Our Country:

Its Possible Future and its

Present Crisis.

Prefatory Note.

This Volume was prepared for the American Home Missionary Society by REV. JOSIAH STRONG, D.D., then its representative for the work of Home Missions in Ohio. As will be seen at a glance, its main purpose is to lay before the intelligent Christian people of our country facts and arguments showing the imperative need of Home Missionary work for the evangelization of the land, the encouragements to such effort, and the danger of neglecting it.

Copies for perusal and distribution can be obtained from the publishers, Messrs. Baker & Taylor, No. 9 Bond Street, New York. Fifty cents in cloth binding or Twenty-five cents in paper.

Copyrighted by the

American Home Missionary Society, 1885.

PERILS.--SOCIALISM.

[p1]
SOCIALISM attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin. It says: "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his wants." But this dictum of Louis Blanc could be realized only in a perfect society. Forgetting that " there is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts," socialism thinks to regenerate society without regenerating the individual. It proposes to work this regeneration by reorganizing society on a co-operative, instead, of a competitive, basis. It talks much of fraternity, but forgets what Maurice finely said, that "there is no fraternity without a common Father."

[p2]
It attracts two very different and almost opposite classes of minds; the one, men of large heart, philanthropic, often self-sacrificing, but unpractical. Among this class there are not a few noble and brilliant names. The other class embraces discontented, envious, selfish, and often desperate, men, who are terribly practical in their proposed methods. Some have become discouraged and sullen under real grievances, others are thoroughly vicious and lawless.

[p3]
The despotism of the few and the wretchedness of the many have produced European socialism. It has been supposed that its doctrines could never obtain in this land of freedom and plenty; but there may be a despotism which is not political, and a discontent which does not spring from hunger. We have discovered that German socialism has been largely imported, has taken root, and is making a vigorous growth. Let us look at it as it appears in this country. There are two parties in the United States, known as the " Socialistic Labor Party,'' and the "International Workingmen's Association." The one is the thin, the other the thick, end of the socialistic wedge. Both seek to overthrow existing social and economic institutions; both propose a co-operative form of production and exchange, as a substitute for the existing capitalistic and competitive system; both expect a great and bloody revolution; but they differ widely as to policy and extreme doctrines. The platform of the Socialistic Labor Party contains much that is reasonable, and is well calculated to discipline American workmen. It does not, as a party, attack the family or religion, and is opposed to anarchy. The International Workingmen's Association, which is much the larger party, is extreme and violent. The ideals of the Internationals are "common property, socialistic production and distribution, the grossest materialism-for their god is their belly, free love, in all social arrangements, perfect individualism; or, in other words, anarchy. Negatively expressed-Away with private property! Away with all authority! Away with the state! Away with the family! Away with religion!" In the manifesto unanimously adopted by the Internationals at Pittsburgh, occurs the following: " The church finally seeks to make complete idiots of the mass, and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising them a fictitious heaven." "Truth," published in San Francisco, says:

[p4]
"When the laboring men understand that the heaven which they are promised hereafter is but a mirage, they will knock at the door of the wealthy robber, with a musket in hand, and demand their share of the goods of this life now...."

[p5]
There are, doubtless, Christian socialists; but the Internationalists are gross materialists. The socialist, Boruttau, says: " No man else is worthy of the name of socialist save he who, himself an atheist, devotes his exertions with all zeal to the spread of atheism." The great increase, therefore, of skepticism in this generation, and especially of doubt touching the sanctions of the divine law, has prepared a quick and fruitful soil for socialism.

[p6]
4. Equality is one of the dreams of socialism. It protests against all class distinctions. The development of classes, therefore, in a republic, or the widening of the breach between them, is provocative of socialistic agitation and growth. Among the far-reaching influences of mechanical invention is a tendency, as yet unchecked, to heighten differences of condition, to establish social classes, and erect barriers between them. In a sense, classes do and must exist wherever there are resemblances and differences; but so long as the individual members of social classes easily rise or fall from one to the other, by virtue of their own acts, such classes are neither unrepublican nor unsafe. But, when they become practically hereditary, differences are inherited and increased, antipathies are strengthened, the gulf between them is widened, and they harden into casts which are both unrepublican and dangerous. Now the tendency of mechanical invention, under our present industrial system, is to separate classes more widely, and to render them hereditary.

