en chiefly
acquired by men who have contributed little to the material
welfare of the country, and by processes that I do not care
in appropriate terms to describe." "The people of this
country are generous and just, they are jealous also, and
when discontent changes to resentment, and resentment
passes into exasperation, one volume of a nation's history
is closed and another will be opened."

This feeling of resentment must arise in a community which
is deeply in debt, and is not prospering. The last census
shows in Iowa a mortgage indebtedness equivalent to over
five hundred dollars upon every head of a family.

Our wealthiest are beginning to have incomes of over $5,000,000 a year,
and it is very plain from the concentration of this wealth that a few
wealthy men who could easily form themselves into close and secret
corporation, will in time outweigh the entire republic, as Mr. Shearman
says that 250,000 families are already a three fourths financial
majority.

It was thought that this was impossible in our republic because we had
no law of _primogeniture_, but we have another kind of geniture that is
very effective. Recent statistics have shown that the very wealthy
inhabitants of Fifth Avenue, New York, have in one year but one
eighteenth as many children as the same number of families in the poorer
neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Thus poverty multiplies itself rapidly,
while wealth concentrates and needs no primogeniture to hold it
together, _because its numbers do not increase_; and a similar fact, but
not so extreme, appears in the reference to our Back Bay region in our
own statistics, and in the statistics of Philadelphia. Thus it seems
that we are destined to have the richest aristocracy by far that the
world has ever dreamed of.

We know that concentrated wealth is power--and that great power is
always dangerous to its neighbors. Like the slumbering power of
dynamite, we are unwilling to have it near us, no matter how well
guarded. I hold, therefore, that a republic has a right to guard itself
against such dangers as much as the city has a right to prohibit the
establishment of powder magazines in the centre of its population.

The profound and prophetic mind of Abraham Lincoln presaged this, and he
said: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me
and causes me to tremble for the safety