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Pictures and Illustrations
He Shall Be Emancipated From Such a Choice
He Shall Be Rescued From Such a Fate
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Introductory.
Fifty years ago pauperism and beggary were almost unknown in America. Madame Levert, one of America's most gifted women, while traveling in England in 1853 was shocked at the extremes of wealth and poverty visible in London, and on seeing a beggar from the window of the Stafford House, she thanked God that such a sight was never witnessed in America — her own land. Now they are a numerous and burdensome class. Every town, city, village and community are taxed for their support. Each county in the older states has its poor farm, a property costing from five to twenty thousand dollars. Charitable institutions dot the land, and private charity taxed so heavily for the relief of the needy that even philanthropy has grown calloused with human sufferings. Provident and relief societies exist in all our cities, yet these only seem to aggravate the evils they were intended to cure. Pauperism fed on charity at length becomes chronic beggary and the pleasures of the rich the comfort of the thrifty are poisoned by the all pervading miasma of human misery. Hunger like a gaunt wolf, glares in at the windows of the banquet halls, or lingers with pale face near the tempting and lavished display of the markets.
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Obese satiety elbows starvation it every turn along our streets. The tide of pauperism is steadily rising and we are rapidly approaching the condition of Europe in the last century. Class legislation has done much to swell the list of America's paupers, but Europe's system of dumping its pauperized class upon our shores has done more. An ever-increasing swarm of dependents are with us. The cause can be traced to class legislation and militarism. The one the curse of our free institutions and the other the bane of European civilization. The remedy lies, not in doling out alms to humanity until the recipients of charity become chronic beggars, but in first removing the cause of extreme poverty by giving every toiler access to the soil, making the ballot the key to unlock the garner where his birthright lies.
A cabbage garden or a potato patch with the incentive of proprietorship and compensation will keep drunkards from tippling, dead beats from mendacity, criminals from crime, and prove not only the source of health, happiness and honesty as well as a source of revenue to the commonwealth, but a panacea also for tough sinners where soap and water, sunshine and air, work and play will take the place of the seven sacraments and the forty days fast on fish and eggs. It is time for earnest men and women to act. Never were needs so pressing and deeds so necessary as today. Gigantic want and gigantic wealth step side by side, but "the cry of the untaught, uncomforted millions sending forth like
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tortured beasts an inarticulate cry from the depths of their destitution and debasement," is unheeded if not unheard.We have elbow room for the world on this continent. Enough land going to waste or held for speculative purposes to feed and furnish homes for the congestive population of the cities. There are mountains and prairies, sea-air and sunshine for the teeming millions, and it is dawning upon the awakened conscience that hygiene is more valuable and not less sacred than the Lord's supper.
We need a Napoleon in the industrial world who, by agitation and education, will lead the people to a realizing sense of their condition and the remedies, and teach them that by wise legislation and access to the land they can attain such majesty and happiness as will fulfill the hopes of humanity and the promise of the ages.
But this can be done if all who believe in the principles of this great union of forces will gather in groups and bands, organize, educate, proselyte with earnest, fiery zeal. Talk the new doctrine of political salvation on the street, at the forge and mill, in the field and mine, and the movement will soon become a whelming tide that will make all former tidal waves seem but ripples on the political sea. Select your leaders, nominate your candidates, and depict to them the dire vengeance of an aroused people, the swift, sure plagues of the God of Moses. Then march on to the last stronghold, encompass the walls of Jericho with shouts of
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valor until the Promised Land be won. The bondage of Christ's children, the poor and lowly for whom he died, be ended forever. God hasten the blessed day! Brothers and sisters of humanity, for the sake of right, civilization and society, for the sake of pallid wives and hungry babes, dejected fathers and brothers, let us awake, let us be up and away from "the bricks without straw." Let us face the wilderness of Sinai, drink the water of Marah, for home and liberty!Will you go? Will you exchange the sleet and gloom of the overcrowded north for a vineyard tinder brighter skies? Do you dare to break the chains of Egyptian bondage for an inheritance of wine and oil, of fig and myrtle? Come out, children of affliction; come not alone; come forth from bondage, a myriad band staffed with faith and shod with zeal, and the lurid waves of the sea of politics shall part at the breath of Jehovah. This cloud by day and fiery pillar by night shall guide safely to the promised land. We shall inaugurate the new ethics of human rights. We shall introduce the ethics of Christ in the politics of the nation and revolutionize the world.
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The Riddle of the Sphinx.
It is related that high on a rocky mountain that sheltered the Copaic lake, dwelt in olden times that dread creature of the fabled past, the Theban Sphinx, whose destroying nature was older than Grecian myth or Oriental superstition. She dwelt far up on the bald rock crags of Mount Phicium, and from its mighty solitude
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propounded to the dwellers in the valley that riddle taught her by the Muse: a riddle old as man. If they answered it all was well; if they failed in its solution, she destroyed them. It is a story whose origin reaches back to the twilight of the world's history — a myth, but myths mean the wisdom of the sage — find the wisdom and you have the life. It typifies the condition of a people in their period of transition, their struggles and failures, their expectations, heart longings and despair, which are the very life of a people. Shadowy the lake, dim the mountain, far-off the story of that far-off time, but in our own day they who have "eyes that see" and "ears that hear," may yet discern the Sphinx — not dim and fabled, but grim and real — sitting by the highway of human progress, — the tear stained, prayer-worn path leading up the march of centuries, — propounding as of old her riddle to the children of men: —"Here, O, Passers-by, in the bosom of
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mother earth are richest gifts and blessings, enough for all How shall we convert this fertile bounty of Nature into wealth, and how shall we so divide this wealth that none may want, and each shall have according to what each has produced."High above the music of steam, the rattle of wheels, the whir of machinery, the rush and roar and increasing strife of a cruelly pitiless competitive system, the problem of the centuries claims the listening ear, enlists the sympathetic heart, and appeals to the quickened conscience of an awakened world for prompt solution.
The tireless hand of Toil, the plundered workers of heart and brain have solved one half the Problem.
Six thousand years have rolled away since we were told to "till and cultivate the earth" from which we were taken, six thousand years of sorrow and red-handed injustices. Myriads and myriads of human beings have put all their
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strength, their ingenuity, their whole being into toil, obedient to the divine behest, "Thou shalt eat bread in the sweat of thy face," which has never been rewarded. The law of heaven has never been unkind. Nature has been mindful of our needs. Earth has yielded up her fruits, bursting granaries, ware-housed wheat, elevators stored with corn tell the story of spring and autumn and yielding soil. The wilderness has been made to blossom, treeless plains have been changed into verdant forests, sandy deserts nod with tangled bloom and laughing grain. Sun and dew of ripened harvest bless and bless again the waiting sod.Wealth we have produced! more than all the inhabitants of the earth can consume. The corn crop of the United States in 1892 was one billion, six hundred and eighteen millions, four hundred and sixty-four thousand bushels; the wheat crop the same year five hundred and nineteen millions, four hundred and ninety thousand bushels,
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enough food to make starvation impossible: enough to enable the United States to become the benefactor of the starving hordes of the world. Enough, with equitable distribution, to enthrone smiling plenty in every home, and crown the toiler King of the wealth his honest hands have won.Wealth we have produced, but we have not learned its equitable distribution — there we have failed to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. We have failed because we have ignored justice, which is only another name for that old-fashioned word Righteousness in the affairs of men, because avaridous Ecclesiasticism has looked more to its own aggrandizement than to the splendid teachings and virtues of Christ.
Law has prated of vested rights and the sacredness of private property: founding public power upon private misery, and placing corporate life above human life. Religion remains blind and mute, while giant Wrong builds up the grandeur
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of state on the sufferings of individuals. The sin expressly forbidden in that theocracy whose constitution was direct from Jehovah, Land Monopoly and Money Monopoly, are condoned with approving silence by a hypocritical Church, that in giving to the usurer and the bondholder the best pew, and a place at the sacred board, is eternally false to the teaching of the Divine Master.Privileged men, under the guise of law, and the sanction of the church, stand on the world's highways and collect toll to add to wealth already "beyond the dreams of Avarice." The commonwealth, of the common people, wrested and wrung from Nature by the hand of Toil, has been diverted from its rightful channels, and made to flow in golden streams into the coffers of the idle rich, because of the subtle process of laws that infringe upon the "inalienable rights of men."
As of old, the Hebrew lies bruised, bleeding and robbed on the road to Jericho, and our modem Samaritans summon the police, call out
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the militia, and invent patrol wagons mounted by gatling guns.Greater fortes for evil and social calamity than humanity ever knew are gathering in resistless might. The Sphinx is devouring her victims. The overcrowded tenements of the great cities are breeding criminals, cripples, and savage paupers — a menace to the well-being of humanity, a menace that public charity and private philanthropy cannot cope with while ignoring justice. Gaunt Famine seeks and finds its victims in the dwelling place of industry, and fastens its fangs upon the plundered poor. Capital and his elder brother Labor meet in deadly strife. The giant (Labor), protesting against slavery or starvation, uses torch and dynamite; Capital, calloused with greed and arrogant from gain, calls out militia, State and Federal, and instructs sharpshooters to "aim at the heart," and sharpens the knife to put to the throat of his brother.
Humanity is preparing for another step in the
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bloody march of civilization, and it remains with the Christian people of to-day to decide whether this age, replete with wealth, replete with the results of inventive skill and genius, and rich in material grandeur, shall join the experiments that lie buried under the mounds of Mesopotamia, and the sands of Egypt; or shall we transmit to future generations a heritage richer and greater than any that preceding ages have given to us?The homeless condition of the highly enlightened Caucasian and the debased degradation of the Negro and Oriental calls in thunder tones to heaven for a great readjustment of the social condition of mankind.
Europe and America are on the eye of a dire revolution, before which all modern civilization may go down to ruin in blood and fire, or perish more slowly beneath the iron hoofs of Russian despotism.
Between the dreaded modern Goth of Russian supremacy or universal empire and the vandalism
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of the British financial system, which threatens to enslave the industrial world, our civilization cannot long survive. The only hope of averting this universal reign of terror lies in inaugurating the most stupendous migration of races the world has ever known, and thereby relieve the congested centers of the world's population of half their inhabitants, and provide Free Homes for half of mankind.This can be done by colonizing the Tropics in America and Africa with fifty million white families as planters on estates of 200 acres each, with three families of negroes or orientals as tillers of the soil.
Through all the vicissitudes of time, the Caucasian has arisen to the moral and intellectual supremacy of the world, until now this favoured race is fitted for the Stewardship of the Earth and Emancipation from Manual Labor.
The era has arrived when the Caucasian must either sink to barbarism or become the planter by
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occupancy of the Tropics, and the professional man and business manager for the inferior races. The Oriental and Negro are in a pitiable condition of ignorance, destitution and misery, from a lack of proper encouragement, and a just and intelligent supervision of their efforts.Cannot the resources and genius of Christendom rescue civilization from its perils by Tropical Colonization?
In asserting that this can be done, the motive prompting to the authorship of this work is to point out the evils under which our system is laboring, their causes, effects and remedies.
In this labyrinthian task; the reader may be led into foreign fields, but when the subject seems alien to his cause, remember even the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.
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The Foes and Evils of Civilization.
Our grand civilization is menaced to-day by the greatest perils since the time of the Goth and Vandal.
On the right marches that dread semi-barbarian from the cold north, the Russian Empire, which is pressing down upon Europe with the stealthy might of a glacier, while on the other hand, close to the heart of society, is held the assassin's knife by that furious maniac — that mal-formed creature, born of Intelligence and Poverty — whom we call the Anarchist.
Roman grandeur was subverted and the world wide empire trampled to ruin under the hoofs of barbarism. The lights of Art, Science, and Commerce kindled from Athens, Memphis, and Tyre, those sublime beacons of human progress, were quenched by the onrolling tide of Goth and
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Vandal — only to be rekindled after a thousand years of the semi-twilight of the Dark Ages. Ancient civilization perished under the blows dealt by Alaric and Genseric, and her torch was extinguished in the life blood of old Rome. Vice, corruptions, and internal dissensions caused the Mistress of the World to fall a prey to northern barbarism, and the flames that wrapped her temples, palaces and theatres, lit the funeral pyre of Ancient Glory.Russia, the Goth of modern times, is gravely threatening England's empire in India, which is the keystone to the arch of Western supremacy.
Britain, with all her faults, is the commercial center of the world, through her dominion of India, the possession of whose trade has always given to the nation holding it, the key to the treasury of the world. All Western nations agree that England should hold this, for it is a mighty trust, very dangerous in the hands of a great military power. The conquest of India
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by Russia means the shifting of the center of exchange from London to Constantinople, which would result in a frightful cataclysm in the financial world, amidst the tidal waves of which would be wrecked the fortunes of America and all Western Europe. From out this chaos would emerge a hideous nightmare, the Universal Russian Empire, and thus for the second time in history civilization would be trampled under the hoofs of the Northern barbarian in his modern guise of the Cossack. Should Russia succeed in wresting India from England, which might be effected during a war in Europe — then in one year the Muscovite giant would over-run China. Farewell, then, to Liberty, for with more than half the world, under her banner and the treasure-house of the world in her possession Russia could, and would, muster an army of fifty millions to crush western civilization. This danger can be averted only by the banding together of Western Europe to settle that vexed26
problem, the Eastern Question, by the Nationalization of the Latin and Teutonic races and the partition of the Old World among the four great agglomerated powers of Europe that would result therefrom, viz: — England, Latin Union, the German Confederation, and Russia, leaving the New World to the United States, which would become the head of the Federate Americas.But how shall the more grave and remaining dangers be met? That Vandal — the anarchist, the latest child of England's Military and Financial System, is with us still!
The only way that insane foe of the Home, the State, and the Church can be subdued is by colonizing the Tropics with Caucasian planters and Negro and Oriental tillers of the soil as proprietors and tenants by occupancy.
The bomb thrower must be induced to exchange his occupation for the more profitable and pleasant pastime of handling the cocoa-nut and bread fruit, by relieving the congested ganglions
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of the world's nerve centre and thus bringing about a reign of individual prosperity.Africa and Latin America could furnish homes of two hundred acres each to fifty million families of the over-crowded, highly-intelligent but despairing members of the Caucasian race in Europe and America; while China, India, and Japan, from out their starving millions, would gladly furnish thrice as many tenants, whose salvation might be secured and lives gladdened by a transferral to the ease and abounding plenty to be found in the vast basins of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Congo.
By transferring the moody and dangerous Communist, the dark plotting, sinister Anarchist to a tropical plantation, where he may be busied in planting his own vine, olive, date, or bread fruit, where he may cool his heated brain and fiery tongue with the juices of his own sub-acid fruits, and the dexterity-learned in bomb-throwing be employed in clubbing the durion and mango-steen
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from his own leafy groves — his haggard face will become amiable and his dangerous lankness disappears in the rotund curves of innocent obesity. He becomes transformed from the Foe of Peace to the Pillar of Society in contemplating his own importance as a tropical planter of comparative prosperity.Convert the despairing, homeless outcast to a tropical planter and the venomous foe of civilization becomes the proud and happy proprietor of a bountiful home, where, surrounded by a tenantry of inferior races, he may exercise that charity taught him by a life of poverty and dependence in the past.
Through those marvellous gifts of personal beauty, or physical perfection, and prodigious mentality, with which God has endowed the Caucasian of Europe and America, this one-third of the human family dominates the world. Ambition, activity, soaring intelligence, and a keen enjoyment of the refinements and comforts of life,
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characterize this favoured branch of the family of mankind, with its crowning grace of Christian virtue, and its tender love for home, justice, and charity.Yet, how often we find people, crushed by the burdens of poverty and want, whose natural sphere is among the highest ranks of life. On every hand, amidst our fierce struggle for existence in this great civilization, we see men on whose faces is stamped the natural marks of genius, and women of grace, beauty, and intelligence, toiling at the meanest calling, homeless and desolate at the frightful contrast between wealth and poverty — but yearning with a hopeless longing for an hour of rest and comfort.
The high intelligence of civilization today only intensifies the bitterness of poverty until, at last, the pent-up anguish and black despair, the woe, grief, and fathomless misery of the masses concentrates in that hurtling thunder-bolt
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of hell, the bomb-thrower, and a quaking world cries: "The Vandal has come!"Back through the dim corridors of the past the God of Ages wound but one blast on the clarion of History for each phase of human existence, but sublime and glorious hope — the nations hearkened to that mighty call!
The avenging steel of the ravening Goth pierced the licentious and festering heart of proud old Rome — the ruthless Vandal harried in blood and fire her sin-haunted, tear and sweat cemented palaces, and hurled to earth the marble glories of her monuments, built by the toiling miseries of flesh lashed captive and Christian. Ancient civilization perished though vice, tyranny, and corruption and Alaric Genseric were but the avenger of an outraged God.
France, grown wise through teachings of the past, reforms her many national abuses by a Reign of Terror and emerges therefrom refulgent with liberty and martial splendor.
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Greece fell through disunion and dissension; but her modern prototype, Germany, profiting by this lesson unites and becomes the arbiter of Europe. Down from the hoary battlefields of the past, across the lapse of ages, floats the trumpet call —"Oh, Civilization! Awake! Awake! the Goth and Vandal come!"
Shall we, admonished by the fate of Rome, shake off the stupor of security, superstition, and fatal indifference?
Yes. Arise Christendom — meet thy foes and the days of bondage for the Caucasian will end forever!
The chosen of God has served his apprenticeship and henceforth shall be the planter of the Tropics and guardian of the inferior races.
