March 17, 1888 Vol. III, No. 11Whole No. 63

THE STANDARD

HENRY GEORGE, EDITOR AND PROPRIETOR.

NO. 63–VOL. III, [NO.?] 11. | NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 1888. | PRICE FIVE CENTS

[Masthead note: a pasted mailing label (“102 S Mendelsen 167”, second line struck through and illegible) lies across the masthead and hides the “NO.” before “11”; a handwritten library/accession mark (“179W74”?) is written above it at top left. Neither is part of the printed page.]

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THE TARIFF PROTECTED SUGAR TRUST.

The witnesses before the congressional committee that is now investigating trusts display the same facility in dodging disagreeable questions that marked the proceedings before the committee of the New York state senate. The congressional committee is less tender in its treatment of these magnates of monopoly, however, and rudely insists on seeing papers and on receiving definite answers to questions. Mr. Havemeyer and other interested witnesses continue to insist that the sugar trust is, on the whole, a benevolent combination which, so far from desiring to enhance the cost of sugar to consumers, really aims to lower prices by cheapening methods. Such testimony, like a great deal of that frequently given before investigating committees, raises a curious question as to the exact meaning attached by many eminently respectable gentlemen to the obligation of an oath^sic,

Disinterested witnesses do not take quite so rosy a view of the probable results of establishing a monopoly of sugar. Mr. Thurber, a wholesale grocer of this city, said that though large concerns could produce more cheaply than small ones, they do not usually choose to sell more cheaply unless compelled to do so by competition. The present combination might, he thought, control the New York market to some extent, but if prices were raised beyond a certain point other refineries would be started and other markets would compete for our supply. He admitted, however, that trusts easily break down or capture those who interfere with their monopoly. Hugh N. Camp, who was for sixteen years a sugar refiner, said he had heard of a vessel that found difficulty in selling a cargo of sugar in New York in January of the present year because there was no longer any buyer here other than the trust, and it would not pay the price asked. This brings clearly to view the capacity of these monopolies for putting down the prices of raw product while putting up the price to the consumer.

One of Mr. Camp’s answers shows how vital an interest the working people, as such, have in the effort to curtail the power of these monopolies. He said he did not believe that a workman who had trouble with one refinery belonging to the trust could get employment in any other refinery belonging to the combination. This certainly appears probable, and it shows that, if the monopoly is maintained intact, the workers in refineries will soon be entirely at the mercy of their employers. That this is one of the objects of trusts and other combinations of manufacturers has long been apparent, but it has rarely been so frankly announced as it is in the articles of agreement made by a number of Philadelphia manufacturers and already commented upon in THE STANDARD. These gentlemen frankly declare that their chief object is united action for the maintenance of a high tariff and for resisting the demands of labor for higher wages.

It seems useless to follow the congressional investigation closely. We already understand fully the object and method of trusts. They seek to put under the control of one compact body of men the whole management of the particular industry to which they relate. That they will thus be enabled to reduce the cost of production is doubtless true. Their object, however, is to increase the profits of the manufacturers forming the combination. They are probably wise enough not to kill the goose that lays for them golden eggs. They will not force down the price paid

p. 2, col. 2 for raw sugar so low as to drive it to other markets or curtail its production, and they will not raise the price of the refined product high enough to make a market here for sugar refined in other countries. Within those limitations the trust can tax the people for one of the necessaries of life just as much as it chooses, and it is doubtful if any law can be framed that will prevent the formation of secret combinations of this character should open trusts be broken up.

The remedy is not so much to be looked for in new laws as in the repeal of old ones. The sugar trust is the direct outgrowth of our high tariff. Had there been no duties on sugar it would never have been formed. If the duty on manufactured sugar were now lowered the power of the trust to make unjust exactions would be to just that extent lowered, and if this were carried far enough there would no longer be any object in maintaining the combination. If the reduction of duty on the manufactured product in the bill proposed by the committee of ways and means is not sufficient to assure the destruction of this trust a further reduction ought to be made. The first step toward effective legislation against trusts must be tariff reduction.

THE PAUPER ZINC OF SILESIA.

The Chicago Tribune recently declared that the tariff on zinc has built up a monopoly that has enabled a few men in the two Illinois towns of La Salle and Peru to amass millions by the employment of imported labor. A reporter of the Inter Ocean rushes to the defense of the tariff and denounces the Tribune as the “organ of free trade and the Cobden club.” The two concerns criticised by that paper are the Matthiessen & Hegeler zinc company and the Illinois zinc company, of which latter Calvin Wells of Pittsburg, the millionaire proprietor of the Philadelphia Press, is president. The Inter Ocean correspondent interviewed representatives of both companies and managed to bring out facts that support ’the^sic Tribune’s charges, and others that show clearly the folly of our “protective” system.

No attempt was made to show that the proprietors had not amassed millions, but, on the contrary, the reporter dwelt with evident satisfaction upon the fact. As to the charge that laborers had been “imported,” a vigorous denial was made, but it was at the same time admitted that of the 425 men employed by the Illinois company but one-fifth were Americans, the remainder being Poles and Germans, who, though not “imported,” came here from Europe for the specific purpose of working in this establishment. Of the 528 hands employed in the larger establishment, 356 were Poles and Germans, 121 were boys born of foreign parents, and 51 were men of American birth. The large proportion of foreigners appears to have impressed the reporter, and he asked Mr. Means, the manager of the Illinois company, the cause. That gentleman replied: “Ours is a kind of work you cannot get Americans to do when they can take to farming or something else, and therefore many of our hands have been in the works in Silesia.” Mr. Means went on to explain that the foreign hands can live cheaply, “for all work, even the little tots.” He further said that many men who had once been engaged in the works are now successful farmers.

After this very frank showing of the facts, Mr. Means dropped quite naturally into the usual protection cant about the influence of the tariff in advancing the price of labor, notwithstanding his own admissions that the wages paid by his company are so low that American workmen, accustomed to the standard of living maintained in this country and disposed to send their children to school, will not work for them, because they can do better at farming. The men who do work for the zinc companies come here from the mines of Silesia and accept wages that require them to live meanly, and to put even their “little tots” to work, and thus rear them in an ignorance that causes some of them, though born here, to accept the conditions refused by the majority of Americans around them. He also shows that the more intelligent and enterprising of the immigrant workmen escape from employment in this protected industry to the more lucrative unprotected farming industry. In the face of facts like these, Mr. Means’s pretense that the tariff on zinc is maintained for the purpose of protecting American labor against “the pauper labor of Europe” is not likely to deceive any sensible man.

That the tariff has had a great deal to do with building up the zinc industry in this country is probably true, but the facts as stated by the persons interviewed cannot fail to raise a question as to whether that building up is worth to the American people what it has cost them. Mr. Matthiessen, the head of the larger company, told the reporter that a sudden removal of the duty on zinc would disturb the entire zinc industry in this country. He said:

We can’t mine so cheaply nor so abundantly as it is done in Europe, where deposits are worked with which our deposits now worked here could not compete. A great many things have been started in this country which could not have been without the duty, and mines have been worked which would not have been without the stimulant of protection. The miners would feel it were the duty removed, for I doubt if all the zinc works could offer high enough prices to keep all the mines going. . . . Yes, there are great deposits in Silesia, and they are increasing the working of them daily. You see, their smelting works are near the coast, and so it is easy to bring both ore and fuel. In many cases they work to better advantage than we. If rich mines were discovered here we might export spelter, but at the present price of ore we could not think of it.

Mr. Means, referring to the same matter,

p. 2, col. 3 said that the European output of spelter (bar zinc) in 1886 was 254,590 tons, and the American output during the same year was 42,641 tons, and our imports less than 2,000 tons. We produce about one-sixth of the whole world’s product, and it comes within less than 2,000 tons of supplying our home demand. In order that this demand shall be thus supplied a tax of $1.50 per hundred pounds has been imposed on spelter, which sells for $4.43 per hundred weight in London, and a tax of $2.50 per hundred pounds is imposed on sheet zinc. As the zinc produced here is also worked here this latter is the tax paid by the public to the government on imported zinc and to the manufacturers on the domestic article, so that from Mr. Means’s own statement we pay at least $2,000,000 a year more for zinc than we otherwise would have to pay.

What do we get in return? Simply this: A few land owners in Wisconsin and other states obtain handsome incomes for allowing workmen to dig zinc ore, a few manufacturers become millionaires and a number of Germans and Poles, who would otherwise be making spelter for us in Silesia, are brought over to make spelter for us in the United States. Is that worth $2,000,000 a year to the American people?

Mr. Matthiessen refused to say to the reporter that a change in the tariff would ruin the zinc industry in this country, but intimated that only the richer mines could be kept open. So far as the zinc working industry is concerned, he declared that he had never petitioned for protection, and his partner, Mr. Hegeler, said: “Let congress do what it pleases, we’ll get along all right.” Both of them said, however, that the effect of a reduction would be the lowering of miners’ wages. This is not necessarily true. Their wages cannot fall much below that paid for farm labor even now, and under any general reduction of the tariff the tendency would be to increase the profits of agriculture and to advance the wages of those engaged in it. Instead of wages falling, the royalties of those who now hold on to mining lands and exact tribute for allowing men to work would be reduced.

With free trade, if a man understanding the business found that he could do as well for himself by mining zinc as at any other occupation, he would mine zinc. If, on the other hand, he discovered that the “pauper labor of Europe” was willing to mine zinc so cheaply that it would be better for Americans to buy it than to make it, the American labor would earn better wages at producing something that could be profitably exchanged for the Silesian pauper zinc, and would not waste his efforts in an unprofitable industry. There would under such circumstances be no difficulty in finding for these miners a more profitable occupation. A larger number than all those engaged in the zinc industry arrive in New York each week of spring and summer, and find something to do, and, furthermore, if the government had never begun taxing the American people to promote the interest of the owners of zinc ore lands, these men, who have been brought here to work in zinc mines, would have been in Silesia, and not in the United States.

FINDLAY’S NATURAL GAS.

A few years ago, on the discovery that great quantities of natural gas lay not far under the surface of the earth in the region of Findlay, Ohio, the people of that town hastened to utilize the gift that nature thus made them, lighting the streets with the gas and burning it as fuel in their manufactories; and in a short time through its use coal and wood were driven almost entirely out of the local market. The fame of Findlay’s cheap light and heat being noised about the country, large numbers of people were attracted to the place, some of them establishing new manufactories there, many seeking employment of its business men, others taking up with the occupation of sinking wells and selling gas, and others, again, buying land and holding it for a profit because of the chances that gas might be reached by wells bored down through it.

Many men were enriched through the discovery and utilization of the Findlay gas basins. The manufacturers who were on the spot early after the discovery of the gas, and who bought for themselves land that at once served as sites for their works and as means of access to a supply of gas, are to-day enjoying a great advantage over manufacturers elsewhere who use coal, and over late comers to Findlay who must pay high prices for land. The owners of wells, for a considerable period, made large profits, raising the price of gas from time to time, as the demand for it became greater from the growing population of Findlay and as the supply of it was artificially restricted through the holding out of use for speculative purposes of a large area of land covering the subterranean reservoirs of gas. Land owners, however, made money more surely and easily than any other class, gaining not only by the rise in price of all the land known to command access to the gas, and even of that which was only supposed to do so, but also of all the town lots of Findlay and the farming lands around about the town.

While fortunes were thus being made, however, a discussion arose among the people of Findlay as to whether it was best for all or just toward all that comparatively a few men should reap profits in delivering the gas, no outlay of labor or money being required in its production. While no one questioned that the owner of a piece of land had a right to all the gas that he could cause to flow through it, no attempt, it seems, was made by any one to prove that the stores of gas in the bowels of the earth were or ought to be

p. 2, col. 4 reduced to private ownership. Nobody advanced the notion that they belonged to any man by right of discovery, or that title to them ought to vest in any one because of earliest appropriation, or that exclusive possession of them could be acquired through the expenditures involved in sinking the first well by which a flow of gas was secured. Nor did the owners of the surface of the earth lying above the gas basins claim that their rights in the gas required a division of its supply among them proportioned to the area of the land owned by each. The people of Findlay assumed that the combustible gas, like the water of the ocean, belonged to all. That postulate standing unchallenged, and consideration having been given to proposed methods of public supply, the municipality of Findlay bought and bored wells and laid pipes in the streets of the town, and now all its inhabitants may obtain natural gas for cooking and illuminating purposes at a cost slightly above that of its production at the point where it is burned. This result is deemed admirable by the people of Findlay in general, but, as may be imagined, it is not satisfactory to the men engaged in supplying natural gas to consumers, their profits having been diminished since the city trenched upon their business. Neither is speculating in such land as may perchance prove an entrance way to the gas deposits any longer so highly profitable an enterprise as it was. The public, however, is but little concerned about the disappointment of the rings of speculators who are making of a general necessity a means of gain for themselves. Popular sentiment declares that a fair division is being made among the people of something that was unquestionably the property of all.

Had the present generation of Findlayites stood by and permitted a complete appropriation of the sources of the natural gas supply in that locality by private individuals, is it not probable that the next generation of natural gas owners would stubbornly contest the right of the municipality of Findlay to go into the business of supplying its citizens with any of the gas from beneath the surface of the earth? Would they not interpose with forces that the public of Findlay would find it difficult to overcome—tedious litigation, inexhaustible streams of editorial writing, procured protests against an invasion of private rights falsely quoted as the voice of public opinion? Would not learned lawyers eloquently plead the cause of the gas owners? Would not the newspapers bring the charge of rank communism against the advocates of the natural rights of the people? Would not the gas owners be able to exhibit charters from the legislature and titles from the state tending to prove that not only the surface of the earth in the natural gas region, but all the underground basins as well, were absolutely and exclusively their property and that of their heirs and assigns forever? And would they not cause many conservative and conscientious people to doubt the “theory” that the gas was a gift from nature to mankind in general?

But no danger of all that now. The people of Findlay, it is their belief, have in a public spirited manner done away with the monopoly of natural gas. They reflect upon the possibilities of being squeezed in purse by the gas grabbers to which they were exposed until they took the matter in their own hands and dealt with it as they considered justly, and they congratulate themselves alike upon the successful operation of their comprehensive scheme of profit sharing and upon their clear perception of the principles of justice in regard to the use of the gas. People in Findlay are generally in good humor over their solution of the problem, and it is at present popularly supposed that the whole matter is completely, and, on the whole, satisfactorily settled.

Yet, correct as have been the principles animating the people of Findlay in dealing with the natural gas question, what have they really accomplished? Have they really abolished monopoly and secured the advantages that will arise from the supply of gas that nature has afforded to all the people of Findlay? Not at all. As the future must show, they have but abolished one monopoly in order that the profits accruing from it shall ultimately pass to another monopoly.

Findlay now offers to the manufacturer cheap heat and power; to the householder cheap fuel and light. Findlay, therefore, has on this account become a more desirable place to work in and to live in, and as it is quite as true in Findlay as it is everywhere else that no one can work or live without land, the value of land is going up.

Already land speculation is the most active business in Findlay. Because the monopoly of the gas in the bowels of the earth has been broken the price of the surface of the earth is going up with leaps and bounds. Business sites, house sites, vegetable gardens, farm land in and around Findlay, are being marked up, and people are growing rich, without doing any work or in any way adding one iota to the stock of wealth, in anticipation of the increased price that other people will be willing to pay for the privilege of working and living in Findlay and availing themselves of cheap gas.

This increased price, even if it has not done so already, must finally neutralize, or all but neutralize, the advantages which have accrued to the general population of Findlay by the breaking down of the natural gas monopoly; and the net result will simply be that what has been gained in that way will go to the holders of land.

So, then, the question of monopoly is far from being settled in Findlay. Abolishing the monopoly of natural gas has only had a result like that following the

p. 2, col. 5 transfer of the water supply of a city from a company overcharging consumers to the municipality itself supplying water at cost, or the building of rapid transit roads to carry people to the suburbs, or the invention of machinery that cheapens production. Capital and labor, in each of these cases, benefit only temporarily, ultimately obtaining no better terms after such improvements are made than they possessed before, land values affected by the improvements rising until the benefits are lost to all classes save the land holders. Just as the people of Findlay cannot rest, as from a task finished, with the abolition of the monopoly of natural gas, so wherever any monopoly short of that in land itself is abolished, men will finally find that they have merely taken away the power of that monopoly from those who possessed it and given it to land holders. In case the great trunk railroad of Dakota were obliged to reduce its rates to cost, the poor farmer of that territory, who is now made to feel the power of the railroad to rob him in freight charges until he is left only with a bare living, might, if he was the owner of the land he cultivated, find his acres so enhanced in value as to make him at least a moderately rich man. But ultimately the poorer farmer, who must rent land or has still to buy it, would find the price of land commensurately increased. If the grossly over capitalized gas companies of New York were to be replaced by the municipality and gas made as cheap as it is in Berlin, the competition of newcomers to New York anxious to share in the improved state of things in the city would finally put rents up until no benefit remained to any but its land holders.

It is well that the smaller monopolies should be attacked and abolished, if for no other reason than that with them out of the way people can more clearly see what the great monopolist really is. But until the monopoly of land is destroyed labor can never secure its own.

PERSONAL PROPERTY TAXATION.

The Review and Record, a real estate paper which is to Brooklyn what the Record and Guide is to New York, has taken up the subject of the abolition of taxation on personal property. Naturally enough a paper representing the kind of constituency which the Review and Record does would not lean very favorably toward a tax reform that would throw all taxation upon real estate. This would never be suspected from its own line of argument, however, for it declares that “all property from which an income is drawn . . . sheds taxes as naturally as a turtle’s back sheds water, distributing the burden always among those by whom it is used.” This being so, there is no reason why the organ of a real estate constituency should oppose taxation on real estate, for the real estate must shed the tax “as naturally as a turtle’s back sheds water.” And if all species of property equally shed taxation it is obvious that the taxation of but one species will necessarily be the most economical way of raising all the taxes that are needed with the least trouble and expense.

