Jobbery is any scheme which aims to gain, not by the legitimate fruits
of industry and enterprise, but by extorting from somebody a part of
his product under guise of some pretended industrial undertaking. Of
course it is only a modification when the undertaking in question has
some legitimate character, but the occasion is used to graft upon it
devices for obtaining what has not been earned. Jobbery is the vice of
plutocracy, and it is the especial form under which plutocracy corrupts
a democratic and republican form of government. The United States is
deeply afflicted with it, and the problem of civil liberty here is to
conquer it. It affects everything which we really need to have done to
such an extent that we have to do without public objects which we need
through fear of jobbery. Our public buildings are jobs--not always, but
often. They are not needed, or are costly beyond all necessity or even
decent luxury. Internal improvements are jobs. They are not made
because they are needed to meet needs which have been experienced.
They are made to serve private ends, often incidentally the political
interests of the persons who vote the appropriations. Pensions have
become jobs. In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats,
because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them.
Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have
political power, to corrupt them. Instead of going out where there is
plenty of land and making a farm there, some people go down under the
Mississippi River to make a farm, and then they want to tax all the
people in the United States to make dikes to keep the river off their
farms. The California gold-miners have washed out gold, and have washed
the dirt down into the rivers and on the farms below. They want the
Federal Government to now clean out the rivers and restore the farms.
The silver-miners found their product declining in value, and they got
the Federal Government to go into the market and buy what the public
did not want, in order to sustain (as they hoped) the price of silver.
The Federal Government is called upon to buy or hire unsalable ships,
to build canals which will not pay, to furnish capital for all sorts of
experiments, and to provide capital for enterprises of which private
individuals will win the profits. All this is called "developing our
resources," but it is, in truth, the great plan of all living on each
other.

The greates