The highly-gifted white race of Europe and America are now fitted for the stewardship of the earth. They should be supplied with land in tropics which must be tilled by negroes and orientals — not as bondsmen, serfs, or servants —
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but as a co-operative tenantry, directed in their efforts by the superior energy and intelligence of the Caucasian.The masses of Africa, China, and India, constituting about two-thirds of the world's population, are in a pitiable condition of destitution and misery. They have no ideas above their physical wants, scant raiment and still more meager food. The overcrowded conditions of the oriental countries makes the bare sustenance of untold millions a grave problem. Thousands often die through famine. The unsubdued tropics invite the white man to the life of a planter with these people for his co-operative tenantry. Then thin out the population from the congested centers of Europe, America, and the orient, and at once solve the vexed problem of Anarchism by removing its causes: that of militarism and congestion of Population, with their attendant evils of False finance and the competition of machinery with human labor.
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Over-population, with the attendant evils of militarism and a false financial and industrial system, are the underlying causes of Anarchism. The people of Europe and America toil through endless cycles of suffering and misery to repair the ravages wrought by warfare, or to meet the requirements of their oppressive national debts.
The lands of Europe and the United States have become monopolized by the rich; hence, it would be far cheaper for the poor to remove to the tropics than to await at home the slow evolution of justice.
By substituting arbitration for warfare the curse of militarism may be removed, and the savings thus accruing to the nations can be devoted to colonization.
The many trillions yearly expended in the cause of foreign missions could bring myraids of Pagans from the influences which surround them for evil in India and China, and place them under the Christianizing guardianship of our own institutions
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in the tropics, where, coming in contact with our higher intelligence, they may be prepared for citizenship, and be saved to Christ by a liberal and unselfish application of those principles which recognize the brotherhood of man.The ryot of India and the coolie of China would gladly embrace any prospect for the betterment of their lot. They would hail with joy the proposition to be placed on free homes in the tropics, where their patient labor could be rated on an equal valuation with the high intelligence, industrial skill, and business capacity of the Caucasian. The Oriental is fitted by ages of experience to the climate and the exigencies of an agricultural life in the tropics; while the unacclimated Caucasian from Europe and the United States would, for a generation at least, be unequal to the task of manual labor in an alien climate.
But, by placing one family of Caucasians and three families of orientals and negroes on a tropical
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estate, where they could co-operate in their labors — where the intelligence and business capacity of the white man could aid the willing hands of his less gifted brothers — where, under wise and beneficent laws, the fruits of their united effort could be equally and justly divided; then, in fifty years, the white race might become innured to labor, and the oriental prepared for Christian citizenship, while all would be possessed of homes of ease and plenty, under a title of ownership, by use.The oriental should be excluded from Europe, United States and Canada. The tropics are his natural home and he should not be brought into a cold region to cheapen the labor of the Caucasian or to suffer from the rigors of an inclement climate.
The Caucasian has served his apprenticeship and now he should leave the drudgery of the world to the inferior race, until by contact with our civilization the coolie, the ryot and the negro
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shall, by fifty years of supervision, kindly encouragement and legal protection, become eligible to citizenship, and be rescued from paganism. By becoming a tropical planter, with the negro and oriental for his tenants, the lot of the white man and the latter will be greatly bettered. The white man should for fifty years transact the business, do the managing and manufacturing, and become the professional man for the remaining two-thirds of mankind. At the end of that period we should celebrate the golden wedding of Justice and Prosperity, by ushering in the era of human brotherhood and equality.The meek eyed moralist may adjust his monocle and begin to scrutinize this theory. He may pry and leer thereat in the vague hope of finding some flaw of immorality. In a desire to find occupation of his abundant leisure, made possible doubtless by the immoral and very questionable business methods of his father, he may discover a taint of injustice in those bold assertions. But when he
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is reminded that we stand between the two grave perils, the modern Goth and Vandal, to meet which we are compelled to resort to a military necessity, even the canting moralist may acknowledge the wisdom of heroic treasures in our dilemma of danger.My white handed friend, please adjust your eyeglass to a nearer focus! See the oncoming tide, with the glint of fire and blood in its black and threatening waves — then join your voice to that of the philanthropist, the wise and humane multi-millionaire, the God-inspired ministry, and despairing poor, and let your tones mingle with the loud roar of awakened Christendom, storming the gates of heaven and reaching the ear of our anxious God with the mighty tumult of its war cry:
"On to the Tropics! On to the Tropics!"
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Anarchy the Offspring of Monopoly.
Poverty and Intelligence are the parents of Anarchism, a bloody-handed monster, whose half-blind fury is directed at the destruction of Society.
That civilization may at any hour be convulsed by a wide-spread reign of terror is an appalling thought; yet the dire omens of discontent, the restlessness of the masses, riots, strikes, and dynamite outrages, presage the coming of just such storms as convulsed the world at the end the last century.
Shall we imitate the folly of the French nobles, who rioted on, heedless of warning until that frightful hurricane of atrocity and horror burst upon them in the fury of the French Revolution with its resulting carnival of blood: The Wars of Napoleon?
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The superior wisdom of to-day may avert this calamity, which threatens to annihilate civilization, but it will require the co-operation of the world; and the coolness, patience, wisdom, and charity of the Caucasian will be sorely tried in the ordeal.
We must remove the cause of Anarchism before we are safe. The bomb-thrower is but the logical effect of conditions inimical to human comfort and happiness. Certainly, all this unrest and lawlessness has a deep-rooted cause, for I ever have found mankind to be more prone to deeds of kindness than of cruelty, unless aroused by what was fancied, at least, to be the incentives of revenge.
The multi-millionaire has grown restless with apprehension for life and property. The statesmen is menaced by the bomb of dynamite, and even churches in the heart of the fairest cities of the world are rendered so unsafe that wealthy families contemplate returning to the practice of
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the middle ages, by worshipping only in their private chapels. The theatre has become dangerous as a pleasure resort, and not infrequently are legislative halls shattered by the exploding infernal machines of Anarchists.At any moment the world may be shocked by some frightful atrocity, far more appalling than the assassination of Czar Alexander of Russia by the bomb of the nihilist.
Premier Crispi, one of the most sagacious and liberty loving statesmen of Europe, narrowly escaped a similar fate within the year. The Anarchists has placed a bomb in front of the Italian Parliament House, and, but for the fact that the chambers adjourned half an hour earlier than usual, out of respect to Signor Crispi's sore eyes, we might have been treated to another instance of the blind folly of Anarchism in destroying some true friend of the oppressed poor. In this case, mere chance, or providence rather, saved not only the life of the statesman,
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but possibly that of all the Italian legislators.Meanwhile, William of Germany is surrounded by his armies of half a million men, and the Russian Czar has become a sceptered hermit, in the deep seclusion of splendid Peterhoff, where, hidden from his subjects, he remains guarded by the triple safeguards of warships, electricity, and Cossacks.
Bomb explosions are of daily occurrence in France, Italy, Spain, and England, while America even is not free from this dreaded weapon of the foe of society.
The cause of Anarchism cannot altogether be a lack of political liberty, for in France, one of the most democratic nations of the globe, we find a perfect carnival or bomb-throwing existing to-day; therefore it must be inferred that republican institutions do not mitigate but rather aggravate the evil.
In republican countries a true appreciation of the ballot by the citizen may help to mitigate the
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evils of a false system — but often the most oppressive laws that curse mankind have been fastened upon the masses through the medium of the ballot by the cunning avarice of capital.The cause of Anarchism are Militarism, Congestion of Population, Land Monopoly, the Competition of Labour-Saving Machinery, and a False Financial System.
As there is no universal remedy for the diseases that afflict mankind, so there is no universal solvent for the ills that oppress humanity.
But the manifold evils under which civilization labors to-day may be greatly remedied and finally removed by removing their causes, and then bending the energies of the united world to Tropical Colonization.
While in Europe and the United States the great mass of the population is landless and homeless, often being driven to despair by want and absolute hungry, until from out this seething cauldron of misery the bomb-thrower is evolved,
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the fairest portions of the earth's surface waves its palm fronds amidst the awful solitudes of the Amazon, vainly beckoning the world to its unappreciated gifts of food, land and boundless resources.That such a condition should exist, and that too in a world of intelligence, possessed of the virtue of Christianity and daring ambition, can be explained only by the fact that our civilization is but an eighteen year old boy, just freed from school and his apprenticeship — where, it must be confessed, he has spent the greater portion of his days in fighting; but with the maturing wisdom of dawning manhood he is just awakening to the possibilities of a life domestic happiness and business prosperity.
To be assured of success he must first redress the wrongs, which in his youthful belligerency and ignorance, he has inflicted upon his fellows in the past. His improvidence must be curbed and courtesy and fair dealing cultivated. Should
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he succeed in these efforts, he may look forward, in the pride and strength of his youth, to a serene and peaceful life of three score and ten — centuries.But he has raised up an almost implacable enemy by appropriating in his boyish, roystering way the dinner of his old schoolmate (Labor), who in his raging hunger and anger at the injustice of the act, is about to hurl a dynamite bomb at the head of the youthful depredator and thus end, forever, his bright career.
The crucial hour in the life of young Civilization has burst upon him with its appalling danger; but the brave youth, remembering his own strength and daring, is not dismayed. He has not forgotten how in the past he slew gross Ignorance and put Superstitution to rout, nor the hour, but yesterday, when he disarmed and led captive the fiery Cossack.
Animated by his many victories in the past, he is prepared for a death grapple with his old-time
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companion, a conflict in which one or both may perish. With heated blood and maddened brain, young Civilization is rushing to the fray — when lo! pale, sweet Conscience rises upon the scene, and in low, vibrant tones — muffled and faint — like that "still, small voice," before which the prophet on Horeb's rock hid his face in the dust, whispers:"Christ died that all men might be brothers."
Dazed and bewildered, young Civilization pauses, and through his mind comes thronging the many acts of injustice, oppression and insult he has heaped upon the patient head of his companion until now he has become his direst foe.
With noble impulse and manly contrition, he cried: "Labor, my poor brother, I have wronged you; in my strength and pride I have driven you from our broad playground, and oh, shame on my young manhood, I have wantonly stolen your food!"
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"Patient and long suffering brother, forgive me! Forgive me! I meant you no harm in my thoughtless abandon! Come with me to my orchard and vineyard! There you shall appease the hunger of which I was the cause. Nay, do not drop your bomb — carry it along, and thus I will share the danger."
With suspicion and hesitancy Labor follows to where the fruits of his more favored brother are rotting and wasting in the capacious orchard, and as he satisfies his hunger the bomb is forgotten on its mossy bed. As civilization watches this transition from misery to happiness, Conscience steals to his side and whispers:
"Dear Civilization, why not grant this poor, hungry brother a part of your tangled wood-land, that he may plant vine and fruit for his own?" And as Civilisation looked with kindling love upon the fair being, henceforth to be his bride, he cried: "Yes, dear Labor! I give you as a token of my penitence and love, all the lands you may
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need among those dales and densely wooded hills. Now, my brother, set to work with axe, plow and bomb, clear and plant that land for your own. Meanwhile eat of my fruits until your vines and trees are fruitful — I have enough wasting for us both. Henceforth you shall be known as Labor no more; but Prosperity, my friend and brother."Then, while tearful Prosperity clasped hands with his new found friend, Conscience called aloud, and Faith, Hope and Charity struck their golden harps with peans of praise; stern Justice, on the headlands of human progress, blew his loud clarion, and Peace, hovering over the vale of happiness, chanted her sweet stains.
Then the loud tumult was wafted through cloudland until there was joy in heaven, and the God of worlds smiled to know His Son had not died in vain.
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The Crimes of Diplomacy.
To preserve the peace of Europe, England and Germany (who act in secret concord on all great questions), are constrained to perpetrate crimes at which all civilization stands aghast. To one who views the events of modern times and their bearing on the great Eastern question, the whole structure of European politics seems permeated with malignant fatality to all who oppose the supremacy of England in India.
It is evident that England and Germany acted in secret conference in the late Franco-Prussian war, for England had become alarmed at the growing power of France and wished to see her humbled. When the French were demoralized and furious at the lack of a military leader, and after casting their despairing eyes about the arold for some one who could lead their armies they remembered General Robert E. Lee, of Confederate
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fame and war genius. The French nation appealed to him by the memory of La Fayette. They urged him to fly to their aid — but at this critical juncture he suddenly died of heart disease! France, for the lack of a military leader, fell prostrate under the hidden hoof of England.When Germany, by her consolidation and triumphant wars, had become England's bravo on the Continent, all Europe was ruled from London through the court of Berlin. Gambetta of France, the greatest republican of Europe, died suddenly, and a cloud of mystery has ever enveloped the cause of his death. Herr Laskar, the leading socialist of Germany, dropped dead of heart disease while visiting America. Admiral Courbet , the great naval commander of the French forces in Asia, after humbling dismembering China and while preparing to return to France and receive the frenzied welcome of its exulting people, dropped dead of heart failure
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on board his flag ship at the hour of sailing. General Skobelloff, whose mad daring and brilliant genius during the Russo-Turkish war had raised him to the first ranks of military commanders, and who had become the idol and pride of the Russian army, visited France soon after that war. He was hailed by the impulsive French as the friend of France, and when he stated in a speech that Russia and France were brothers in peace and war, and French and Cossacks would yet ride into London, the wild transport of the French people knew no bounds. But, alas! Soon after his return to Russia, he too fell dead of heart disease.France, anguished and revengeful, cast her eye on General Grant as a possible military leader, but he soon faded away. Cancer, the ally of England and Germany against Napoleon, again did its fatal work, and heart disease claimed General McClelland, a friend and warm admirer of the French nation.
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Louis of Bavaria, Alexander of Russia, Francis Joseph of Austria, and France meditated an alliance and a rebellion of South Germany to curb the power of Germany. It was rumored that the King of Bavaria met the sovereigns of Russia and Austria together with the representatives of France in secret conclave, but soon after this, poor Louis of Bavaria was found dead; suicide, it was reported, but the ground about was trampled over with the hob-nailed tracks of Prussian soldiers. Alexander, it is claimed, died by the bomb of Nihilists (?) and Rudolph, the Crown Prince of Austria — who was outspoken in his enmity, to Germany — committed suicide, it was said.
The recent alliance of France and Russia, over which the people of France went mad with enthusiasm, is still fresh in our minds. to counterbalance this, the court of St. James and Berlin intrigue to control the future Czar of Russia by placing a granddaughter of Victoria with him on
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the Russian throne. This was the work of William of Germany and his English relatives.Soon the events of history began to multiply, for Carnot, of France, died by the hands of an Italian Anarchist, and Alexander III, of Russia, in the prime of life, endowed with a wonderful vitality and health — a physical and mental giant — yet an implacable enemy of England and Germany, at the critical moment of the war in the orient, is stricken with death by some mysterious malady!
It is passing strange that England's enemies should thus all be removed from her pathway to India! These fatalities may only be the work of Providence, yet many a criminal has been convicted on less substantial evidence. The world, however, has begun to attach a significance to these mysterious deaths, and millions of intelligent people today regard them as diplomatic murders.
Can peace be long preserved by such oriental methods? No, for just once let the masses of
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Christendom become convinced of such a condition of affairs and a storm will arise that will at once either lead to the most frightful war the world has ever known, or a carnival of crime, anarchy, revolution and riot will sweep every monarch of Europe off his throne and usher in a universal reign of terror, or end in military despotism for the world.But when England stands confronted with her crimes and those of her secret emissary on the continent — Germany — whose people are growing restless under their British subservience — it will hasten the hour of arbitration, disarmament and universal peace, if the voice of the people of England, America, France and Germany is heeded. The self-interest and preservation of morality will prompt the Christian people of the world to settle forever the political problems which foster such a dangerous method of preserving the peace — methods which are teaching the masses that lawlessness and Anarchism are no worse than diplomatic crimes.
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Overpopulation.
Few people, in the feverish haste of life in this electric age, ever pause to consider the fact that two-thirds of the earth's population is confined to one-eleventh of the areas of the land surface of the globe; but the following figures will readily convince the most skeptical of its startling truth:
| Sq. Miles. | Population. | |
| Area of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway and Sweden, | 1,400,000 | 241,000,000 |
| China proper (estimated), | 1,500,000 | 420,000,000 |
| India, | 1,400,000 | 287,000,000 |
| Japan, | 147,000 | 40,000,000 |
| New England, N. Y., Penn., Del., Md., Ohio and Ind., | 258,000 | 27,000,000 |
| 4,705,000 | 1,005,000, 000 |
Land surface of the globe, 52,000,000 square miles.
Total population of the globe approximates 1,5000,000,000.
These figures indicate a population of more than two hundred to the square mile one-eleventh
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of the earth's surface, while the remainder has an average of only ten.In the more densely peopled localities of Europe the inhabitants are huddled together like sheep in a pasture, for statistics prove that Belgium has six hundred and England five hundred people to the square mile, while even our own young state of Massachusetts has nearly three hundred people to every square mile of its surface.
Two hundred and seventy millions of Caucasians in Europe and the thirteen north-eastern states of America live, or at least endeavor to exist, on an area of 1,650,000 square miles, a great portion of which is seamed and broken by lofty-mountain ranges, and occupied by wide tracts of sterile land.
