k now amounts to $23,000,000.
The monetary interests control all things, and Mr.
Stewart forcibly says: "The time has come, gentlemen,
when the government must run the railroads, or the
railroads will run the government. In Pennsylvania
to-day two roads own the State, its legislature, its
governor, its courts, its people, own them body and
soul, and stole the money from the people to buy them
with. You elect men to positions and pay them salaries,
and then the railroads buy them and make you pay for
bribing your own officers, in the freight rates they
charge you. The net income of the railroads of the
United States is three times that of the entire revenue
of the government."

The great mass of accumulated wealth was all unearned. It was the
donation of absurd law to monopolists,--to men who procured the titles
to lands. Their value came from the entire community, created by the
people, and when that amount is rescued from landlordism, the millions
vanish and society reclaims its own. Thus do I assert the ownership of
the community in millionnaire hoards. And when the tenant for life has
gone, to whom the law has been by far too generous, and left his
hoards, out of which he has already squandered more than he was
entitled to--the commonwealth from which this wealth was gathered may
rightly step in and reclaim it.

It is but a waif on the ocean of commerce--the jetsam and flotsam, of
which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been
called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time,
after the soul has gone to eternity--but law must decide whether these
wreckers are entitled to the cargo,--to goods which they did not
produce, and whether it is safe and patriotic to allow them to carry
off what is substantially in the majority of cases morally and justly
the property of the commonwealth. There may be some exceptions to
these general statements as to property, but when we recollect how
land monopoly and other monopolies have robbed the commonwealth, I
hold that the commonwealth is bound to reclaim the stolen wealth
wherever it can find it, and certainly wherever the commonwealth can
find it abandoned by the claimant, the action of trover should come in
when the tenant for life has ceased to exist.

Perhaps the devotees of precedent may be bold enough to call