But this canon of taxation is not the only one the Review and Record lays before its readers. As a question of principle, it says, there can be no hesitation in deciding on what description of property taxes should be levied, and promptly decides that they should be levied alike on real and personal property. It is quite true that on principle there can be no hesitation in deciding, but this decision that personal and real property should be taxed alike is as unsound as it is prompt. That houses and other improvements of land, which with land are accounted real estate, should in principle stand on the same footing as to taxation with personal property is true; but not so with the land itself. Personal property and improvements are the result of human exertion; they are in the highest sense property; to deprive any one of them without his consent and without consideration is stealing, and it is no less stealing, in principle, to take a percentage than to take the whole. But when a man is taxed on the value of his land, he pays for an advantage over his fellow citizens which the particular land gives to him, and receives from the community a full equivalent in that advantage.

The Review and Record does not confine itself, however, to discussing questions of principle. In fact, it spares but a brief paragraph to that discussion. Questions of principle do not seem to be in its line, and it turns abruptly to questions of policy. First among the questions of policy comes the suggestion that taxation on personal property drives it from the state. This falls to the ground, according to our real estate contemporary, because “all the states tax, or try to tax, such property.” That all the states are, therefore, equally impolitic, and that this gives an opportunity for one of them—ours, for example—to tempt the personal property of other states to seek a home among us by abolishing personal property taxes, is a phase of the subject which does not appear to have exhibited itself to the Brooklyn real estate editor. But if it had, it would no doubt have been relegated to the background by the talented pen that was able to put into shape such a piece of philosophy as this: Personal property “could only be driven out of one state to go into another state where an equally strenuous effort is made to compel it to pass under the yoke, and where the efficient system of assessment that had caused it to migrate would certainly be imitated as soon as its efficiency was discovered.” Why a state to which personal property had been forced to migrate should want to imitate the “efficient system” that sent it there, so as to send it further, is past finding out on any

p. 2, col. 6 other theory than that personal property is something to be feared, like small pox or typhoid fever. The theory is not wholly new, for it has been the custom of the federal government for a long time to put foreign personal property in quarantine when it immigrates; but it is just as stupid as it would be if it were new.

The other question of policy which our contemporary discusses is the familar^sic one that “it is useless to attempt to tax personal property, because it cannot be traced, or if traced until it is discovered, it will often be found beyond the jurisdiction of the tax collector.” This is supposed to have no weight “because if we cannot find all the personal property that exists we can still find a considerable amount, and what we discover and tax is clear gain.” But to whom is the gain if it “sheds taxes as naturally as a turtle’s back sheds water?” Of course all thought of the crime engendered by tax laws that invite the public to escape them as far as they can, of the inequalities resulting from the exemption of personal property owners through their trickery or perjury at the expense of personal property owners who will not resort to either trickery or perjury, and of the fact that taxes on personal property are ultimately paid by the consumer which imposes the burden of such taxes on those least able to pay them, is cast aside. The sanctity of property in land looms up like a mountain before the Review and Record to hide from its view the inequalities, iniquity and corruption that are involved in the taxation of personal property, and it is not strange that it should lead up to so impotent a conclusion as that indirect taxation, “which has a great deal to recommend it,” may finally “knock out all other theories.”

Indirect taxation is from every point of view the worst that could be possibly devised. When the final consumer pays the tax he also pays a varied collection of intermediate profits on the tax. Thus, while the government receives a small income at one end of this process of taxation the consumer is subjected to a large outgo at the other. This tax also invites all sorts of schemes to defraud the revenue, with a tendency to undermine public morals and diminish respect for law. It takes property from people by subterfuge, making them feel that they do not contribute to public expenses and that the government is a powerful something of which they are no part and in which they have no other interest than by hook or crook to secure its bounty or escape its vengeance.

The fact is, the Review and Record of Brooklyn to the contrary notwithstanding, that as a question of policy as well as of principle, personal property ought not to be taxed. It is equally true that houses and all other improvements included in the term real estate ought not to be taxed. It is true also that land values ought to be taxed to the uttermost. The abolition of taxes on personal property will encourage its production and increase demand for its consumption, while attracting it from places where it is taxed to places where it is not. Likewise will the abolition of taxes on improvements encourage improvement. Taxes on these things make them abnormally expensive, diminish demand for them, and limit their production. None of these results, but the reverse, flow from taxes on land values. Land cannot be increased in quantity; therefore reduction of taxes on it will not give us more land. It cannot be diminished in quantity; therefore increase of taxes on it will not give us less. But high land values tend to keep land out of use, while low values encourage its use; therefore, high values do in effect make less land while low values in effect make more. Now, as taxes on land values make it harder to keep land out of use, such taxes increase the market supply of land and bring values down. For of land almost alone is the statement of the Review and Record erroneous, that all property from which an income is drawn “sheds taxes as naturally as a turtle’s back sheds water.” A tax on any product of labor is a tax on the consumer, while a tax on land values is a tax on the owner of an advantageous opportunity—on the owner, in other words, of a monopoly.

To abolish taxes on personal property is to increase the burden of the users of land improvements, but it is also to increase the burdens of owners of valuable land. And when accomplished it is not improbable that the users of land improvements will soon be willing to abolish taxes on improvements as well as on personal property, and leave the monopolists to pay for the privileges they enjoy, as they should.

The idea of abolishing taxes on personal property is good as far as it goes, and any movement based upon it is in the right direction.

NO PRIVATE ASSISTANCE IN LEGISLATION.

The indignant clamor of the protectionists against the refusal of the majority of the ways and means committee to grant private parties hearings on provisions affecting them is largely manufactured, but there are many evidences that some sensible men think that a wrong has really been done to the interests thus refused a hearing. The existence of such a feeling shows how completely the protective policy has caused us to lose sight of the real functions of congress and the character and objects of the taxing power. If it were not for this confusion of thought the demand that the representatives of each industry affected by the Mills bill should be permitted to make verbal argument and protest against the changes proposed would excite nothing but laughter and ridicule.

This bill does not propose to increase continued on p. 3 →

THE TELEPHONE INVESTIGATION.

The report of the assembly committee that has been investigating the conduct of the telephone business in this state may be summed up in a single paragraph. The business is in the hands of an odious monopoly, which first charges local companies extortionate royalties for permitting them to operate telephone lines in this state, and then insists that they shall donate to it thirty-five per cent of their watered stock in order that it may share directly in the profits of the exactions that it licenses them to impose upon the people of New York.

The committee has reported two bills, the first of which prohibits the transfer of this thirty-five per cent to the Bell company in the future and forbids stock watering, while the second limits the charge for telephone service within half a mile of the central office to $6.50 per month, but authorizes a further charge of $2 per month for each half mile or fractional part thereof beyond the limit first mentioned. The objection to the latter bill is that it actually authorizes an increase on existing charges, while the first, if effective, would afford one set of monopolists relief from the extortion practiced on it by another set, and do really nothing for the people. What is essential is not larger profits for local telephone companies, but a material reduction in the charges that are imposed on the public for the use of telephones.

We must look to Washington rather than to Albany for relief from the telephone monopoly. The telephone will quickly come under the control of a postal telegraph department of the government, after such department is established; but even if that were not the case, it is to national and not to state law that we must look as the source of this and many other of our worst monopolies. They are built on tariffs or patents, and the hope of relief lies in congressional action. It is very well for an enlightened government to foster invention by patent laws, but it is bound to discover some means of doing this without at the same time establishing monopolies that rob the people of almost the entire benefit of such inventions, while proving to the great majority of inventors nothing but a delusion and a snare. It is preposterous for us to idly cry out against the exactions created by statute without inquiring into the wisdom and utility of such statutes. This custom of making foolish laws that produce evil effects, and then legislating to ameliorate these evil effects, has been pushed to the extreme of absurdity. It is time that we had begun to accustom ourselves to go back to the beginning, with aview^sic to making a new and a better start. We should then have fewer laws and more justice.

A NEW PACIFIC RAILROAD PLOT.

Still other modifications have been made in the proposed legislation for the relief of the Union and Central Pacific railroad companies. These modifications have been made at the instance of Charles Francis Adams, president of the Union Pacific, and they reduce the amount of annual payments at first to be made in order to release the companies from their present obligations to the government. Some additional security is contemplated, but it is to consist of mortgages on the land values that the growth of population in Omaha, Denver and other cities will create. As has already been pointed out by THE STANDARD, this security will not amount to much if the people of those cities should during the next fifty years awake to a practical recognition of the fact that the values that they thus create should go by right into their own common treasury.

Again, there is a strong feeling at p. 3, col. 2 Washington that Charles Francis Adams is one of the truly good, and that anything he asks in the name of the Union Pacific, after fescuing^sic it from the hands of that bad man, Jay Gould, ought to be done, even though those other bad men, Stanford, Huntington and Crocker, profit by it. This is queer, since congress can have no possible assurance that at the very next annual election Mr. Adams may not be succeeded by a Central Pacific wrecker, or even by Jay Gould himself. Any one wanting a controlling interest in Union Pacific could easily buy it if he had money enough. What then has the supposed virtue of Charles Francis Adams to do with the matter?

There is but one proper course for congress to pursue. These roads were built with government money and they were dishonestly acquired by private parties. That the money has been wasted and stolen is not denied, and it is this money that is represented in the existing stock. The companies must, in the course of a few years, default on their obligations to the government. All congress has to do is to leave them alone, and when the default comes let the government that built them take the roads. All these proposals to extend the time for payment of the loan are dishonest. The people making them have no idea of paying anything either now or during the next fifty years. What they propose is that the government shall lend them its credit and confirm them in the possession of property that does not rightfully belong to them. They promise that if it will do this they will do their best during the next fifty years to squeeze enough money out of the people of this country to enable them to make good the lost money represented by their own stock and to pay the principal of the government loan also, if they can. Such a proposition ought not to be even considered. These men have robbed the people of certain states and territories long enough. Let the government take its roads out of their hands and give those overtaxed people a chance to get their freights carried at a reasonable price, without paying for other men’s losses.

A POSTAL TELEGRAPH BILL.

The house committee on commerce is disposed to deal much more radically than the senate post office committee with Jay Gould’s telegraph monopoly. The committee’s report declares that the control of telegraphy throughout this country has fallen into the hands of “the worst and most dangerous” of existing monopolies, one that is “substantially owned and controlled by one man.” It comments severely on the efforts of the Western Union company to prevent action by congress, and strongly affirms the constitutional power of congress to establish a postal telegraph. The committee scouts the idea that the government is under any conceivable obligation to purchase existing lines, and declares that “of all corporations in this country” the Western Union company “is the last one which ought to talk about vested rights, when it has never hesitated to destroy and annihilate them in every instance where it has met with competition or encountered opposition.”

The committee therefore reports in favor of building a postal telegraph line, and submits a bill providing that the secretary of war shall acquire by purchase the right of way for such a line and proceed to build the same, the lines when built to become a part of the postal system of the United States under the immediate control of a fourth assistant postmaster general, which office is created by the act. The bill appropriates $8,000,000 for the fiscal year ending next June toward building such lines. The introduction of this bill and the tabling of the senate bill providing for the mere supervision of Jay Gould’s monopoly give some reason to hope that the present congress may really accomplish something in this direction.

The only objection urged against the establishment of a postal telegraph, aside from the objections inspired by the monopoly, is the fear that the change will unduly enlarge the patronage of the government before civil service reform is sufficiently well established. If this is the only obstacle the friends of the measure should cheerfully assent to the addition of an ironclad provision for the competitive examination of applicants for positions. The most pronounced of spoilsmen could not object to this, for no one wants to run any risk of having telegrams handled by incompetent operators.

The proposed bill is a good measure in itself. It will provide a needed public convenience, strike a fatal blow at the insolent and dishonest Western Union monopoly and weaken the allied monopoly of the Associated press, which at least has the power to throw serious obtacles^sic in the way of the establishment of any real anti-monopoly daily journal. The indirect advantages of the establishment of a postal telegraph will be enormous. It will be but the first step toward the resumption by government of the powers it has unwisely delegated to private corporations. It will not need many more such complications as have been brought about by the recent quarrel between engineers and railway corporations in the west to show the public that it cannot afford to leave these great highways of commerce under private control, and the acquisition of the telegraphs will pave the way for the government ownership and control of the railway system. If this congress will take away the taxing power now exercised by Jay Gould, curtail the use of governmental taxing power for individual benefit, and refuse to pass the pending bills to surrender the people’s property to the Pacific railroad companies, it will p. 3, col. 3 deserve grateful recognition for the long stride it will have taken toward denying all taxing powers to individuals and relieving governments from the necessity of imposing taxes on any product of human industry.

VANITY OF VANITIES.

In this skeptical age most of those engaged in the eager race for wealth would probably answer St. Mark’s question, “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” by the old adage, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” The very same men might, however, give a different answer to the question as it is translated in the new version, “For what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” or if it were put in a more practical form still, and men were asked, “What is the use of amassing millions if they bring no pleasure or contentment?”

That these are practical questions is known to thousands of men in our money marts, but now and then some fact crops out that brings the folly of this greed for millions home to men. Last summer a New York millionaire died in a distant island, whither he had gone in search of that which his millions could not buy—health. He was a man who in early life had felt what misfortunes and straitened circumstances meant to men of his class. He was fond of sport, a genial companion, a faithful friend, and his fame as a wit extended beyond his own country. He prospered in speculation, and became many times a millionaire. If great wealth could bring joy and content to any man, here was such a man. But the trouble was that he could never reach the point where, in his own opinion, acquisition ought to stop and well earned repose begin. Two winters before his death an eminent physician, who was his intimate friend, told this man that nothing but an immediate cessation of work and worry could save him from a fatal malady with which he was threatened. The millionaire pleaded for an assurance that he might safely take time to close up a few negotiations then pending, but his friend was inexorable. A family physician was more yielding in judgment, and the millionaire took the time to close up his transactions. By the time he had finished it was too late, and he spent eighteen months trying to escape the inevitable, and then died. What would have been that man’s answer in his last hours to the question, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

Two or three years ago Mr. Flood, one of California’s bonanza kings, was worth $40,000,000, most of which he had gained quickly and by means not at all creditable. Last summer Mackey^sic and Flood lost between them $10,000,000 or $12,000,000 in a gigantic wheat speculation. The two men quarreled over the settlement of these losses and Flood suddenly determined to unload all speculative stocks and invest his money in something more stable, and he dumped the stocks on the San Francisco market without warning, and the result was that they sold lower than any one imagined possible. This still further demoralized Flood, and his condition is described as pitiful. Though still enormously rich he is oppressed with a fear that he will die a pauper. He trembles with horror at the bare thought of poverty, and spends sleepless nights in imagining ways in which his remaining millions may slip from his grasp. There is but one escape from this condition of mind in life, and that escape is madness. What has it availed this bonanza king to amass the millions that he cannot enjoy? Success has not even relieved him of that horrid fear of poverty that goaded him on in his race for riches.

It is not alone to the poor that a change that abolishes the fear of want and the danger of poverty will bring the choicest of blessings.

The friends of tariff reform in the house of representatives begin to hope that the Mills bill can be carried through that body. Ever since the tariff reformers succeeded in electing Kerr as speaker in 1876 the strength of the Randall following has steadily diminished. Nearly half of the democrats were then protectionists or opposed to any attempt to revise the tariff. Six years ago, when Carlisle was first elected speaker, Randall’s followers numbered forty. The number of these electroplated republicans is now estimated at eighteen, with a diminishing tendency. If they all stand with Randall there will remain but 150 out of the 168 democrats in the house to vote for the bill. Of the four independents, two are expected to vote for and two against the bill. Of the republicans, Nelson and Lind of Minnesota, Fuller of Iowa, and Fitch of New York, are expected to vote with the revenue reformers. If this calculation holds good, the bill will get 156 votes, which is within seven of a majority, and it is likely that the rapidly increasing evidences of a popular demand for the reduction of duties will secure that number before the vote is taken.

One of the most significant features of the situation is the lack of unanimity among republicans. The leaders of that party have patted Randall on the back, sarcastically condoled with the democrats on the unfortunate division of sentiment in their ranks, and loftily assumed that all good republicans would stand together as one man in support of a high tariff—the higher the better. It is now reported, however, that northwestern republicans will not help in relieving whisky and tobacco from taxation while a tremendous tax is imposed on sugar. Mr. McKinley of Ohio, says the New York Times, prepared to p. 3, col. 4 head off the tariff reduction bill by a resolution repealing all taxes on tobacco, but was amazed to find that no less than fifty republicans would vote against such a resolution. Mr. Reed of Maine is reported on the same authority to have made a similar discovery concerning a project of his own for repealing the tobacco tax and lowering that on whisky. The western republicans would not touch it. This was to be expected. The farmers of Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas have been chafing for a long time under the burdens imposed upon them by the tariff, yet they have consented to indorse them for the sake of the party. If it is shown to these men, however, that the only aim and object of their party is the maintenance of these very burdens, there is among western politicians a well grounded fear that their constituents may take to democracy, prohibition or the woods rather than submit. No wonder under such circumstances that western republican congressmen begin to doubt the wisdom of accepting the full Pennsylvania policy at this juncture. Thus the probability grows that enough republican support can be had to pass the Mills bill. This would be a matter for present rejoicing, but of little difference in the long run. The greater the resistance the more sweeping will be the flood when it does come.

