Confiscation | Page 8

who borrows money at 7 per
cent. one day may find it worth only 6 1/2 the day after.
To prevent these fluctuations in the value of either money or
commodities is a legislative feat beyond the power of mortal man. And
when we see our Legislator trying to regulate the value of anything that
one man has to sell to another, are no longer surprised at his trying to

regulate the weather by exploding powder in the air. Our Mark Twains
and Bill Nyes are flat indeed, when compared to that straight-faced
clown, the American legislator, who would give an unchangable value
to either the shoes we wear or the money we use.
This whole question of currency has as little to do with the prevailing
misery as the missing button off your vest would have to do with your
being frozen to death. England not only has enough money to carry on
her own business, but also has $15,000,000,000 to lend to outsiders. It
is not the wealth of a country, but how it is distributed that tells the
story.
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The single taxers of whom Henry George is the great apostle, are also
claiming the floor, but a patient hearing finds the distressed turning
away for relief that the single taxer can not give. They are cultivating a
century plant, and while we are waiting for it to bloom three
generations of human beings will have met their millionaire masters
and taken their place in the line that leads to the soup house and the
pauper's grave.
The masterly logic of these reformers is the work of serene-tempered
and well-fed men, whose cosy library with windows facing to the south,
and the open fire-place with its soothing and cheerful glow, is
conducive to the developing of a red-tape reform that must be an
inspiring subject for discussion at an afternoon tea. Because they are
well fed is the reason why they can play a waiting game, but the
despairing and maddened people, for whose benefit this single tax
contract, with its long deferred payment, is being drawn up, will have
as little use for it as they will have for the plate-glass window when
their bread riots begin.
The land owner alone is the one these one-horse-chaise reformers
would start their Dobbin after. The large landowner should be cut down
in his holdings, and their plan is just the one to fix him and make him
let go. They will tax him in such a way that he cannot pay, and then
they have got him, they tell us, as they leisurely jog along over their
pleasant highway.
Now, why this dilly-dallying with the large land-owner, or any one else,
that has something that he should surrender for the general good?
When the owning of 50,000 acres of land by one man is wrong, then it

is wrong to let him own it, and if there was one drop of the John Brown
blood in this crew of house-gown and plush-slipper reformers, they
would go into the enemy's camp, and never let up on their open warfare
until what belonged to the people was returned to them.
Taxing an enemy to make him give up his plunder!
When hunger and plenty is found side by side what solution can there
be but to set a limit to what the overendowed can tag with his name,
and to put his forfeited surplus where the underfed can, with reasonable
labor, get possession of it.
If the single taxer is given plenty of time, he will accomplish something,
undoubtedly, but the whole thing will be over long before poor old
Dobbin gets on to the scene.
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The millionaire land-owner and the millionaire capitalist are as much
out of place in a republic as is the man with a title; and the laws which
permitted the growth of the first two are the primary cause of the
disgraceful conditions that exist in this Republic to-day. When we
know that people in actual want are to be found in every section of the
United States, we ought to be able to say that it is Nature that has failed
us for the time being; but it is not Nature, but the wretched laws of
man's own making that are at fault. Had we the economic laws that
belong to a republic, instead of those that belong to a despotism, the
foreign markets could be entirely closed to us, and all our people would
still have enough of all things that are necessary to life. And those able
men who have gone into the domain of natural philosophy, to see what
they could find to advance and benefit the human race, have found so
much, and brought about such a change in the industrial