When a society fosters as much crime and destitution as ours, with ample resources to meet the actual necessities of every one, there must be something radically wrong, not in the society but in the foundation upon which society is reared.  Where is this ulcer located?  Is it to be found in the dead-weight of illiteracy which we carry?  The masses of few countries are more intelligent than ours.  Is it to be found in burdensome taxation or ill-adjusted tariff regulations?  Few countries are burdened with less debt, and many have far worse tariff laws than curse our country.  Is it to be found in an unjust pension list?  We hardly miss the small compensation which we grant to the men (or their heirs) who, in the hour of National peril, gave their lives freely to perpetuate the Union of our States.  Where, then, is secreted the parasite which is eating away the energies of the people, making paupers and criminals in the midst of plenty and the grandest of civilizations?  Is it not to be found in the powerful monopolies we have created?  Monopoly in land, in railroads, telegraphs, fostered manufactures, etc.,—­the gigantic forces in our civilization which are, in their very nature, agents of public convenience, comfort and absolute necessity?  Society, in the modern sense, could not exist without these forces; they are part and parcel of our civilization.  Naturally, therefore, society should control them, or submit to the humiliation of being ruled by them.  And this latter is largely the case at the present time.  Having evolved those forces out of its necessities, made them strong and permanent, society failed to impose such conditions as wise policy should have dictated, and now suffers the calamitous consequences.  The tail wags the dog, instead of the dog wagging the tail.

No government can afford, with any degree of safety, to make four million of citizens out of so many slaves.  And when it is remembered that our slaves were turned loose upon their former masters—­lifted by one stroke of the pen, as it were, from the most degraded condition to the very pinnacle of sovereign manhood—­the equals in unrestricted manhood, with the privileges and immunities of citizens who had been born to rule, apparently, instead of being ruled—­it will be seen readily how critical was the situation.

But the condition having once been created by the strong arm of the Federal Government, based upon a bloody and costly war in open defiance of the Constitution as designed by the compromising Fathers of the Republic; the slave once made a free man the same as his former master, and given the ballot, the highest privilege of government a man can exercise;—­the Government having once gone so far, there was absolutely nothing for it to do but to interpose its omnipotent authority between the haughty and arrogant free man on the one hand and the crouching and fearful freed man on the other—­the lion and the lamb.  To do less would be more than cruel, it would be murderous;—­the