The aggregate wealth of these nations, however, is so great that each individual might exist in comfort, for on this portion of the earth's surface is located the centre of wealth, commerce,
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manufacturing, and arts; but the unequal distribution of property is such that a comparative few own a preponderance of the riches, while probably two hundred millions are homeless and destitute of the luxuries and even the comforts of life.Oh, the blind stupidity and wanton waste of our age! The criminal neglect of our statesmen has brought civilization to the brink of ruin! While the miner of Belgium, the weaver of England, and the artisans of France, Italy, and Germany toil through a ceaseless round of exhausting labor, spending their lives in a weary struggle for a bare existence, their families are deprived of the use of meat, a luxury rarely found upon their tables. The young men of those nations are hurried away to the army, while, their mothers and sisters perform the labors in the fields, the area of which often is less than an acre per capita. Yet vast tracts of the most favoured portion of the earth's surface
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in Africa and South America are waiting, in primeval solitude, the fostering hand of civilization. More than 16 million square miles of the most fertile lands in the world are as yet almost untouched by the hand of man, while in Europe and North-Eastern America the question of room for the dead is becoming a grave problem.While the use of beef is an unknown luxury to two-thirds of the earth's population, scores of millions of fat cattle roam at will over the grassy Pampas and Llanos of South America, almost valueless for want of a market. Millions of tons of delicious beef is allowed yearly to decay on these plains after the cattle have been slaughtered for their hides and tallow. This is only one instance of apparently wanton waste, for Humboldt said, "That of the choicest food known to man, enough goes annually to waste in the Amazon valley to feed the whole population of the globe."
The revolting fact has been stated, although
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it seems incredible, that in Peru whole flocks of sheep have been driven into the lime-kilns and burned alive for fuel, while just across the Andes exists a forest of a million square miles, whose useless timber might rebuild all the homes and navies of the world. Whitening bones, strewing the plains from Mexico to the Mackenzie, are all that remains of the swarming millions of buffalo that grazed not a generation ago over a region better adapted by Nature to a great pasture field than to the requirements of an agricultural country. The wanton destruction of bison by hunters in pursuit of their hides, the fat and nourishing meat being left to the wolves, was a crime against Nature. Could our Government have had the sagacity to protect those wild cattle, the plains might have remained a great store-house of food for the world through thousands of coming years. At present it affords a meager living to probably a family to the square mile.70
No better illustration of the political economy of the present day could be adduced than by the condition of Italy. Here is a region that has been cultivated for thousands of years, hence the soil must have been exhausted of a portion of its riches long ago; but at the present time the area of one hundred and fifteen thousand square miles, from which must be deducted roads, parks, cities, long chains of mountains and vast tracts of morass, still is required to sustain a national population of thirty millions. Yet, just across the sea, only a few hours' sail, lies the continent of Africa, with more than eleven millions of square miles, begging for the hand of civilized man to reclaim it from waste and Paganism.
While Africa, with a hundred fold the area of Italy at the highest estimate, barely contains seven times the latter's population, and seven billions of acres, well adapted to the palm, orange, vine, olive, bread-fruit tree, peach, almond, durion, mangostan, cotton, corn and
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banana are awaiting industry and use, the Italian peasant, in his half-starved fury, burns the Government buildings and chases the tax officials over the lava beds, the heart and stilleto of the poor oppressed creature, alike, thirsting for blood. Finally, out of this chaotic admixture of hunger, ignorance and oppression is evolved that thunderbolt of civilization, the bomb-thrower, who blindly tries to blow up the Italian Parliament, and with it the only man in the nation who has enough common sense to see that the policy of acting as England's sentinels over her water-way to India is speedily bringing Italy to bankruptcy and ruin.Where the tiger or deadly cobra lurk, there also reigns the poisonous miasma fatal to human life. The very presence of these dread creatures warn men of a more terrible danger existing in the fens and jungles, for poison is in the very air.
So it is with the bomb thrower. He only thrives when the conditions exist inimical to prosperity
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and human happiness. As well might the Hindoo try to prepare the jungle for his habitation by killing the cobras and tigers, and then feeding his family on quinine, as to try to subdue Anarchism by cutting off a few heads. No, the wisdom of the ryot prompts him to drain the fen, and thus deprive the dangerous denizens of shelter, then he fires the jungle and at once is rid of the pests and their cause. Thus the world will have to drain off its surplus population by some great preconcerted national effort at colonization before civilization can be safe from the venom and fury of the bomb thrower or the miasma of Anarchism. This will have to be agitated with fiery zeal by all true lovers of the home, the state, and the church, before its realization, for the vexed problems of Nationalization of Races, the Eastern Question and the partition of the earth's surface among the civilized nations will first have to be settled before an intelligent effort can be made for this betterment of the condition73
of mankind. As it is, Europe is divided among a multitude of nations, each exhausting itself by rivalries and jealousies, begotten through long ages of ignorance and folly on the part of their rulers. America, blinded by the glamor of youth and riches is prodigal of her gifts, and as careless of consequences as when she allowed her vast herds of bison to be ruthlessly swept from the earth to make new homes for her toiling masses in a region so deficient in rainfall that farming there has resulted in failure. The sufferings thus entailed upon the Pioneer of the Plains might well be regarded as a visitation of Divine displeasure at man's short-sighted improvidence, and the supine indifference of Europe to the capabilities of Africa has brought political disquietude to the most powerful nations of the Old World, over whose densely-crowded population hovers the grim shadows of War, Bankruptcy and Anarchy.Colonization is a vent for political danger.
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That Britain has enjoyed a period of political tranquility for two centuries is really owing to her vast colonization of other countries, by which she has earned the title of "Mother of Nations." America, Australia and Southern Africa each in turn has been subdued by her turbulent citizens. Even the brave and pugnacious Irishman has found it cheaper to emigrate than to rebel. So long as restless France sent out swarms of settlers to Canada there was no more peaceful and law-abiding subjects in Europe, but when all the American colonies were lost to England the clouds of discontent began to darken the national skies, and the vapors from the political morasses of her polluted system, poisoned by Anarchism, arose until the storm of fire and blood of the French Revolution burst over that fair land. Had France retained a land suitable for colonization during the last half of the eighteenth century, her discontented "Sans coulottes" would have emigrated thither, as did Puritan and Cavalier
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Her from England, and the horrors of the long era of human woe and misery known as the French Revolution and the Wars of Napoleon, would thus have been averted. Napoleon, that gigantic prodigy of human valor and genius, might have ended his days happily as a Canadian peasant, had not all avenues of emigration from France been closed, until in an excess of despair and misery the French serf was transformed into a blood-thirsty demon, at the very remembrance of whose awful atrocity the world turns pale with horror.
Can civilization, today, turn a deaf ear to that loud note of warning sounded by the trumpet of history? The lands of the north temperate zone are practically colonized — nothing remains to the despairing poor of both continents but the far off pampas of the La Platte or the semi-arid pasture fields of Australia.
The whole of Christendom is disturbed by the same dire omens of discontent, which at the end
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of the last century presaged the coming of that awful blot on human history, which in our paucity of language we call the reign of terror. Will the stubborn millionaire, the fossilized statesman and the misguided poor take warning?Let us be up and doing! Organize and agitate! Nationalize the races. Settle the Eastern question. Disarm the nations and partition the world. Federate the Americas in the grandest nation the world has ever known. Then Niagara's clamor and Cotopaxi's roar will be drowned in the grand slogan of triumphant civilization. A joyful God will chain the vandal of anarchism for a thousand years, while swarming millions, in the migration of races, pour oward to tropic land, making heaven resound with that battle hymn of triumphant world: "On to the tropics! On to the tropics!!"
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The Genius of Man has the Masses.
The inventive genius of our age has helped to accomplish the industrial thraldom of the masses. Labor saving machines have entered into competition with human labor with the result that the man becomes merged in the machine — a mere human accessory — or the mechanic is forced out of employment to compete with an already redundant class.
When a mechanical instrument is devised which will perform the labor of fifty men, forty-nine laborers are deprived of the means of procuring daily bread. The inventor is protected, however, and his patent secures him a royalty that amply repays him for his labor and rewards his genius. The consumer is benefited frequently by a slight reduction in the cost of the manufactured article; but the capitalist, who
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owns the factory or shops in which the labor-saving machine is employed, reaps the golden profits — the unearned increment of labor-saving machinery — the bread of forty-nine toilers — is confiscated to enrich the manufacturer.This, doubtless, is lawful. So once was negro slavery, the whipping post and the practice of burning or hanging witches.
The laws that produce a hundred millionaires in Pittsburg and millions of homeless tramps in our land will bear a great deal of revision, both in the interests of humanity and the commonwealth.
Labor-saving machinery in itself might be a boon and blessing to mankind; but by its perverted use it has entailed great suffering among the very class it should have benefited. When any number of men are thrown out of employment — especially is this true of skilled laborers — they are plunged helpless into an already overflowing reservoir of labor. This creates strife,
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competition and finally pauperism; the addition of this dead mass agitates the whole body of labor. The unemployed discover that machinery is competing with them in every line of manufacturing. Where shall they turn for relief?My poor, degraded brothers, the cure for your ills may found in tropical colonization.
Yes, open an avenue of escape for the unemployed where he may become a consumer of manufactured articles, and thus broaden our markets and lessen labor competition in mechanical pursuits.
Then let us amend our laws so that the use of labor-saving machinery can only be employed on the conditions that the unearned increment of the machine — the profits accruing by the saving of labor — shall be enjoyed equally by the capitalists, the consumer and the operative.
This will give all an equal heritage in any machinery on which the people have granted to its inventor alone the privilege of levying.
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tribute for its use. This will at once greatly cheapen all manufactured goods and raise the wages of skilled labor to that commanded by professional talent. The cheapness of goods will operate to enhance the income of the professional class, and, in fact, of all consumers of manufactured articles.The capitalist or manufacturer may deem this an injustice — which it is not — but should he refuse to operate his factory on these terms the operatives would soon form companies of their own — rent his idle factory and thus reap two-thirds of the unearned increment of labor-saving machinery.
The increasing perfection of machinery threatens soon to either result in overproduction in manufactories, or in throwing out of employment a majority of the skilled laborers of America and Europe. Where then shall those laborers turn for relief? This phase of the sphinx-like riddle can only be solved by tropical colonization.
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Let the unemployed go to new lands and fairer scenes, where they may make new markets for those mechanics who remain behind to operate labor-saving machinery on salaries that rate with those enjoyed by the professional class.
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Militarism.
By far the most serious burden resting upon Christendom today is Militarism. Europe is one vast armed camp — and that too in a time of profound peace. Every article of comfort and luxury is taxed to its utmost to sustain an idle army so prodigious that the hordes of Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon were but clans of poorly equipped semi-savages by comparison. Rome in her prime never mustered legions comparable in numbers and expense with the French army on its present peace footing. Babylon and Egypt failed in their palmiest times to send forth such swarms of warriors as Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy today are prepared to hurry to war equipped with engines of destruction, the cost alone of which might have appalled even diamond-decked Pharaoh of old.
This great burden falls with crushing pressure
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by far the most serious burden resting upon Christendom today is Militarism. Europe is one vast armed camp — and that too in a time of profound peace. Every article of comfort and luxury is taxed to its utmost to sustain an idle army so prodigious that the hordes of Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon were but clans of poorly equipped semi-savages by comparison. Rome in her prime never mustered legions comparable in numbers and expense with the French army on its present peace footing. Babylon and Egypt failed in their palmiest times to send forth such swarms of warriors as Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy today are prepared to hurry to war equipped with engines of destruction, the cost alone of which might have appalled even diamond-decked Pharaoh of old.This great burden falls with crushing pressure
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upon European society, already cursed with the twin evils of over-population and land monopoly. Taxes, amounting to virtual confiscation, are imposed upon the sorely tried and impoverished poor, on whose shoulders capital adroitly shifts the load, until in self-defense the peasant becomes either an emigrant or an anarchist.To escape military service, or its burdens, the peasant, deeply imbued with anarchism, flees to America — if he can — and thus Europe dumps the product of her vicious system upon our shores to swell our already overflowing reservoir of labor. The riots and strikes, which so often paralyze American industry and commerce, are, therefore, clearly traceable to European causes.
In the late Franco Prussian war, where two millions of the grandest and bravest of mankind engaged in a duel of destruction, the expenditure of wealth and labor, not counting the lives sacrificed, was of such enormous proportion that the whole of Africa might have been prepared at less
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expense for the homes of twenty-million of European families, its lands colonized by a hundred million Asiatics and its fields planted by them to grain and fruits.We of the United States often talk in disproval of the Militarism of Europe, forgetting the fact that our own army of pensioners costs us about one hundred and sixty millons annually, to which must be added forty millions more for our small and very useless standing army, making a total of two hundred millions of annual expense, fully equal to that of the vast armies of France and Germany. But our pension system should not be condemned; it is but an act of justice entailed by a false system: that of warfare and miliarism, which more than all else has retarded the development of the human family and fettered its happiness.
Yet this burden of ours is a great drain upon the resources of a nation, even so young and vigorous as our own, for it absorbs the profits on
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thirty-two hundred millions of national values. The War of the Rebellion cost this nation a sum so great that we, the richest and most vigorous of all countries, still feel its effects, for it entailed a debt of bonds and pensions aggregating not less than the inconceivable sum of six billion dollars, while the destruction of life and property cost an additional loss to the nation of not less than two billions more, making the staggering aggregate of eight thousands of millions of dollars — more than a thousand dollars to each family existing in the United States at the close of that war.Had that prodigious expenditure of wealth, labor, diplomacy and blood, been devoted to the betterment of the condition of the masses of this nation we now should not be laboring in the throes of an "Era of Depression." Men or nations after spending their best days in a drunken debauch may with poor grace exclaim: "Am Era of Depression," or "A Visitation of Providence."
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Nations or individuals who indulge in such excesses of passion are only inviting disaster and stern retribution. The hideous Anarchist in all his unspeakable, moral deformity is but an offspring of such wanton conditions of mankind.
The prodigal waste of the War of the Rebellion might have secured to the United States the political control of both North and South America. Every acre or land in Latin America might have been bought and divided into estates, with intelligent white men as planters. A hundred and fifty millions of the starving Hindoos and rat-eating denizens of China might have been transported thither as tenants to homes of ease and plenty, while the new markets, thus secured in a country destined by nature to non-manufacturing pursuits, would have brought riches, beyond the wealth of Solomon, to the remaining half of our population.
Yet the folly of this mistake is being reaped by our good business man, who dodges the dynamite
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bomb as best he can, and by the poverty-crushed proletariat who feels justified in committing any crime against society, while riots, lockouts, strikes and outrages multiply in appalling ratio. Meanwhile the alleged statesman of the average Caucasian nation lies away to his cellar, yacht or country house, and rolling up his eyes to heaven and raising his white hands in mild protest exclaims:"Whither are we drifting?"
Thus we see what untold evils the one war of our recent history has entailed upon the nation. Ah! Well, we were young and impetuous then; but doubtless our finger-burning may teach us the lesson of not meddling with fire in our more mature national life. But poor old Europe, burdened with twenty billions of war debts — menaced by anarchism and Russian aggression, is standing over a volcano, for it seems that nothing short of a general disarmament will avert one of the bloodiest wars of history. She has
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those triple problems, The Eastern Question, the Nationalization of Races, and the Partition of Asia and Africa, to settle before she can turn the sword into the pruning-hook of blessed peace.The standing armies of Europe in times of peace aggregate about four millions of men, with an expenditure including that of the navies of not less than a billion of dollars annually. Added to this is the loss in labor of the young and vigorous citizens taken from the ranks of the people to become a public burden. This loss sustained by the nations is fully as great as that of maintaining the soldier, which makes a total annual loss to mankind of two thousand millions of dollars.
The vast national debts of Europe and America, amounting to twenty-seven billions of dollars, with an interest charge of about five per cent., adds another thirteen hundred and fifty millions, making the burden of civilization reach the
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astounding total of thirty-three hundred and fifty millions annually.This absorbs the profit of a valuation as great as the entire wealth of Great Britain, France and Italy.
How long can the civilized world stand this frightful drain upon its resources? Possibly ten, or at most twenty years longer.
Should Europe adjust its difference by arbitration, and thereby settle the eastern question, the nationalization of races in the Latin union and the Germanic confederation, and the partition of the Old World among the four great powers, a general disarmament of the world would speedily ensue. Should this be accomplished one-half the cost of maintaining those huge and impoverishing equipments would be saved.
This vast sum, a billion of dollars annually, could be diverted to the purpose of colonizing Africa with white planted and negro and oriential tenantry. Twenty years would suffice to
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transport thither one-half of the families of Western Europe and three times as many more from India and China.In this way only can the Goth and Vandal be met and vanquished, for thereby the frontiers of Russia would be permanently delimitated, her career of conquest would end forever, while the anarchists would go to the tropics to become a planter and a maker of new markets for the commercial and manufacturing centers of his mother country.
That we are about to witness the consummation of this blessed result, there is but little doubt; yet the way is beset by grave difficulties and dangers. America must be converted to the wisdom of the course of a federation of the Americas under the leadership of the United States. All the Americas must become a mighty sisterhood of nations under the all-powerful protection of Uncle Sam. Then the valleys of the Amazon, Parana and Orinoco, and the plateaux of
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Mexico, Guiana and Brazil will be open to settlement by white planters and oriental tillers of the soil. Yet Europe is better prepared to-day for the colonization of Africa than America is for that of Latin America. The rulers of Europe will immediately see the profit and safety of the course, for it will aggrandize their power and glory and will remove the menace of anarchism forever from their midst. While we of the United States wrangle away the golden hours of opportunity in political strife, Europe, with rare acumen, is extending her sway over all the tropical lands of the Old World, in preparation for the grandest migration of races the world has ever witnessed.Yet the difficulties in Europe in the way of a general disarmament are deep and grave. The nations of the Continent are divided by rivalries and jealousy, sentiments fostered by England in her efforts to maintain the Balance of Power, the latter being a thinly disguised scare-crow
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by which she hopes to protect India from Russia.The student of international politics may learn a great secret by close attention to its details. This secret is the key to the science of diplomacy. It will be found that one mighty influence — secret, profound in its cunning or wisdom, with its vast ramifications sways the human family, to the remotest confines of our globe. This is the power of British gold.
