Few
countries are burdened with less debt, and many have far worse tariff
laws than curse our country. Is it to be found in an unjust pension
list? We hardly miss the small compensation which we grant to the men
(or their heirs) who, in the hour of National peril, gave their lives
freely to perpetuate the Union of our States. Where, then, is secreted
the parasite which is eating away the energies of the people, making
paupers and criminals in the midst of plenty and the grandest of
civilizations? Is it not to be found in the powerful monopolies we
have created? Monopoly in land, in railroads, telegraphs, fostered
manufactures, etc.,--the gigantic forces in our civilization which
are, in their very nature, agents of public convenience, comfort and
absolute necessity? Society, in the modern sense, could not exist
without these forces; they are part and parcel of our civilization.
Naturally, therefore, society should control them, or submit to the
humiliation of being ruled by them. And this latter is largely the
case at the present time. Having evolved those forces out of its
necessities, made them strong and permanent, society failed to impose
such conditions as wise policy should have dictated, and now suffers
the calamitous consequences. The tail wags the dog, instead of the dog
wagging the tail.

No government can afford, with any degree of safety, to make four
million of citizens out of so many slaves. And when it is remembered
that our slaves were turned loose upon their former masters--lifted by
one stroke of the pen, as it were, from the most degraded condition to
the very pinnacle of sovereign manhood--the equals in unrestricted
manhood, with the privileges and immunities of citizens who had been
born to rule, apparently, instead of being ruled--it will be seen
readily how critical was the situation.

But the condition having once been created by the strong arm of the
Federal Government, based upon a bloody and costly war in open
defiance of the Constitution as designed by the compromising Fathers
of the Republic; the slave once made a free man the same as his former
master, and given the ballot, the highest privilege of government a
man can exercise;--the Government having once gone so far, there was
absolutely nothing for it to do but to interpose its omnipotent
authority between the haughty and arrogant free man on the one hand
and the crouching and fearful freed man on the other--the lion and the
lamb. To