In framing certain legal enactments,
in the shape of a constitution that was supposed to be good against such
inequality and injustice, the fathers thought to eliminate privileged
classes by wiping out the laws of primogeniture and entail. They took no
account, for they could not know, of the corporation, that has all the
powers and privileges of the born aristocracy, and renders all the
guarantees of the constitution of no avail.

Under the power of the corporation we have a hundred and fifty thousand
miles of operating railway that has passed to the control and into the
virtual ownership of less than sixty families. To this combination has
gone an attribute of sovereignty found in the power to tax the people.
As Senators Sherman, Conkling, and Windom said, in their famous report
to the Senate, this railroad power can tax all the products of the
country in a way Congress dare not attempt. This iron network of rails
enters every man's business and pleasure, and is the taxation without
representation that brought on the Revolution and gave birth to our
government. The people lose through fraud all that they gained through
violence; and, sad to say, generally with their own consent.

We have the telegraph, so necessary to our business, which science gave
as the poor man's post, for it consists of a wire, a pole, a battery,
and a boy, that is openly owned and operated as a luxury by one man.

The currency, the life-blood of trade, is farmed out to something over
two thousand corporations, that, acting as one, contract or expand it to
suit their own greed.

We are cursed with a system, called a tax, but which is in fact an
extortion, that, under the plea of favoring certain moneyed interests,
not only forces the consumer to support the burthens of a government
kept upon a war footing nearly a quarter of a century after the war
closed, but enables less than a million out of sixty millions to
accumulate means until our rich men are marvels to mankind. The great
Republic, through this process, has entered the avenues of private
enterprise, and with its crushing weight reduces labor to starvation
wages.

All these combined form trusts, as they are called, which, limiting
production, shut out competition, and accumulate for the favored few
while the masses suffer.

All then, united, make our government; for government is that power from
which there is no appeal, upon which we depend for a recognition of our
rights. This