n general reforms
would immediately ensue. If the city should do what the Swiss have done,
it would speedily rid its administration of unnecessary office-holders,
reduce the salaries of its higher officials, and rescind outstanding
franchise privileges. If the municipality should have power to determine
its own methods of taxation, as is now in some respects the case in
Massachusetts towns, and toward which end a movement has begun in New
York, it would probably imitate the Swiss in progressively taxing the
higher-priced real estate, inheritances, and incomes. If the
wage-workers, a majority in a direct vote, should demand in all public
work the short hour day, they would get it, perhaps, as in the Rockland
town meeting, without question. Further, the wage-workers might vote
anti-Pinkerton ordinances, compel during strikes the neutrality of the
police, and place judges from their own ranks in at least the local
courts. These tasks partly under way, a change in prevailing social
ideas would pass over the community. The press, echo, not of the widest
spread sentiments, but of controlling public opinion, would open its
columns to the wage-working class come to power. And, as is ever so when
the wage-workers are aggressive and probably may be dominant, the social
question would burn.

_The Entire Span of Equal Rights._

The social question uppermost, the wage-workers--now in political
ascendency, and bent on getting the full product of their labor--would
seek further to improve their vantage ground. Sooner or later they would
inevitably make issue of the most urgent, the most persistent, economic
evil, local as well as general, the inequality of rights in the land.
They would affirm that, were the land of the community in use suitable
to the general needs, the unemployed would find work and the total of
production be largely increased. They would point to the vacant lots in
and about the city, held on speculation, commonly in American cities
covering a greater area than the land improved, and denounce so unjust a
system of land tenure. They could demonstrate that the price of the land
represented for the most part but the power of the owners to wring from
the producers of the city, merely for space on which to live and work, a
considerable portion of their product. They could with reason declare
that the withholding from use of the vacant land of the locality was
the main cause of local poverty. And they would demand tha