CALIFORNIA TO QUEBEC 195 



absolutely dependent on these monopolists for permission to 

 work and to live as ever were the negro slaves of the South 

 before emancipation. 



The result of acting- upon this false conception is, that the 

 Government has already parted with the whole of the acces- 

 sible and cultivable land, and though large areas still remain 

 for any citizen who will settle upon it by the mere payment of 

 very moderate fees, this privilege is absolutely worthless to 

 those who most want it — the very poor. And throughout the 

 western half of the Union one sees everywhere the strange 

 anomaly of building lots in small remote towns, surrounded 

 by thousands of uncultivated acres (and perhaps ten years 

 before sold for eight or ten shillings an acre), now selling at 

 the rate of from £1000 to £20,000 an acre! It is not an 

 uncommon thing for town lots in new places to double their 

 value in a month, while a four-fold increase in a year is quite 

 common. Hence land speculation has become a vast organ- 

 ized business over all the Western States, and is considered to 

 be a proper and natural mode of getting rich. It is what the 

 Stock Exchange is to the great cities. And this wealth, thus 

 gained by individuals, initiates that process which culminates 

 in railroad and mining kings, in oil and beef trusts, and in the 

 thousand millionaires and multi-millionaires whose vast accu- 

 mulated incomes are, every penny of them, paid by the toiling 

 workers, including the five million of farmers whose lives 

 of constant toil only result for the most part in a bare liveli- 

 hood, while the railroad magnates and corn speculators absorb 

 the larger portion of the produce of their labour. 



What a terrible object-lesson is this as to the fundamental 

 wrong in modern societies which leads to such a result ! Here 

 is a country more than twenty-five times the area of the 

 British Islands, with a vast extent of fertile soil, grand navi- 

 gable waterways, enormous forests, a superabounding wealth 

 of minerals — everything necessary for the support of a popu- 

 lation twenty-five times that of ours — about fifteen hundred 

 millions — which has yet, in little more than a century, de- 

 stroyed nearly all its forests, is rapidly exhausting its mar- 

 vellous stores of natural oil and gas, as well as those of the 