The statements concerning republican dissension on the tariff question are partially confirmed by the well-informed Washington correspondence of the Herald, and, despite republican denials, there is probably enough truth in them to prevent Mr. Randall’s scheme of how not to do it from receiving any republican support. Farming communities with a strong bias toward prohibition are not likely to look favorably on a proposition to abolish all taxes on tobacco and reduce the whisky tax one-half for the express purpose of maintaining a high tariff on the necessaries of life. However much of a sham Mr. Randall’s bill may be, it is nevertheless the official confession of this democratic representative of protected monopolists that public opinion has made such a demand for tariff reform that at least a pretense of conceding something to it must be shown.

The Mills bill may possibly undergo some modification before it is officially reported, but any change will probably be made with a view to striking a heavier blow at protection. The provisions that are most generally criticised are those relating to sugar. It is urged with much force that unless the duties on refined sugar are very materially lowered that the large reduction on raw sugar proposed will inure almost entirely to the advantage of the trust now controlling the refinery industry, and a popular demand is rapidly rising for the killing of the sugar trust by the abolition of sugar duties.

The lecture of Bishop John F. Hurst of the Methodist church, delivered before the general Christian conference of the evangelical alliance in Washington last December, is published in full in the Christian Advocate of March 8. Its subject is “The Estrangement of the Masses from the Church.” Among the reasons given by the bishop for the estrangement of the working masses is that “the typical wage earner is taught by the apostles of dynamite and free land that the man who lives in his own house and has enough to support himself without manual labor is his bitter foe.” It is no wonder that workingmen are estranged from a church whose high priests, to please front pew pharisees, are guilty of the mendacity of which this quotation is a typical expression. Bishop Hurst, in preparing his lecture, forgot that a lie, though sanctified by a bishop, is none the less a lie.

Senator Vedder has introduced a bill to tax trusts, but under the form of taxing them the bill actually legalizes these conspiracies, which, in the absence of any such legislation, are now possibly under the ban of the law. In the present condition of public opinion any such attempt as that of Mr. Vedder will provoke general indignation. Yet this effort to help the monopolists, while pretending to aim a blow at them, shows that the corporations are quite as well represented as the people at Albany.

The recent savage and senseless attack by Senator Ingalls on the president and on the memory of Generals Hancock and McClellan has met a reception which shows that appeals to war passions and sectional prejudices are no longer helps to popularity. This is a good thing in itself, and it is also a gratifying proof that dead issues can no longer be used to divert attention from the pressing economic questions that now demand the gravest consideration.

Right on the heels of the investigation of the envelope trust comes the publication of a circular issued by one of the firms in the combination, urging stationers and printers to use all their influence to discourage the use of government stamped envelopes. The government is denounced as a monopoly by this member of a trust, and the people are asked to boycott it in the interest of a private monopoly! The effect ought to be to increase the sale of stamped envelopes.

There is a project on foot to build a tunnel under the East river connecting this city and Brooklyn, and to so extend it as to establish an extensive system of underground rapid transit. It is now rumored that the aldermen scent “boodle” in the p. 3, col. 5 project, and are forming a new “combine” to demand a large bribe for granting to the projectors the privilege of burrowing beneath the city. This is only natural. The ground of the island from the surface to the center of the earth belongs of right to the people inhabiting it. If some private individuals are permitted to appropriate it without making due compensation to the owners, why should not other men seek to share in the proceeds of the theft^sic. The community must cease to sanction robbery, if it would put an end to the rapacity of thieving aldermen.

The London Christian Commonwealth has established an anti-poverty department, into which it gathers news of the single tax movement. The Commonwealth gives the movement its support, and includes under the anti-poverty head the amusing interview of Donald Macrae in the London Star, reprinted elsewhere in this issue of THE STANDARD. It will be seen that the grace ends thus: “And then when the land shall be restored to us we will give Thee all the glory.” When Scotch Highlanders thus get the land question into their prayers and graces there is no danger that there will ever be with them even the shadow of turning.

The prospect of James Redpath’s recovery after five strokes of paralysis is as gratifying as it is unexpected; but such a recovery is only possible on the condition of rest and quiet. Like most men of his impulsive and generous disposition, Mr. Redpath is not in a position to enable him to take the rest so essential without pecuniary worry. Not stopping to consult him, the Twilight club have therefore set on foot a subscription to send Mr. Redpath to Florida, and give him a long holiday in which to recuperate. His many friends will be glad to have this opportunity to testify their regard for a man whose time and money has ever been at the service of every generous cause. Contributions can be sent to Mr. Charles E. Wingate, secretary of the Twilight club, 119 Pearl street, New York.

Miss Taylor Will Not Come to This Country at Present.

The following cable dispatch has been received from Miss Taylor:

LONDON.—To Henry George, STANDARD Office, New York: Please announce in THE STANDARD from me that circumstances connected with the Washington convention have decided me to withdraw my acceptance of invitation.

HELEN TAYLOR.

What an American Traveler Learned Abroad.

An interesting book of foreign travel, entitled “A Tramp Trip,” by Lee Meriwether (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1887), contains in the appendix the following passage:

I recrossed the ocean in midsummer and before leaving London had made to order by a fashionable tailor a heavy melton overcoat. It cost $16; in America $40 would have been the price.

On arriving in New York I stood on the platform of a Third avenue surface car and talked with the driver, a wearied looking man, his face pinched with cold, his overcoat, like Nanki-poo’s, was a “thing of shreds and patches.” Presently he addressed me:

“I would like to ask you, sir,” he said, “how much you gave for that coat?”

“Sixteen dollars.”

His eyes opened with astonishment.

“Sixteen dollars! Why, this thing of mine cost eighteen. Tell me where did you get your coat?”

“In London.”

The poor fellow turned to his horses sadly disappointed.

Protectionists talk of the horrors of an “inundation” of English goods. As I looked at the shivering car driver it seemed a pity he could not be “inundated” by a good warm overcoat. That car driver works thirteen or fourteen hours a day for $2. If his clothing, fuel and other necessaries were reduced fifty per cent in price, he could live on fifty per cent less than he now spends; he could afford to work fewer hours and have a little time to pass with his family. But protectionists oppose such a reduction, on the ground that free trade means pauper wages and tariffs mean high wages.

Investigation showed me that that country in Europe with least protection pays most wages. England—England with its royalty, its endless red tape, its idle aristocracy, its army of useless officials—England, alone of all monarchical forms of governments, pays it laboring classes^sic living wages, and England alone has free trade. America, with all its abundance of land, its democratic and comparatively inexpensive government, its sparsity of population—even favored America is pulling behind that little island in the sea; is taking a second place, when her natural advantages entitle her to the very foremost seat among the nations. Formerly we had the lion’s share of the carrying trade of the world. What have we now^sic! When I saw an American vessel I stared at it curiously, so great a rarity was it amid the forest of masts of vessels belonging to other countries.

The author has prepared two tables, one showing wages received in protected Italy, Germany, etc.; the other showing the amount of tariffs imposed upon certain articles by different European states, concerning which he says:

Let the protectionist read these tables and say why, if protection protects, if tariffs make high wages, the protected states of Europe are in so impoverished a condition. If free trade causes stagnation and low wages, why is England so far ahead of her protected European competitors—so far ahead of her own condition forty years ago, before she had the sense to adopt a free trade policy?

Until these questions are answered the thoughtful student cannot but ask himself, “Does protection protect?”

S. J. H^sic

The Lesson of a Millionaire’s Philanthropy.

NEW YORK CITY.—Please permit me to make a few comments on the following extract from the World’s obituary article on the late Mr. Corcoran:

The large fortune of Mr. Corcoran was accumulated entirely by the legitimate operations of his profession as a banker. He made with his surplus capital judicious investments in real estate, and to this source more perhaps than to any other he owed the great wealth of which he came to be possessed. He held great landed possessions in nearly every state of the Union, especially in what were the “new states” at a not very remote epoch of our history, before he had retired from business. The extent and variety of these [continued in column 6] p. 3, col. 6 possessions arose from the fact that at one time he became a purchaser, for a given sum, of all the lands then owned by the treasury of the United States, and which had been seized for debts due to the government. We shall subsequently see how extensive these landed possessions were in some of the states, and how freely he gave away his broad acres in the cause of charity.

Note the beautiful non sequitur between the statement, “the large fortune of Mr. Corcoran was accumulated entirely by the legitimate operations of his profession as a banker” and “he made with his surplus capital judicious investments in real estate, and to this source more, perhaps, than to any other, he owed the great wealth of which he came to be possessed.”

The cat is let out of the bag by the statement that at one time he purchased all the lands owned by the treasury of the United States. Suppose the then treasurer had simply leased the lands to Mr. Corcoran instead of selling them to him, and had kept on increasing the rent as population in the “new states” increased, where would Mr. Corcoran have gotten his millions from to endow his charities? What sort of an art gallery could the people of the United States have built with the money at Washington without being beholden to anybody? How many institutions similar to the “Louise home” could have been erected where indigent “gentlewomen” would have a right to be cared for, not merely to be begged for?

J. R. ABARBANELL.

Land Scarce, Labor and Capital Abundant.

In the course of an address at the last meeting of the anti-poverty society of Cincinnati Dr. Alfred S. Houghton said:

Now, the unemployed labor of this country numbers over 2,000,000 of men, and is the greatest menace to our institutions and the greatest disgrace to our boasted civilization that we have. Unemployed men, think of it. What do they require to employ themselves? Capital? There is plenty of it to be had at four per cent per annum. But given capital in unlimited amounts, what could capital and labor do without land? Then you say, but there is plenty of land to be had for nothing. Land to be had for nothing is not worth anything. Every acre of land in this country commands an annual rent, or is held by speculators until such time as it will, equal to its annual production, minus the lowest rate of interest and the lowest rate of wages that will tempt capital to engage in production, and enable labor to sustain life. That is why we want to abolish the private ownership in land—not the private use, but the private abuse of land as property. It explains why the Incas had no poverty, because they had no monopoly, for all monopoly rests upon the private monopolization of land and from the habits and customs thus inherited, the offspring grows and flourishes. But the rent of land is a very different thing from the rent of a house. Houses are built by labor, and depend for their value on the amount of labor in them, and the labor that built them is entitled to the rent of the house. But the land was not built by labor, and its value is due to the whole community, and is correctly measured by its annual rent; hence, to confiscate rent for the use of the community is simply to restore to the community what it has created, and thus practically abolishing land ownership.

It was Printed in The Standard of July [19?].

NEW YORK CITY.—Please inform me what issue of THE STANDARD contains Dr. McGlynn’s excommunication sermon.

S. G.

Suffering from the Results of Last Year’s Boom.

Springfield, Mass., Union.

Life in the wide, woolly west is not all that it is painted by the people who go there to stay, determined to grow up with the boom. A young house keeper, who has just returned to Massachusetts after a year’s life in Omaha, where she saw the average sort of life, can hardly tell how glad she is to get back to where people have things as they want them. Rents are very high in Omaha for tenements which would hardly be regarded as habitable in Springfield. A small house with no chambers, no water in the house and not even a sink rents readily for $40 per month, and the tenants are liable to be hustled out as soon as the landlord thinks he can afford to pull down the house and build a bigger one that will pay more rent. Many very respectable families live in tenements of three or four rooms, for which they pay $18 or 20 a month. Their household goods are piled together in any way most convenient, and they have the constant appearance of being ready to “move on.” Omaha, as well as many other western towns and cities, is now suffering from the results of last year’s land boom. There is very little money in circulation and general business is very dull. Everything is tied up in real estate and must stay there till the boom can start up again.

Three Lives.

London Democrat.

Any one who wishes to study a peculiar phase of the land laws in England should visit a little town called Torpoint, in Cornwall, situated opposite Devonport, in Devon. He will there find that an epidemic, especially among children, is a substantial pecuniary gain to the owner of the land on which the town stands. This is not the theory, but actually occurs, and, indeed, took place not very long ago. The reason is this: the land is let, chiefly to cottagers and small householders, on the three-life system of leases, with power of renewal. That is to say, the lease is for as long as three persons mentioned in it shall live; and naturally the youngest lives are selected. If one of the parties named should die, there is the power of renewal, that is, of nominating another life, but “fines,” “heriots,” and other antiquated charges have to be paid to the landlord on such an occasion, and he also insists upon the premises being renovated and repaired at the leaseholder’s expense. If the poor cottagers cannot pay the charges and repair the building, he forfeits his lease. The landlord is thus like Tommy Dodd; whichever way things go he is “sure to win.” It is a very cruel arrangement, and is especially hard after an epidemic. Rachael^sic may weep for her children, but the landlord will not. His coffers are replenished.

Rich and Poor.

London Democrat.

Mrs. Williams, the wife of a Wiltshire landlord, stole several articles from Weymouth tradesmen. Her thefts extended over a period of three months, and in the case of one tradesman amounted to the value of fifteen pounds. She was discharged upon her husband entering into recognizance for her good behavior. John Rabbet, a fisherman, fished up a hare which had been hunted into the water. He was charged with “killing a hare;” it was shown that the hare was dead before he touched it, but the bench fined him 2s. 6d. and [17s.?] 6d. costs.

Alabama Merchants Rebelling Against the Rent Tax.

Merchant’s Letter in Birmingham, Ala., Chronicle.

The rents now being wrung from merchants in this city by merciless landlords, amounts almost to confiscation, and it is surprising that they have submitted as long as they have. But there is a point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and in my humble opinion the time has come for us to rise up and demand that rents be placed at a figure at which we can live. There is no justice in levying upon us outrageous rents for the purpose of paying interest on fictitious valuations of real estate.

What It Means.

Topeka Post.

The single tax theories all summed up simply mean that you have as much right to live as I, and that my rights are as sacred as yours. The absolute equality of man is the rock upon which is a superstruction^sic of free land.

THE STANDARD.

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QUERIES AND ANSWERS.

Silas M. Burroughs, His Business and His Partner.

Readers of THE STANDARD know something of Silas M. Burroughs from his contributions to our columns, as well as from articles of his which we have reprinted from eastern papers. The London Chemist and Druggist of recent date contains a long account of the large works and splendid offices of his firm in London, Burroughs, Wellcome & Co., which is of interest in connection with the story already told in THE STANDARD of how Mr. Burroughs came to New York last summer for the purpose of establishing the factory of the firm here, and of his experience with the dogs-in-the-manger who demand such a heavy blackmail before permitting others to use what they themselves will not or cannot use.

The Chemist and Druggist says of the firm, of which both the principal partners it seems are Americans:

“Mr. S. M. Burroughs, who is a graduate of the college of pharmacy of Philadelphia, came to London in 1879 first of all to place some of the goods manufactured by Messrs. Wyeth Bros. of Philadelphia among British pharmacists. He soon extended his operations in other directions, all strictly pharmaceutical, and when joined, in 1880, by Mr. H. S. Wellcome, who was also a gradute^sic of the same college of pharmacy, the business established had grown into one of considerable importance. The partners were both young men with an astonishing amount of energy, thorough pharmacists, clearly apprehending the wants of medical men, and with the means and willingness to supply these. They took up agencies from some of the best American firms, and introduced specialties of their own. These were brought before medical men and pharmacists all over the world in lavish style; but the firm never sought to influence the public except through the regular professional channels. They thus won the confidence of a large number of doctors, and this, we suppose, has contributed in no inconsiderable degree to the remarkable development of their business.

“Parallel with their business success, and not altogether unassociated with it, Messrs. Burroughs & Wellcome have won a social reputation of a notable character. In their Holburn^sic viaduct parlors, or in their private receptions, are to be met from time to time many of the distinguished Americans who visit this country. Outside his business Mr. Burroughs is an ardent supporter of the anti-poverty league founded by Mr. Henry George, and he is often to be found in unexpected quarters of London assisting in the promotion of social reforms. His extraordinary fluency of ideas and language, and the quaint and original forms in which he clothes his thoughts and beliefs, make his speeches and conversation peculiarly attractive. Mr. Wellcome has won a place in literature as well as in commercial pursuits, but avoids mixing in politics, and, though progressive, holds views of a conservative tendency. He holds the medal of the Royal humane society, awarded to him two or three years ago for the gallant rescue of a young lady in one of the locks of the Thames. In literary and artistic circles Mr. Wellcome is always popular. He is a member of the Lotos club of New York, and is the author of the”Story of Metlakahtla” and various papers.”

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS.

W. C. BOHANNON, St. Louis, Mo.—Will you please explain, if possible, how a single tax man can believe in a double tax—a tax on land values and a tax on imported goods? Or, in other words, how can a man believe in the abolition of all forms of taxation except a tax on land values, when he does not believe in the abolition of all forms of taxation except a tax on land values.

Eugene Wood, Chicago.—A great deal of interest is felt here on the subject of the conference called by Messrs. Bailey and Williams, and as might be expected all of us are in favor of its being held in Chicago, as this is the most easily accessible point in the great west. Mr. Bailey tells me that letters are beginning to pour in from all parts of the country. All of the single tax men here are as stanch free traders as Mr. Bailey, and while they do not all hold the views he does on the subject of independent political action, yet they all with one voice desire a conference. Western men would like to see Mr. George, Rev. Father Huntington and Rev. Mr. Pentecost, and have a good long palaver with representative land reformers from all over this country.

A. J. Rose, Batavia, N. Y.—If we can in no other or better way than putting a presidential ticket in the field, retain our identity as a party, then it seems plainly a matter of duty to do so, not for the sake of standing up to be counted, but to prove that we stand on principle, not policy; to prove that in the past we were acting upon our convictions of right and justice, and that in the future our actions shall be consistent with our declared principles—much less should we be swerved from our duty by any sugar coated resolutions offered by either of the shylock parties or by any cunningly devised scheme of, any individual member^sic of either party.

We must not look to either of the old parties for any reform in politics, and especially to the party in power, for it is the great monopolies that always support the party in power, no matter how corrupt, as they instinctively fear change.

