334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



holding of land, political economists have perhaps paved the way for 

 a more radical discussion of the rights of property than they ever an- 

 ticipated. 



~No landlords have ever been more oppressive to a community, or 

 levied more odious exactions, than the merchants and speculators who 

 in the United States corner coal or pork, or the manufacturers who, 

 secure in a close, protected market, combine to extort from consumers 

 an exorbitant price for oil and chemicals. Canadian cotton-mills, which 

 before the rise in the tariff, effected in 1878, were paying about eight per 

 cent in dividends annually, since then have earned double and treble 

 such profits at the public expense. The broad question of property, 

 not the narrow one of land, is up for discussion, and it can not be dis- 

 missed with inadequate treatment. At the dawn of the present manu- 

 facturing era, in the days of Watt and Arkwright, about a century 

 ago, there was a hope widely prevalent that the conquered forces of 

 nature, acting through the ingenious machinery and processes so rap- 

 idly brought forth at that time, would greatly improve the lot of the 

 poor. That hope, so creditable to the hearts of the men who enter- 

 tained it, remains unfulfilled. The poor, it may be admitted, have 

 been improved in condition, but have they proportionately shared in 

 the enormous aggregate increase of national wealth ? The development 

 of the past century's manufacturing and trading industry in the exist- 

 ing moral and social circumstances has been attended by the constantly 

 growing contrast between colossal fortunes on the one hand and the 

 earning of a mere livelihood on the other. The masses toil as hard as 

 ever, for all the steam-engines, the railways, and complicated machinery 

 applied to every form of industry. The chief result, and certainly an 

 unsatisfactory one, is that the luxury of a few increases. Within re- 

 cent years palace-building has begun in America, and sums have been 

 lavished upon the homes of railroad and mining kings to an extent 

 equal to the making cheerful and wholesome whole quarters of cities 

 occupied by the squalid tenements of toilers. With industry highly 

 specialized, and becoming more and more so year by year ; with the 

 web of a credit competition continually increasing in complexity and 

 liability, leading to panics more severe with every recurrence, there is 

 manifest danger to property danger, because these stresses of busi- 

 ness entail suffering beyond description among the working-classes, 

 and, under some sharp distress, they may make a savage and ill-con- 

 sidered attack on capital. Let Pittsburg and Baltimore justify the 

 assertion. 



Popular discontent has in all ages been a dangerous thing, but how 

 much more so than ever now, when a numerical majority that is, the 

 poor control legislation, elect the executive, and levy taxes ! In the 

 last analysis the rights of property depend upon the popular will, and 

 the people can readily modify existing rights in what they may take 

 to be the general good. Fourier and Saint-Simon did not speak to 