"Anything threatening England's Indian Empire is certain to meet with antagonism in Europe," is a maxim among diplomats. For fifty years England has been on her guard against her powerful rival of the North, and the Crimean War was waged by the aid of France, Sardinia, and Turkey, to arrest the advance of Russia. Louis Napoleon evidently incurred the secret hostility of Britain by this active interest in the Suez Canal, and soon after this he was hurled from power by England's firm friend, the King.
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For thousands of years the seat of power, wealth and intelligence shifted about in this region, with the nation or city that enjoyed the fruits of the commerce of India.
Eventually the center of commerce bounded away to the West and landed at Carthage, Rome and Syracuse. Those cities became the western termini of the Indian trade, and this region arose to a pitch of opulence and splendor such as the world had never witnessed. Rome became the mistress of the world, while Greek merchant-men swarmed her emporium and enriched the eternal city with the wealth of the East. This continued for about five hundred years when, suddenly, the commerce of the world, the center of science, wealth and culture, took a retrograde movement eastward, as Bazantium or Constantinople and Alexandria became the entrepot of the East. The West sank into the deep obscurity of the dark ages, while the East glowed with the splendors of her ancient glory.
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The Eastern Question.
Thee after Mohammed's time the Saracen became the concervator of art, wealth and intelligence, and the polished Arab controlled the much-coveted commerce of the Orient. Bagdad and Damascus became the havens of his fleet-footed argosies of the desert, as the long caravans carried the trade of Hindoostan across the desert. Those cities soon vied in wealth and splendor with the dust-hidden glories of their old neighbors, and the Saracen armies were triumphant from the Indies to the Pyrannees.
The Saracen commerce flowed from Cordova to Delhi through a long range of splendid cities.
"The West was immured in the blackness of an intellectual and commercial night, and all wealth, learning and power, then known to the world, were centered in the hands of those purveyors of the commerce of India. But over Gaul, Britain, Italy and Germany brooded the poverty, ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages, only lit by the feeble glimmer of monastic scholarship,
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which was the only light visible amidst Western Europe's deep, mental and commercial gloom. The thriving colonies planted by Rome in Gaul, Britain and along the Rhine, relapsed into barbarism. The splendid highways, aqueducts, theatres and baths, the beautiful cities, with their colleges of learning, temples, villas and galleries of art went to ruin and decay, and soon the debris of oblivion covered the site of once thriving marts of trade. Italy became a wilderness, and the half-clad savage tended his flocks amid the ruins of temples, palaces and monuments, once the pride and glory of the world." The lights of Western civilization were extinguished by this retrograde movement of commerce; this transferral of the centre of exchange to the East. Since this appalling calamity has once befallen Western Europe, its fears of recurrence has ever been present with those Western nations. Should Russia wrest India from England and establish her capital at Constantinople, the centre of113
exchange, of commerce and wealth would be transferred to the shores of the Bosphorus with the shock of a financial earthquake which would wreck the prosperity of England, America, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.Europe knows full well that should the Muscovite succeed in a conquest of India, her next step would be the absorption of China and Japan. Then the subjugation of the world by the semi-Tartar would speedily follow. This is a real danger which the most sagacious statesmen of Europe forsee clearly, and to baffle which is bent the energies and the best minds of Western Europe today. But Russia, guided by the masterly brains of her Romanoffs and the councils of Gotchakoff and DeGiers, steadily encroaches southward with the stealthy force of a glacier until now with one hundred and twenty-five millions of inhabitants, she stretched from the Polar Sea to the gateway of India, from the heart of Europe to the remotest confines of China, and on,
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on, to Behring's Strait and the waves of the Pacific. She has become a dread monster at which civilization is appalled. Compact and impenetrable to a foe by reasons of her rigorous climate, threaded by vast navigable rivers and a network of canals, she is steadily pushing her railways with indomitable energy across the Steppes of Siberia, and soon her Trans-Siberian railway will be in operation from Moscow to the Pacific. Already her railroad is finished almost to the borders of India, and should Europe become embroiled in war, she could hurry forward a million of the most stubborn, well drilled and equipped soldiers in the world and hurl them on the plains of India with irresistible might, and then — God pity the world! For possessed as she would be of the purse of the East, the whole united world would be no match for her power and gold. Germany would be divided and humbled, Austria dismembered, Norway, Sweden and Denmark speedily annexed and all Europe115
would become feudatories of the great Tartar Mogul of the Bosphorus. China and Japan would be conquered in a year and the world would witness the revolting spectacle of fifty millions of Asiatic soldiers marching under the banner of Russia to stamp out the torch of Liberty in France, England and America. The Goth and Vandal swept the civilization of Rome from the earth when the centre of commerce and wealth was shifted back to the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and the Tartar may yet overthrow our civilization in the guise of the Cossack of Russia.Europe remembers, with fear and trembling, the times that victorious Napoleon led six hundred thousand of her sons into the heart of Russia and lost half a million lives in the terrible snows and cold of her inhospitable climate. Civilization has not forgotten that terrible lesson, taught when her greatest warrior and mightiest genius was chased back to his capital on the
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Seine and dethroned, while the Cossacks rode through the streets of Paris and Kalmuck Tartars bivouacked in the gardens of the Tuilleries. Napoleon said at St. Helena that "England would yet repent in tears and blood the advent of the Cossacks into France." "That not France, England or Germany were the nations to be dreaded of Europe, but Russia" — in whom he divined the purpose of a universal conquest of mankind.During the Crimean War, Britain, France, Sardinia, and Turkey strove to arrest the progress of the Russian Empire, and with all the arts of modern warfare, backed by valor and boundless resources, they thundered along the southern borders of the great Northern Power; but after two years of desperate fighting, and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of reassure and tens of thousands of lives, their united efforts only succeeded in taking one city.
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Nationalization of Races.
This signal failure, to more than temporarily check the Russian nation, caused Louis Napoleon to begin the work of the Nationalization of the Latin Race, a dream of the Great Napoleon, in which he hoped to unite Latin Europe in one vast nation, similar to the German Confederation. The first step of the French Emperor, in this direction, was to drive Austria out of Italy; but in this, although partially successful, he was thwarted by Prussia, who then was in close alliance and active sympathy with Russia.
The Italian Kingdom owes its existence, as a nation, to the armies of France, yet so skillfully has Russia hoodwinked England that Italy was allowed to join the triple alliance, hostile to France. Meanwhile the German race consumated a partial nationalization under the German Empire, with its close ally, Austro-Hungary.
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So unstable is the condition of Europe today that at any hour the heads, of the two great families of mankind, the Latins and the Teutons, may again be evolved in a desperate war between France and Germany. This would be Russia's opportunity to seize India. Of this England is aware and she strives, with all her influence of gold and diplomacy, whose power holds France in check.
But the bonds of the great central European alliance are weakening. Italy staggers under the burdens entailed by the conditions of the triple alliance, and any day may inaugurate a rebellion of the Italians against their king, which can only result in the nation being broken up into a number of small republics, and the force of circumstances will drive them under the sheltering wings of the French eagle. Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland are ripe for the same movement, and the republicans of Spain, under the wise Castelar and Zorilla, may join the
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movement with Portugal, both encouraged by the clergy under the guidance of the Pope, and unite themselves into one vast confederation of one hundred and seven millions of catholics in the Latin union. Paris will be its capital and northern Africa its pasture field and plantation.That such a move is contemplated by the nations of Southwestern Europe, one can be easily convinced by the republican utterances of the Pope and by the grouping of the African colonies of France, Italy and Spain. Italy holds Abyssinia as a key to the mouth of the Red Sea, the southernmost limit of Latin aspirations, while Spain is becoming paramount in Morocco, abetted by France, who will never see it pass into the hand of hostile power. Meanwhile the French nation has annexed the Sahara and the Soudan, and her territories, of vast extent, reach in an almost unbroken sweep from Algiers to the Congo, and still her expeditions are lost to the world around Lake Tchad and Eastern
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Soudan, from which they will emerge some fine day along the shores of the Red Sea above Egypt, and civilization will hear the news that French rule has been extended from Senegambia to the Nile.
The consummation of the Latin Union will hasten the confederation of Germany, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden in one nation, either under the leadership of the Hohenollern, Hapsburg or the new head of the house of Coburg-Gotha. Austria-Hungary is only bound together by the life of Francis Joseph and the fear of Russia. When the hour of separation arrives — which appears to draw near — Hungary will become a distinct nation, whose example may be followed by Bohemia. These with Austria, will join the German confederation; and the Scandinavian nations, by the force of outward pressure, will be compelled to do likewise or fall a prey to Russia. They would prefer the former alternative admits of no doubt, for the
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members of the Germanic confederation may enjoy state rights almost as independent nations.This day may seem very remote — but yet it may be precipitated at any moment by the death of that kind old emperor, Francis Joseph of Austria, or by an uprising in Italy. When that pregnant moment arrives civilization must be upon its guard, for Russia knows when the nationalization of races is effected and the Latin Union and Germanic confederation is an accomplished fact, then will ring the death knell of ail her hopes of the conquest of India and a Universal Russian Empire. A great council of the nations will convene in haste, for the destiny of the world will tremble in the balance.
The rulers of Europe learned a great lesson at the Berlin Congress.
Russia held Turkey prostrate in the dust, and the bright dream of Muscovite ambition was near realization, for at the close of the late Russo-Turkish war Skoboleff and Gourko clutched
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Constantinople in an iron grasp. But aroused Christendom blew her trumpet and called a halt. The Congress of Berlin was convened and sullen Russia had to accept its verdict. She was robbed of the fruits of the bloody war; for while her rival, Austria, got the two rich provinces of Herzegovina and Bosnia, England took Cyprus, the key to the Mediterranean, and France acquired the important province of Tunis — necessary to the perfection of her great African empire; but baffled Russia got a little slice of territory at the mouth of the Danube. Germany, with rare acumen, took only the glory of being peacemaker among nations. It was a sublime triumph, however, for the advocates of peace, and that time honored maxim, "the pen is mightier than the sword," gained a new and powerful meaning when the diplomats partitioned. Africa with a few strokes of the quill.The new factor in the world's affairs — Arbitration — was born at the Congress of Berlin. Out
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of the throes of the last great war arose this hope of the regeneration of the earth, a general disarmament of the nations and a universal peace. There the united efforts of Western civilization gave Russian aggression the first real check. Then Europe learned her power, which will thus be exercised in future, as long as men allow reason to hold sway over human passions.131
The Partition of the World.
When the great commotion incident to the nationalization of the Latin and German Races arises, then will be convened the most important tribunal since Christ stood before Pilate, for the complexion of the Earth will be adjudged by its members. It is probable the first question to be settled will be that of the ruler of the Germanic Confederation. William of Hohenzollern, who is winning the admiration of the world by his ardor and sagacity, will necessarily stand first; then the House of Hapsburg will be a most formidable competitor for the great crown; but the choice may, in all probability, fall to Victoria's son, whose wife is the only sister of the Russian Czar. France, England and Russia evidently would prefer him to William, and here lies a grave danger that may tax Diplomacy to its utmost. The proud Hohenzollern will not submit
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to vassalage — even as the powerful King of Prussia — without a death struggle.The next great problem will be the restoration of Alsace-Loraine to France, with, possibly the cession of the long coveted Rhine frontier to that nation. This may be effected by Russia giving up Poland to Germany, and accepting in turn all the Balkan provinces and Eastern Turkey, with Constantinople, and a slice off from northern Norway and Sweden for ports on the Atlantic. Germany may doubtless receive Servia, Montenegro, Western Turkey, with Salonica and the Kingdom of Greece, while Austria will probably lose Tyrol to the Latin Union, thus giving the latter nation a European population of one hundred and fourteen millions, consisting of Netherlands, Belgium, Germany to the Rhine, Alsace-Loraine, Switzerland, France, Luxemburg, Italy, Tyrol, Spain and Potugal. Italy will probably consist of a half dozen republics and the Pop will recover his temporal power at Rome.
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The Germanic confederation will probably contain about one hundred and ten million souls, with the territories of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Servia, Montenegro, Western Turkey and Greece, with the islands of its Archipelago.
Russia will then stretch from North Cape in a regular frontier down to a point east of Salonica and will embrace a European population of one hundred and ten million, with her capital at Constantinople.
England, by her insular position and vast wealth, will then hold the balance of power between the nations.
Encouraged by the remembrance of the Berlin Congress the nations, doubtless, will then settle forever the vexed Eastern Question. To secure herself in the possession of India, England may next be called upon to make some great concession. The dominions of Turkey will probably be divided as follows: Russia to receive the Northern
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and the Germanic Confederation the Southern half of Asia Minor, through to the frontiers of Persia, while Latin Union will be likely to get all north of thirty degrees thirty minutes, taking in Syria and Palestine to the borders of Persia. Next Persia will be remorselessly dismembered, Elboorg Mountains and across to the southern boundary of Turkestan.Then the Germanic Confederation will be granted a strip across Persia and Afghanistan about two hundred miles wide, eastward to the frontiers of China.
Next, the Latin Union will be given a similar territory through to India, receiving from England all of the latter country down to thirty degrees thirty minutes, across to the Chinese frontier; but in compensation for the great concession Britain will be awarded Beloochistan, the south third of Persia and all Arabia, making her
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a compact Empire of three millions of square miles, and more than three hundred millions of tropical subjects. But even yet the great work will not be completed until that mighty congress of the nation divides and dismembers China and distributes its territories among the three powers of the Old World. China is destined to be subjugated by the superiority of Europe at no distant day, and it is too grave a question to leave unsettled. Already the great Mongol Empire shows signs of disintegration and any day may witness its subversion by the powers of Europe. The people of Western Europe know how readily Russia could overrun the Mongol Empire, and once at the head of one-third of the human family the Muscovite could speedily subjugate the world. To avert this dire calamity, the great congress will divide its territories as calmly as Africa was partitioned at Berlin.Russia, doubtless, will receive most of its territory with one hundred and seventy-five millions
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of its people, her frontiers being carried down to a point south of the Hoang-Ho.The Germanic Confederation will next be awarded the central portion with the valley of the Yang-Tse-Kiang and one hundred and twenty-five millions of inhabitants, thus giving the German power a magnificent empire sweeping down from the North Cape to the Pacific at Shang-Hai. The Latin Union will receive the southern and remaining portion with its one hundred million population, and with her French possession of Siam, Anam and Malacca, together with the Islands of Borneo, Celebes and the Philipines will give that power a superb Asiatic empire of hundred and fifty million, extending in an unbroken line from Canton to Cairo.
England will in turn be rewarded with the islands of Sumatra, Java and the Spice Islands, to link Australia to her Indian Empire, which will then sweep from the Selwin river to the Suez Canal and be girded on the north by a double
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chain of German and Latin Union territories, thus separating and forever protecting her Indian Empire from Russia.This then is the true solution of the Eastern question which is the secret cause of Militarism, the curse, the burden and bane of civilization today.
The solution of this problem will tranquilize the world. It is true that the expansion of England and Russia would be forever arrested, but the remainder of the human family have determined that those two nations must be curbed. The advent of the dynamite gun terminated the naval supremacy of England, and now old Britain must listen to reason or speedily fall. But the instincts of self-preservation of the nations by a balance of power will allow England to retain her great colonies in the world, and by their consolidation and safety she may gain more by turning her attention to their development than by a selfish policy of expansion.
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The Suez Canal will be made an international highway, Latin Union territories crossing it at thirty degrees thirty minutes. England will command its Southern outlet.
Next Africa will be finally partitioned, Latin Union receiving all the northern part down nearly to the Congo, its southern boundary running from the Bight of Biafra to the mouth of the Red Sea, giving that power seven millions of territory arid eighty-five millions of African subjects.
Then England will be awarded a narrow strip South of this, running from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, for a trans-African railway. Her Southern territories will be extended and she will have African possessions with twenty-five million people.
The Germanic confederation, however, will receive the most valuable portions of the dark continent, embracing three millions of square miles with the Congo Valley and down to the
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Zatmbesi. The salubrious lake region will be embraced in this territory, which contains about eighty million of people and a country of marvelous fertility.
For the future assurance of peace a wise adjustment of the balance of power will be observed in the partition of the Old World.
Russia's enormous empire of more than eleven million square miles, with the unrivaled location of its capital at Constantinople, will justify the powers in curtailing the population to three hundred millions. The German confederation, including Greenland and Iceland, will stretch from Baffin's Bay to New Guinea, with an area of seven and one-half millions and a population of three hundred and thirty million.
The Latin Union, whose lower percentage of increase in population warrants a larger number of inhabitants, may be awarded a total of three hundred fifty millions of people with a magnificent territory of ten millions of square miles.
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The British Empire will lead the world in numbers with four hundred millions of souls and an Old World area of seven and one-half million square miles. Each nation will thus receive about an equal share of fertile land, for the territories of the Latin Union and Russia will include, in the former, the Great Desert of Sahara of three million, and the latter not less than five millions of square miles of the desert Tundras of the northern plain. Thus each of the four great powers will be endowed with an empire of six million square miles of fertile territory with an average population to the square mile as follows: Russia fifty, Latin Union sixty, Germany fifty-five, and Britain sixty-six to the square mile of habitable land, so the comparative density of their populations might well be represented by that of the states of Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and Ohio, localities which today are noted for the plenty and comfort by their people.
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The population of the Old World would aggravate thirteen hundred and eighty millions, leaving one hundred and twenty millions in America.
