xxxii] CALIFORNIA TO QUEBEC 195 



them slavery, both white and black — a curse from the effects 

 of which they still suffer, and out of which a wholly satis- 

 factory escape seems as remote as ever. But even more 

 insidious and more widespread in its evil results than both of 

 these, we gave them our bad and iniquitous feudal land system ; 

 first by enormous grants from the Crown to individuals or to 

 companies, but also — what has produced even worse effects — 

 the ingrained belief that land — the first essential of life, the 

 source of all things necessary or useful to mankind, by labour 

 upon which all wealth arises — may yet, justly and equitably, 

 be owned by individuals, be monopolized by capitalists or by 

 companies, leaving the great bulk of the people as 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 ^ioco 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 fourfold increase in a year is quite 

 common. Hence land speculation has become a vast organized 

 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 toil- 

 ing workers, including the five million of farmers whose lives 

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