[p7]
Before the age of machinery, master, journeymen, and apprentices worked together on familiar terms. The apprentice looked forward to the time when he should receive a journeyman's wages, and the journeyman might reasonably hope some day to have a shop of his own. Under this system there was little opportunity to develop class distinctions and jealousies. Moreover, there was a great variety of work. A blacksmith, for instance, was not master of his trade until he could make a thousand things, from a nail to an iron fence. There was relief from monotony, and scope for ingenuity and taste. But machinery is introduced, and with it important changes. It is discovered that the subdivision of labor both improves and cheapens the product. And this double advantage has stimulated the tendency in that direction until a single article that was once made by one workman now passes through perhaps threescore pairs of hands, each doing a certain part of the work on every piece. Manchester workmen, complaining of the monotony of their work, said to Mr. Cook: "It is the same thing day by day, sir; it's the same little thing; one little, little thing, over and over and over." Think of making pin-heads, ten hours a day, every working day in the week, for a year-twenty, forty, fifty years! A nailer, in the midst of a clatter, enough to drown thought, does his day's work by pressing into the jaws of an ever-ravenous machine a small bar of iron, which he turns rapidly from side to side. Think of making that one movement for a lifetime! Such dreary monotony is the most wearisome of all manual labor. It admits of little interest and no enthusiasm in one's work; and, worst of all, it cramps the mind and belittles the man. Once the man who made the nail could make the iron fence, also; now he cannot even make the nail, but only feed a machine that makes it. Beyond question, under the minute division of labor, the operative tends to degenerate. This truth is sadly manifest in the manufacturing towns of England. Says Mr. Emerson: ["English Traits," p. 240.] "The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner-far on the way to be spiders and needles. The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills!" And statistics show that the population of the manufacturing departments of France, also, is far inferior to that of the agricultural departments.

[p8]
Under the low wages of the present industrial system, there is a strong tendency among operatives to form an hereditary class, and thus degenerate the more. In Massachusetts, where statistics of labor are the most elaborate published, the average working man is unable to support the average working man's family. In 1883 the average expenses of working men's families, in that state, were $754.42, while the earnings of workmen who were heads of families averaged $558.68.[Fifteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics," p. 404.] This means that the average working man had to call on his wife and children to assist in earning their support. We accordingly find that, in the manufactures and mechanical industries of the state, in 1883, there were engaged 28, 714 children under sixteen years of age. Of the average working man's family 32.44 per cent. of the support fell upon the children and mother. I am not aware that the condition of the working man is at all exceptional in Massachusetts. "In their last report, the Illinois Commissioners of Labor Statistics say that their tables of wages and cost of living are representative only of intelligent working men, who make the most of their advantages, and do not reach the confines of that world of helpless ignorance and destitution in which multitudes in all large cities continually live, and whose only statistics are those of epidemics, pauperism, and crime. Nevertheless, they go on to say, an examination of these tables will demonstrate that one-half of these intelligent working men of Illinois 'are not even able to earn enough for their daily bread, and have to depend upon the labor of women and children to eke out their miserable existence.[Henry George's " Social Problems," p. 100.] In 1880, of persons engaged in all occupations in the United States, 1,118,356 were children fifteen years of age or under.["Compendium of the Tenth Census," Part II, p. 1368] Their number, in ten years, increased 21 per cent. more rapidly than the population. These children ought to be in the school instead of the mill or the mine. How much longer will the operatives of the United States be distinguished for their intelligence if our children under sixteen are pressed into the factory? In many cases the body is stunted, the mind cramped, and the morals corrupted. A writer [Henry D. Lloyd] in the North American Review, for June, 1884, says that in Pennsylvania there are "herds of little children of all ages, from six years upward, at work in the coal breakers, toiling in dirt, and air thick -with carbon dust, from dawn to dark, of every day in the -week except Sunday. These coal breakers are the only schools they know. A letter from the coal regions, in the Philadelphia Press, declares that 'there are no schools in the world where more evil is learned, or more innocence destroyed, than in the breakers. It is shocking to watch the vile practices indulged in by these children, to hear the frightful oaths they use, to see their total disregard for religion and humanity.'" In the upper part of Luzerne County there are three thousand children, between six and fifteen years of age, at work in this way. In mills and factories children are put to feeding machines, and the narrow round of work prevents a natural development of the mind. Girls brought up in the factories, or whose mothers are there employed, make poor housekeepers, learn little of those arts of economy by which the handful of meal and the cruse of oil of a meager income waste not, neither fail. They make poor wives, and keep their husbands poor. Thus the children of another generation are forced into the factory. Hence the tendency to establish a class of hereditary operatives, which classes are already established in Europe, and will appear here in due time.