It seems necessary that there should be a national conference in the near future and a programme marked out for the coming campaign; then let state conventions be held and delegates to a national convention be selected. They should be the best and bravest, and such that will command the support of every single tax man in the land.

T. P. Ryan, Secretary Twenty-second Ward Association, Brooklyn.—The Twenty-second ward association of the united labor party, at its last meeting, Friday evening, March 9, passed the following resolutions unanimously:

Whereas, Certain members of the united labor party are trying to force the party to nominate a national ticket in the coming campaign; be it

Resolved, That the members of the Twenty-second ward association consider that the party should confine itself to the nomination of congressional, state and county officers, but favor the calling of a national conference of the single tax men throughout the union some time early in July.

H. L. Buzzell, New Hampton, N. H.—Perhaps a few words from a partial convert may not be out of order. For the past two or three years my mind has been rather unsettled on tariff matters. Until within a few months I have been a protectionist, because I had an idea protection protected. Now I am quite convinced that it does not. Without the single tax I believe free trade to be impracticable in America, but with a single tax free trade must come. With Mr. George I believe that free trade will have to come before free land can. I have carefully read both sides as far as I could obtain both in the McGlynn-George controversy. I believe that if the democrats are going our way let us go as far as the crossroads. I would vote the ticket headed by Mr. George for president, but would for no other man. With him I believe it is our duty to support President Cleveland, not because he is a democrat, but because he is going our way, and the party is not cohesive enough to stand a national campaign without a rupture. If the republicans come into power it will hurt the free land cause more than twenty years of democratic rule.

John Costello, New Brighton.—I am sorry to see Mr. George turn his back to the united labor party now and proposing to help a party which has so bitterly opposed us and the principles we advocate. Free trade without free land would be of no benefit to the laboring masses. That is an issue between the two old parties, and we should let them fight it out. Labor will never secure justice by turning to this party or that party, because either happens to propose to do something that is in our line. We have been fooled too often in that manner. It is only a bait thrown out for the purpose of breaking up the labor party.

A Convert, Providence, R. I.—THE STANDARD of Feb. 4 asks what can be done with a man like W. M. Fishback, who in the North American Review says: “Communism, socialism, Henry Georgeism, and all that family of dogmas, have among their adherents one common, essential principle, that it is the right and duty of governments to seize, by law, the fruits of the labor of one man and divide them with others.” I say that that man is color blind if he can see no difference between the three doctrines and is troubled with myopy. I would remove the bandage of prejudice, have him bathe his eyes often in THE STANDARD and take large and frequent doses of “Progress and Poverty.” But if he don’t want to see the cat let him keep on stroking pussy’s fur the wrong way and he will soon learn her dimensions and her form, and perhaps, he will even hear her growl and spit.

This reminds me of a sermon preached by our pastor several years ago. He spoke on socialism, warning the congregation of its dangers. He said, “That book,” holding up “Progress and Poverty” and bringing it down on the desk with a bang, “was the bible of the socialists, who were armed and were drilling for future trouble.” In our minds it raised a curiosity to read that wonderful book. We did so and made three converts in our house, and the leaven is at work yet. Some time after, Mr. George was announced to speak in the opera house and we three were among the first to be there. And we were well paid. I thought it a better sermon than I ever heard preached by our pastor.

Boyd Cormick, M. D., Mascoutah, Ill.—The single tax doctrine is rapidly gaining ground with us, and that, too, among substantial farmers who farm their own land. The doctrine takes root everywhere and will bear fruit in due season.

Charles Harvey, Semper, Col.—I was not in accord with you at first as to our policy in the presidential campaign, but was convinced, by reading Mr. Shearman’s argument, that ours was an abolition movement, and that the road we must travel was the road that Mr. Cleveland proposed to go a short distance on. Probably the reason I and many others did not see this at once was owing to our dislike to the democratic party; for although we may imagine that parties are nothing to us, we are unconsciously swayed both by old associations and by dislike to the party which so easily whipped us in the last New York election. I wish to indorse what

p. 4, col. 5 Mr. L. Miller wrote last week. Let us put a million copies of “Protection or Free Trade?” where they will do most good, and we shall have done more to cause correct thought than if we nominated a full ticket and fought a battle which would tax our utmost resource.

P. H. Smith, Peru, Ind.—I favor the Williams-Bailey national conference, and I believe that is the sentiment here.

UNITY CONGREGATION.

THE WORSHIP OF ISTAR.

Let us be under no illusions, then. So long as unlimited multiplication goes on, no social organization which has ever been devised, or is likely to be devised; no fiddle faddling with the distribution of wealth, will deliver society from the tendency to be destroyed by the reproduction within itself, in its intensest form, of that struggle for existence, the limitation of which is the object of society. And however shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state of things must abide and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx, and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.

These are the words of Professor T. H. Huxley in an article on “The Struggle for Existence” in the Nineteenth Century for February. Professor Huxley occupies a leading position among teachers of exact science. His influence upon modern thought has been exceptionally great. To his observations and arguments is largely due the radical change which has taken place within the last generation in our conception of the physical universe. He is one of that small band of philosophic students of nature who have taught mankind to regard the universe as a harmonious whole, and to perceive, behind apparently contradictory phenomena, a single, all-controlling law. He is an apostle of the doctrine of evolution. When such a man comes forth from his laboratory, surveys the social situation, and gives us not only a diagnosis of the disease with which he finds us suffering, but a prognosis of its course, and advice for its treatment, the least we can do is to listen respectfully, and to carefully perpend.

As, when into the current of a swiftly flowing river, an equally rapid stream projects itself at right angles, there ensue whirlpools, bubblings, aqueous disturbances of various kinds; so, according to Professor Huxley, our present troubles are due to the interference of ethical principles, made necessary and fostered by our social organization, with the strong current of non-moral evolution. In the professor’s own words, “the course shaped by the ethical man—the member of society or citizen—necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical man—the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom—tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle.”

But the effort of ethical man to work toward a moral end by no means abolished, perhaps has hardly modified, the deep seated organic impulses which impel the natural man to follow his non-moral course. One of the most essential conditions, if not the chief cause, of the struggle for existence, is the tendency to multiply without limit, which man shares with all living things. It is notable that “increase and multiply” is a commandment traditionally much older than the ten, and that it is, perhaps, the only one which has been spontaneously and ex animo obeyed by the great majority of the human race. But in civilized society the inevitable result of such obedience is the re-establishment, in all its intensity, of that struggle for existence—the war of each against all—the mitigation or abolition of which was the chief end of social organization.

Istar, the impassive one, who knows neither good nor evil, is avenging herself upon us who have defied her. We have checked infanticide. We have diminished the ravages of pestilence and famine. We have lengthened the span of human life. We have established our hospitals and alms houses, our free soup charities, our wood yard charities, our prisons and reformatories. We have, to some extent, enabled the weakest to survive. And Istar smiles—a smile in which is neither mirth nor pity, but only the calm mockery of relentless fate—and puts forth her hand and grasps her victims just the same! She says to us: “You want to save alive those weaklings who should be my natural victims! Then I will take the stronger ones, whom otherwise I should have spared. You want more men to live? Let them live! But the suffering that should have been theirs in sharp quick pangs of death, shall be endured by the entire race—to each his share!”

It is conceivable that at some period in the history of the fabled Atlantis the production of food should have been exactly sufficient to meet the wants of the population, that the makers of artificial commodities should have amounted to just the number supportable by the surplus food of the agriculturists. And, as there is no harm in adding another monstrous supposition to the foregoing, let it be imagined that every man, woman and child was perfectly virtuous, and aimed at the good of all as the highest personal good. In that happy land the natural man would have been finally put down by the ethical man. There would have been no competition, but the industry of each would have been serviceable to all; nobody being vain and nobody avaricious, there would have been no rivalries; the struggle for existence would have been abolished and the millennium would have finally set in. But it is obvious that this state of things could have been permanent only with a stationary population. Add ten fresh mouths, and as, by the supposition, there was only exactly enough before, somebody must go on short rations. The Atlantis society might have been a heaven upon earth, the whole nation might have consisted of just men needing no repentance, and yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar, non-moral Nature, would have riven the social fabric.

Such is Professor Huxley’s diagnosis of the world wide social disease—a constant struggle between the ethical ambitions of society—the desire to increase happiness and abolish wrong and suffering—and the non-ethical, inexorable laws of nature. Nor is his prognosis a hopeful one. To the vast majority of mankind the disease will be fatal.

According to Professor Huxley, as social organization renders more and more impossible the actual physical struggle between individual men for the privilege of existence, there will arise—indeed there has already arisen—a struggle between communities. In one way or another, industrially or with arms in hand, nation is to strive against nation, and the fittest

p. 5, col. 2 shall survive. So shall Istar triumph and the great principle of evolution be fittingly vindicated. And having determined this point, having shown the hopeless folly of attempting to do anything for humanity at large, Professor Huxley finds the field of his inquiry marvelously narrowed. There is no hope for mankind, but there is hope for some men. One nation at least may be saved, and why shouldn’t that nation be Great Britain?

It would be folly to entertain any ill feeling toward those neighbors and rivals who, like ourselves, are slaves of Istar; but, if somebody is to be starved, the modern world has no oracle of Delphi to which the nation can appeal for an indication of the victim. It is open to us to try our fortune, and if we avoid impending fate, there will be a certain ground for believing that we are the right people to escape.

Says Professor Huxley:

There are now 36,000,000 of people in our island, and every year considerably more than 300,000 are added to our numbers. That is to say, about every hundred seconds or so, a new claimant to share in the common stock of maintenance presents him or herself among us. At the present time the produce of the soil does not suffice to feed half its population. The other moiety has to be supplied with food which must be bought from the people of food-producing countries. That is to say, we have to offer them the things which they want in exchange for the things we want. And the things they want and which we can produce better than they can are mainly manufactures—industrial products^sic,

The insolent reproach of the first Napoleon had a very solid foundation. We not only are, but, under penalty of starvation, we are bound to be, a nation of shopkeepers. But other nations also lie under the same necessity of keeping shop, and some of them deal in the same goods as ourselves. Our customers naturally seek to get the most and the best in exchange for their goods. If our goods are inferior to those of our competitors, there is no ground compatible with the sanity of the buyers, which can be alleged, why they should not prefer the latter. And, if that result should ever take place on a large and general scale, five or six millions of us would soon have nothing to eat. We know what the cotton famine was; and we can therefore form some notion of what a dearth of customers would be.

And so the problem for Great Britain to solve is simply this: By what means can she continuously produce better goods than her neighbors and offer them for sale at lower prices to the food producing countries who want to buy them. If she can find the answer to the conundrum she may survive and flourish, and contemplate with philosophic pity the downfall of France, Germany, the United States, and other nations who also want to make things in exchange for food. If she cannot find the answer, why then five or six millions of Englishmen must die of starvation, and Istar will get square with John Bull. The matter is one of national life or death; and if Professor Huxley has succeeded in finding the answer, one is tempted to wonder why he did not communicate it in confidence to the constituted authorities of Britain rather than publish it to the world.

Two things, Professor Huxley tells us, are necessary to the maintenance of British commercial supremacy. The first and most obvious one is that “our produce shall be better than that of others.”

There is only one reason why our goods should be preferred to those of our rivals—our customers must find them better at the price. That means that we must use more knowledge, skill and industry in producing them, without a proportionate increase in the cost of production; and as the price of labor constitutes a large element in that cost, the rate of wages must be restricted within certain limits. It is perfectly true that cheap production and cheap labor are by no means synonymous; but it is also true that wages cannot increase beyond a certain proportion without destroying cheapness. Cheapness, then, with, as part and parcel of cheapness, a moderate price of labor, is essential to our success as competitors in the markets of the world.

The second condition of success is that while Great Britain shall be thus working out her industrial salvation, the struggle for existence shall be practically abolished within her borders and the demon of poverty held at bay.

It needs no argument to prove that when the price of labor sinks below a certain point, the worker infallibly falls into that condition which the French emphatically call la misere—a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest, in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper’s grave. . . . Argumentation can hardly be needful to make it clear that no society in which the elements of decomposition are thus swiftly and surely accumulating can hope to win in the race of industries.

So! Goods are to be cheap, but of good quality; wages are to be low, but not too low; and the slough of poverty is to be so far filled in that the masses of Englishmen may find therein a tolerably firm footing—not comfortable, but yet not absolutely unendurable. How is all this to be accomplished? Very simply. It may be done by the establishment of technical schools, in which instructions shall be given “in the principles of those branches of science and of art which are peculiarly applicable to industrial pursuits, which may be called preliminary scientific education.” Since Elisha prescribed for the leprosy of Naaman never was a simpler remedy offered for a terrible disorder.

Professor Huxley would probably repel with scorn any attempt to class him among the advocates of the protective tariff system; but his essay from which I have quoted contains the essence of the protectionist doctrine, and is as strong a defense of the protective principle as could be made. For what our aposties^sic of protection claim is simply what Professor Huxley claims, to wit, that some men must starve that other men may eat, and that the only proper national policy is that which forces foreigners to do the starving.

p. 5, col. 3 Indeed, our American protectionists have long since ranged themselves by the professor’s side. Their chief argument for protection in America is that Great Britain must find a market for her manufacturers^sic or perish from among the nations; and there is no sort of doubt that much of the support given them comes from men whose object is not so much to benefit this country as to have England perish. Were Professor Huxley an American instead of an Englishman, the same line of argument that now leads him to see the salvation of Great Britain in technical schools would force him to advocate a protective tariff as the only means of salvation for America.

But is it so, indeed? Can it be true that the doctrine of evolution has nothing better to offer as its ultimate than a world full of war and commotion and suffering, in which nation shall be striving with nation, civilizations rising and falling, the weakest going to the wall, and the devil forever taking the hindmost? Is this earth altogether under the dominion of Istar, the blind, all-seeing, ignorant, all-knowing, passionately passionless goddess of doom, or has the universe been planned by an intelligence that wills that through successive stages all creation shall advance toward a nobler harmony, a more divine perfection of happiness and peace? Was the Christ who urged that men should do unto others as they would others should do unto them simply an accidental and utterly abortive variation of humanity, or did his teachings mark a distinct advance along the line on which mankind are destined to move until they reach their highest moral development? Professor Huxley prostrates himself before Istar and derides the Christ. If he be right, then science is but a pretty plaything, a dime museum which men waste their time in visiting. What shall it profit mankind that they have called down the lightning from heaven to run their errands, and dragged imprisoned sunbeams from the earth to labor in their mills and on their roads, if the only result is to be that the struggle for existence shall be made fiercer, and the inevitable end be brought more near. If the true philosphy^sic of life is that we should rejoice in each other’s misfortunes, and count as a gain only that which we have torn from other men, then the human ideal should be the savage Indian, alternating absolute idleness with predatory warpath, rather than a civilization that will bring man in harmony with his fellows.

Fortunately Professor Huxley gives us, quite unintentionally, the clue to the logical processes which have led him so amazingly astray. Having decided that salvation lies in technical education, he goes on to demonstrate the right of the state to impose taxes for that purpose; and in doing this he has occasion to define the status and rights of the individual man. This is what he says of himself:

I cannot speak of my own knowledge, but I have every reason to believe that I came into this world a small, reddish person, certainly without a gold spoon in my mouth, and in fact with no discernible abstract or concrete rights of any description. If a foot was not at once set upon me as a squalling nuisance, it was either the natural affection of those about me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to deserve those advantages. And if I possess anything now, it strikes me that though I may have fairly earned my day’s wages for my day’s work and may justly call them my property—yet without that organization of society, created out of the toil and blood of long generations before my time, I should probably have had nothing but a flint ax and an indifferent hut to call my own; and even those would be mine only so long as no stronger savage came my way.

In the light of this extraordinary paragraph it is easy to see the chain of argument by which Professor Huxley has reached his protectionist conclusions. If a child born into the world really is simply “a small, reddish person” without rights of any description, whom to extirpate as a squalling nuisance would be, albeit illegal, not at all immoral, then the whole argument follows. For such a child, like a rattlesnake, would have no right to existence save on one of two conditions; either he must be able to maintain it by fighting for it, or he must be given the means of maintaining it by somebody already possessed of them. And as the vast majority of small, reddish persons are without friends to give them the means of maintaining existence, they must fight for it as best they may, either in such combinations as tariff leagues, trusts, trades unions, Knights of Labor, legislative bodies, corporations, gangs, or nations, or singly, as “scab” workmen, gamblers, beggars, thieves, vagabonds, or paupers. If society allows them to fight openly the physically stronger will get the better of the weaker on the whole; if society forbids open violence the more cunning will survive. In either case Istar, the relentless, will claim her own, and the philosophy of Professor Huxley will be justified. If society suffers small, reddish persons without rights to intrude into the world, society must pay the penalty as surely as a boat load of shipwrecked sailors on short allowance must suffer added pangs if they take on board an extra man who brings no food at all. It’s a west coast of Africa sort of philosophy, but there can be no doubt that it is strictly logical.

A small, reddish person without rights! Has the bird no right to the air through which it wings its flight, no right to the tree top in which it builds its nest, no right to the food it seeks and finds? And is the “small, reddish person” not of more value than many sparrows? Professor Huxley would perhaps answer that the bird’s rights are conditional on the bird’s power to maintain them by force or cunning, and that in that sense the “small, reddish person” also has rights. But the chief function of society, the very object of its existence, is to assure that men shall have their rights without the need of resorting to force or cunning. And the crime of society is that it fails to perform this function, that it protects the spoiler, that it allows the strong

p. 5, col. 4 to prey upon the weak, the armed man upon the defenseless. Where it should be a beneficent agency, enabling men to enjoy their common rights to the bounties of nature without interference, and at the same time to gain the immense advantages that come of co-operating and co-ordinating hands and thoughts, it has degraded itself into a blighting oppression, making of human knowledge and invention a chain to bind humanity. And therefore it is that the dread goddess Istar triumphs, and Professor Huxley, looking out upon the world from the windows of his laboratory, sees nothing but a hopeless paradoxical struggle between opposing forces—the soul of man struggling toward human brotherhood, and the inexorable laws of the universe beating it back.

