LAND MONOPOLY. 679 



wealth and transcendent glory. Her network of canals, 

 reaching out in all directions to the border of the empire, 

 brought in on their glassy bosoms such wealth as man 

 never saw before. 



But, like Egypt, she sinned against her people, and 

 "her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath re- 

 membered her iniquities. " She violated the decree of 

 Deity. Her haughty ruler, standing upon her highest bat- 

 tlements, intoxicated by the magnificent scene beneath 

 him, gave utterance to the falsehood, "Behold, great 

 Babylon, which I have builded;" forgetting in the pride 

 of his heart, the toiling millions who had worked, in sun- 

 shine and in rain, at three cents a day, to create the mag- 

 nificent city. "The cry of the laborer entered into the 

 ears of the Lord of Sabbaoth. God breathed the fire of 

 his wrath upon Babylon and she died. Usury and land 

 monopoly were her death warrant. Two per cent of her 

 people owned all the land; the rest were slaves. 



Next in order came Medo- Persia, the silver empire. 

 The rulers were more tyrannical than any that had gone 

 before. Plato says: . 



"So great was the distance between the prince and the 

 subjects that the latter were looked upon as slaves, while 

 the king was looked upon not only as their sovereign, their 

 absolute lord and master, but as a kind of divinity. In a 

 word, the peculiar characteristic of Asiatic nations was ser- 

 vitude and slavery. Luxury to madness on the one side, 

 and wretched poverty and abject servitude on the other. ' ' 



The robbery of these people eclipsed all that had gone 

 before. Usury and extortion prevailed throughout the 

 land to the greatest extent. So haughty and tyrannical 

 did the rulers become that they gave forth the proverb: 

 "The laws of the Medes and Persians change not." Thus 

 were the people lashed with fury over the road to poverty 

 until less than one per cent of them owned all the land, 



