MONOPOLY OF TRANSPORTATION. 573 



the few hundred men who make lip what we call the gov- 

 ernment, the implied trust is that the property will, in all 

 oases, 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 remaining 

 millions. Now if the government that is, 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 calling themselves the government, as if they had 

 committed 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, gloriously, 

 beautifully right, is the doctrine underlying the subsidy 

 system. 



u 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 of millions of public money for the 

 purpose of building up and operating a business for the 

 exclusive profit of the said companies, to the utter and 

 eternal exclusion of any and all of the millions of other 

 citizens whom the act of incorporation fails to recite. It 

 is right say the advocates of this subsidy system for the 

 government to give away to whom it will so much of the 

 $4,000,000,000 as it deems proper. It develops the country 

 to do this; it is progress; it is in the line of best patriotic 

 thought; the wilderness is thereby made to bloom and 