Let Professor Huxley take a thought! The small, reddish person has a right—the right of the leaf on the tree, of the bird in the air, of the tiger in the jungle, of the fish in the sea—the right to an equal chance with his fellows! Joint heir of God’s bounty, sent we know not whence, to abide a season on this planet and depart we know not whither, he has an equal right with every other small, reddish person, with every other living man, woman and child, to the usufruct of the earth. For him God stored the everlasting hills with coal and metals, unrolled the fruitful plains, and ordained the pleasant places of the earth—that he should use them freely, and departing on his journey, leave them for the joy and sustenance of succeeding generations. To deny it is a blasphemy! To fail to recognize it or take it into account is to neglect a chief factor in social evolution. Let but this right be acknowledged, and the evils which Professor Huxley sees, and those which he so dolefully forebodes, will alike vanish. For as surely as the bee seeks the clover, the crow the corn field, and the sparrow the barn yard or the busy street, each unhesitatingly and unerringly finding its way to the place where its desires can be satisfied with the least exertion, so surely will men diversify their occupations, each using his powers to the best advantage, when once the chains that shackle industry shall be taken off and the equal right of access to the bounties of nature be recognized in all men. In the wealth of his fellow man each will see the promise of his own gain, and find the incentive to his own exertion. Individuals and communities alike will be quick to learn that it is the wealth produced, and not that gained by fraud, force or device, that constitutes prosperity. And round happy firesides old men will tell to scarce believing children the story of the days when statesmen sought to win prosperity by making commerce a crime, and wise men bowed themselves before Istar and cunningly bethought them how they might sacrifice all other nations upon her bloody altar and so persuade her to spare their own.

T. L. McCREADY.

A Cigarmaker on the Cigar Tax.

PHILADELPHIA.—I indorse the position of THE STANDARD that the taxes on tobacco and cigarmaking are not in the interest of cigarmakers. President Strasser in trying to keep up the internal revenue tax is working tor^sic his own self interest, and not for the cigarmakers at large. Yet not satisfied with expressing his own views, he is compelling local unions to indorse a resolution passed in our last convention, asking congress to leave the present internal revenue as it is, under penalty of suspension from the International union. The effect of this is to keep the cigarmakers at the mercy of the bosses, just contrary to what the union is organized for.

It is clear that the organization of laboring men does not of itself solve the labor problem, and that little is accomplished by strikes. As the result of a strike many families suffer for the necessaries of life, strong and hearty men leave their homes to travel and tramp over the country for work, and in some instances take other strikers’ places, and then come back consumptive or become tramps. and^sic in many cases, after all this, the strike is lost. If we, the laboring men of this country, must strike let us strike at the real enemy through the ballot box.

But no, the average cigarmaker will go to the polls on election day and vote for that humbug protection and that infernal revenue system, and then go around and growl when he is out of work and kicks at the system that keeps him from employing himself.

In many instances men have told me that if they could get a bondsman they would go into business for themselves. Just think, in this free American country a man is required to furnish bonds for a legitimate business, while without getting any license or giving bonds other men can gamble on the necessaries of life and rob the public.

There are always a great many cigarmakers out of work the whole year round, and especially this time of the year. Now there is an agitation going on in our unions for an out-of-work benefit. Just think, what an idea for such intelligent men to be contented with. What men ought to ask themselves is, why in a country like this any one should be out of work?

What is the cause but monopoly, the monopoly of land, the monopoly of that which we create (ground rent) land values, the monopoly of the natural rights which the creator has given to all. Let us strike at that, and there would be no need either for strikes or out-of-work benefits.

PETER KARL,

1410 Frankford ave., Philadelphia.

Before the Reform Club of Manistee, Mich.

MANISTEE, Mich.—The reform club of this city met on Tuesday night last, the subject for debate being the “land question.” The meeting had been well announced in the local papers, and a large audience was present.

The discussion, though highly interesting to the citizens of Manistee, is scarcely worth repeating at length in the columns of THE STANDARD. It consisted mainly of an elucidation of elementary principles, and the poor man’s house standing on an immensely valuable lot came prominently to the front. The objectors to the single tax system were Rev. P. B. Norman and T. B. Collins, and Messrs. W. R. Hall and App. M. Smith were very successful in confuting the objections.

At the next meeting of the club Rev. J. M. Walkley will discuss the tariff question with Mr. M. Gill.

Just So.

Todd County, Minn., Argus.

Let taxes be removed from all kinds of personal property and put them all on the bare land alone. When the holder of wild land has to pay as heavy a tax as the farmer on his improved farm the land syndicates will go out of business.

p. 5, col. 5

THE PROBLEM OF MUNICIPAL TAXATION.

The Union Labor Party and the Cooper Union Party.

INDIANAPOLIS, March [8?].—The national committee of the union labor party, at its session in this city on March 6, selected Cincinnati as the place and May 15 as the time for holding a national convention. A feature of the meeting was the presentation, by L. P. Zane of Bradford, Pa., of a letter from Dr. Edward McGlynn. The substance of Dr. McGlynn’s letter was a proposal that the union labor and united labor parties should unite on a platform which should advocate the tax on land values, and otherwise be the same as that adopted at Cincinnati. The letter urged that all should be willing to sink minor differences of opinion for the sake of the adoption of a few fundamental and essential principles, and that Dr. McGlynn and his friends were, therefore, anxious to do something to effect a union between those whose belief in material issues was substantially the same. “The land clause in our platform” (the Syracuse), said the letter, “is a vital one to the party in this state. We believe devotedly in it and any reduction of its demands would simply leave us without a following.” He thought that the union labor party could accept this part of the platform consistently and advised that a joint call be issued by both branches for a joint national convention. Dr. McGlynn’s letter was listened to respectfully, but there was no disposition manifested to adopt any of the suggestions made, and the committee voted to refer it to Thomas Gruelle, with instructions to answer it by saying that the union labor party could not accede to the terms proposed, but that if Dr. McGlynn’s party would send delegates to the Cincinnati convention they would be received, and with them a basis of consolidation might be made. The committee then adjourned to meet in Cincinnati May 14. Colonel S. F. Norton, editor of the Chicago Sentinel; Jesse Harper of Danville, Ill.; Hon. A. J. Streeter of Illinois, and E. P. Allis of Milwaukee, are spoken of as possible presidential candidates.

ANTI-POVERTY.

The Executive Committee of the Anti-Poverty Society.

An informal meeting of a number of the members of the executive committee of the anti-poverty society was held last week to consider what attitude they ought to assume in view of the coming annual meeting. It was the unanimous opinion of these present^sic that no good purpose could be served by an unseemly struggle for the control of the society. In order that there might no longer be any dispute as to the status of those now claiming to be the executive committee, and that no act of those present should even seem to prolong contention, all resolved to resign from the executive committee and withdraw from the society.

A Suggestion.

NEW YORK.—Having had a little experience in the work of trying to spread the single tax doctrine through an organized society holding public meetings, and having unfortunately found very little good resulting from such a method of work, I write to ask whether you would think it well to advocate through THE STANDARD the plan of work proposed by Mr. Ring of Texas.

As I understand it, his plan is to form missionary groups of five members. If there is but one advocate of the single tax in a town, let that one hammer away until he (or she) has a club of five with regular meetings. These would concert some plan of work and add to their number until it had increased to ten, when five of these would establish themselves as a new group and both groups go to work to convert other fives, and so on.

If your readers think well of this plan, I would suggest the organization in New York of a central club (call it what you will) having a charter from the state. The work of such a central organization should be to receive reports from the groups, to keep some record of work done, to stimulate the formation of such groups throughout the whole country, and to distribute the necessary single tax literature.

GEORGE ST. J. LEAVENS.

Every obstruction to a free exchange of commodities is born of the same narrow and despotic spirit which planted castles upon the Rhine to plunder peaceful commerce. Every obstruction to commerce is a tax on consumption. Every facility to a free exchange cheapens commodities, increases trade and protection and promotes civilization.—SENATOR JOHN SHERMAN.

p. 6, col. 4

A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

PROVIDENCE, R. I.—Dear ——: Yours of March 1 duly received. It seems to me that you entirely fail to comprehend the system advocated by Henry George when you say that the overthrow of a custom (private property in land) “would bring distress upon not individuals alone but all classes who bear any responsibility in life.” Now it seems to me that if this means anything it means that all would be distressed and none benefited beyond a few perhaps who are idle and shiftless. According to your view the shifting of taxes from the products of industry would entail universal distress! How the idle and shiftless would be benefited by such a con- dition passes understanding, since their only source of relief must be in the general prosperity of the people.

You say “the George plan advocates force,” and that “his arguments insidiously pamper the revolutionary spirit of man.” True, all reform implies revolution and all action involves force, but you seem to object to these agents as applied to this particular reform, and virtually charge him with dishonesty when you use such terms. I do not understand him to advocate force in any obnoxious sense. He simply proposes to change or modify a force already in existence; to remove all burdens in the shape of taxation upon the products of industry and place them upon land values. Wherein lies the wrong? How will such a change produce the “universal distress” which you deplore? On the contrary, it seems to me that such a change would give a wonderful impetus to industry; that enforced idleness would disappear; that all who are willing to work would have the opportunity, of which hundreds of thousands in this country are to-day deprived. Very likely a certain percentage would remain confirmed tramps, but under a system of taxation that encouraged industry, that percentage would necessarily diminish. It could not possibly be otherwise.

It has been a practice by some towns to remit a portion or the whole of taxation to manufacturing enterprises established within their precincts. Without such abatement of taxes no factory would have been built, and the opportunity for the employment of hundreds of workers would have been lost. Is there any reason why a success like this would not be duplicated upon a larger scale?

I have a piece of land near this city upon which I contemplate building for a permanent home. Yet I hesitate. Why so? Because now it is taxed only $9 a year, and if I build upon it the taxes will immediately rise to at least $40 per year. So I guess I’ll wait a while and keep the money that the buildings will cost at interest, and pay only the $9 tax. But suppose the tax is shifted from all products of industry to land values, and my land be taxed even as high as $40 (an extreme limit —probably it would not be more than $25 or $30), how quick buildings would blossom upon that land! With or without buildings the tax would not be increased, except as the rental value of the land increased. I might put a hundred thousand dollars worth of buildings upon the land, and still my tax would remain the same. Every owner of valuable land being affected in the same manner, you will at once perceive what an immense boom would be given to human industry. “Universal distress” would become unknown. Speculation in land would absolutely cease. European and other capitalists and syndicates, who have gobbled immense areas of unoccupied land, would be obliged to abandon their unused holdings to those who would improve. Wild, unproductive land, beyond the limits of present settlement, has now no taxable value, consequently it is not taxed. No one would go upon such land until they wished to use it, and it would have no rental value until the influx of new settlers created such values. Rental value having thus been created, how eminently just and equitable, from every point of view, is it that such rental value should be absorbed in taxation for the common good so far as might be needful. This is the single tax system in a nutshell, and it is important in examining this question that we keep this central principle constantly in mind. All else is a matter of detail.

All human laws are based in theory upon the equality of man—not that all men are equal in capacity, but that each and all have a natural right to equal opportunity. Any system which tends to impair or subvert this natural right is manifestly inequitable, and therefore contrary to the spirit of human law.

You argue that it is wrong to absorb land values without compensation. But why wrong? If the land monopolists, who have so long fattened upon the industry of the people while they themselves have remained idle, adding nothing to the world’s stock of wealth by their own labor, have rendered no equitable return for their lion’s share, why should they be compensated for the loss of power for further extortion? These land values have been created by the industry of the whole people—why add to ill-gotten gains? It would seem to be more in the line of equity and justice to compel the land monopolist to restore to the people the wealth so wrongfully taken. The land of Manhattan island was originally purchased by a Dutchman for the sum of twenty-four dollars. To-day its value is at least one thousand million dollars. Would there be any justice in paying the whole or any portion of this value to the descendents^sic or devisees of the Dutchman, by way of compensation, when we consider that this enormous increase in value is due to the active industry of the whole people of the city of New York? Nay, not of New York alone, but of the whole country and of the whole world.

But the land value tax system advocated by Henry George does not propose restitution; it simply asks that wrongful extortion should cease.

Man is a creature of progress. The ever onward march of civilization unfolds to him new duties and new possibilities. As he emerges from the darkness of mediæval serfdom, the distinction between right and wrong becomes clearer and more accurately defined. In our own country, founded on the principles of perfect equality before the law, he finds certain privileges obtaining, insignificant at first, but waxing stronger, and which threaten at no distant day to subvert and destroy that principle. He sees combined wealth—wealth in a large measure derived from land monopoly, the railroad and the telegraph—crystallizing into syndicates and trusts, monster corporations like the Standard oil, whose action tends solely to one evil, that of crushing out all opposition. Like the miser, they are never satisfied with a sufficiency. Like the octopus, they crush and absorb everything within their reach. Their agents and tools invade our legislative halls and corrupt our courts of justice. The recent failure in New York to indict two noted millionaires for fraudulent conversion of three millions in bonds—a failure not attributable to improbability of guilt, but to the potent power of a well filled purse—may well cause us to pause and ask, “What are we coming to?” Against the irresistible power of these gigantic combinations, the individual concern with a capital of a few thousands, or even a few hundred thousand, fares no better than the humblest tradesmen.

Already the skies are brightening, societies

p. 6, col. 5 for the discussion of the single tax system are being formed all over the country. They have regular meetings, where the subject receives full and free discussion and all possible objections are met and answered. Mayor Hewitt of New York has recently put himself upon record in advocacy of one of the principal features of the single tax system by recommending the abolition of all taxes upon personal property and confining them entirely to real estate, claiming that such a change would greatly benefit the business interests of the city. He also favors the acquirement by the city of certain wharf lands now held as private property. Further, he favors the building of a rapid transit subway railroad by the city. He thus fights about one-half of Henry George’s battle. At this rate he will fight the whole of it shortly. Once embarked in the right course there is no stopping place short of that goal toward which eternal justice points. Truly, the world moves!

The advocates of the single tax see no necessity for inflicting hardship upon any legitimate interest. The proposed change might be gradual, say at the rate of five per cent per annum, completing the change in twenty years. It is confidently believed, however, that the excellence of the change would be so rapidly demonstrated as to insure its complete fruition at a much earlier period.

H. H. BOARDMAN.

LESSONS FROM THE BLIZZARD.

The terrific storm that swept over this whole region of country this week caused enormous damage and inconvenience wherever it raged, but nowhere were its effects so marvellous as in the city of New York. The business and social life of a vast metropolis was paralyzed at a single blow. Exchanges, banks and private firms ceased to transact business. The administration of justice was practically suspended in the courts. The stock of fuel and provisions in the smaller groceries was speedily exhausted, and for days could not be replenished, so that people were actually subjected to famine in the very center of civilization within apparently easy reach of abundaece^sic. Men who had the courage to attempt a journey on Monday from their homes to their places of business actually became lost in snow drifts in the city of New York and perished of cold. Men residing but a few miles from the city were unable for more than two days to reach the city. Many streets were impassable for vehicles, and there were well grounded apprehensions of an awful conflagration in case any fire broke out. Theaters closed and social intercourse ceased. Never before was there given such conclusive evidence of the vital importance of the transportation problem to the people of a great city.

It was the lack of proper facilities for transportation that rendered it possible for even so great a storm to thus paralyze human activity. Travel on the surface street railways has been suspended before and the streets have previously been badly blocked with snow, but never before has the operation of all the elevated roads been stopped. It was this that rendered it impossible for people to reach their places of business at the time when all other methods of transit were greatly impaired. This could not have occurred with underground roads, nor could the situation have been so prolonged with elevated roads built on properly constructed viaducts and faithfully managed in the interests of the public. Public attention has recently been directed to the provision of adequate means for rapid transit by the municipality. The loss and inconvenience to which our people have been subjected this week through the lack of such provision not only shows the necessity for prompt action, but demonstrates that the matter of transit is so vital to our very existence as a great metropolis that we cannot safely leave it in private hands.

Evidence has also been given by this storm that our municipal government is poorly equipped for meeting great emergencies, even in the performance of those public duties that it does assume. It would have been unreasonable to expect that it could deal as promptly with the altogether phenomenal task imposed upon it by this terrific blizzard as it deals with that imposed by an ordinary snow storm, and hence there is some excuse for the failure of the street cleaning department to do anything at all on Monday, but by Tuesday evening private enterprise had cleared the sidewalks [of the?] principal streets, while apparently nothing at all had been done by the public authorities, and little if anything by the corporations to which the use of the public streets has been improperly granted.

There is no excuse for this apathy, as there was plenty of labor available for the work, and the safety as well as the comfort of the people depended on its prompt performance. Private firms have actually offered to assist the city in removing snow, and a suggestion that others should do so has received an official indorsement from Commissioner Coleman that reads very much like an appeal to public charity for help in the performance of a duty clearly devolving on the municipality. This is simply one of those breakdowns that occur from time to time in our governmental and social system because the community fails to appropriate the vast land values created by the growth of population, the possession of which alone would justify men in expecting their government to fully perform all of the duties properly devolving on it.

