, especially in your representative governments, of all monopoly combinations, by reason of their wealth and large individual patronage, presents to you the choice of either a government ruled by outside influences, which cannot be held responsible for the evils it inadvertently inflicts by the irresistible pressure from without, or a government entirely and absolutely liable, and to be held to a strict accountability for all encroachments upon the common welfare while handling these services of supply. In the latter case your remedy is an easy one; and may be readily applied; while in the former, nothing short of a political convulsion will serve you. No advanced government upon your Earth has ever undertaken a public service of any magnitude for a long term, which has not been systematized and improved by all the available knowledge and science of its time. The difference between a public and a private supply of a common demand is, that to one is added the costs and profits of capital; while the other, shorn of these oftentimes excessive exactions, is furnished at the cheapest rate possible.

Any policy of your governments, no matter how unwisely adopted, becomes in time a fixture which is[Pg 203] difficult to remove. The abuses which it may be known to produce are tolerated long after its evil is understood. Yet, there is scarcely one of these which has not had its active defenders. The able defense of measures which have long since been expunged for their flagrant injustice, exhibit some of the most striking examples of mental obliquity in your annals. No government of the Earth, however, in its long legislative career, was ever known to favor the laboring and landless over the interests of those holding endowments of the Earth’s surface. What seems at a superficial glance to be in your own country such a measure, in what may be generally termed your land policy, with its homestead provisions, becomes upon a closer examination delusive. Every one of your laws for the pretended purpose of bestowing your territory upon labor bears the covert design or connivance to further the opportunities of capital. From the inauguration of your system, capital and wealth have been gradually absorbing your lands, and the partnership of labor in them is as transitory and accidental as the opportunities afforded in the early stages of your city’s growth.

The fact appears that, in your present development, the general sense of individual acquisitiveness among your[Pg 204] governing classes is too great to deal fairly with the whole body of your people under such seductive opportunities for self-gain. You cannot prevent, under your present system of private ownership, the lands now held by your people from drifting into a comparatively few hands. This process, although going on for years, gradually accelerates, and will rapidly become apparent when the last of your public territory shall have passed out of the hands of your government. The owners of your lands always have, and will continue to govern the countries of the Earth. No representative government can exist long without a system which prevents the monopoly of its territory by wealth.

No other idea appears to have been held by the founders of your nation, but that your land was a chattel, to be disposed of for money, and as much a subject of barter and speculation as merchandise, and like it, liable to that depression in value which a superabundant supply produces. Its unequalled advantages as a subject for speculation became more and more apparent as your population increased. It is a striking illustration of the irresistible influence of the mercenary impulse on your planet, that those who were prominent in establishing[Pg 205] so many advances toward equalizing the conditions and privileges of their fellow-men held, in the aggregate among themselves, the title and possession of which they stood ready to defend, an area of the Earth’s surface equal to about eight million of your acres, one hundred thousand acres being in possession of him who became the first presiding officer of your republic. I do not refer to these facts in a spirit of censure to those men, so enlightened and liberty loving beyond their times; but only to show that singular limit of vision which sincerely proclaimed the equality of all men, which fostering a political method which must in time enslave or pauperize the majority.

There can be no doubt but that the unlimited privileges of capital in these directions have greatly accelerated your material progress. The speedy utilization of the immense resources of your own republic has hidden and disguised the evil it was gradually producing. The new fields of labor opened by the many monopoly enterprises have satisfied and quieted it; and the open invitation............