[p9]
Moreover, our labor system, together with mechanical invention, is steadily developing an unemployed class, which furnishes ready recruits to the criminal, intemperate, socialistic and revolutionary classes. Mr. Gladstone estimates that manufacturing power, by the aid of machinery, doubles for the world once in seven years. Invention is liable, any day, to render a given tool antiquated, and this or that technical skill useless. Every great labor-saving invention, though it eventually increases the demand for labor, temporarily throws great numbers out of employment. The operative, who for years has confined himself to one thing, has, thereby, largely lost the power of adaptation. He cannot turn his hand to this or that; he is very likely too old to learn a new trade, or acquire new technical skill; he has no alternative; and, unless anchored by a family, probably turns tramp. Competition produces over-production, which results in closing mills and mines for long periods, thus swelling the floating population.

[p10]
We have seen that mechanical invention tends to create an hereditary operative class, and an unemployed and floating population. It also tends, on the other hand, to create a class of capitalists and monopolists.[After discussing these tendencies of modem manufactures, De Tocqueville advises the friends of democracy to "keep their eyes anxiously fixed In this direction," and adds: "For if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this Is the channel by which they will enter," "Democracy in America," Book Second, Chap. 20] Before the age of machinery, manufacturing power was, of course, muscular. That power belonged to the workmen, and could not be monopolized or centralized without their consent. Every man had a fair chance to compete with his fellow; no one enjoyed an immeasurable advantage; but machinery enables one man to own a power equal to that of a thousand or ten thousand men. Modem science and invention, in subjecting mighty forces of nature to human control, have made the Anakim our slaves. Here is an army of giants who never hunger and never tire, who never suffer and never complain; when ordered to stop working, they never raise bread riots. They always recognize their masters, and obey without question and without conscience. The availability and magnitude of these forces make the concentration of power both certain and dangerous. The masters of these forces are the Caesars and Napoleons of modern society. Within certain limits, other things being equal, the larger the manufactory the cheaper the product, and the greater the percentage of profit on the investment. This law results in the massing of capital. These great enterprises demand able men to organize and conduct them. The employer is no longer a workman with his employes; his work is mental, not manual; it tasks and strengthens all his powers; his faculties are developed, while those of the men who tend his machines are cramped He has little personal acquaintance with his employes, and, with noble exceptions, has little personal interest in them. Thus these classes grow apart. Says Mr. Lecky: " Every change of conditions which widens the chasm and impairs the sympathy between rich and poor, cannot fail, however beneficial may be its effects, to bring with it grave dangers to the state. It is incontestable that the immense increase of manufacturing population has had this tendency."["England in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II, p. 693.] And not only are these classes becoming further removed from each other, they are also becoming organized against each other. Capital is combining in powerful corporations and "pools," and labor is combining in powerful trades-unions. And these opposing organizations make trials of strength, offer terms and conditions of surrender, like two hostile armies.

