Confiscation | Page 4

for those conditions because he
will not buy our wheat, or use a metal that we have an overplus of,
places us side by side with the witch-burner of old. We are just as
ignorant in one way, as he was in another.
At his door who has been writing on this subject does the blame of this
universal ignorance of it belong. He takes up this plain, simple subject,
and becomes an intellectual aristocrat and a snob of exclusiveness from
that time on, and, like the aristocrat of wealth, will have nothing further
to do with the common people, cutting off all former connections by
turning out a mass of intellectual mud that, only leisure and education
can penetrate. And dear to him is the dignity of bulk, the dignity of
paunch, using, as he does, twenty words where three would do better
work. The living and the dead if his species are alike in this hunt for the
"Absolutely Pure" to puff out their little dough.
Dissecting "Co-operation," the writer of Progress and Poverty must
drag the poor remains through over 800 words - almost enough to bury
the single tax theory itself. Co-operation means getting rid of the
middleman. With organized labor it, means keeping out all whose

admittance would cause a surplus of labor among those who have
organized to prevent that as well as injustice by the employer. But what
has become of that middleman and black-balled laborer? One is ruined
and the other is a helpless chip that is drifting into - some State prison
for forty years.
Co-operation is the savior of some, but the ruination of others, and her
plea of justifiable homicide cannot be accepted while this earth has
more than enough for her own.
Not a God-like wisdom, nor the assumption of it, is needed to either
conceive a remedy for our present troubles, or to formulate laws for its
application. Plain sense we most all have, let us use it, then, and we
will have no further use for either the bookworm or the logic chopper.

Confiscation.

I.
Running a republic under the economic laws of a monarchy must of
necessity result in producing the same conditions - great wealth for
some and great poverty for the rest. This may be a government by the
people, but it certainly is no longer a government for the people.
Heretofore individual greed has had full swing in the United States, and
naturally enough the ablest returned in possession of everything worth
grabbing. And naturally enough, too, if a republic means a country
owned by all its people, it cannot be a republic if it is owned by only a
few. All the power of a country is bound to be in the hands of those
who own it. If its wealth is in the hands of a few, its power is there with
it. In the hands of a few it must be, if it would be a kingdom or empire.
In the hands of all it must be, if it would be a republic. To insist on
having the personal liberty that goes with a republic, and at the same
time not to set a limit to the resources an individual can own, is a
contradiction. A republic has economic laws that are essential to her
existence. Any others mean her destruction. And it is utterly out of the
question for any political party to improve the conditions of the people,
while they use the present economic laws as the basis of their proposed
legislation.
You must begin at the foundation. Individual greed should be made to
respect the right of others to exist, and made to conform itself to laws

that are as necessary to the life of a republic as is the ballot itself. The
ballot, in fact, has lost its power. It is the key to a house we have lost
possession of, and if we would regain possession and make the ballot
something more than a mere symbol of a thing that is dead, we have no
choice but to resort to the one process by which the resources of the
country can be returned to its people, and the blight of poverty and
pauperism that is settling down on the country and is becoming
permanent can be removed - namely, confiscation.
Man, in the beginning, seeing annihilation staring him in the face,
combined and gave us the Government of the Tribe; out of that
developed the Despotic form; out of that developed the Constitutional
Monarchy, out of which developed the Republic, the highest type of
them all; and this work of development must ever go on, if we would
not lapse into former conditions.
The founders of the republic could not have expected their work