people are supposed to enjoy all the advantages of
the competitive system, and where all are, measurably, free to take
and to use the opportunities offered the pioneers, or him who gets
first his grip upon the three natural elements absolutely essential to
man's existence, viz.: air, water, and land.

Wm. Goodwin Moody says (_Land and Labor in the United States_, p. 77):

Instead of being able to boast, as could our fathers, that
every man who tilled the soil was lord of the manor he
occupied, owning no master, the last census report made a
return of 1,024,701 tenant farms in our country in 1880.

A comparison of this showing with the land-holdings of
Great Britain and Ireland will help to a better
understanding of what these things import. The very latest
statistics give the total number of holdings in England and
Wales at 414,804; in Ireland, at 574,222; in Scotland, at
80,101; total, 1,069,127. Showing that in the whole of Great
Britain and Ireland, counting all the holdings as tenant
occupations, which they are not, there are 200,000 less
tenant farms than in the United States.

Again:

Among the owners of the tenant farms in our country are
English, French, and German capitalists, non-residents, who
have bought immense tracts of the railroad lands, and seized
upon the alternate government sections lying within their
railroad purchases, and on those tracts have commenced their
bonanza operations, or planted their tenants on the American
system.

When it is remembered that the entire network of railroads in the
United States is practically under the absolute control of five or six
men who, having derived their valuable franchises and more than
princely land grants from the people, show the utmost disregard of the
comfort, convenience or rights of the donors; when it is remembered
that one family in the city of New York controls enough land with
enough tenants to constitute an overgrown village; and that what they
do not claim as their own is held by one-fourth of the rest of the
population; when it is remembered that nearly every article which has
become a household necessity has been seized upon and can be obtained
only through some corporation, in the manufacture of which the
government has virtually granted a monopoly, as Charles granted to the
Duke of Buckingham a monopoly in the sale of gold lace; when it