THE SOCIAL QUAGMIRE 401 



enabled a small proportion of the community to possess 

 themselves of so much of the wealth which the whole of 

 the community have helped to produce. That much of 

 this wealth has been obtained dishonestly, is quite 

 certain, yet it has for the most part been obtained legally ; 

 and it is probable that if the whole of the transactions of 

 some of the chief of American millionaires were made 

 public, few of them would be found to be contrary to law, 

 or even contrary to what public opinion holds to be quite 

 justifiable modes of getting rich. Yet there is probably 

 a very large majority of voters wdio see the evil results of 

 the system, and would be glad to alter it if they knew 

 how. They have a vague feeling that something is 

 wrong in the social organization which renders such 

 results possible. They begin to see that the old explana- 

 tions of the poverty and starvation in Europe were all 

 wrong; since, though America still possesses its repub- 

 lican constitution, though it is still free from hereditary 

 aristocracy, state church, or the relics of a feudal system, 

 though its population is less than tw^enty-five per square 

 mile, while Great Britain has over three hundred, it has, 

 nevertheless, reached an almost identical condition of 

 great extremes of wealth and poverty, of fierce struggles 

 between capitalists and labourers, of crowded cities where 

 women are often compelled to work sixteen hours a day 

 in order to sustain life, and where thousands of little 

 children cry in vain for food. The causes that have led 

 to such identical results, slowly in the one case, more 

 rapidly in the other, must in all probability be identical 

 in their fundamental nature. 



The present writer has long since arrived at very 

 definite conclusions as to what these causes are, and what 

 are the measures which alone will remedy the evil. In 

 America there has hitherto been a great prejudice against 

 these measures because they run counter to one of the 

 institutions which has profoundly influenced society, and 

 which, till quite recently, has been considered to be 

 almost perfect and to be of inestimable value — I allude, 

 of course, to the land system of the United States. It is 

 because the present generation has been taught to look 



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