nal improvement. As in the cantons of Ticino and
Neuchatel, our legislative bodies might be opened to minority
representatives. As in the Swiss Confederation, the great forests might
be declared forever the inheritance of the nation. What public lands yet
remain in each state might be withheld from private ownership except on
occupancy and use, and the area might be so increased as to enable
every producer desiring it to exercise the natural right of free access
to the soil. Then the right to labor, now being demanded through the
Initiative by the Swiss workingmen's party, might here be made an
admitted fact. And as is now also being done in Switzerland, the public
control might be extended to water powers and similar resources of
nature.

Thus in state and nation might practicable radical reforms make their
way. From the beginning, as has been seen, benefits would be widespread.
It might not be long before the most crying social evils were at an end.
Progressive taxation and abolition of monopoly privileges would cause
the great private fortunes of the country to melt away, to add to the
producers' earnings. On a part of the soil being made free of access,
the land-hungry would withdraw from the cities, relieving the
overstocked labor markets. Poverty of the able-bodied willing to work
might soon be even more rare than in this country half a century ago,
since methods of production at that time were comparatively primitive
and the free land only in the West. If Switzerland, small in area,
naturally a poor country, and with a dense population, has gone far
toward banishing pauperism and plutocracy, what wealth for all might not
be reckoned in America, so fertile, so broad, so sparsely populated!

And thus the stages are before us in the course of which the coming just
society may gradually be established--that society in which the
individual shall attain his highest liberty and development, and
consequently his greatest happiness. As lovers of freedom even now
foresee, in that perfect society each man will be master of himself;
each will act on his own initiative and control the full product of his
toil. In that society, the producer's product will not, as now, be
diminished by interest, unearned profits, or monopoly rent of natural
resources. Interest will tend to disappear because the products of labor
in the hands of every producer will be abundant--so abundant that,
instead of a borrower paying interest for a loan,