We stand only upon the threshold of governmental existence; the nation, in comparison to the hoary-handed commonwealths of Europe, was born but yesterday; but, having adopted at the beginning the system which hastened the downfall of Rome after she had spread her authority over the known world, we are already weak and exhausted.  Monopoly has stunted the people, and they stagger to the grave, starved to death by a system of robbery almost too transparent to require minute elucidation at the hand of the conscientious writer upon economic questions.  The suppressed groans of the toiling masses are echoed and reechoed from every corner of the land, and burst forth in mobocratic fury that the entire police authority finds it almost impossible to stay.  The newspapers are a daily chronicle of the desperate condition to which the country has been brought by the rapacity and ignorance of legislators and the parasitical manipulations of the gang which has rooted itself in the soil of the country.

The fires of revolution are incorporated into the Magna Charta of our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon Herculaneum and Pompeii.  It is too late for America to be wise in time. “The die is cast.”

CHAPTER XVI

Conclusion

I know it is not fashionable for writers on economic questions to tell the truth, but the truth should be told, though it kill.  When the wail of distress encircles the world, the man who is linked by “the touch of nature” which “makes the whole world kin” to the common destiny of the race universal; who hates injustice wherever it lifts up its head; who sympathizes with the distressed, the weak, and the friendless in every corner of the globe, such a man is morally bound to tell the truth as he conceives it to be the truth.

In these times, when the law-making and enforcing authority is leagued against the people; when great periodicals—­monthly, weekly and daily—­echo the mandates or anticipate the wishes of the powerful men who produce our social demoralization, it becomes necessary for the few men who do not agree to the arguments advanced or the interests sought to be bolstered up, to “cry aloud and spare not.”  The man who with the truth in his possession flatters with lies, that “thrift may follow fawning” is too vile to merit the contempt of honest men.

The government of the United States confiscated as “contraband of war” the slave population of the South, but it left to the portion of the unrepentant rebel a far more valuable species of property.  The slave, the perishable wealth, was confiscated to the government and then manumitted; but property in land, the wealth which perishes not nor can fly away, and which had made the institution of slavery possible, was left as the heritage of the robber who had not hesitated to lift his iconoclastic hand against