Should the United States profiting by her past mistakes and the wise example of Europe, assume the leadership of the Americas and become the head of the American federation, what a vision is presented of matchless grandeur and national greatness. With Canada and the Union as the seat of commerce, manufacturing, arts, education and science; with eight millions of square miles of tropical provinces for their markets, America would lead the world in glory and wealth. With fifteen millions of square miles of territory we would soon attract one hundred and eighty millions of the surplus population of the Old World, reducing thereby their average to fifty people to the square mile, while yet with a population of three hundred millions we would barely have twenty. America then would became the refuge for the world's expanding population for all future time.
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To many people this may seem but the dream of an enthusiast; but when we come to calmly, it becomes not only possible, but certain. Europe has already secured control of greater part of the Old World, and the only nations that have power, wealth and vitality enough to profit thereby are Britain, France, Germany and Russia. It is to the interest of the three former to strengthen themselves against Russia, not only for defense but for actual existence in the future. The law of the survival of the fittest indicates the speedy termination of the troubles attending the Eastern Question.
It is evident that the Pope, whose sagacious councils are to-day all powerful in Catholic countries, is favorable to the nationalization of the Latins of Southwestern Europe. The hatred of German dominion leads France to look to this end to regain her old-time degree of influence in Europe. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands would lose very
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much less than they would gain by the change. The Pope would thus regain, his temporal power and the Italian Republics might yet retrieve their old-time glory and riches as members of the Latin Union. In fact, this is the only course left for deeply-burdened and bankrupt Italy.French capital controls the commerce and finance of Italy, Spain and Portugal; Belgium is practically French in language and religion; Switzerland is in deep sympathy with the French Republic, and the Netherlands have no great love for Germany. The masses of these people are Catholics, and they are encouraged in their secret dreams of nationalization by the Pope and by leading members of the powerful clergy. England, at last, has recognized the fact that she will need all the aid of Western Europe to retain her control of India. To further this plan Britain will gladly consent not only to the Latin Union, but a vast confederation of the Teutonic race on the continent.
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Germany would hail with delight the broadening of her boundaries to a nation of three hundred and thirty million, with territories reaching from the Lofoden Isles to the mouth of the Yang-Tse-Kiang; for there is a deep-rooted suspicion in central Europe that Russia may, at some future time, extend her sway over Bohemia as well as Servia and Montenegro, thus forever arresting German expansion. Norway and Sweden, Austria and Hungary are, alike weakening their bonds of nationality, frail threads of tradition which may snap at any moment.
William of Germany, after many years of doubt and distrust, finally has won the respect of the world, which today recognizes in him one of her most sagacious and profound statesmen. The young Hohenzollern appears to be admired so warmly by his kingly neighbors that is not improbably he may peacefully effect a vast confederation of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Austro-Hungary, Servia, Western Turkey and Greece
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in a compact union under the leadership of Germany. He is a tireless, active worker in behalf of his subjects, who are beginning to realize that he has their interest at heart. In fact, there are many factors silently, but surely, working towards the goal of German ambition — the unification of central Europe in a Germanic confederation, and the finger of Destiny points with furtive significance at the figure of William of Hohenzollern, of whom history may yet record that the "grandson" became the father of German unity.Another potent factor in the nationalization of the Latins and Germans into vast confederations is the influence of the bondholders of Europe, This wily and shrewd class, who hold between twenty and thirty thousand millions of national bonds, are deeply interested in anything which will add to the security of their holdings. The bondholding banker is the real potentate of Christendom today, for without his sanction no wars of modern times are waged, At any moment
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Italy, Spain and Portugal may be declared bankrupt. Anstro-Hungary also hovers on the borderland of financial embarrassment, and one great and expensive war would bring nations to ruin. To avert this, and to prevent the loss of probably ten billions of bonds, the all-powerful bondholder must be reckoned as a factor in favor of a peaceful solution of a militarism by the settlement of the Eastern Question and a nationalization of the Latin and German Races of the two great powers of the Latin Union and Germanic confederations.By settling these great questions Europe may at once and forever rid herself of militarism, then being prepared for the next step of colonization of the tropics, the solution of Anarchism becomes easy and practicable.
Anarchism is largely an outgrowth of the twin evils: Militarism, and an overcrowded population. Remove those causes and the resulting effect to exist.
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Federation of the Americas.
That the old world will be partitioned among the four Great Powers of Europe within twenty years is a foregone conclusion, for to-day it is almost a certain fact. But while this great question is being settled shall America sit down supinely and waste her prodigious energies in wrangling over matters of local importance?
The United States must awaken to the exigencies of the hour before it is too late. As the wealthiest and most enlightened nation on earth, she should proudly declare her intention of becoming mistress of America. Canada is becoming ripe for annexation and her advances should be welcomed with no doubtful enthusiasm.
Cuba will naturally fall to us, as will the lesser islands of the West Indies. A little encouragement will bring Hayti, San Domingo, and the Sandwich Islands into our fold.
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Latin America, embracing eight million square miles of the richest lands on the globe, is wasting her golden opportunities in anarchy and strife. Life and property are so insecure and the governments so unstable, that foreigners hesitate to risk the chance of life in her turbulent republics. Yet so prodigious are her natural resources that the Old World would make common cause and subjugate the Latin Americas, with the same insatiable desire of conquest as that which prompted them to overrun Africa and a great portion of Asia. Only the fear of the powerful arm of the United States has maintained the independence of the South and Central American Republics to the present time. One day our government has to dispatch a fleet to Rio to see that England and Germany do not subvert a sister republic while in the throes of a rebellion. At another time our squadrons are ordered to Blue-field to warn England to keep her hands off the key to our Nicaragua Canal. France intrigues
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for the Isthmus of Panama, or sets ip a vassal empire in Mexico; but when Uncle Samuel calmly unrolls that time honored scroll, the Monroe Doctrine, and begins to finger his needle gun, the foreign intruder hastily bows an apology and makes his exit. Admiral Benham, who not only protected our own merchantmen from the shells of De Gama, but in addition became the brave champion for the defenseless vessels of other nations at Rio during the bombardment by rebels, raised the prestige of the United States, in the minds of our Latin neighbors, higher than it has ever stood since we told Louis Napoleon to clear out of Mexico.Our weaker sister republics have come to lean and depend upon the all-powerful arm of the American Union, and now one supreme effort on our part would weld them to us in a bond of federation from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn. In the great nationalization of America we might not go so far as the German confederation may
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go, but the bond of union should be close enough to give our citizens emigrating there the benefit of our protection from molestation by the turbulence of countries long torn by civil commotion and strife.No longer would the settler in tropical America fear that he might be mustered under arms to side with this or that dictator or congress. Our own great tribunal would peaceably settle all such disputes as rend Brazil. The Amazon, Orinoco and Parana valleys would, under treaties, be thrown open to settlement with free homes of two hundred acres each, while the government of South America would furnish transportation to millions of Asiatics to act as tenants on the new plantations.
Our railways would hurry over the Andes, and, tapping the great rivers with their thousands of miles of navigation, could pour a stream of northern emigration into the rich valleys, threaded by the vast rivers, on which to their
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remotest confines could ply steamers and sailing crafts.The American markets must be ours, for we then would be possessed of the commerce of a newer India. The Latin States should be free in their domestic affairs, but we of the United States should only be capable of making treaties or declaring war. This will give us control of their commerce.
As morally today we are the protectors of Latin America, certainly we should not be denied the usual privileges awarded to a protector. We should grant them free trade, as between the States of our own Union; but in return they should accept our Custom Laws, thus giving reciprocal markets to the products if both countries. Our railroads then would soon ramify the vast and incredibly fertile country south of us, linking us together by strong commercial ties. In fact we should at once proceed to assert a protectorate over the Latin nations of America.
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Europe would not dare deny what she so long has tacitly acknowledged, and the United States, at future Congress of Nations, can become the Mistress of America, in a legal sense.
When we assert that no nation of Europe may hold territory on this continent, nor America in the Old World, we shall effect a compromise that will be satisfactory even to greedy old England. When this important step is taken Latin America will become the heritage of the more enterprising North. No injustice need be done those Southern Sisters, but we could colonize vast tracts of their fertile lands with our already superabundant population and import vast swarms of Asiatics as laborers for the plantations, thus transferring the half-starved peasants of over crowded India, China and Japan to homes of to comfort and plenty, and at the same time relieve the congested centres of our population by the sure reward of a life of ease and comparative luxury as planters in the tropics.
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The liberties and autonomy of the Latin American republics need not be impaired by this union. On the contrary they would only assume a prouder station in the world by the transaction. Hungary, in its union with Austria, has become a potent factor in the affairs of the world, while security and tranquility is maintained by its close connection with more powerful Austria. Scotland, as an independent country, would sink low indeed in the scale of nations; but as part of the gigantic Empire of Britain its influence and importance is enhanced an hundred fold.
Thus would it be: with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, states which at present are perpetually at brawl, either at home or with their neighbors. As portions of our vast brotherhood of nations, presided over by the paternal authority of our own powerful and enlightened republic, they would become tranquilized, and, when their idle lands should become the plantations of our energetic
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northern race, and tilled by the labor of oriental tenantry, a day of splendor would dawn for those benighted countries unknown since the days of the Incas and Montazumas.New cities, towns and villages would spring up, enriching and employing a large commercial and professional class to supply the wants of a great and new civilization. Our northern mills, foundries and factories would feel the magic impulse of a new and expanding market, and business would revive permanently.
No northern nation can thrive in commerce and manufacturing without having tropical markets. We have none at present. Then let us make them! This can be accomplished by federating the Americas, with the United States as its leading power. We should extend our strong arms over the South and make it forever impossible for one of the Latin nations to rob Peru of its nitrate beds or Bolivia of its sea coast through the wanton aggression of military force. Make
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it impossible for a De Gama or Mello to rebel and bombard a defenseless city, and teach the dictators how to gracefully surrender their powers at the close of their constitutional terms of office. Make the Latin nations submit their quarrels to arbitration. Give them every advantage, of a free market with us for their raw materials and products, and in turn extend our custom laws over the whole continent. The world by that time will pursue a similar course with its provinces, hence we will have no foreign markets. The products of India, Austria, Africa and New Zealand have cheapened our markets in England by their competition until we must speedily look elsewhere.Here in Latin America is the golden chance not only for northern agricultural products, but also for our manufactured goods to find a safe and profitable market.
Let us then, in a spirit of national wisdom, lay side our political jealousies and bend all our
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energies to the Federation of America and tropical colonization. By this achievement we can become the regenerated Rome, Canada and New England the Greece, Brazil the Newer India, Argentine the Egypt, Chili the Phoenicea, and Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico the Ophir of modern times. The anarchist will disappear, lost forever in the bewildering maze of comfort and luxury on his tropical plantation, and business stagnation will be unknown in a civilization only hastening after the blessings of happiness and comfort.163
Colonization of the Tropics.
Admitting that Europe and America, working in harmony for their own salvation, have solved the great problems of the age, and the world owns the supremacy of the five great powers, whose boundaries are adjusted to the mutual interest of all, then will dawn the golden era of progress and human development. Great railways will link China with Europe, the Strait of Gibraltar may be tunnelled, and it is not an unreasonable prediction that trains may run from Paris through Madrid, Algiers, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Babylon and Cashmere, then piercing the Himalayas may steam on through Thibet and China to Canton. Others may be completed through Germany to Athens and Salonica, from which port swift steamers will transfer freight and passengers to Smyrna, the western terminus of the great German railroad to the Pacific coast
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of China. England will hurry to link Suez with her Indian railway system, another line across Africa may also be built by Britain, and even Behring Strait may be bridged or tunnelled, and New York tourists may yet ride in vestibule trains through Chicago, Pekin and Constantinople to Paris.Africa will be pierced by great iron highways and its fertile lands made accessible to Caucasian planters and Oriental and Negro tenantry. The Northwestern Sahara will be flooded from the Atlantic and a great inland sea may admit vessels to a region near Timbuctoo. Western Europe may readily spare one-half its teeming population, who will emigrate southward to become planters in its rich valleys and wide plateaux, the soil of which will be owned through occupancy by whole planters and tilled by African and Asiatic tenantry. Lines of railway acriss the Sahara to Mediterranean ports are already projected by France, whose artesian wells are making even
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that great desert habitable. Possibly that vast stretch of arid land, together with Arabia, may be planted with growths of suitable plants and watered by artesian wells, thus becoming the great natural pasture field of Europe and Asia.Africa, exclusive of the Sahara and Kalihari deserts, contains the vast area of eight million square miles — more than five billions of acres of land, which, would give twenty-five millions of plantations of two hundred acres each, suitable to the growth of cotton, tobacco, corn, tropical fruits, sugar and coffee, together with plants peculiar to that region of great commercial value to mankind.
The colonization of such a vast tract, with more than one hundred millions of Europeans and as many more Indians and Chinese, may tax the resources of Europe to its utmost; but when we remember that the cost of preserving the peace of the world entails a yearly expense of two billions of dollars, more than half of which would
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be saved to the nation by me adjustment of the Eastern Question and a partition of the Eastern World, we realize the fact that Europe could well afford to improve her new domain by transporting her settlers to their destination and by assistance in various ways.When Christendom realizes that her last great war has been fought — that her resources, heretofore wasted, may be diverted to the double purpose of ridding her crowded centers of the bomb-thrower and at the same time develop new empires, whose resources and commerce will return to her treasury an hundred fold the money expended in the great enterprise, then the multi-millionaire and proletariat will be moved to the same motives which rule all human action, obedient to the laws of self-preservation and personal interest.
The expenditure of the savings on armaments, by the general disarmament of the nations, will enable Western Europe to devote a thousand
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million dollars annually to her African colonies, thus enlarging her boundaries five fold. Who doubts the result? Spread over a period of twenty years half the population of England, the Germanic confederation and Latin Union could be settled on plantations on the Dark Continent with a negro, Chinese and Hindoo family for tenants. This would be the death knell of Anarchism in Europe: for the restless, the dissatisfied and the despairing poor would be in the very van of the mighty migration of races. It is trite that the movement would deplete the population of those old countries, but not to an alarming degree, when we keep in view the fact Europe would be but enlarging her boundaries. The remaining population, largely employed in skilled labor, would receive double pay, for the markets would be more than doubled. Shorter hours of labor, assisted by electrical applications to machinery, would lighten and sweeten the lives of the still168
teeming millions of the mother land. Then the cheapness of the heretofore unattainable luxuries of the tropics would add its blessing to the lot of the half famished laborers of Western Europe, who through love of country and the attraction of an exalted civilization might prefer to remain in the older land. The lands of Europe would gradually be subdivided into homes for the masses. Arabia, under Britain's fostering care, would become a vast coffee plantation, in its more favored localities, the remaining portions being irrigated by artesian wells sufficient to maintain flocks to feed Britain, while semi-arid Australia in its northern portion would undergo a similar process of improvement.Asia Minor, Syria and the Mesopotamian plain would be restored to their olden fertility, through the energy of Germany and France, and the buried glories of art and wealth, among the ruined cities of this region, would enrich the world of art and history by being once again revealed to light
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teeming millions of the mother land. Then the cheapness of the heretofore unattainable luxuries of the tropics would add its blessing to the lot of the half famished laborers of Western Europe, who through love of country and the attraction of an exalted civilization might prefer to remain in the older land. The lands of Europe would gradually be subdivided into homes for the masses. Arabia, under Britain's fostering care, would become a vast coffee plantation, in its more favored localities, the remaining portions being irrigated by artesian wells sufficient to maintain flocks to feed Britain, while semi-arid Australia in its northern portion would undergo a similar process of improvement.Asia Minor, Syria and the Mesopotamian plain would be restored to their olden fertility, through the energy of Germany and France, and the buried glories of art and wealth, among the ruined cities of this region, would enrich the world of art and history by being once again revealed to light.
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Britain, Latin Union and Germany would transform Africa to a region more wealthy and populous than India, and its markets and commerce would enrich its masters in Europe. With the vast demand in professional, financial and commercial channels thus open to the Caucasian in these new regions, we should hear no more complaints of redundant labor or over production in manufactures, for skilled labor would soon command the wages of professional talent.
In America, should a federation be formed, treaties and laws might be enacted which would simplify colonization in Latin America. By arrangement with Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia millions of square miles of their unoccupied lands might be thrown open to settlement under a uniform law, granting two hundred acres to each family of whites, with three families of the inferior races for tenants. The conditions of settlement should be ownership by occupancy —
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the planter and tenants to share equally in the products of the land and to pay taxes equal to the average of the nation.The tenure of title should be vested in the nation, which will tend to correct the curse of land monopoly and prevent the recurrence of the evil of a landless and homeless class; for these plantations should be held in perpetuity by the nation. The planter and tenants might be allowed the privilege of exchanging locations, when, for social or climatic reasons a change would be desirable, but as the home would be exempt from debt, hence would be inalienable, plantations would become in a measure hereditary properties by their occupants, for just as long as the plantation was occupied it would virtually be the property of the occupant.
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Obstacles to Colonization of the Tropics.
The two-fold obstacles to be met with in colonizing the northern people are Political and Natural.
The partition of Africa among the nations of France, Britain and Germany, by a peaceful conference of diplomats, paved the way, in the Old World, to future, colonization of that country by Europeans. When the various African empires of those European countries are fixed by a final absorption of all its territories into these great realms of new and uncultivated lands, then will dawn the true era of prosperity for Western Europe, for millions of its people will flock to the Dark Continent to become tropical planters with Negro and Oriental tenantry.
