The wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations of free Government, and wrings from the heart of labor the cry of despair!  With the public lands exhausted, with remnants of the Indian-tribes despoiled of their reservations, and the lands seized upon by capitalists and merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands everywhere advanced in price beyond the reach of laboring men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully conscious of the wrong you have done them by your legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for as of old?  I am not astonished that gentlemen deem this early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great navy; it will come, if it does come, in the natural order before a great army.  Capital is timid and full of suggestions; the Navy is the most remote, but I am not surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that your Army is too small.  These, too, may be some of the bitter fruits of your imperial grants.  I fear that it will be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will be no more.  Gentlemen should not forget that the wrong that has been done to laboring men and their children by giving over their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in due time be considered by the most intelligent body of laboring men who ever debated a public wrong—­men fully aware of their rights and capable of asserting them.

But the foreign land-shark, and the corporate land-shark, dwindle into insignificance by the side of the individual land-shark.  Every hamlet, town, city, and state in the Union is in the grasp of the individual land holder.  Starting with his fellows as a pioneer two hundred and fifty years ago, with his pickaxe on his shoulder, he has steadily grown in size and importance, so that today he holds in his hands the destinies of the Republic and the life of his fellow citizens.  His bulk has become mastodonian in proportions and his influence has shrivelled up the energies of the people.  More absolute than the Iron Prince of Germany, he pays no taxes; he limits production, not to the requirements of the population but to the demand of the market, at such figures as he can extort from the crying necessities of the people through the operations of “corners;” he regulates the wheels of government, State and Federal, and dictates to the people by making them hungry and naked.