for traffic, on every great line; and
we might have been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded by
well-paid pointsmen, for half the present fares. [For, of course, a
railroad company is merely an association of turnpike-keepers, who make
the tolls as high as they can, not to mend the roads with, but to
pocket. The public will in time discover this, and do away with
turnpikes on railroads, as on all other public-ways.]

129. Suppose it should thus turn out, finally, that a true government
set to true work, instead of being a costly engine, was a paying one?
that your government, rightly organized, instead of itself subsisting by
an income-tax, would produce its subjects some subsistence in the shape
of an income dividend?--police, and judges duly paid besides, only with
less work than the state at present provides for them.

A true government set to true work!--Not easily to be imagined, still
less obtained; but not beyond human hope or ingenuity. Only you will
have to alter your election systems somewhat, first. Not by universal
suffrage, nor by votes purchasable with beer, is such government to be
had. That is to say, not by universal _equal_ suffrage. Every man
upwards of twenty, who has been convicted of no legal crime, should have
his say in this matter; but afterwards a louder voice, as he grows
older, and approves himself wiser. If he has one vote at twenty, he
should have two at thirty, four at forty, ten at fifty. For every single
vote which he has with an income of a hundred a year, he should have ten
with an income of a thousand, (provided you first see to it that wealth
is, as nature intended it to be, the reward of sagacity and
industry--not of good luck in a scramble or a lottery). For every single
vote which he had as subordinate in any business, he should have two
when he became a master; and every office and authority nationally
bestowed, implying trustworthiness and intellect, should have its known
proportional number of votes attached to it. But into the detail and
working of a true system in these matters we cannot now enter; we are
concerned as yet with definitions only, and statements of first
principles, which will be established now sufficiently for our purposes
when we have examined the nature of that form of government last on the
list in Sec. 105,--the purely "Magistral," exciting at present its full
share of public notice, under its ambiguous title of "slavery."

130. I have not, h