Victor Hugo, with futurity piercing vision, saw this and said: "As America was the theatre of
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civilization during the nineteenth so will Africa be in the twentieth century." The political obstacles in that region are being overcome by the somewhat questionable methods of European warfare waged against the brutish but powerless native population, and by the more enlightened arts of diplomacy. At any rate it is safe to predict that all the lands of Africa will belong to France, England and Germany by the end of this century, or at least will be controlled by the three great nations of western Europe.But in America the political obstacles to the colonist from the Union are of a very grave nature. From the Rio Grande southward stretch away eight million square miles of Spanish and Portuguese speaking inhabitants, about one-fourth of which are of pure white blood, the remainder being an admixture of Indian, Negro and — indolence, the latter strain predominating. The various republic, if we except Mexico, Chili, Argentine and Uruguay, are in a state of semi-anarchy,
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and are republican only in name, for one high-handed dictator follows another in bloody succession, in the consequence turmoils of which the vast natural resources of that region remain undeveloped.It is true that Brazil encourages emigration and a large number of settlers are landing on her shores; but the heat of her climate makes it impossible for a northern man to stand manual labor. Nothing but the importation of vast hordes of Asiatics from China, India and Japan would ever serve to subjugate the rich valleys of the Amazon and its thousand armed affluents. Not until law is enforced by the strong arms and cool heads of northern white men will this be effected. It has been stated on good authority that out of the two billions of acres of land which constitutes the Brazilian nation not one acre in two hundred is under cultivation. Yet notwithstanding the small area tillled, the bulk of the world's supply of coffee comes from that
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region, and her annual export of products exceed one hundred millions of dollars.This vast amount may be termed her surplus after maintaining fourteen millions of people! When half her vast and incredibly fertile acres are under cultivation her yield would increase, in proportion, by a hundred fold! Then added to her area are those of Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Paraguay and Central America, making more than five million square miles of the richest lands on the globe almost untouched. There are yet millions of square miles of this region still government land, only waiting political stability and proper laws to become richer and more populous than India.
Nothing but occupancy of the soil by enterprising white men from the North and oriental tenantry can ever redeem this superb country from its slothful condition.
That those Southern regions still thrive under all their loads of indolence and misgovernment
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is but a proof of the bounties of nature which here are poured out in such lavish prodigality that riches are forced upon its inhabitants, while, in the meager North, millions of highly intelligent and frugal people are yearning for a spot that they may call home.The great distance of this tropical country from the centers of western civilization, the expense of the voyage and the political insecurity of Latin America makes any attempt at colonization by weak and poor families utterly futile; hence the poor of the North remain in their misery and become a prey to the theories of anarchism, by the triumph of which fallacy they hope to become possessed of independence when a general distribution of property ensues.
The disturbing fact has become apparent that the United States no longer has a public domain with which to endow her rapidly increasing millions. In only one what can the betterment of the condition of her people be effected,
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and that is by colonizing the valley of the Amazon and the tropical plateaux of South and Central America. We stand, and have stood for years, ready to expend our blood and treasure in defense of Latin America against European aggression.Can they not reciprocate by giving us the leadership on this continent! If not, we should take it! We should follow the example of European nations and annex all we can and establish protectorates wherever possible in America.
A sisterhood of nations on this continent must be established under the powerful but benign sway of Uncle. Sam — that once accomplished the rest is easy. Our citizens could then go to the most remote tributaries of the Amazon or Orinoco under the all powerful shadow of our laws.
The natural obstacles to colonizing the tropics are these: Climate, the plagues of insect life and the scourges of yellow fever and cholera.
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But yellow fever is the great enemy of the white man in tropical America, for it often visits those regions with appalling mortality; yet we should not forget that our own temperate climate is also ravaged at times by the dread scourge. Memphis, located far up in the north temperate zone, was recently decimated by a visitation of the yellow fever. Good sanitation and the triumphs of medical science promises soon to divest this plague and cholera of their honors by the process of innoculation, as smallpox has been rendered harmless by the same agency.
The boundless forests of the Amazon are an obstacle to the cultivation of that region that may well make even northern energy pause in dismay; for not less than a thousand million acres of fertile land is covered by a tangled mass of rank vegetable growth and forest giants in a bewildering maze of tropical luxuriance, which hitherto has defied the hands of man, possibly from the fact that no concerted and intelligent
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effort has been made for its subjugation.But once let a few million Asiatics invade this region, led and directed by men of northern energy, each intent on clearing a plantation for himself and those workmen as tenants, and the great forest would disappear as rapidly as did that of the region east of the Mississippi.
With the aid of small portable steam engines, might be brought to bear upon the leviathans of the forest, whose valuable trunks of rosewood, mahogany, ebony and satin-wood, together with thousands of other varieties, valuable beyond measure to the wants of man, could be felled, trimmed and sawed into lumber and then floated down the rivers to market, or laid up on the dry plateaux for the use of future ages. The brushwood and useless vines might be left to dry upon the ground. The stumps after having holes bored therein, which should be filled with crude saltpetre and petroleum, when the dry season has
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reduced the clearing of a dry jungle, should be fired with the whole tract. The stumps treated in this manner will burn to their remotest rootlet and the once impervious forest will become an ash heap, leaving a cleared field of marvelous fertility ready for crops of maize, cotton, sugar-cane, tobacco, jute and indigo, which will quickly smother out the quick tropical growths of a wild nature.Fire ants and locusts are among the most formidable enemies to agriculture in tropical America, but by the researches of science we now are able to propagate parasites and diseases among the insects so successfully that by an earnest effort at international co-operation we soon can rid America of these pests. Prof. Snow's chintz bug cholera has been used with perfect success, and by this agency the West has been practically freed from the ravages of that very destructive scourge of farming, the chintz bug.
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Is there any good reason that the same agency might not be employed in exterminating other insect enemies?
The Commissioners of Agriculture should be required to make this matter an important order of their duties. They could disseminate the remedies among the planters with instructions for their use — designating time and methods of procedure.
Animals and reptiles abound in the tropics, species of which are dangerous to human life, but these conditions also existed in the early of America. The breech-loading rifle in the hands of the colonists will soon, remedy these evils.
Swamps and morasses, breeding pestilential fevers, are found along the tropical rivers, but these could be drained by the same systematic efforts as have reclaimed similar regions in Ohio and Indiana, where the most unhealthful localities in our Union have been thus converted to salubrious farms of great fertility.
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Resources of the Tropics.
When we realize the wonderful productiveness of a tropical region such as that of the Amazon valley, the possession of an estate of two hundred acres, only half of which may be in cultivation, is an assurance of comfort and even luxury to its owner.
Americans engaged in coffee culture in Mexico calculate on a return of fifteen thousand dollars annually from twenty-five acres of coffee trees, six years after planting! Think then for one moment of the income from one hundred acres of such lands at one half rental.
It is true the increased production of coffee, which might result from extensive tropical colonization, would greatly cheapen its price — in itself no mean blessing — yet the greatly enhanced consumption attendant upon universal prosperity would but reduce this commodity to a fair price,
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while the planter and tenants still might live, by the profits, in comparative comfort and luxury.Then northern energy and intelligence would soon effect the introduction and acclimation of the most delicious fruits of Asia, Africa and Malaysia into the colonies of South America. The mangosteen, uniting the flavors of the strawberry, grape, raspberry and orange, its fruit the size of a large peach, growing on a tree similar to our northern apple, would add a hitherto unknown luxury to western civilization.
The chirimoya, growing on a lofty tree like our elm, is a fruit weighing fifteen pounds, which travelers compare to a "spiritualized strawberry." It already is acclimated in the Andean region of South America, and by propagation it might be spread over great portions of that country. But the people of the north are just beginning to realize the advantages offered by the tropics.
The butter tree of Africa might, by careful attention, be introduced into tropical America.
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It grows along the Niger in great profusion and yields one hundred pounds of butter from a tree at each, gathering, which may be repeated in a few months. Buel and Karl Muller attest the truth of this fact, and the former says: "The butter, which is a secretion of the tree, is hardly of the consistency of ordinary butter, but on exposure to cold it hardens, and when salt is added it is almost impossible for a person to distinguish it from fresh, pure butter."
Generous nature has given its complimentary blessing to man in the milk or cow-tree of South America. Humboldt mentions this wonderful gift to mankind and he had the milk analyzed, finding it similar to cow's milk in its properties. The natives make an incision in the bark of the tree from which issues a stream of fresh, cold milk. These assertions may seem incredible; but, nevertheless, they are facts of which the reader may be convinced by a little investigation on his part.
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The taro root, an edible tuber, grows in some parts of the tropical world on marshy lands, and is so prolific that fifteen hundred people may subsist on a square mile of its yield.
Another tropical fruit, almost unknown to our northern civilization, is the durion, which may justly be styled the king, as the orange is the queen, of fruits. Wallace thus describes it:
"The durion grows on a large and lofty forest tree, somewhat resembling an elm in its general character, but with a more smooth bark. The fruit is round or slightly oval, about the size of a cocoanut and of a green color. The pulp is the eatable part and its consistence and flavor are indescribable. A rich, butter-like custard, highly flavored with almonds, gives the best idea of it; but intermingled with it come wafts of flavor that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, brown sherry and other incongruities. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its
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delicacy. It is neither acid nor sweet, nor juicy, yet one feels the want of none of these qualities, for it is perfect as it is. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop. In fact to eat durions is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience."Another gift of the great Maker to mankind is the bread fruit tree, of which Dr. Hartwig says: "The bread fruit tree (artocarpus incisa) is the great gift of Providence to the fairest isles of Polynesia. No fruit or forest trees in the North of Europe, with the exception of the oak or linden, is its equal in regularity of growth and comeliness of shape; it far surpasses the wild chestnut, which somewhat resembles it in appearance. Its large oblong leaves, frequently a foot and a half long, are deeply lobed like those of the fig tree, which they resemble not only in color and consistence, but also in exuding a milky juice when broken. About the time
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when the sun, advancing toward the tropic of Capricorn, announces to the Tahitians that summer is approaching, it begins to produce new leaves and young fruit which commence ripening in October and may be plucked for about eight months in luxuriant succession. The fruit is the size and shape of an infant's head; and the surface is reticulated, not much unlike a truffle; it is covered with a thin skin and has a core about the thickness of the handle of a small knife. The eatable part lies between the skin and the core; it is white as snow, and somewhat of the consistence of new bread. It must be roasted before it is eaten, being first divided into three or four parts; its taste according to some is insipid, with a slight sweetness, somewhat resembling that of the crumbs of wheaten bread mixed with boiled and mealy potatoes. But Wallace, who met with it in the island of Amboyna, speaks of it in very different terms. He says: — "Here I enjoyed a193
luxury I have never met with either before or since — the true bread fruit. It is baked entire in the hot embers, and the inside scooped out with a spoon. I compared it to Yorkshire pudding; others thought it was like mashed potatoes and milk."It is generally, about the size of a melon, a little fibrous toward the center, but every where else quite smooth and puddingly. We some times made curry or stew with it, or fried it in slices; but it is no way so good as simply baked. With meat and gravy it is a vegetable superior to any I know either in temperate or tropical countries. With sugar, milk, butter, or treacle, it is a delicious pudding, having a very slight and delicate but characteristic flavor, which, like that of good bread and potatoes, one never tires."
A single bunch of bananas often weighs from sixty to seventy pounds, and Humboldt has calculated that thirty-three pounds of wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes require the same
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space of ground to grow upon as will produce four thousand pounds of bananas.Dr. Hartwig says of the sago palm, growing in profusion along the Amazon: "A good sized tree will afford nine hundred pounds of raw sago. This will make six hundred pounds of bread, and one tree will therefore supply a man with food for a whole year. Two men will easily finish a tree in five days, so that a man in ten days can raise and make his flour for a whole year. If he chooses to bake his year's supply at once, another ten days is quite enough; so that the labor of twenty days will give him food for a year. This is on the supposition that he happens to own sago trees. If he does not, he can buy one standing for two dollars. As the price of a man's labor in this region is estimated at ten cents a day, the cost of food ready cooked for a man is four dollars a year."
A hundred of the palm trees can be grown upon an acre of tropical land. Needing little or
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no care after planting, they would mature in twelve years and produce sixty thousand pounds of bread — an average of five thousand pounds per annum — enough to provide eight people with their daily food.The yam returns an hundred fold from planting in the moist soil of the Amazon valley. India rubber, quinine, dye woods, spices and mate, or American tea, aid their resources to the already bewildering riches of tropical agriculture. The production of artificial ice and the cheapness of wire screens insures a degree of comfort to dwellers in the tropics unknown in former times.
What more alluring prospect need be presented to the homeless and despairing poor — put of employment and rent day drawing near, hopeless and wretched with the monotony of poverty — than a picture of such comfort as a tropical plantation presents? With the sublime hope of such a life, surrounded by the perfume of flowers,
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the fruits of Eden at hand to gratify every taste, a picturesque, if rude home, where the courteous hospitality of the planter supersedes the shame and fear begotten in people of true refinement by the curse of poverty and dependence, there would be neither time, cause nor inclination for anarchism.199
Transportation to the Tropics.
Europe can transport her colonists to the tropics by the saving accruing through the disarmament of half her standing armies.
But America has a grave problem to face in the question of transporting so many millions. This may be solved by the railways, which may soon reach navigation on the Amazon. The railroads should give very cheap rates by running emigrant trains. The companies could well afford to carry passengers as cheaply as they do the cattle of the plains. A train of thirty cars might convey five hundred people at $20.00 each and allow them to carry a great many household effects. These trains, running and hour apart, would transport twelve thousand persons daily, earning the roads two hundred and forty thousand dollars a day, these cars should bring back the products of the tropic — thus cheapening the
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freight one-half, and the fare thereby might be reduced to $10.00.Already the Santa Fe railroad runs its trains into and beyond the heart of Mexico, and, doubtless, will hurry forward to the Orinoco, or some navigable branch of the Amazon. In the great rush of travel, consequent upon the exodus of one-fourth of the population of the United States to the tropics, this road alone could carry three or four millions of people southward yearly and earn from fifty to one hundred millions thereby, and that, too, at $10.00 a head.
New York city spends fifteen million dollars yearly in charity. Other cities, towns and localities swell the amount until it would not fall short the amount of one hundred millions annually. This sum, or a small portion thereof, would solve the problem of transporting many poor and homeless people — who in their present state are a burden and menace to society — to a new home in the tropics. Every town would find it wise to raise
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contributions for this purpose, and the churches might divert their home mission fund to settling distressed people where they might end their days in peace and plenty. But national aid should be extended to all poor citizens in their efforts to secure homes in the tropics and national loans at three per cent., might be granted them on fifty years' time for this purpose.A Medical Commission should be instituted to examine emigrants and locate them where best suitable to those predisposed to pulmonary complaints.
The transportation of Asiatics should be undertaken by the Latin American nations; these could be brought over and delivered on plantations in the ratio of three oriental tenants to each white person. These tenants could repay their passage money, after a few years, so the nations would lose little and gain incredible national wealth by the transaction.
The Union and Canada should exclude this
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class of orientals from our territories, but the precaution of gaining permission to secure vast numbers of them should not be neglected, and treaties should be made with the great powers settling this important question.For several years past Brazil has paid the passage of her immigrants, their fare from their homes being refunded to them on arrival at her ports, and the charges of their transportation to the colony is borne by the Brazilian government. Other South American nations are following this rule as rapidly as their disordered finances will permit, and in addition to fare and transportation other aid of a substantial nature is often extended to the settler by the various Latin American nations.
This system evinces a desire on the part of those countries to promote immigration. They are ripe for the movement. Nothing but the unstable nature of their governments prevents them from inaugurating, on a grand scale, the
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system of tropical colonization. But by co-operating in a federation of America this movement would acquire safety and uniformity of purpose.The majority of would-be emigrants in the United States are poor — they find it impossible to raise money sufficient to defray the expenses of their journey, hence our own government should stand ready to bear this expense, half or all of which might be refunded by the Latin American States on the arrival of the immigrant within their territories.
Bureaus of Emigration should be established either by government or co-operation, and all homeless people in our overcrowded centres of population should be supplied with information to enable them to form themselves into colonies. Then when their location has been selected and arrangements made to have the Oriental, Indian or Negro tenants on the land on their arrival thereat, the expedition could set out by ship or rail under the charge of a government agent.
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Thus all uncertainty of movement would be obviated, and families, friends and relatives might secure contiguous plantations, thus affording them the satisfaction of close neighborship and future co-operation.
At the end of their journey these white colonists should find a building provided for their temporary sojourn until the habitations of a more permanent and private nature could be provided on their allotments by the labors of the three families of tenants, directed in their efforts by the planter.
The expense of transporting colonists should really be borne by the various governments. The sums thus expended could be repaid by the colonists, who should be charged no higher than three per cent., annually, and the time of payment might be extended for twenty or even fifty years.
The expense attending the removal of one-fourth of our people to the tropics might aggregate
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the total of five hundred million dollars. This may seem like an enormous sum, but pray remember we expend a vast amount annually in coast and harbor defenses and upon what then will be a useless navy. Let us now protect ourselves from our eternal foe, the anarchist.209
The Colonization of Tropical America.
Southward from the Rio Grande exists a vast and almost untouched empire of the most fertile lands on the globe, aggregating eight million square miles in area. It is true that portions of this highly favored country are thickly peopled and in a fair degree of cultivation; but this is mainly true only of the elevated regions of the Cordilleras and the coast lands of Brazil. The mighty valleys of the Amazon, Orinoco and Parana; and hundreds of other navigable streams, are yet almost in a state of primeval solitude. This region embraces an area so vast that all the territories of China proper, India, Western Europe and the North Eastern states of our Union, with their billion of people, might be contained within its boundaries. The soil and climate of this country surpasses that of India,
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which, with one-fourth its area, contains a population of three hundred million. Yet one may travel for days through portions of marvelously fertile country in the interior of South America without meeting a human being — this, too, in a land capable of sustaining a more dense population than the Kingdom of Belgium with its six hundred people to the square mile.The basin of the Amazon contains two million seven hundred thousand square miles, an area two hundred and forty times greater than that of Belgium, whose total population it does not equal. Peopled with the density of the latter country it would contain one and a half billion of souls, and from its boundless resources even then they would exist in a greater degree of comfort than is found today among the peasants of Belgium.
