LEGISLATIVE AIDS TO AGRICULTUEE. 31 



merchant of the country, E. Basket Derby, of Massachusetts. 

 The fortune of the merchant was nine hundred thousand dollars, 

 and of the farmer seven hundred thousand dollars ; and those 

 were the very largest fortunes of that day, obtained under the 

 most advantageous circumstances. But now, by manipulation of 

 stocks ; by taxing the productions of agriculture in their tran- 

 sit from the farm to the market ; by employing men in large 

 numbers to work and taking the profits of their labor in manu- 

 facturing ; by taking advantage of or evading the laws relating 

 to the importation of merchandise ; by evading the internal taxa- 

 tion which the wants of the country imposed ; by loaning the 

 money received from the government without interest at enor- 

 mous profits — nay, by buying and selling the indebtment of the 

 nation itself; by subsidies and grants of special privileges by 

 law ; by the power of association of capital under the forms of 

 laws ; by any and every way except hard labor, we see many 

 hundreds, aye thousands, of colossal fortunes such as in other 

 countries and in other times were only the result of the long- 

 continued nurture of wealth locked up in single families for gen- 

 erations. Indeed, all special legislation tends to make the rich 

 richer, and necessarily, by comparison, the poor poorer. 



In fact, our system of incorporated wealth has brought back 

 the laws of entail and primogeniture with all their most odious 

 features. The property of a husband invested in the stocks of 

 a corporation bars the widow of her dower, and enables the fa- 

 ther, because his property is in stocks which are under the care 

 and perpetual direction of others, to give a fortune to an imbe- 

 cile son, which, without these legal provisions — which keep it 

 productive for his use — would have been distributed in the com- 

 munity by his follies or dissipation. 



Our legislative Acts of association give another advantage to 

 capitalists and to the accumulation of wealth which the laws of 

 primogeniture and entail never did. They so aggregate capital 

 that it can escape the eye of the tax gatherer, whether State or 

 national, and thus work a practical inequality and injustice in 

 taxation. While we boast — and the boast is true if the laws 

 could be honestly and efficiently administered — that all taxation 

 is equal, yet, as we have before seen, the land and farm stock 

 lie out under the eye, while moneyed capital, by the very provi- 



