38 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



the following forcible statement of the popular view 

 of this question : 



" Let us say that the property of the Government 

 of the United States meaning thereby of course the 

 common property of the people of the United States 

 is worth $4,000,000,000, or $100 a head. In the 

 management of this property by the few hundred men 

 who make up what we call the Government, the im- 

 plied trust is that the property will in all cases be 

 managed for the benefit of the whole people, and that 

 in no case shall one or two, or half a dozen, or a hun- 

 dred citizens be given any portion to use for their own 

 peculiar personal profit, to the exclusion of the re- 

 maining millions. Now if the Government i. e., the 

 men under this trust, the trustees of the people in 

 other words give, say, $500,000,000 of this property 

 to a score of men associated together as a railway or 

 other company, to have and to hold and to use it as 

 their own as much as if it were the product of their 

 own toil, the implied trust is broken; the trustees 

 betray the confidence reposed in them. This is not a 

 fashionable view, we know, but still it is a true one. 

 The wrong is the same in the few men called and call- 

 ing themselves the Government as if they had com- 

 mitted it in their individual capacities and as private 

 citizens. No man in any capacity has any right to 

 betray a trust reposed. And yet, that such betrayal 

 is not only not wrong, but that it is even nobly, glor- 

 iously, beautifully right, is the doctrine underlying the 

 subsidy system. The Government, (so the subsidy 

 doctrine runs,) may, and not only may but should, 

 give the Union Pacific Railroad Company, and the 

 rest, hundreds of millions of public acres and scores 