Then in addition to the basin of the Amazon is that of the Orinoco, of three hundred thousand, and the La Plata, of one million two hundred and fifty thousand square miles and that of the
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basins of the Paranahyba and Upper Francisco aggregating five million square of tropical lands, practically undisturbed by the hand of man.Orton says of the valley of the Amazon: "It possesses the most enjoyable climate of the world, with a clear atmosphere, only equaled by that of Quito, and with no changes of seasons. Life may be maintained with as little labor as in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps no country in the world is capable of yielding so large a return to agriculture. Nature, evidently designing this land as the home of a great nation, has heaped up her bounties of every description. Fruits of rarest flavors, woods of finest grain, dyes of gayest colors, drugs of rarest virtues, and last no sirocco or earthquake to disturb the people.
And Agassiz sums up the capacities of the marvelous region of the Amazon basin in the following words; "Its woods alone have an almost priceless value. No where in the world is there
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finer timber, either for solid construction or for ornament."The rivers, which flow past those magnificent forests, seem meant to serve, first as water power for the saw mills which ought to be established on their borders, and then as means of transportation for material so provided.
"What surprised me most was to find that a great part of this region was favorable to raising of cattle. An empire might esteem itself rich in any one of the sources of industry which abound in this valley; and yet the greater part of its vast growth rots on the ground and goes to form a little more river mud, or to stain the shores on which its manifold products die and decompose."
"Of the precious tortoise shell wood enough is torn up by the roots and carried down by the annual floods of the Amazon to veneer all the palaces of the world," are the remarks of another traveller, who viewed with shocked amazement this prodigal waste of nature's gifts.
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The plateaux of Brazil, Guiana, Mexico and Central America constitute a vast empire of virgin land with a climate resembling that of Italy. Millions of square miles, probably aggregating twenty-five times the area of Italy with its thirty million people, are practically unsettled and unpeopled today. These regions are capable of sustaining as dense a population as Italy — yet with one-third its population to the square mile they would contain two hundred and fifty million inhabitants!
The mountains of this region are a storehouse of gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, coal, iron, copper and marble. All the minerals, valuable and necessary to the wants of a great and highly civilized people, are here found in almost unrivaled richness and profusion, of which the silver mines of Potosi is an example. Mineral and healing springs abound on those elevated and salubrious table lands, while the scenery often is of transcendent beauty. The
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soil, however, is not of such prodigious fertility as that of the mammoth valleys of the Amazon, Orinoco, Parana and Tapajos, but the healthfulness and less degree of heat on the table lands may recompence the settler for this disparity.The prevalence of yellow fever in tropical America can be arrested by sanitary measures and by inoculation. It is a well known fact that filth, bad draining and heat are the conditions necessary to the propagation of this dreaded scourge, which is almost unknown on the table lands of South America. The fear of this disease may prevent many people from emigrating to this region; but we must not forget the scourges of our climate, for consumption and pneumonia cause the death 10,000 people annually in New York city. These two diseases cause a yearly mortality of 176,000 in the United States, while fevers of various kinds swell the annual death roll of our nation to 238,000.
Lung diseases are not prevalent in the agricultural
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cultural districts of the tropics, hence in incurring exposure to yellow fever the colonist would yet have his average chances of life. It is safe to predict that very soon science will conquer yellow fever and cholera as effectually as smallpox has been mastered by the same agency. Yellow fever is no more destructive or dreadful than la grippe, and, as it usually appears in crowded and unspeakably filthy cities, its very existence may be rapidly stamped out by the efforts of a great international health commission. When the day of federation arrives and all the Americas are a great nation, independent in their local affairs, yet each country practically a self-governing state under the control of the United States, it will be possible for them to co-operate in this gigantic system of colonization. The colonists, from the congested centers of northern population may go southward in mighty swarms like those which swept over Rome in her decline when Goth and Vandal subdued her degenerate216
population and with their northern vigor regenerated Southern Europe.Mexico, West Indies, Central America, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia will then feel the impulse of northern energy and might soon rise to a pitch of opulence and splendor, rivaling that of France and India.
The vast basins of the Orinoco, Amazon and Parana would be linked together by canals, and hundreds of millions of Asiatics would flock thither in quest of the plenty of a land of natural richness outrivaling that of the Ganges or the Hoang-Ho.
Our nearly completed railroad would pierce the heart of this great region, ramifying the whole Southern continent with strong bands of iron and pour down on to its plateaux and valleys millions of hardy whites, from the overcrowded north, as heritors of the lands of this future India.
It is true the north be greatly depleted of its population; but the emigrant, from thither,
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would only go to prepare new markets for our surplus manufactures and the products of our northern farms, while at a vastly reduced rate, we would receive the southern luxuries and staples in exchange for our own, thus, at once, quickening the chanaels of trade and relieving the unrest and disquiet of our present situation.It is true that the wealthy aristocrat in Europe and America may find his rent roll depreciate when half the population of these countries emigrate to the tropics; but even should Astor, who draws nine millions of annual rental from New York only to enrich the decayed aristocracy of London, find his rent reduced one-half, he may yet manage to live at home in comparative comfort on his income of four and a half millions.
The increased security of the rich may compensate for this temporary loss of income, and by lending their aid to this movement they will feel the satisfaction which comes as a reward to one who performs a noble deed. Even the calloused
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millionaire would feel a thrill of delight in seeing the starving, hopeless and desperate poor rescued from his depths of degradation as the colonies steamed away in mighty swarms to the Promised Land of the Tropics, there in kindness and thrift to learn and exercise, on their plantations, the sublime principals of the Brotherhood of Man.The importation in vast numbers of coolies and ryots from China, Japan and India is a serious problem. Without their aid tropical colonization by the Caucasian would fail, for the northern white man is unable to perform manual labor in the tropics. But this climate is the natural home of more than five hundred millions of such people who lead lives of fathomless misery in the overcrowded Orient. To prove that the Chinese are anxious to emigrate to America it is only necessary to point to the rigid laws of exclusion which the United States has been compelled to enact to prevent our nation being flooded by a tide of Mongols. Even under the most careful surveillance
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by our authorities great numbers of Chinese manage to elude detection and undergo great risks and suffering in their efforts to reach our shores.The missionary is powerless to reform the oriental on his native soil, for the traditions and laws of his pagan countries present an almost unsurmountable barrier to his becoming Christianized. Even Britain, with all their power, does not dare to interfere with the brutal heathenism of India. But by bringing them away from the trammels of those priest ridden countries the oriental may be brought in contact with our civilization and become susceptible to the teachings of Christianity.
Interpreters should be provided so the planter and tenant may work intelligently on the new plantation. When brought together on the scene of their future labors their relations to one another may thus be explained so that the work of preparing their future homes may begin with good will and hearty co-operation.
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When, by co-operation or government aid, the colonists have been transported from the crowded, smoke begrimed cities of the north, with their sin cursed squalor, their bitter cold, their snows and dreary fogs, the blooming splendor of the tropics will appear by contrast like an earthly heaven.
On arrival at their destination they should be alloted their lands and tenantry and be supplied with proper tools and implements, together with one years' supply of food for all the occupants of the plantation. These supplies, with enough domestic animals for use, might be charged to the colonist on from twenty to fifty years' time at three per cent., annual interest. A book of instructions embodying all requisite information relative to the clearing up of the forests, the building of houses, planting of crops and orchards should be furnished free to each planter by the Commissioners of Colonization.
Schools should be organized at which all
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children should receive instructions. This will tend to elevate the tenant to a higher plane of civilization, which indeed should be the main object of oriental tenancy under the supervision of the white planter.The objection might be raised to a poor and improvident white man being placed as a guardian over the labors of the ryot, negro and coolie. But before allowing him this great privilege he should be bound by oath in an article requiring him to deal justly and equitably with his tenants; and should he be a victim of intemperance, he must submit to a course of treatment which will remove from his system all the taints of alcoholism.
He should be required to follow the rules of his book of instruction, which should include minute directions regarding tropical agriculture.
Individual allotments of fifty acres should be granted to himself and each tenant, and upon such tracts the houses and the other improvements
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should be made by the co-operative labors of all. The work on the plantation should always be done on this plan — which will prevent the planter from securing the advantage on his own tract. As the tenant and the planter are to divide the products of their labor equally for the period of fifty years it is evident that each would be equally interested in the common prosperity. At the end of this period it is hoped that the world will have arrived at a true appreciation of the benefits of co-operation. At any rate the inferior races cannot fail to have been elevated to intelligent citizenship and material prosperity while the planter class — the second generation — will have become acclimated to the tropics, with their homes highly improved and will have attained a high standard of intelligence.This is the true motive which should actuate the system of tropical colonization. The riddle of the sphinx can be solved only by the charity and mutual concession of all classes. Thus can
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we avoid the both of military despotism on one hand and the Vandal of anarchism on the other.Cabins for the tenants and a plantation house for the planters could be constructed with no other cost save that of the labor and the slight expense of nails, windows, and wire netting. Fields of grain and tropical products would afford a speedy recompense for the labor expended, and after a year the plantation would become not only self-sustaining but profitable also.
New orchards of palm, orange, cocoanut, bread fruit, coffee, durion, fig, almond, olive, brazilnut, banana, orange, lemon, sago palm, chirimoya and mangosteen could quickly replace the less profitable trees and growths, sacrificed in the clearing up of the tract. Fruits from the neighboring forests, half of which should be left standing, could supply the needs of settlers until orchards and groves came into bearing, and the sale of valuable timber, india rubber, nuts and medicinal roots and barks would help sustain the
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settlers until the plantation became productive. The labors of an average Caucasian family of five, with the help of three families of Asiatics, on a plantation of two hundred acres, could subdue one hundred acres of even the Amazon forests, build their homes and plant new orchards in one year, by the aid of modern appliances of the small steam engine to lighten labor.In clearing Mexican forests for coffee planting it is calculated that fifteen natives will clear an acre daily. Estimating the available force on a plantation at ten men and boys, they could, by the aid of a small and inexpensive engine, clear a similar amount daily. In one hundred days the land could be cleared, another period of the same length would be consumed in priming the stumps with crude saltpeter and petroleum, and in burning the clearing and in building houses. The remainder of the year would suffice for the planting of the land, setting out of orchards, and the cultivation of the crops.
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The unnumbered millions of cattle and horses in South America would supply the settlers with domestic animals at a rate of cheapness unknown to Northern markets. This matter could be arranged systematically by the various governments of Latin America who could supply the necessary animals, on credit to the settler, as they have been accustomed to do in some localities in the past.
Great nurseries of valuable plants and trees would spring up, either fostered by government aid or private capital, and the dissemination of new and unattainable luxuries would soon follow.
An era of railroad building would be inaugurated that would distance any movement of that nature in the history of the world; for the vast inland water navigation of the Amazon and its affluents, estimated at fifty thousand miles, would be linked together by bands of iron. The Paraguay and the Amazon or Madera would soon be connected by canals, as would also the Orinoco
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with the Amazon. Steamers innumerable would ply upon their waters — not for half the year, as in our climate, but without intermission.Our national territories should be bounded by the Arctic Ocean and Baffin's Bay on the north and by Mexico and the Gulf on the south. Embraced by the two oceans we then would be possessed ot the grandest and most resourceful of all northern regions, fitted by nature for the home of power, science, arts, commerce and manufacturing. Here the Caucasian would attain his greatest advancement, for in addition to the advantages of a climate suitable to the highest mental and physical vigor, he would control the resources of the wealthiest tropical regions on earth. Should five million homesteads, with three families of Asiatics for tenants to each plantation, be thrown open to settlement in Latin America we should lose one-fourth of the population of the United States within the following ten years, for a highly educated class — or at least a class of
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great intelligence — would emigrate thither to escape the wearying monotony of northern poverty.It would be unreasonable to consider this a national calamity, for we were far more prosperous as a nation of forty than of sixty-five millions. It is true labor would not be so abundant; but it would all find employment at far better wages than is paid today — both capital and labor would be better employed — for the vast new markets of the tropics would tax our industries to their utmost capacity to supply the demand. Living would become cheaper and better. Every one willing to employ his talent could find a ready demand for the same in the territories of Pan-America.
By the united labor of four families a tropical plantation of two hundred acres could be made an earthly paradise. After half the area is cleared and prepared for cultivation, the work of planting for future years should begin with intelligent care. Great nurseries established by
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the state, should furnish and diffuse the rare fruits and plants from other lands. Experimental stations, for studying and combating the diseases of plant life, should be conducted in every state and the results made known by publication; and the proper methods of conducting tropical agriculture should be taught through the reports of those institutions.The planter, having no manual labor to perform, could devote his time to securing information valuable to the improvement and management of the estate, in supervising the plantations and fields and in marketing their products.
From such plantations nearly all the wants of their occupants could be supplied. Coffee, tea and sugar, bread from the sago palm and bread fruit, all the most delicious fruits known to the tropics, with the milk of the "cow-tree" and butter from the "butter-tree," would afford the elements of a large and luxurious food supply, making the colonist independent of the artificial
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wants of our northern civilization; while the otherwise unattainable luxuries of the French cuisine would be found blent in the marvelous flavors of the durion. The tropical rivers teem with fish and the forests abound in game. Fowls and domestic animals could be raised in abundance, thus multiplying the comforts and luxuries of domestic life.Cotton, ramie, and jute might be produced and exchanged for manufactured goods, while the cotton seed oil would add a valuable adjunct to the food supply of the producers.
This surplus of tropical products would enable the colonists to secure many articles necessity and luxury, for the United States, Canada, Europe and the three hundred million consumers of the Russian Empire would afford a steady market for tropical products — as within the boundaries of those countries would yet be found one-third of the world's population, all residing
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in countries unsuited by nature to the production of tropical staples.The cheapness of lumber in tropical America would facilitate the erection of dwellings on the plantations, thus insuring at a nominal expense rude though comfortable and even picturesque homes for the colonists. Latticed verandas, porches and balconies, rustic arbors and trellises could be embowered in roses, while the hot house flowers of the North would be found growing wild in luxuriant profusion.
Here, surrounded by the charms of nature, while the orange and citron distil their odors, while the nightingale warbles her magic melody and the feathery palms toss their plumes in the soft breeze, while rose and orchid load the air with delicious fragrance, the tired and world-worn Caucasian may find a peaceful home.
Here, when the scarlet sun sinks low beyond the snow clad Andes, and long files of red flamingoes wing their evening flight to the sail
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flecked, silvery river, the white clad planter and his family may sit out on the vine wreathed gallery of their dear, new home. They watch the humming birds scintillating in hues of emerald, rose and purple as they flash among the clinging lianas that festoon the tall ciebas and stately moras in garlands of snowy bloom and tangled streamers of violet, crimson and gold.And when the quick coming tropic night steals on in darkening shadows and myriads of cucojos, the fireflies of the tropics, weave tangled webs of golden green by broad leaved plantain and yucca, the happy group talk of new scenes and friends and of the peaceful affairs of a primitive life. The cool sea breeze of evening comes stealing along the Amazon, and the white moon floats up over the hills of Brazil, gliding in mellow glamor the dew drenched fronds of palm and myrtle. The sound of mandolin and guitar rises on the night and fresh young voices mingle and blend with the deep bass of a voice we have heard before.
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We have heard that voice when the snow and sleet raged over the smoke obscured and gloomy cities of the North, when gaunt and hollowed eyed men clamored for work or bread, we have heard its hoarse curse when the rich rolled by in luxury and splendor, and heard it cry in despair to God when the mad stampede of competition trampled his famished form under foot. Like the roar of a raving lion, we have heard that voice when sacked and plundered cities glowed fiery red with flame and blood. Above the wild roar of carnage, of bursting bomb and crashing palace, civilization has its maniac yell. Ah, it is the voice of the Anarchist — an Anarchist no more, the proud and manly king of a home!
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Paternal Government.
The most extensive system of paternalism, which history has revealed, was that of Peru under its Incas at the time of the conquest by Pizarro. The Inca was the father of the people. In him was centered all the functions of state and church; for he was at once the Son of the Sun, divine in his personality, and the fountain of power and beneficence.
To the Peruvian his Inca was the vice-regent of God, a sovereign entrusted with a commission from the Creator as his agent on earth to supervise the lives of the people, to administer to their comfort and well-being; to direct their labors in useful channels, and to guide them in all spiritual, political and domestic affairs.
The land was held to be the common heritage of the people, the church and the Incas. Every family was provided with a home, and on the
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marriage of a couple their homestead was provided by the labors of their district. Land was assigned to each householder, in proportion to its numbers, but once a year the home was reverted to the government. During the time the family could neither alienate nor add to this holding; but it is supposed that the tenant occupied the homestead for life.The lands of the church were cultivated, then that of the unfortunates, of soldiers and of those burdened, by a family of infants. Next the tillage of their own lands engaged their attention, after which, with great ceremony and festal rejoicing, the lands of the Inca were cultivated.