A singular recognition of this impotency of our governmental authorities is emphasized just now by the death of Henry Bergh, president and founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Many tributes to Mr. Bergh appear in the daily papers, and the feeling appears to be general that his death is little short of a calamity to the animals of the city. The reason for this singular feeling is found in the fact that Mr. Bergh was the moving spirit of a private association endowed by statute with police powers of its own and given a certain command over the public police force, with a view to preventing the brutal treatment of dumb animals. Now if the prevention of cruelty to animals is a legitimate function of government, the ordinary public agencies ought to be prepared to perform this duty, and if not adequate to its performance, they should be made adequate without an appeal to any private organization to assist in the performance of police duty. The same may be said of the societies for the prevention of vice, for the prevention of cruelty to children, and of all other voluntary associations endowed with police power; and it is equally true of all private associations empowered to assume the custody and control of paupers, lunatics, homeless or incorrigible children, drunkards and others supposed to be incapable of self control.

Those who have seen but partly the meaning of the demand that commonly created values shall be taken for common use, and administered by public authority for public purposes, have raised an outcry against the undue enlargement of the power of the state involved in such a scheme. Such people have utterly failed to comprehend the extent to which the state has depended on voluntary

p. 6, col. 6 and really charitable assistance for the performance of its obvious duties, while it has meanwhile been using its powers to regulate or benefit numerous private businesses that can be much better managed without its interference. The advocates of the land movement are the only people who clearly see the well defined line that separates public functions from private duties, and at this stage of the discussion they cannot do better than utilize every opportunity to point out the failure of governments to perform their rightful duties through lack of means, and on the other hand show the evil results of taxing the products of industry.

Another lesson is easily deduced from the results of the storm. We have experienced in New York and in all this region of country the distressing result of a sudden and complete paralysis of all railway transportation and telegraphic communication. A proposition to voluntarily bring about an equally complete cessation of railway travel and transportation throughout the whole country has recently been seriously considered by the Brotherhood of locomotive engineers, as a means to enforcing their demands on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad company.

The engineers have indicated that they will adopt such a policy in a certain contingency. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy officers have just as clearly indicated their entire willingness to see all railway travel thus suspended rather than grant what disinterested persons who had studied the question regard as the legitimate and reasonable demands of the engineers. Without entering at all into this controversy between two opposing organizations of private individuals over a matter of personal pecuniary concern to them as engineers and stockholders, is it not plain to all that the control of the great highways of commerce ought not to be in the hands of private individuals who may, because of a personal dispute, bring about in the country at large as complete a paralysis of transportation as that wrought by the terrible storm of this week in New York and its vicinity? Such a calamity thus brought about would not only be more exasperating than that to which this city has just been subjected, but actually more injurious. In case of an earthquake or hurricane there is a general acceptance of the inevitable consequences, and men adapted themselves to the situation, but a complete stoppage of transportation and travel, when people are prepared and expecting to do business, would aggravate the resulting evils. Thus the blizzard comes to aid the tariff agitation in forcing upon public attention the great economic problems that urgently demand solution in the near future.

WM. T. CROASDALE.

The New York Call for a Conference.

28 COOPER UNION, New York, March 10, 1888.

The following resolution was adopted by the Syracuse convention of the united labor party in August last:

Resolved, That, in view of the near approach of the national contest, this convention joins with our brethren of the west in requesting the chairman of our state committee to co-operate with the land and labor committee in issuing a call for a national conference of such organizations of citizens of other states as may be disposed to act with the united labor party of New York in forming a great national party.

In pursuance of this resolution the undersigned hereby call upon all electors of the United States who seek the emancipation of labor and the abolition of involuntary poverty by doing away with the system which compels men to pay their fellow creatures for the use of the common bounties of nature and permits monopolizers to deprive labor of natural opportunities for employment, and who believe (1) that by the taxation of land, exclusive of improvements, according to its value and not according to its area, those values which arise not from the exertion of the individual, but from the growth of society, should be devoted to common use and benefit, and that all taxes on industry or its products should be abolished; (2) that the general government should issue all money without the intervention of banks; (3) that all agencies which, like the railroad and the telegraph, are in their nature monopolies should be owned and controlled by the people—to send delegates, three from each congressional district, three from each territory and three from the District of Columbia, to a national conference to be held in Cincinnati on the 15th day of May next, at noon, to aid in forming a great national party, in view of the near approach of the national contest. This committee requests that delegates be empowered by their constituencies to resolve the conference into a convention.

In the language of the call for the Syracuse convention, “We denounce the democratic and republican parties as hopelessly and shamelessly corrupt, and by reason of their affiliation with monopolies equally unworthy of the suffrages of those who do not live upon public plunder,” and in the words of the platform adopted by that convention, “We ask the co-operation of citizens of other states,” and invite them “to ignore all minor differences and join with us in organizing a great national party.”

JOHN MCMACKIN, EDWARD MCGLYNN, JAMES REDPATH, Land and Labor Committee. JOHN H. BLAKENEY, Chairman State Committee United Labor Party of New York. GAYBERT BARNES, Secretary.

The resolution of the Syracuse convention, adopted August 19, 1887, which is quoted in the call, was preceded by the following preamble:

Whereas, At a conference of members of the united labor party of the states of Ohio and Indiana, held in Cincinnati on the 4th of July last, resolutions were adopted urging the central land and labor committee to issue a call for a national conference.

The Cincinnati resolutions referred to were as follows:

Be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the Henry George idea of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, in conference assembled at Cincinnati, deem it expedient and necessary that a national conference or convention be held in October, 1887.

We authorize and request Mr. John McMackin of New York to appoint a committee of five, of which he shall be chairman, to issue a call for said convention, fixing the time, place, ratio of representation and details of said convention.

The mover and drafter of these resolutions was Mr. S. W. Williams of Vincennes, Indiana, who has recently issued a circular proposing a call for a national conference on July 4.

A Good Illustration.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—The land tax and the tariff tax are like the long arm and the short arm of a lever. When we go to lift the long arm the short arm lowers itself and vice versa. Now our aim is to raise this long arm. We cannot just yet. Somebody comes along who wants to lower the short arm. Should we not assist that somebody, whether he be a democratic or any other somebody?

CHARLES E. REID.

A LETTER TO AN EDITOR.

An acquaintance told me the other day how he had lately given to a little community an opportunity to see certain facts as he saw them, and how events have led him to believe that he has actually persuaded perhaps two or three persons of that community to look upon those facts as he does.

My friend has lived in New York for a good many years, but he still maintains an interest in a few of the people of his native town, a little place in a farming district in Ohio, and he takes its weekly paper to keep track of them. He smiled as he spoke of this country newspaper. He said he has always enjoyed reading it, but at different stages of his life the nature of his enjoyment of it has varied. When, as a youth, he quit his native heath and began the struggle for bread and cake among strangers, he had welcomed his home newspaper as a host greets the guest who comes beaming with sympathy, gossip and good cheer. The paper always had a love story on its first page—a tolerable story for very young people of limited range of reading. On the same page, un-the head line^sic in old English type, “Selected Miscellany,” was matter which had certainly been selected, though in accordance with a plan difficult for the reader to trace and the key to which the editor had never made public. The second page led off with editorials in big type which my friend never read, and was filled out with news that he had always read some time before. But the third page was his delight. There he was told about the picnics in summer and the parties in winter, and who attended them; about whither people had gone and whence others had come; about the new barn going up and the “conflagration” that had “incendiarily destroyed” somebody’s stable; about an attempt at “burglarizing” somebody’s else’s^sic grocery; about what “came near” being a “terribly destructive accident,” and how a “horrible holocaust” had been “narrowly escaped.” The last page of the paper was advertisements. In the course of time, as my friend’s attention became more and more engaged with the life around him, and as the people mentioned by the newspaper were less and less known to him, the contents of the paper lost their interest to him, and nowadays his enjoyment of it is mainly because it irritates him, though he finds a kind of pleasure in his very habit of getting angry with it. It has become an eight-page sheet, and, as newspapers are privileged to do, boasts over its improved appearance and lies gallantly about its circulation. The four pages of one side are ready print, manufactured, like the grocer’s labeled paper bags, in a city factory, and a page or two more are made up of stereoptypes^sic, also furnished from the city. As my friend reads the Sunday dailies, the comic weeklies, and the magazines, he finds the patent side and plate matter stale. The big type editorials are still in the paper, and still he never reads them. Having glanced at this much of the journal, he is generally in the mood in which a man finds himself when he meets another who has an imposing exterior and a hollow pate. But my friend’s real enjoyment at fault finding comes with a reading of his country newspaper’s “locals.” As their import is now quite uninteresting to him, he sees only the style of their presentation, and this style, with its misuse of words, its blundering essays at humor, its antiquated arrangement of news, its provincial flavor, its general pettiness and backwardness, causes him to gnash and grind his teeth in a madness that he likes to indulge in.

My friend was one day hurriedly and disdainfully looking over his pet aversion, his country paper, pleasing himself with seeing its flaws, when he read an article of a finger’s length, which carried him to the point of really putting him out of humor. It was a country newspaper’s original funny article. He imagined when he had finished reading it that he could see the detestable, giggling, youthful smarty that conceived it in hysterical laughter and wrote it with a conviction that it was a hit. He could see the nebulous-brained editor sitting in judgment on it and declaring it to be fun of the purest mirth provoking quality. Then he curled his lip, looked scornfully at the article and muttered to himself his opinion of both contributor and editor. The article was on tramps—that farcical, original subject. “How Shall We Dispose of Tramps?” was the heading. After saying that the county in which the paper was printed was “alive” with tramps, and that people must either feed them or dispose of them, the writer, with a wordy circumlocation^sic which would sink him to the level of an imbecile were he to utter it speaking face to face with men, proposed that they be “disposed” of. In an adjacent county, he said, there were few tramps, for the reason that, denied shelter at the jails even in the coldest nights of winter, they found their way to a warm place on the top of an enormous boiler at a great iron works and—here is the screaming fun—were there smothered to death. The delectable point of this brilliant joke was that a number of tramps had actually just lost their lives in this way.

My friend thought over this joke for several days, and at the end of that time decided to write a letter to the editor of his country newspaper. He would endeavor at once to point out that tastes differ as to jokes and to say a word on the tramp question. I have no doubt he wrote a sober, plain, fair letter. He says he reminded the editor that some subjects, such as murder and women’s virtue, do not admit of trifling, just as noisy hilarity and dancing are deemed by some people out of place in church. He felt sorry as he was writing that he could not say to the editor, as he wished, that the article was vile and that its writer was an ass, but it occurred to him that he could bring the tramp question home to the people of his native town. He told the editor that, though the writer of the article which excited his ire seemed to regard tramps as pariahs whom it were meritorious to kill, it was a fact that men of that very town who in earlier life had never dreamed of any future save one of

p. 7, col. 2 success had become tramps. He could himself recall a dozen. He remembered having been approached in a western city by a ragged, begrimed, shaggy headed tramp who proved to be a member of a “good family” of his native town. Another instance was that of a man who at the close of the great war had returned to the town with a high military title and the honors awarded a brave soldier, but who, unsuccessful in business, walked away westward a few years after and was never heard of again. My friend had seen old schoolmates sitting on the park benches in that city which is a great wilderness for the men who have no friends, chill penury freezing the genial current of their souls. Again, he recollected being on a fast train near his old town when the engine killed two men walking on the track. They were farm laborers brought up in his native county, who were seeking work only a few miles from home, but the newspapers recorded their deaths as those of tramps. My friend added that not infrequently was he called on by impecunious old fellow-townsmen and requested to pay their fare back to the old place. Ah! he could not help but reflect, Who are the tramps? Who may not be tramps? All who are poor and who cannot get relief of the better off; all who work hard at rough labor, but whose employment is irregular; all artisans who are thrown out of work by machinery—these may become tramps almost as easily as dry autumn leaves may fall. What heedlessness, what heartlessness, then, to jest, at the launching into eternity of unfortunate, homeless fellow men, whose awful fate may await our dearest friend, aye, even ourselves!

My friend’s letter promptly appeared in the next issue of his country newspaper. The editor knew how to dodge an unpleasant matter, however, and merely said of it that some men are prone to see only the serious side of things, and are incapable of appreciating a joke.

Since the publication of his communication my friend has received several letters from his native town, which illustrate the fact that people ordinarily perceive the concrete while the abstract remains unseen. One letter was from a man who said the reference to his brother in my friend’s letter was pointed and that it had given offense to his entire family, who would certainly remember it at a time when the matter might prove not very pleasant for him. Another was from a young chap who had borrowed money from him to pay his fare home, and who said he had thought my friend was more of a man than the bragging of his slight favor had shown him to be. People would not have known of the transaction but for that letter in the paper; now everybody was asking him who had saved him from being a tramp. A woman wrote to him to say that, while people spoke of feminine spitework, she thought that his mean stings, delivered under pretense of writing about tramps, were unequaled in all the history of spitework. A preacher wrote to him asking where he could obtain a volume on tramps, as he thought of writing a sermon on the attractive subject. A friend wrote him a letter of consolation, saying the town was talking about him and that people did not know whether he had meant devilment or had turned crank.

What makes my friend think that a few people have taken his words to heart is that a “number” appearing in the programme of the “Young people’s home literary society,” printed in his country newspaper, announces as the subject of a debate, “Do tramps do as much injury as monopolies?”

HAGAN DWEN.

Good Argument, But Not Pushed Far Enough.

Toronto Globe.

Mr. Waters has before the legislature a bill the only fault of which is it does not go far enough. It proposes to do away with levying taxes on a man’s live stock. The tax upon live stock is so manifestly and outrageously absurd that it is a wonder the farmers have stood it so long. The unfairness of it can be seen at once when the case of two farms lying side by side is contrasted. On one farm nearly all the grain and other vegetable crops are being consumed on the premises by live stock. The farmer sells almost nothing but live stock. This farm is increasing in value, and of course the assessment is rising too. Not satisfied with the increased taxation from increased value, the township goes and claps a tax on this farmer’s crop—in other words, upon his annual income, for he has no annual income but from the sale of live stock.

The other farmer is that of an old style land skinner, who is sending grain and hay to market, and who grows no more live stock than he can help. His farm is running down in value, and the township’s revenue from it is therefore running down. There is no tax on the crops he sells. He has no enterprise and very little skill. Therefore, he is the man to be encouraged, and his progressive neighbor is the one on whom all the burdens should be laid. That appears to have been the theory upon which the live stock tax was constructed.

Take again two other farms—one rich grain land, the other hilly, rocky pasture. The poor farm is to be taxed on its product, while the rich farm escapes.

The only absurdity in taxation which is greater than the absurdity of taxing live stock is the attempt to tax personalty and incomes. Two years ago the Globe made such an exhibition of the injustice and ludicrous unfairness of these taxes as set the whole country to thinking. We showed how the personalty tax worked—how it makes it profitable for a merchant to lock up his own capital in real estate and use that of banks, because on the latter he will not be taxed. We showed how almost everybody who is liable to income tax evades all or nearly all of his liability. We showed how the attempt to enforce these unjust taxes must always be a failure, and how the existence of such taxes promotes fraud on a tremendous scale.

Let all these iniquitous and partial taxes be abolished. The additional burden on real estate caused by their abolition would be so small as to be imperceptible even if the real estate owners were the ultimate bearers of the burden, which they are not—for the taxes paid by real estate are unerringly distributed over all the persons using real estate, that is over the whole community.

More Wheat, but Fewer Blankets.

Chicago Herald.

There are indications on every side that the masses are learning that taxation is a burden and a curse. The gamester at last discerns the plain truth—that he is sure to lose his money against a more skillful gambler. From that moment the allurement is gone. Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska have dwelt happy in the thought that the tax of $3.15 on a $5 pair of blankets reduced the price of blankets. The fact that the farmers have fewer blankets than they had when they had smaller wheat crops is at last securing its proper degree of attention. The day must therefore come when there will be more blankets and lower taxes.

p. 7, col. 3

A LEADER OF THE PEOPLE.

The London Star recently received a visit from Donald Macrae of Lewis, of which it gives the following account: The schoolmaster of Balallan is a famous man in Lewis, and he is not unknown here. In his own island and parish he is the guide and inspirer of the land war, and the leading spirit of that powerful and active body, the highland land league. If to-morrow the crofters and the cottars of the island could possess the desire of their hearts, they would revert to some primitive kind of commune, and choose Donald for their elder and lawman. In the raid he took no part, though he does not pretend to disguise his approval of it; and since his triumphant acquittal he has raised the fiery cross with prodigious success. This specimen of Lord Salisbury’s political prisoners is a strong, sober Scot with keen black eyes, now dashed with Celtic fire, now twinkling with dry humor. There is a touch of the kirk and the “dominie” about him, crossed with Roderick Dhu. He has every fact, every detail of the land question in Lewis at his fingers’ ends. His mission in London is twofold. He has the starving people of Lewis to think of, and he bears a message from the crofters that on one condition, and one only, will they consent to a limited scheme of emigration. There must, of course, be no compulsion; but, above all, Lewis demands that those who will not emigrate shall have the choice of migrating to lands now occupied by deer forests or sheep farms. The land for the people—not for the landlords or the deer—and room on it for those who cling to their native soil and will not leave it, is the programme.

“The landlord party here, Mr. Macrae, insists that there is no room for the people.”

“They lie,” said Mr. Macrae briefly. Three-quarters of the land under deer is fit for grazing or cultivation. A dozen sporting tenants and a few large sheep farmers occupy half an island where live 27,000 people. Two-thirds of these are crofters, with crofts about half the size necessary, to whom the governments have shamelessly broken their promise to enlarge their holdings. “Not an acre,” said Mr. Macrae, “has been added under that huge fraud” (the crofters’ act), and one-third are cottars, utterly landless. As with the land so with the fishing. “Balfour promised us £20,000 for boats, and we have not had a penny. Even boats are useless without harbors, and we have only one—in Stornoway. The land is full of widows,” said Donald.

