WHAT SHALL WE DO? 335 



and farm interests in our country in a worse condition 

 than are those interests in Great Britain, after a feu- 

 dal land tenure of more than ten centuries. 



The development of large land holdings, through 

 the railroad grants, is marvellous and sinks into little- 

 ness the holdings of England j running, as those in 

 our country do, from tens into hundreds of thousands 

 and millions of acres, with single grain and cattle 

 farms of hundreds of square miles in extent. These 

 holdings and farms are scattered throughout the 

 country and numbered by thousands. More than 

 this : quite one half of the small farmers in our coun- 

 try, who hold the titles to the lands they cultivate, 

 have a merely nominal interest in the land they occu- 

 py ; the mortgages and other liens held by capitalists 

 making it only a question of time and the payment 

 of interest when the titles shall be changed. 



Within the same period of time monopoly has seized 

 upon and holds all the highways of the nation, impos- 

 ing arbitrary taxation upon society for every service 

 rendered, whether the carrying of the mails or the 

 transportation of the produce of the soil or any other 

 industry, or of passengers. So in every other manner 

 capital has made a successful application of the prin- 

 ciples of tyrannous monopoly, first adopted by the 

 laborer against his own brethren and children., Where 

 the workingmen, because of their overwhelming nu- 

 merical preponderance, had and still have the abso- 

 lute power to control all the material conditions of 

 progress, and so direct them as to be of the utmost 

 benefit to themselves and to society in general, they 

 have, by disunion, proscription, violence, a narrow 