[p11]
5. Again, socialism fattens on discontent. We are told that the condition of working men everywhere has vastly improved during the last fifty or a hundred years. If this be true, it has not prevented a rapid growth of socialism in Europe; and the fact that American workmen are better off than European, will not prevent its spread here. De Tocqueville observed and wondered that the masses find their position the more intolerable the more it is improved. This is because the man improves faster than his condition; his wants increase more rapidly than his comforts. A savage, having nothing, is perfectly contented so long as he wants nothing. The first step toward civilizing him is to create a want. Men rise in the scale of civilization only as their wants rise; and, wherever a man may be on that scale, to awaken wants which cannot be satisfied is to provoke discontent as surely as if comforts were taken from him. Macaulay argues that the nineteenth century is the golden age of England, rather than the seventeenth, because then, "noblemen were destitute of comforts, the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, and farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, "and especially because few knights had " libraries as good as may now perpetually be found in a servants' hall, or in the back parlor of a small shop-keeper."[History of England," Chap. 3.] The evidence of progress is found not so much in the fact that the footman has a library as that he wants it. There has been a wonderful "leveling up" of the common people, and their wants have risen accordingly. It is very true that within a century there has been a great multiplication of the comforts of life among the masses; but the question is whether that increase has kept pace with the multiplication, of wants. The mechanic of to-day, who has much, may be poorer than his grandfather, who had, little. A rich man, may be poor, and a poor man may be rich. Poverty is something relative, not absolute. I do not mean simply that a rich man is poor by the side of one richer. That man is poor -who lacks the means of supplying what seem to him reasonable wants. The horizon of the working man, during this century, has been marvelously expanded; there has been a prodigious multiplication of his wants. The peasant of a few generations ago knew little of any lot save his own. He saw an aristocracy above him, which enjoyed peculiar privileges; but these were often justified in his eyes by superior intelligence and manners. The life of the rich and great was far removed from him and vague. He was not discontented for lack of luxuries of which he knew nothing. But modern manufactures and commerce and shop-windows have made all luxuries familiar to all eyes. The working man of to-day in the United States has probably had a common school education, has traveled somewhat, attended expositions, visited libraries, art galleries and museums; through books he has become more or less acquainted with all countries and all classes of society; he reads the papers, he is vastly more intelligent than his grandfather was, he lives in a larger world, and. has many more wants. Indeed, his wants are as boundless as bis means are limited. Education increases the capability of enjoyment; and this capability is increasing among the many more rapidly than the means of gratification; hence a growing popular discontent.

[p12]
There is much dissatisfaction among the masses of Europe. There would be more if there were greater popular intelligence. Place Americans in the circumstances under which the peasant of Continental Europe lives, and there would be a revolution in twenty-four hours. Hopeless poverty, therefore, in the United States, where there is greater intelligence, will be more restless, and more easily become desperate than in Europe. Many of our working men are beginning to feel that, under the existing industrial system, they are condemned to hopeless poverty. We have already seen that the average working man in Massachusetts and Illinois is unable to support his family. At that rate, how long will it take him to become the owner of a home? Of males engaged in the industries of Massachusetts in 1875, only one in one hundred owned a house. When a working man is unable to earn a home, or to lay by something for old age, when sickness or the closing of the factory for a few weeks, means debt, is it strange that he becomes discontented?

[p13]
And how are such items as the following, which appeared in the papers of January, 1880, likely to strike discontented laborers? "The profits of the Wall Street Kings the past year were enormous. It is estimated that Vanderbilt made $30,000,000; Jay Gould, $15,000,000; Russell Sage, $10,000,000; Sidney Dillon, $10,000,000; James B. Keens, $8,000,000; and three or four others from one to two millions each; making a grand total for ten or twelve estates of about eighty millions of dollars." Is it strange if the working man thinks he is not getting his due share of the wonderful increase of national wealth?