“And are the people starving?”

“They are. Before the raid I took round to Laxay a few balls of destitution meal^sic to twenty-seven families, and there was not enough meal in the households to give a cool drink to the sick children.”

“And Lady Matheson has done nothing?”

“Nothing. Sheriff Frazer called on me to stop the raid. I told them she might save it at the price of a few bolls of meal. She refused, and her ground officer, Mackay of Valtos, was sent round the island to report that there was no destitution.”

“And who is this gorgon of a Lady Matheson?”

“She’s pretty, fifty-five years old, and spends all her time in lecturing her gamekeepers on the principles of the Primrose league, of which she is ruling councilor. For her people she will do nought. Her husband, Sir James, used to tax every crofter in Lochs 5s. per head for roads that never existed. In 1867, when the roads act came into force, the 5s. went on to the rent, though in Parks not a single road was in use. Lady Matheson bought the foreshore from the borough commissioners of Stornoway for £500, on the pretense that it was solely for the people’s benefit, and then when they wanted to extend the pier, refused. Hugh Matheson was like her. He spent £80,000 in building a castle and laying out the land around it, but for the people—nothing.”

“But the raid, the raid? Mr. Macrae?”

“Ah, ye may well ask. I was not at the raid, but I saw the great tent, 150 feet long, at the close of the first day. There were the relays of men tending the fires and cooking the deer. Over one swung a stag’s head, on another was a huge cauldron, used by the crofters for tanning hides, with collops of deer simmering in it. And the grace before meat. Never was such a grace since God created the earth,” said Mr. Macrae, in a burst of fervor. “It was in Gaelic, and was pronounced by the oldest raider. ‘O, that the spirits of our fathers who raised an altar to the living God in this forest, would look down on us and cheer us, that we rise up early before the heats of the day and continue the good work until the last hoof is out of the land. Lord, Thou knowest that we would not steal a sheep or a pin.’”

“Ye’ve forgotten the peroration, Macrae,” said his friend, who had been watching Mr. Macrae’s eloquent elocution with interested anxiety.

“Oh, ay,” said Donald. “‘And then, when the land shall be restored to us, we will give Thee all the glory!’ And the evening and the morning,” added Mr. Macrae, in biblical phrase, “were the first day.”

“And how about the second day?”

“That gave us the key to the whole business. On their return a party of thirty crofters met the sheriff and some gamekeepers. One of the crofters was clothed in deer’s skin, the tail hanging between his legs, and half a deer slung over his shoulders. The keepers claimed the deer, but the sheriff stopped him, saying, ‘Let the man who won the deer hold it.’ There you have the solution. Lord Moncrieff ruled at Edinburgh that deer, like other wild animals, were not property, so that, apart from the absurd charge of rioting, of which the jury acquitted us, the only offense committed by the raiders was that of trespassing. The fine for a day trespass is 40 shillings,” added Mr. Macrae, significantly.

“So your plan of campaign is—”

“The crofters have their guns and licenses, and when the deer come along they will fire, in the full knowledge that the beasts belong to the man that takes them.”

“And your aim, then, is the abolition of the deer forests?”

“We’ll no call it aboleetion,” said Mr. Macrae, with Scottish caution. “Give me forty or fifty crofters in a deer forest, and we can settle the rest. The restoration of the land to the people is our programme, but meanwhile we will take what we can get. For fifty years Lewis has been periodically destitute, the men who made Hugh Matheson’s roads for Hugh Matheson’s pleasure being fed on destitution meal. But meanwhile we’ll take instalments of justice. I am seeing Sir Henry Holland about a scheme of emigration. Tory governments are just good for harbors and piers,” said Mr. Macrae, with easy contempt, “and when the whigs come in we’ll have the land.”

“But won’t your relief committee of lords and ladies rather handicap your political work?”

“The Highland land league will see to that. Every farthing of relief will be in the hands of committees acting for parish, district and township.”

“The Star congratulates you on your acquittal, Mr. Macrae,” we said.

“Yes; we do these things better than in Ireland. The defense had the right of challenging the jury till over half of the original panel were ordered to stand aside. To every tory in the box we cried ‘Object!’ In Scotland it is the defense which challenges; in Ireland it is the crown.”

The Tariff and the Building Trades.

Detroit Evening News.

If tariff protection could be so adjusted as to protect the interests of every citizen equally, it would be of no value to any one, for it would simply be equivalent to levying a general tax upon all and returning to each the amount he paid, less the cost of collection. Nobody would care for that sort of protection, for all would lose by it. The advantages derived from protection are due entirely to the inequalities of its application, the few specially favored industries levying upon all the others. All pay, but few receive. Many are called to pay the costs, but few are chosen for the benefits. The industries of the country might easily be classified as the victims and beneficiaries of the tariff, but the former class would be vastly the greater How^sic one industry preys upon many is well illustrated in a recent number of the American Architect and Builder, in the case between iron and building. In Belgium the price of rolled iron floor beams is about one cent a

p. 7, col. 4 pound. In France and England it is a trifle more—about a cent and a fifth. If this iron could be obtained free from duty in the United States, builders would be able to use it instead of wooden beams in all the better class of buildings, for it would be cheaper than wood, and would give us more durable and more fireproof structures. On the other side of the ocean wood is scarcely ever used, the iron being cheaper, and the result is that for the same money Americans pay for flimsy and poorly constructed tinder boxes, which are constantly falling down or burning down, Europeans get good, solid buildings which last for ages and rarely burn. But the infant industry of the iron monopoly must be protected, and accordingly any industry in the country which is not conducted in the open air must be satisfied with flimsy buildings or pay a tax to the monopoly. The duty on structural iron is considerably more than one hundred per cent, and when this is added to the freight and both added to the foreign price, the domestic infant industry is able to charge more than three times the Belgian price for the product.

The result of this extortion is that every city in the United States is built more shabby and more combustible than it might be; every man who builds anything bigger than a cottage pays almost twice what he ought for the skeleton of the structure, and millions of dollars and many lives are annually consumed by fire which might be saved if people could afford to build more solidly.

Experientia Docet.

Correspondence Ashtabula, Ohio, News.

That “the knowledge acquired by experience is worth more than all theories” is true. You cannot find a man in the state of Ohio who believes that “all kinds of property” have been taxed in this state since 1846. None but the poor, honest and simple, and widows, orphans and other wards pay on all their property. Rich men and corporations pay on but a very small part of theirs. In the city of Cleveland fifty parties, with property valued at $61,590,997, pay taxes on but $10,424,585. Here is $50,966,412 of property not on the tax duplicate. Here in Ashtabula is a vast amount of property not on the tax duplicate, and the same is true all over this state, and in every other state with similar laws as to taxation. For fraud, inequality and injustice no scheme could be devised by the arch enemy of mankind to surpass our present system of taxation. Nor is this all. If enforced to the letter it rewards the miserable wretch who spends his time in drinking, gambling and debauchery and punishes the industrious, temperate, good citizen. Nearly every European nation, after hundreds of years of trial, have given up as hopeless the attempt to tax personal property. “Experience is worth more than theories.”

On the Back Track.

Albuquerque Citizen.

The train from the west yesterday was loaded with returning California boomers, all of whom had the same story to tell. They say that country is overcrowded, that there are twenty men to every job of work and that wages for all kinds of employment are going down rapidly. Board is not going down, and it is almost impossible to get shelter in any of the booming towns. In San Diego and Los Angeles $2.50 per week is considered cheap for a poor bed in a second class tenement house and every necessary article bears a price to correspond. They all unite in saying that there must necessarily be much suffering there this winter. Of the passengers by this train nearly all had gone to California to spend the winter or with a view to permanent location, but found that it required large capital to do either with comfort. It was the concurrent testimony of these passengers that the “boom” in California is a snare and a delusion which must soon end in great suffering to the boomers.

What Right Has Congress to Give Anything, Anyhow?

New York Sun.

Inasmuch as the present import duty on flour is twenty per cent, on wheat twenty cents per bushel, on barley and oats fifteen cents per bushel, on Indian corn ten cents per bushel, on beef and pork one cent per pound, and on other products and merchandise in proportion, it is quite evident that the proposed amendment to the interstate commerce act, requiring the collection of duty on all merchandise carried by rail through Canada from one point in the United States to another, would prove entirely efficacious.

It would be a “differential” on the right side, and congress should not be slow in giving it to the American railroads as the very best possible means of saving the long and short haul clause of the law, and of cutting off rebates, drawbacks, commissions, underbilling, and all the other secret devices in which the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Pacific are such adepts, and which, even if detected, neither congress nor the American railroads can correct or punish.

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THE LAND AND LABOR LIBRARY.—We are now publishing under the title of “The Land and Labor Library” a series of short tracts on various phases of the social problem. These pamphlets contain facts, figures and arguments expressed in concise, vigorous language easily understood. As a means of propaganda we recommend them to all who desire to help on the movement for social reform. Those who wish to have these tracts placed where they will do good but who are unable personally to attend to their distribution, can remit the price to us, as we have every facility for sending them where they are needed and will be read.

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DO HIGH WAGES NECESSITATE PROTECTION?

BY HENRY GEORGE.

Chapter XIV. of Protection or Free Trade.

In the United States, at present, protection derives strong support from the belief that the products of the lower paid labor of other countries could undersell the products of our higher paid labor if free competition were permitted. This belief not only leads workingmen to imagine protection necessary to keep up wages—a matter of which I shall speak hereafter; but it also induces the belief that protection is necessary to the interests of the country at large—a matter which now^sic falls in our way.

And further than concerns the tariff this belief has important bearings. It enables employers to persuade themselves that they are serving general interests in reducing wages or resisting their increase, and greatly strengthens the opposition to the efforts of workingmen to improve their condition, by setting against them a body of opinion that otherwise would be neutral, if not strongly in their favor. This is clearly seen in the case of the eight hour system. Much of the opposition to this great reform arises from the belief that the increase of wages to which such a reduction of working hours would be equivalent, would place the United States at a great disadvantage in production as compared with other countries.

It is evident that even those who most vociferously assert that we need a protective tariff on account of our higher standard of wages do not really believe it themselves. For if protection be needed against countries of lower wages, it must be most needed against countries of lowest wages and least needed against countries of highest wages. Now, against what country is it that American protectionists most demand protection? If we could have a protective tariff against only one country in the whole world, what country is it that American protectionists would select to be protected against? Unquestionably it is Great Britain. But Great Britain, instead of being the country of lowest wages, is, next to the United States and the British colonies, the country of highest wages.

“It is a poor rule that will not work both ways.” If we require a protective tariff because of our high wages, then countries of low wages require free trade—or, at the very least, have nothing to fear from free trade. How is it, then, that we find the protectionists of France, Germany and other low wage countries protesting that their industries will be ruined by the free competition of the higher wage industries of Great Britain and the United States just as vehemently as our protectionists protest that our industries would be ruined if exposed to free competition with the products of the “pauper labor” of Europe?

As popularly put, the argument that the country of high wages needs a protective tariff runs in this way: “Wages are higher here than elsewhere; therefore, if the produce of cheaper foreign labor were freely admitted it would drive the produce of our dearer domestic labor out of the market.” But the conclusion does not follow from the premise. To make it valid two intermediate propositions must be assumed: First, that low wages mean low cost of production; and second, that production is determined solely by cost—or, to put it in another way, that trade being free, everything will be produced where it can be produced at least cost. Let us examine these two propositions separately.

If the country of low wages can undersell the country of high wages, how is it that though the American farm hand receives double the wages of the English agricultural laborer, yet American grain undersells English grain? How is it that while the general level of wages is higher here than anywhere else in the world, we nevertheless do export the products of our high priced labor to countries of lower priced labor?

The protectionist answer is that American grain undersells English grain, in spite of the difference of wages, because of our natural advantages for the production of grain; and that the bulk of our exports consists of those crude productions in which wages are not so important an element of cost; since they do not embody so much labor as the more elaborate productions called manufactures.

But the first part of this answer is an admission that the rate of wages is not the determining element in the cost of production, and that the country of low wages does not necessarily produce more cheaply than the country of high wages; while, as for the distinction drawn between the cruder and the more elaborate productions, it is evident that this is founded on the comparison of such things by bulk or weight, whereas the only measure of embodied labor is value. A pound of cloth embodies more labor than a pound of cotton, but this is not true of a dollar’s worth. That a small weight of cloth will exchange for a large weight of cotton, or a small bulk of watches for a large bulk of wheat, means simply that equal amounts of labor will produce larger weights or bulks of the one thing than of the other; and in the same way the exportation of a certain value of grain, ore, stone or timber means the exportation of exactly as much of the produce of labor as would the exportation of the same value of lace or fancy goods.

Looking further, we see in every direction that it is not the fact that low priced labor gives advantage in production. If this is the fact, how was it that the development of industry in the slave states of the American Union was not more rapid than in the free states? How is it that Mexico, where peon labor can be had from four to six dollars a month, does not undersell the products of our more highly paid labor? How is it that China and India and Japan are not “flooding the world” with the products of their cheap labor? How is it that England, where labor is better paid than on the continent, leads the whole of Europe in commerce and manufactures? The truth is, that a low rate of wages does not mean a low cost of production, but the reverse. The universal and obvious truth is, that the country where wages are highest can produce with the greatest economy, because workmen have there the most intelligence, the most spirit and the most ability; because invention and discovery are there most quickly made and most readily utilized. The great inventions and discoveries which so enormously increase the power of human labor to produce wealth have all been made in countries where wages are comparatively high.

That low wages mean inefficient labor may be seen wherever we look. Half a dozen Bengalese carpenters are needed to do a job that one American carpenter can do in less time. American residents in China get servants for almost nothing, but find that so many are required that servants cost more than in the United States; yet the Chinese who are largely employed in domestic service in California, and get wages that they would not have dreamed of in China, are efficient workers. Go to Highbridge, and you will see a great engine attended by a few men, exerting the power of thousands of horses in pumping up a small river for the supply of New York city, while on the Nile you may see

p. 8, col. 2 Egyptian fellahs raising water by buckets and tread wheels. In Mexico, with labor at four or five dollars a month, silver ore has for centuries been carried to the surface on the backs of men who climbed rude ladders, but when silver mining began in Nevada, where labor could not be had for less than five or six dollars a day, steam power was employed. In Russia, where wages are very low, grain is still reaped by the sickle and threshed with the flail or by the hoofs of horses, while in our western states, where labor is very high as compared with the Russian standard, grain is reaped, threshed and sacked by machinery.

If it were true that equal amounts of labor always produced equal results, then cheap labor might mean cheap production. But this is obviously untrue. The power of human muscle is, indeed, much the same everywhere, and if his wages be sufficient to keep him in good bodily health the poorly paid laborer can, perhaps, exert as much physical force as the highly paid laborer. But the power of human muscles, though necessary to all production, is not the primary and efficient force in production. That force is human intelligence, and human muscles are merely the agency by which that intelligence makes connection with and takes hold of external things, so as to utilize natural forces and mold matter to conformity with its desires. A race of intelligent pigmies with muscles no stronger than those of the grasshopper could produce far more wealth than a race of stupid giants with muscles as strong as those of the elephant. Now, intelligence varies with the standard of comfort, and the standard of comfort varies with wages. Wherever men are condemned to a poor, hard and precarious living their mental qualities sink toward the level of the brute. Wherever easier conditions prevail the qualities that raise man above the brute and give him power to master and compel external nature develop and expand. And so it is that the efficiency of labor is greatest where laborers get the best living and have the most leisure—that is to say, where wages are highest.

How, then, in the face of these obvious facts, can we account for the prevalence of the belief that the low wage country has an advantage in production over the high wage country? It cannot be charged to the teaching of protection. This is one of the fallacies which protectionism avails itself of, rather than one for which it is responsible. Men do not hold it because they are protectionists, but become protectionists because they hold it. And it seems to be as firmly held, and on occasions as energetically preached by so-called free traders as by protectionists. Witness the predictions of free trade economists that trades unions, if successful in raising wages and shortening hours, would destroy England’s ability to sell her goods to other nations, and the similar objections by so-called free traders to similar movements on the part of workingmen in the United States.

The truth is that the notion that low wages give a country an advantage in production is a careless inference from the every day fact that it is an advantage to an individual producer to obtain labor at low wages.

It is true that an individual producer gains an advantage when he can force down the wages of his employes below the ordinary level, or can import laborers who will work for him for less, and that he may by this means be enabled to undersell his competitors, while the employer who continues to pay higher wages than other employers about him will, before long, be driven out of business. But it by no means follows that the country where wages are low can undersell the country where wages are high. For the efficiency of labor, though it may somewhat vary with the particular wages paid, is in greater degree determined by the general standard of comfort and intelligence, and the prevailing habits and methods which grow out of them. When a single employer manages to get labor for less than the rate of wages prevailing around him, the efficiency of the labor he gets is still largely fixed by that rate. But a country where the general rate of wages is low does not have a similar advantage over other countries, because there the general efficiency of labor must also be low.

The contention that industry can be more largely carried on where wages are low than where wages are high, another form of the same fallacy, may readily be seen to spring from a confusion of thought. For instance, in the earlier days of California it was often said that the lowering of wages would be a great benefit to the state, as lower wages would enable capitalists to work deposits of low grade quartz that it would not pay to work at the then existing rate of wages. But it is evident that a mere reduction of wages would not have resulted in the working of poorer mines, since it could not have increased the amount of labor or capital available for the working of mines, and what existed would still have been devoted to the working of the richer in preference to the poorer mines, no matter how much wages were reduced. It might, however, have been said that the effect would be to increase the profits of capital and thus bring in more capital. But, to say nothing of the deterrent effect upon the coming in of labor, a moment’s reflection will show that such a reduction of wages would not add to the profits of capital. It would add to the profits of mine owners, and mines would bring higher prices. Eliminating improvements in methods, or changes in the value of the product, lower wages and the working of poorer mines come, of course, together, but this is not because the lower wages cause the working of poorer mines, but the reverse. As the richer natural opportunities are taken up and production is forced to devote itself to natural opportunities that will yield less to the same exertion, wages fall. There is, however, no gain to capital; and under such circumstances we do not see interest increase. The gain accrues to those who have possessed themselves of natural opportunities, and what we see is that the value of land increases.

