ade with the people has been kept and performed.

Instead of limiting the tribute drawn from our citizens to the
necessities of its economical administration, the Government persists in
exacting from the substance of the people millions which, unapplied and
useless, lie dormant in its Treasury. This flagrant injustice and this
breach of faith and obligation add to extortion the danger attending the
diversion of the currency of the country from the legitimate channels of
business.

Under the same laws by which these results are produced the Government
permits many millions more to be added to the cost of the living of our
people and to be taken from our consumers, which unreasonably swell the
profits of a small but powerful minority.

The people must still be taxed for the support of the Government under
the operation of tariff laws. But to the extent that the mass of out
citizens are inordinately burdened beyond any useful public purpose and
for the benefit of a favored few, the Government, under pretext of an
exercise of its taxing power, enters gratuitously into partnership with
these favorites, to their advantage and to the injury of a vast majority
of our people.

This is not equality before the law.

The existing situation is injurious to the health of our entire body
politic. It stifles in those for whose benefit it is permitted all
patriotic love of country, and substitutes in its place selfish greed
and grasping avarice. Devotion to American citizenship for its own sake
and for what it should accomplish as a motive to our nation's
advancement and the happiness of all our people is displaced by the
assumption that the Government, instead of being the embodiment of
equality, is but an instrumentality through which especial and
individual advantages are to be gained.

The arrogance of this assumption is unconcealed. It appears in the
sordid disregard of all but personal interests, in the refusal to abate
for the benefit of others one iota of selfish advantage, and in
combinations to perpetuate such advantages through efforts to control
legislation and improperly influence the suffrages of the people.

The grievances of those not included within the circle of these
beneficiaries, when fully realized, will surely arouse irritation and
discontent. Our farmers, long suffering and patient, struggling in the
race of life with the hardest and most unremitting toil, will not fail
to see, in spite of misrepresentati