[p14]
"There is," says the eminent Professor Cairnes, " a constant growth of the national capital, with a nearly equally constant decline in the proportion of capital which goes to support productive labor." And this can result, he points out, only in "a harsh separation of classes, combined with those glaring inequalities in the distribution of wealth which most people will agree are among the elements of our social instability." "Unequal as is the distribution of wealth already in this country (England), the tendency of industrial progress-on the supposition that the present separation between industrial classes is maintained- is toward an inequality greater still. The rich -will be growing the richer, and the poor at least relatively poorer."[Political Economy.] Professor Henry Carter Adams says that "the benefits of the present civilization are not impartially distributed, and that the laborer of to-day, as compared with the non-laboring classes, holds a relatively inferior position to that maintained, in former times. The laborer himself interprets this to mean that the principle of distribution, which modern society has adopted, is unfair to him."[Quoted by Washington Gladden, LL.D., in Century Magazine for October, 1884, p. 906.] Is it strange that working men should agree with such conclusions of political economists?

[p15]
Many wage-workers have come to feel that the capitalist is their natural enemy, and that he is always ready, when opportunity offers, to sacrifice them and their families to his selfish gains. This does the greatest injustice to some employers, who, in times of depression, run their factories for months at a daily loss to themselves, rather than throw their -workmen out of employment. But such capitalists are as rare as they are noble. More do not hesitate to enter into combinations powerful enough to command the trade, and then stop work for weeks and months in order to inflate prices, already fair. In November, 1883, the Association of Nail-makers ordered a suspension in order to raise prices; and for five weeks 8, 000 workmen were thrown out of employment, just as winter was coming on. Every mill in the West was in the "pool"; the suffering workmen, therefore, could not gain employment by going from one to another. They had learned to do but one thing, and could not turn their hand to anything else. There was nothing to do but nurse their discontent. Those November and December weeks were a good spring-time for sowing socialistic seed. The Liverpool Cotton Exchange, three years ago, by manipulating prices, stopped 15,000,000 spindles, thus taking the bread out of the mouths of thousands of men, women, and children. The above simply illustrates a strong tendency toward combination and monopoly, which is one of the darkest clouds on our industrial and social horizon. Our various industries are combining to force down production- that means that working men are thrown out of employment; and to force up prices-that means increased cost of living. There are lumber, coal, coke, oil, brick, nail, screw, steel, rope, fence-wire, glass, wall-paper, school books, insurance, hardware, starch, cotton, and scores of other combinations, all made in the interest of capitalists. Small dealers must enter the "pool" or be crushed. Once in, they must submit to the dictation of the " large " men. Thus power is being gathered more and more into the hands of conscienceless monopolies.

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Adam Smith thought wheat was less liable than any other commodity to be monopolized by speculators, because "its owners can never be collected in one place." But this supposed impossibility is practically overcome by the railway and telegraph, and now Boards of Trade arbitrarily make and unmake the prices of food, and wheat is as easily " cornered" as anything else. A single firm in Chicago, five years ago, gained control of the pork market, more than doubled the price, and cleared over seven million dollars on a single deal, the influence of which in advancing prices was felt in every part of the world. The full significance of such transactions is seen only when we consider, as has been shown by Drs. Drysdale and Farr, of England, that the death rate rises and falls with the prices of food. When the necessaries of life are "too easily" secured, combinations declare a war against plenty, production is stopped, and tens of thousands are forbidden to earn while prices rise. Thus, in this land of plenty, a few men may, at their pleasure, order a famine in thousands of homes.

[p17]
This is modern and republican feudalism. These American barons and lords of labor have probably more power and less responsibility than many an olden feudal lord. They close the factory or the mine, and thousands of workmen are forced into unwilling idleness. The capitalist can arbitrarily raise the price of necessaries, can prevent men's working, but has no responsibility, meanwhile, as to their starving. Here is " taxation without representation " with a vengeance. We have developed a despotism vastly more oppressive and more exasperating than that against which the thirteen colonies rebelled.