The immediate effect of a general reduction of wages in any country would be merely to alter the distribution of wealth. Of the amount produced less would go to the laborers and more to those who share in the results of production without contributing to it. Some changes in export and imports would probably follow a general reduction of wages, owing to changes in relative demand. The working classes, getting less than before, would have to reduce their luxuries, and perhaps live on cheaper food. Other classes, finding their incomes increased, might use more costly food and demand more of the costlier luxuries, and larger numbers of them might go abroad and use up in foreign countries the produce of exports, by which, of course, imports would be diminished. But except as to such changes the foreign commerce of a country would be unaffected. The country as a whole would have no more to sell and could buy no more than before. And in a little while the inevitable effect of the degradation of labor involved in the reduction of wages would begin to tell in the reduced power of production, and both exports and imports would fall off.

So if in any country there were a general increase of wages, the immediate effect would only be so to alter the distribution of wealth that more of the aggregate product would go to the laboring classes and less to those who live on the labor of others. The result would be that more of the cheaper luxuries

p. 8, col. 3 would be called for and less of the more costly luxuries. But productive power would in nowise be lessened; there would be no less to export than before and no less ability to pay for imports. On the contrary, some of the idle classes would find their incomes so reduced that they would have to go to work, and thus increase production, while as soon as an increase in wages began to tell on the habits of the people and on industrial methods productive power would increase.

Hearts of Hope.

Frances M. Milne in San Francisco Star.

Repine who may, no more, we say,
The skies will bleakly lower;
Thro’ darkest day, thro’ dreariest way,
Our spirits shall now cower.
They dimly scan the heavenly plan
Who faint before endeavor;
But hearts of hope find fullest scope
Where cowards falter ever.

Forevermore, from shore to shore,
The glorious light is spreading;
While tyrants quail, and flee and fail,
Its dazzling luster dreading;
The wrath of man hath mortal span,
Tho’ feil^sic be its endeavor;
Up, hearts of hope! find heavenly scope,
For love shall conquer ever.

Oh joy, to feel the ringing steel
On Truth’s bright shield descending!
While at her feet, the trophies meet
Of foes in homage bending.
Tho’ keen the fray, and long delay,
The crown of our endeavor,
Yet hearts of hope find truest scope,
In noble conflict ever.

On earthly skies to close our eyes,
Were grief for fear to borrow,
But we have seen the heavenly sheen
That brightened all our sorrow.
And soul to soul we felt the whole
Of brotherhood’s endeavor;
No heart of hope can darkly grope,
However paths may sever.

What tho’ the sun for us may run,
His brief allotted measure,
Within the veil, it shall not fail,
Our steadfast trust and treasure.
To God be praise! our earthly days
Had share in Love’s endeavor—
For hearts of hope, immortal scope
His grace shall find forever.

The Lesson of o^sic Blizzard and the Coal Famine.

Topeka (Kan.) Post.

The lessons of experience come high but they are effective. The miners of Pennsylvania are learning at the cost of fearful privation and suffering that private ownership in the bounties of nature—in the deposits of coal which underlie their state, is robbery of the whole people. The settlers in Minnesota and Dakota, and the great west generally, have learned by the freezing to death of their friends and relatives and fellow citizens that private ownership of the highways of transportation, and their operation for private profit is a danger greater than that of foreign war. These principles, ground in by suffering, emphasized by starvation, illustrated by the “short graves” on the Pennsylvania hillsides, and the stark, frozen forms in the fireless cabins of the west, are finding expressions in pretty radical forms of thought—not radical from the standpoint of the millionaire and pauper breeding institutions which we miscall civilized and free. The session of D. A. 79 just over, which convened at Minneapolis, Minn., was marked by two important moves. One was a catechism of Minnesota congressmen as to their positions on the question of the postal telegraph, and it is needless to say that, with one or two exceptions, their position is “waiting for the cat to jump,” and the other was a resolution demanding the seizure by the general government of all coal and mineral lands, the owners to be compensated for plant of machinery^sic, but to receive no compensation for their claims to coal and minerals undug. The men who are demanding this are the frozen out farmers who are burning wheat and corn because the coal barons and the railroads have conspired to pinch them in the matter of fuel, while at the same time they are starving the miners at the other end of the line.

Yet This is Only One of Our Thousand Taxes Upon Industry.

Richmond Dispatch.

The planter feels deeply aggrieved that he is always under the surveillance of government officials, not to say spies and informers, and resents the imputation cast upon his calling, not to say upon his honesty, by a law which denies to him the right to sell his tobacco to whomsoever he will. He will listen to nobody who asks him to cease the agitation of the proposition to abolish all taxes upon tobacco. But the planter is damaged in another way. He is not only not allowed to sell his tobacco without being subjected to official surveillance, but the demand for tobacco is diminished by a tax which amounts to more than the average price of common tobaccos.

A tax of $8 per hundred is an incredibly oppressive tax. It operates to destroy competition among the purchasers, and to keep down the number of factories. Enterprising young men of limited means cannot afford to pay over $100 tax on one hogshead of tobacco. Go to one of our tobacco warehouses in this city and calculate the tax upon its contents and then ask yourselves whether or not you can censure the planters for denouncing a law which drains their purses to the bottom, limits the number of purchasers of tobacco, destroys competition in manufacturing, and punishes the planters if they exercise the right accorded to the owners of all other agricultural products of selling them where and to whom they will.

An “A B C” Tariff Talk.

Chicago Herald.

Let us start at a ten-pound piece of flannel on its journey. It costs abroad $3. The duty—10 cents per pound and 35 per cent ad valorem—is $2.05. Importer adds his 20 per cent. Cost, $3.60; plus tariff, $2.46. The wholesaler adds his cost, $4.32; plus tariff, $2.95.2. The retailer adds his cost, $5.18.4; plus tariff, $3.54.2, and $8.72.6 is the price the consumer finally pays. The duty cost $1.49.2 more than the government receives, or on these flannels every $4 of duty drags after it $3 of profit. Without a tariff, at the same profit, the goods that in England would cost at most $3.60, as there the retailer can buy direct from the manufacturer, would cost here the two profits, and would be sold at $4.32. With but one profit and the tariff they would cost $6.06. At this price the working people of the great cities can sometimes buy with cash to spare and “job lots;” but usually, as they buy at the nearest store, and often on credit, they pay the same prices the farmers do, and get for $8.72 the same flannel that is retailed abroad at $3.60. As far as that flannel is concerned the workingman’s wages must be $10 here when they are $4.13 abroad to have the same purchasing power.

Well, Isn’t the Protective Tariff Intended to Stimulate Certain Classes of Our Industries?

Chicago Evening Journal.

That is the condition to which free trade has brought Great Britain. It has stimulated certain classes of their manufacturing industries, but has destroyed the agricultural industries of the country. By low wages, the use of vast capital at a nearly nominal rate of interest, and from other causes, a few lines of manufactured productions have filled the markets of the world. But the special development has cost the loss of $250,000,000 a year in agriculture—equal, as Mr. Chaplin said, to one-fourth the entire export trade of the country. And yet there are crack brained theorists in the United States who advocate free trade for the benefit of the “farmers!”

p. 8, col. 4

THE RELIGION IN IT.

F. E. R. in Unity.

Those of us who must believe in a good God or in none at all, would long ago have become atheists had not our trust in God’s goodness far exceeded our actual knowledge. How glad we are to find a farther justification of this “larger hope” in the new land doctrine! To be able to see that God is really wiser, and better than the condition of human affairs has made him appear to be; to know that “on earth as in heaven” his will may be done and his kingdom may come so that every child born into this earthly life may at the very gate of birth find conditions that make possible to it, in a full, glad sense, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I know of no more clear teaching of the doctrine of the equal “right of all to the use of the earth” than is found in the ninth chapter of Herbert Spencer’s “Social Statics.” That in itself is not Georgeism, though it is the foundation principle—that the ownership of the earth by individuals is wrong, since all have an equal right to its use. This is admitted by many who can see no way out of the present conditions. Evidently it would never do to parcel out the land among any set of “present inhabitants,” thus defrauding other generations. And then some situations are much more desirable, and so more valuable than others. All do not want land, even to build on, to say nothing of cultivating it. Yet there is a way of equalizing the land privilege, of giving each one his or her share of the common estate—our earth. It is no patent remedy for a disease that Mr. George offers. He has discovered a great wrong, a deep injustice at the foundation of our human relations, and he simply says, “Cease to do evil, and learn to do well.” That is the religion that is in it. In other words, “What doth the Lord require of thee but to deal justly, love mercy and walk humbly?”

What gives money value to land? Take any city lot which has never been improved—is it not the growth and enterprise of the whole population that causes its rise in value? Does it make any difference in the increase whether the owner is lazy or industrious, whether he is intemperate or not? To the public which created that rise in the value, the “unearned increment” belongs. The man who “owns” it may have invested his last dollar in its purchase, like the “poor widow” who, a generation ago, was supposed to have her little all invested in a few slaves. The proclamation of emancipation took away the widow’s slaves, giving her no recompense. The George theory takes no man’s land from him, nor even requires of him restitution for the land values he has already drawn as rent or as increase in value from our common estate. It only puts an end to the taking of the state’s natural revenue by private individuals. Let the man (every man and woman) keep his land if he wishes to—keep it and use it and pay the public for the privilege. He cannot afford to keep it unless he does use it in some way, so as to get back the price of the ground rent, or land value tax which he will be required to put into the public treasury. Those who have the best situations—business lots, water fronts, fine views, mines or valuable wells—must pay for their extra privileges. Thus it will happen that the land value tax on a single city business lot will often exceed the tax on a large and valuable farm. The national W. C. T. U., under competent advice, does not hesitate to promise a yearly rent of $35,000 for the piece of land upon which it proposes to build a temperance temple. Suppose that all these rentals went into the public treasury instead of into private pockets. It might cause many to work for a living who now live in idleness upon the labor of others; but what might not that treasury do for them as a part of the public, and for us all? Could not the necessary expenses of government be met by the tax on the land value alone? Think what a lessening of government expenses that change would make.

In the natural rise of land values wherever population increases and improves, we see now, with reverent delight, a most beautiful provision for the increasing needs of a growing population. This is the natural revenue of the state, a simple tax on the value of land without reference to its improvements; or ground rent from those who use the land which is our common inheritance.

That is all there is of the famous land doctrine—that every one may use the land, but no one may own it; that all who do use it shall pay for the privilege, if the land they use has acquired a money value because of the scarcity of that particular kind of situation or privilege; and the revenue from this source is supposed to be so ample and so sure and safe that all taxes on products and improvements can be dropped; the state need no longer “confiscate” private property to make good its loss from the stealings of individuals. Land may no longer be considered private property; only that which is produced by labor of hand or brain is private property, and the public has no right to take that by taxation (often ruining some business or discouraging improvements by the tax on industry and enterprise) unless in some emergency it may need more than its natural revenue from land values, and so vote further contributions from us, the people.

This change in the method of taxation is not all that Mr. George advocates in the way of reform; but it is the first step, the one without which no other reform can avail much, but which, once accomplished, makes every other step far more easy and effectual than without it.

The change of taxation may cause temporary hardship to a minority, while greatly lightening the “doom of the majority” in this world. But all must profit by the great improvement in the general welfare. Speculators will drop great quantities of land now held “for a rise, and^sic much land easy of access, now lying idle, can be taken for homes and shops and for tillage, giving work to the unemployed and causing a natural rise of wages as the crowd of those who must work for almost nothing or starve grows less. With taxes removed from products and improvements, food and clothing and utensils will grow cheaper. The terrible strain upon the nerves of those who are in the race for wealth, or clinging to the ragged edge of poverty, liable at any time to get”out of work” and slip into the abyss where an increasing number suffer in hopeless wretchedness—this strain will be greatly relieved, and rich and poor alike will have less craving for stimulants, more of that wholesome rest of body and mind which health requires.

No one knows what the public fund from land values will give us—perhaps light and heat in all our houses, free galleries and libraries and gymnasiums and baths and free transportation. Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, the beautiful co-operation that may result, when we have realized the fact that our father has given our planet for the use and blessing of our whole human brotherhood, that here on earth his will may be done as it is in heaven.

Questions to be Answered Next Fall.

Chicago Herald, March 5.

If the protective tariff do not foster and encourage trusts [and?] monopolies, why does hard coal that was sold all through 1877 and 1878 for $4 and $4.25 gross retail—why does that same coal now cost $8, with severe fines

p. 8, col. 5 to be imposed on any distributor who may dare to sell for a smaller price? If a protective tariff be such a wise expedient of government, why are wages lower now than when coal was $4. Why, anyhow, should coal be held for two years at the cornered price of $8 in the cold months? Why should it be twice as high? In the face of strikes and lockouts the output on the Schuylkill constantly increases. Coal costs the house holder in Scranton $2.25 in his cellar; it costs the New Yorker $4.75 in his cellar. It costs the house holder in the agricultural, tariff paying state of Illinois $8 in his cellar, and the vote in the council of satraps has often been large to make it $8.50. But for a warm October and November, Chicago would to-day be paying $9. Eight dollars is an infamous price. All the men engaged in rending such a sum from the salaries of the poor, who, as a rule, pay this price, deserve ill of the republic. The republic could take no action, however harsh, against the coal engrossers that would not have the aspect of a punishment well deserved.

The Skirmish That Brings on the Battle.

Toronto Globe.

Of course, where there is such a mighty pecuniary force on the side of ultra-protection, great prudence has to be shown by the friends of revenue reduction as to the ground they take, and as to the manner in which the campaign is to be arranged. As in all gigantic struggles against vested and venerated wrongs, the final ground of battle is not even seen when the preliminary skirmishes are gone through. The defenders of abuses and the apologists of wrongdoing might often have saved a good part of their unrighteous privileges had they been willing to surrender that portion which was most glaringly infamous and indefensible. But they would not. The whole history of human progress and of popular rights gives illustrations of this wrongheadedness on the part of the abettors of unrighteous monopolies.

What the Report of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Labor Shows.

Boston Globe.

It shows that out of 816,470 persons engaged in gainful employment in this state in 1885, 241,589, or 29.59 per cent, were idle over four months in the year.

The most valuable fact ground out of this investigation is that if all the remunerative work in the state were distributed equally among those engaged in it—that is, if production were carried forward regularly, rather than fitfully—the whole demand could be supplied by workingmen in less than eight hours a day. This is saying that as an actual fact an average eight-hour labor force is all that manufacturers are willing to employ to-day, and that 241,000 persons are unemployed during four months of the year, chiefly because the long hours of those employed and the spasmodic character of production render it a necessity.

Perhaps This is Why the Protection Men Would Like to Go to War Over the Fisheries.

Chicago Herald.

Perhaps there is no stronger proof of the desirability of a scheme of commercial union with Canada than the fact that, notwithstanding we repel the trade of that country by tariff duties averaging 46 per cent, and Great Britain invites it by open ports and free trade, the aggregate of Canadian trade with the United States is millions of dollars in excess of the aggregate of trade with Great Britain. A tariff wall between conterminous countries is so repugnant to the natural laws regulating traffic that it breaks over the barrier. Nothing but a state of actual hostilities could entirely interrupt it.

Labor Only Wants a Chance.

Ceresco, Neb., Times.

Give labor unrestricted access to natural opportunities and hard times will be unknown. Give to workmen, thus kept busy, the full fruit of their toil and there will always be a market for all the desirable things that skill and labor can produce. There has never been more manufactured goods in this country than could have found a profitable market if the people wanting them had had money to pay for them, and they would always have money to pay for them were they allowed to exert their labor upon natural resources without restraint.

The First Step to be Taken.

Marinette, Wis., Eagle. Let the principle of the Australian system of voting once be thoroughly engrafted into the laws of all the states of this union and firmly carried out, and then the preliminary step toward a grand reform would be taken. For then there would be a free ballot and a fair count in the broadest and most comprehensive sense. Then the workingman’s ballot would really count for as much as that of the millionaire.

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[Notice] Single Tax National Conference

NOTICE.—Those who believe that the public revenues should be raised by a single and direct tax upon relative land values, and who favor the holding of a National Conference, are requested to send address immediately to

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[Notice] Illinois

ILLINOIS.—Readers of the “Standard” in the state of Illinois, and all others interested in the great principles it advocates, are requested to send names and addresses to W. H. Van Ornum, president of land and labor club No. 1, Room 68, 1[illegible]0 Madison street, Chicago, with a view to effecting some plan of organization for the state. Persons in Chicago not already members of land and labor clubs, as well as secretaries of such organizations, are especially requested to write.

[Notice] First Assembly District, Albany

ALL READERS OF THE STANDARD IN favor of a united labor party in the First assembly district, composing the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifteenth wards, also the counties and towns included in the district will please send their names and addresses to the undersigned, for the purpose of organizing the district thoroughly. JOS. H. [ROSHIRT?], President First assembly district, united labor party, 22 Third avenue, Albany, N. Y.

[Notice] 23d Assembly District

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[Notice] Voters of Maryland

VOTERS OF MARYLAND WHO ARE desirous to aid in propagating the principles of the united labor party, as set forth in the New York platform, adopted at Syracuse, Aug. 19 are requested to send their names and addresses to

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