[p18]
Working men are apt to be improvident. It is often their own fault that enforced idleness so soon brings want. Though, at times, they know enough of want, as a class they know little of self-denial. They generally live up to the limit of their means. If wages are good, they have the best the market affords; when work and credit fail, they go hungry. Neither the capitalist nor the laborer has a monopoly of the fault for the difficulties existing between them. But our inquiry is after facts, not faults; and the fact of improvidence on the part of many working men only makes their discontent the deeper and more certain.

[p19]
A communistic leader, who visited America thirty years ago, was asked what he thought of the condition of the working classes here. " It is very bad," he replied, "they are so discouragingly prosperous." But the growth of dissatisfaction and of socialism among our wage-workers, in recent years, has taken place notwithstanding generally good harvests and a great increase of aggregate wealth. Poor harvests were potent causes in bringing Louis XVI to the guillotine, and precipitating the Reign of Terror. We must, of course, expect them to occur as heretofore, perhaps recur in successive years. The condition of the -working man will then probably be bad enough to satisfy the most pessimistic agitator. Every such " winter of discontent " among laborers is made "glorious summer" for the growth of socialistic ideas.

[p20]
We have glanced at the causes which are ministering to the growth of socialism among us: a wide-spread discontent on the part of our wage-working population, the development of classes and class antipathies, and the appearance of an unemployed class of professional beggars, popular skepticism, a powerful individualism, and immigration. If these conditions should remain constant, socialism would continue to grow; but it should be remembered that all of these causes, with the possible exception of skepticism, are becoming more active. Within the life-time of many now living, population will be four times as dense in the United States as it is to-day. Wage-workers, now one-half of all our workers, will multiply more rapidly than the population. After our agricultural land is all occupied, as it will be a few years hence, our agricultural population, which is one of the great sheet-anchors of society against the socialistic current, will increase but little, while great manufacturing and mining towns will go on multiplying and to multiply. In the development of our manufacturing industries and our mining resources we have made, as yet, hardly more than a beginning. When these industries have been multiplied ten-fold, the evils which now attend them will be correspondingly multiplied.

[p21]
It must not be forgotten that, side by side with this deep discontent of intelligent and unsatisfied wants, has been developed, in modern times, a tremendous enginery of destruction, which offers itself to every man. Since the French Revolution nitro-glycerine, illuminating gas, petroleum, dynamite, the revolver, the repeating rifle and the Gatling gun have all come into use. Science has placed in man's hand superhuman powers. Society, also, is become more highly organized, much more complex, and is therefore much more susceptible of injury. There never was a time in the history of the world when an enemy of society could work such mighty mischief as to-day. The more highly developed a civilization is, the more vulnerable does it become. This is pre-eminently true of a material civilization. Learning, statesmanship, character, respect for law, love of justice, cannot be blown up with dynamite; palaces, factories, railways, Brooklyn bridges, Hoosac tunnels, and all the long inventory of our material wonders are destructible by material means. " The explosion of a little nitro-glycerine under a few water mains would make a great city uninhabitable; the blowing up of a few railroad bridges and tunnels would bring famine quicker than the wall of circumvallation that Titus drew around Jerusalem the pumping of atmospheric air into the gas-mains, and the application of a match would tear up every street and level every house."* We are preparing conditions which make possible a Reign of Terror that would beggar the scenes of the French Revolution.

[p22]
Conditions at the West are peculiarly favorable to the growth of socialism. The much larger proportion of foreigners there, and the strong tendency of immigration thither, will have great influence. There is a stronger individuality in the West. The people are less conservative; there is less regard for established usage and opinion. The greater relative strength of Romanism there is significant; for apostate Catholics furnish the very soil to which socialism is indigenous. Mormonism also is doing a like preparatory work. It is gathering together great numbers of ill-balanced men, who are duped for a time by Mormon mummery; but many of them, becoming disgusted, leave the church and with it all faith in religion of any sort. Skeptical, soured, cranky, they are excellent socialistic material. Irreligion abounds much more than at the East; the proportion of Christian men is much smaller. "Into these Western communities the international societies and secret labor leagues and Jacobin clubs, and atheistic, infidel, rationalistic organizations of every name in the Old World, are continually emptying themselves. They are the natural reservoirs of whatever is uneasy, turbulent, antagonistic to either God or man among the populations across the sea. They are also the natural places of refuge for all in our own country who are soured by misfortune, misanthropic, seekers of radical reforms, renegades, moral pariahs. They are hence, in the nature of things, a sort of hot-beds where every form of pestilent error is sure to be found and to come to quick fruitage. You can hardly find a group of ranch-men or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue's end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of Robert Ingersoll, the socialistic theories of Karl Marx."["Rev. E. P. Goodwill, D.D., Home Missionary Sermon, p. 16.]

[p23]
Socialism makes few proselytes among farmers. Less than one-half of all the lands West of the Mississippi is arable. The agricultural element, therefore, will be a much smaller proportion of the whole population in the West than in the East. The industries of several of the great mountain states will be almost wholly mining and manufacturing; nearly the whole population, therefore, will be wage-workers-the class most easily discipled by socialistic agitators. The capitalist is a large figure in the West. He owns the mines, he owns vast reaches of grazing land, and the great herds of cattle.[At a meeting of cattle " kings " In St. Louis, last November, there were many associations represented which own half a million head of stock or more. The Northern New Mexico Cattle Grower's Association own 800,000 cattle, besides a large number of horses, which graze over 16,000,000 acres of land. The Texas Live Stock Association own 1,000,000 cattle, 1,000,000 sheep and 360,000 horses. A moderate estimate of their value would be $146,000,000.] He has also invested in many thousands of acres of farming lands. Railroads of immense length have been richly subsidized with lands which will steadily appreciate in value. These corporations bid fair to become much richer and more powerful than like monopolies in the East. The longest eastern roads would hardly be considered more than first-rate side-tracks out West; and some day the wealth and power of the western roads will be in proportion to their length.

[p24]
There was no immense disparity of fortune between the early settlers of the East. They started pretty evenly in the race, and it has taken several generations to develop the wide extremes of modern society; but these differences exist at the outset in the West. Eastern capital has emptied itself into Western mines and herds and " bonanza " farms. The comparatively small population of the West has to-day more millionaires and more tramps than the whole country had a few years since. Many cattle and railway " kings," many gold and silver " kings," there rule their subjects. And last August eighty tramps took possession of Castle-ton, Dakota, drove many families from their homes and committed numerous excesses. Western society is organized at the very beginning, on the class distinctions which are so favorable to the growth of socialism.

[p25]
Modern civilization is called onto contend for its life with forces which it has evolved. Said President Seelye, last summer, to the graduating class of Amherst College: "There is one question of our time toward which all other questions, whether of nature, of man, or of God, steadily tend. . . . No one will be likely to dispute the affirmation that the social question is, and is to be, the question of your time." That question must be met in the United States. We need not quiet misgiving with the thought that popular government is our safety from revolution. It is because of our free institutions that the great conflict of socialism with society as now organized is likely to occur in the United States. There is a strong disposition among men to charge most of the ills of their lot to bad government, and to seek a political remedy for those ills. They expect in the popularization of power to find relief. Constitutional government, a free press and free speech would probably quiet popular agitation in Russia for a generation. The new Franchise Bill will allay restlessness in England for a time. If Germany should become a republic, we should hear little of German socialism for a season. But all our salve of this sort is spent; there are no more political rights to bestow; the people are in full possession. Here then, where there is the fullest exercise of political rights, will the people first discover that the ballot is not a panacea. Here, where the ultimate evolution of government has taken place, will restless men first attempt to live without government.

[p26]
There is nothing beyond republicanism but anarchism.