Irrigation on a vast scale, public highways, national pasture fields and mining all were conducted by the common labor of the nation. The products of one region were exchanged with another at tri-weekly fairs; and great magazines of stores were maintained to guard against famine. Schools and colleges disseminated learning —
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arts and crafts were taught to the people, and, while there was no incentive to accumulate riches, real poverty was unknown.They had no money, although gold, silver and precious stones enriched the temples and palaces with, incredible treasure. Their commerce consisted in barter and exchange of commodities — their wealth was measured only by the standard of comfort and plenty. Owing nothing, secure of food, raiment and shelter through their own toil — not that of others — they must have led an ideal life of primitive contentment and stoical happiness.
But the social restrictions were tyrannous and irrational. The Peruvian native was fettered in every action by the ultra-patertialism of the Incarial System. Sons were compelled to follow the avocations of their father without reference to their fitness or inclination for such calling.
Ambition was stifled in a race where the incentive to accumulation was removed, and the affection
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became atrophied in a marriage state where wedded life was not founded upon mutual affections, but were regulated to suit the judgment, or caprice of the state official, whose function consisted in selecting wives and husbands for the subjects.Thus, while the Peruvian system of internal improvements, the tenure of land, the safe-guards against want and famine had developed from barbarism to the highest standard; yet the ultra-paternalism of the Incas resulted in serious injury to the race, for at the period of the conquest by Pizarro their civilization had congealed. At the distance of three and a half centuries it is rather difficult to penetrate the mist of obscurity in which Peruvian history is enveloped; but to the student of that strange civilization comes the conviction that the remarkable system of paternalism which, budding in the primeval condition surrounding the aborigines, had blossomed and its fruits were ripening to the fall when the iron
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heart of Pizarro stamped out Peruvian nationality by his atrocious acts of Spanish, cruelty. He found a nation of slaves — serfs to ultra-paternalism — whose condition had been raised above material want by wise governmental care, yet the absolute absence of personal responsibility and ambition in the nature of the Peruvian, which had resulted from excessive exercise of Incarial Paternalism over the domestic affairs of the nation, led to their conquest and subsequent destruction.Egypt is another example of ultra-paternal government. Vast systems of canals were perfected by the aid of the state, reservoirs to hold the surplus overflow of the Nile were constructed by national labor, and the land became the granary of the ancient world. The ponderous Egyptian civilization was evolved from the dim past, with an elaboration of detail unequaled in history.
The king and priesthood became the state, the subjects were children, directed in all their movements
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from the cradle to the grave by a system of ultra-paternalism. The Egyptian labored, thought, married, lived and died in the same sphere in which he was born. He followed the craft of his father, because he was bound by law until he could only move in the narrow groove prescribed by the folly of excessive paternalism. All Egyptian society thus crystallized into castes, the national characteristic became a monotonous regularity — personal ambition was destroyed, and Egyptian happiness must only have been a leaden apathy. The civilization of Egypt petrified. It had become a stony monster in the eyes of the ancient world — in that far remote era of the past when Babylon was still in her prime. While the paternal spirit was exercised for the material comfort of the people along the lines of public improvements, in reclaiming and irrigating lands, in building harbors, excavating canals, making: great storehouses for times of scarcity or famine; and in advancing the art, sciences and245
agriculture, Egypt, like Peru, serves as an example of the benefits which may flow from the policy of public spirit on the part of the state. But when the Egyptian king reduced the whole nation to physical and mental servitude, for the sole benefit of the state, the grandeur of the nation was built up by sacrificing the liberality and personality of the individual. The monuments to this system of perverted paternalism remain as a land-mark in human history. The pyramids, reared by the toil of misdirected power, entomb the mummy of a great but false system, while the Fellaheen, toiling half-naked amid the mudbanks of the Nile, existing apparently for the sole purpose of paying British taxes, is a being devoid of ambition and intelligence, the logical results of a system that claimed a paternal interest in a people only for the purpose of aggrandizing the wealth and splendor of the state.Peru and Egypt achieved remarkable progress,
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as nations, by directing the prodigious energies of vigorous races. Their public works eclipse any modern effort in that line; the evils of want and idleness among their people were reduced to a minimum by the theory and practice of a paternalism evolved from the ignorance of primitive man; but having no standard of history for their guide they committed the fatal error of ultra-paternalism. They lost sight of the individual in believing that the man existed for the benefit of the state.Through the slow evolution of justice and conscience, at the cost of blood and fabulous treasure, mankind at last has learned that state should exist for the benefit of the individual.
Of modern paternalism we have a few strange examples. The sub-division of land among the French people during the reign or terror was but a bloody foot-print of justice in the path of human progress.
The liberation of the German serfs — their purchase
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by the state and the allotment to them of sixty millions acres of land, was a sublime example of the true paternal spirit on the part of the nation. Those serfs were enabled to purchase not only their freedom, but homes likewise, through the intervention of the state.The Austrian, Bohemian and German nobles were required to accept national bonds in exchange for their lands and human chattels. The serfs, however, were charged an annual sum to discharge the debt, hence the state, the noble and the serf lost nothing by the arrangement, while the price of land advanced fifty per cent. The blot of human slavery was removed from the national honor and Germany, since that day, has never suffered from revolution, the Hungarian war having been merely a struggle for nationality.
Louis Napoleon planted the bays and inlets of France with artificial beds oysters, thus securing to that country a perpetual supply of the delicious bivalves.
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Many European states have nationalized great tracts of woodland to preserve their forests.
The Trans-Siberian railroad, now in course of construction by the Russian government, is a gigantic example of modern paternalism, only matched by the glorious action of Alexander II in freeing a nation of serfs.
Our river and harbor improvements, the jettying of the mouth of the Mississippi, thus opening that river to ocean steamship navigation, the Erie Canal, a free waterway to which the city of New York owes its great commercial ascendancy, all are the fruits of national-paternalism: Therefore the numerous cities in our land, owing their prosperity to safe harbors and enhanced commercial facilities, secured by national appropriations for such purposes, should loudly advocate a broad paternalism.
Another instance of paternalism by our nation was evinced in the building of the Pacific railroad. But this was a case of paternalism run
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mad. However, there might have been method in the madness of the legislators who gave to a company of speculators an empire of land and subsidy in bonds sufficient to build an equip the road, taking only a second or third mortgage as security for the peopled money and lands. The lobbyist and boodler held high carnival at the nation's capital about this time, and it is safe to suspect that corruption alone prevented the nation from owning the roads built by its own wealth. Had not the people been cheated through bribery out of their rights those roads today might be an enduring monument to the grandeur of national paternalism. Their value aggregates a sum equaling our national debt, but today they only serve to enrich the American and foreign bondholder.The true spirit of paternalism is manifested by a government that aids the individual to help himself.
The American homestead law is an exponent
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of this truth. Is it not better, more humane, to lend the assistance of the state to struggling mankind than to allow its weaker citizens to be trampled under foot by a pitiless, competitive system, such as we have built up, by allowing the strong to rob the weak?Civil liberty has degenerated to license when it allows such extremes of wealth and poverty as exists in our land today. Can we not, profiting by the precepts of history, avoid the ultra-paternalism of Pharaoh and the Incas and rescue our poor from their depths of despair? We acknowledge the wisdom of the state in providing asylums for the deaf, the dumb and the blind. We gladly lend our assistance in public and private charities to the amelioration of the sad lot of those so afflicted. Then why should we forget and ignore the swarming millions of mankind who are afflicted with inheritable incapacity.
We are all more or less the children of heredity. Genius may slumber for generation to reappear
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in some remote descendant. Money getting is a strain in some families, as clearly traceable to ancestry, as an inheritated taint of scrofula. The Hollander, a proverbial wealth winner, crops out in the multi-millionaire Astor, Vanderbilt, and the additional multitude of "Vans," whose names are enrolled among Gotham's four-hundred. The inherited instinct of thrift and frugality, transmitted from a commercial Dutch ancestor, bears golden fruit amidst American opportunity, in wealth transcending that of Croesus. This being the case why deny the absence of such a gift.At every hand we find people who are poor but industrious, generous to a fault — for generosity is not the besetting sin of the millionaire — refined and sensitive, ardently wishing for wealth and with a deep appreciation of the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, yet hopelessly desponding and unsuccessful in the fierce battle for life with our coarse and brutal civilization. Such
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people usually are Christians; they are the bone and sinew of our land. They are the patient, toiling men and women who fill our great cities with such scenes of pathetic misery. They battle bravely with failure, want and despair from childhood to the pauper's field. But they are enslaved by the chain of hereditary failure and thriftlessness. Many a pale-faced man and anguished woman have gone down to their graves knowing full well that the woe and grief of their blasted lives was not their own fault, but that of their ancestry.Then in the name of the blessed Nazarene let us hold out to them the golden sceptre of national paternalism. Let us transfer this class from the cruel cold and sleet and the ruthless turmoil of our northern civilization to the ease and plenty of the tropics. The land of the bread fruit invites this great class of nature's unfortunates to its genial clime. There the misery and grief of an unhappy lot may be assuaged in half of
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mankind, while the remaining half may rejoice at a tender act of Christian grace and worldly wisdom.Let us federate the continent and unite with Latin America in a vast system of tropical colonization.
This at once will solve one phase of the riddle of the sphinx by providing homes for the homeless and rescuing the victims of hereditary failure from the present state of despair.
Tropical colonization must be conducted by governmental aid, such as the German States extended to their serfs in 1848. By providing a land of refuge for unemployed labor, and making the tenure of title on tropical plantations to consist of ownership by occupancy, vesting the absolute title of all such lands in the government, not only may the sisterhood of American States become possessed of twenty-five million plantations, of two hundred acres each, worth at $20.00 an acre the enormous aggregate of one
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hundred and twenty-five thousand million dollars, more than twice the present sum of our nationa wealth; but in addition labor troubles would cease, new markets would be created and want and poverty, like slavery and warfare, would become a relic of the barbarous past.This gigantic enterprise may seem impracticable from its very enormity, but surely what Peru could accomplish unaided by precept for a nation of one-fifth of our population, we, with all the lore of the past, the genius, wealth and absolute necessity of today, may consummate far more readily, and with our superior knowledge avoid the failures of the Egyptian and Peruvian system.
Europe has Africa at her gates to endow her poor, and for her the task of colonization will be simplified when war is a thing of the past.
All sums expended for the benefit of colonists should be a debt upon their labor to run for fifty years at two per cent., interest. This would
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avoid an increase of taxation, and will save the colonists from the odium of pauperization.In our war on negro slavery the northern states, with half our present population and resources, expended in 1865 the enormous sum of 1,897 million dollars.
Today we are waging a peaceful conflict to free the chattleized masses of America.
It is said that 31,000 people own one-half of all our national wealth. Would it not be wiser, cheaper and more safe to settle the conflict between capital and labor by paternalism than by resorting to warfare?
This work was not conceived in a spirit of menace or incendiarism.
Mutual concessions and compromise, unselfishness and philanthropy, illumed by the Christ spirit, are the methods which will energize this movement for a broad national paternalism, and our nation should enter at once upon the work of federation and colonization.
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Labor saving machinery is a mighty factor in our civilization today. The following article from the New York World may serve to show the disturbing tendency of suddenly introducing such radical changes in our industrial system:
"BRADOCK, PA., Nov. 19, 1891. — A young electrician, now in Paris, on visiting Carnegie's great steel-rail plant here casually suggested that electricity could be made to operate the widely separated machinery, at a saving of many thousand per year.
"Today Andrew Carnegie visited the plant for the first time in two years and saw electricity doing the work. This improvement, together with others, makes it possible for eight men to do the work three hundred did in 1891. Of course, Mr. Carnegie will now be able to under-bid all his competitors.
"It is rumored that the employes of the construction department of Carnegie's Thirty-third
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Street Mill will be given an advance of ten per cent., in wages."
This is a great achievement of science. But when one man secures control of a labor-saving device that throws two hundred and ninety-two men out of employment, when an invention is perfected whereby eight men are enabled to accumplish the labor of three hundred, and the capitalist in control of the institution can underbid all competitors, both capital and labor are violently disturbed.
Mr. Carnegie is a Briton. He claims residence in America, a province which he occasionally visits for revenue only. But he resides in Scotland.
He is as much a Briton as was Cornwallis, Lord Howe or Tarleton.
Our forefathers bled and died at Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown that American might be free from Briton and Hessians, yet here is a man, who after making fifty millions in America,
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retires to his baronial castle among the hills of Scotland and from his stronghold of British royalty he piay wreck three-fourths of the iron mills in America by under-bidding all competitors, through his electrical devices and labor-saving machinery, and at the same time turn adrift ninety-seven per cent., of his operatives to compete with their brethren, or starve!Paternal government should grapple with and overcome such dangers.
Labor-saving devices when applied in shop and factory, should not be used wholly to enrich either native or foreign millionaires; but the unearned increment therefrom should accrue equally to the capitalist controlling them, the public, or consumer, and the operative.
We cannot operate an expost facto law, but we can, and should, prohibit the employment of labor saving; machinery on any other terms than those enumerated.
This, at once, will cheapen products, and raise
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skilled labor to the dignity and salary of the professions, while the unemployed, who have been deprived of employment by the introduction of such machinery, may go to the tropics and become planters by occupancy.Government ownership of railways and telegraphs has become the imperative necessity of the age.
The public can no longer endure the strain of such an enormous burden.
We are at the mercy, under the existing conditions, of foreign railroad stockholders who regard America as their lawful prey.
A syndicate of London capitalists wishing to "freeze out" the American investors in a certain road, find a pretext to throw the property into the hands of a receiver. Then they depreciate the stock until it is but so much waste paper in the eyes of the public; but, when the clouds roll by, it is discovered they have bought up the stocks and are in control.
And hereafter in future when public money is devoted to public enterprises, let us avoid the shameful crimes of the Pacific railroad steals. When the Nicaragua canal is built — as built soon it should be — if our government aids the enterprise it should be not by subsidizing a private corporation, possibly a London syndicate or their secret American agents, but let us expend the people's wealth for the people's property.
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The American Party.
We are ready for a new movement. Let us lay aside our prejudices, and unite in a patriotic effort to raise the masses of mankind in the scale of humanity.
Let us place America at the head of a federated continent.
Let us inaugurate the most stupendous migration of races the world has ever known, and raise the Caucasian above want, despair and anarchism by giving a home to the homeless on a tropical plantation, and thus forever put an end to poverty.
Let us for the time being merge our republicanism, our democracy and populism in the one grand movement of Americanism. Our watch word: — Justice to all, and our war cry the Americas for the Americans.
Nationalize the railroads, telegraph and all
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labor-saving machinery and end the cause of industrial strikes and business disquietude.Free trade in federated America and tariff on alien products will solve the problem of the tariff.
Free coinage of American gold and silver, and the issue of treasury notes, redeemable by taxation, will settle the financial problem.
The iniative and referendum system of voting will banish lobbyists and boodlers and give untrammeled freedom to public opinion.
These should be the fundamental principles of a new party into which naturally will merge all those whose interests are favorably affected thereby — all true lovers of mankind, and advocates of national glory. Those who believe in the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, may here find expression, in their opinions in a powerful combination.
The patriot, the Christian and the philanthropist are only needing the cohesive principles of organization to effect our national salvation.
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Then in the area of national and international politics, we, the great commoners of the world, raise our standard of brotherly love, on the following platform of Americanism:
1. Arbitration of the national disputes and cessation of warfare.
2. Federation of the Americas, with United States as leader.
3. Tropical colonization in Latin America, with Caucasian planters and Oriental, Negro and Indian tenantry.
4. Government aid to colonists.
5. Colonized lands to be held ms a heritage of the people on a title of ownership by use.
6. Free trade in federated America with tariff on alien products.
7. Government ownership of railroads and telegraphs.
8. Free coinage of American products of silver and gold at a ratio of sixteen to one.
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9. National treasury notes redeemable by taxation.
10. The unearned increment of labor from labor-saving machinery to be equally divided between the manufacturer, the operative and the consumer.
11. A Pan-American unity of money, weights and measures.
12. The iniative and referendum system of voting.
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Government Ownership of Railroads and Telegraphs.
The valuation of railways in the United States is placed at 10,000 million dollars, on which the earnings are 1,000 millions yearly. The railways thus burden the commerce of our nation by an annual charge of 1,000 million dollars. Only 406 millions of this goes to pay interest, tolls and dividends — the remaining 594 million being consemed in expenses of operating the roads, attorney's fees, high salaries and in influencing legislation.
Not less than 200 million annually go to attorneys and legislators — a sum equivalent to two per cent., on the valuation of the railroads.
The free pass system is a great burden which eventually falls on those who ship or travel by rail.
Competing lines are often run parallel to other
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roads through thinly peopled regions. This results in needless expense which, however, is assessed on the more prosperous communities by increasing the freight rates. A hoard of overpaid officials are maintained at the expense of the public; stocks and properties have been watered until the present valuation is out of all proportion to the actual cost of the roads, and by such means the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Pullmans and Huntingtons have amassed fortunes so gigantic that they have become a menace to our free institutions.Widespread strikes often paralyze the business of our country. Who can say how soon the general government may become involved in civil war, not only with a million of railway operatives, but with kindred labor organizations, who may make common cause with them. Not only may these dangers be removed by government ownership of railroads, but fully 500 millions dollars annually may be saved to the people by doing
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away with attorneys, lobbyists, free passes and parallel lines.Let the general government take control of every line of railroad, even at their present valuation and operate them faithfully for the benefit of the nation, and by exchanging legal tender notes and government bonds bearing two per cent., and levying a sinking fund of one per cent., on the valuation of the roads, these obligations could all be redeemed in 100 years, the danger of strikes would be forever averted — the corrupting boodler will disappear and freight and travel will be cheapened fifty per cent.
The chronic alarmist may see in government ownership a great danger to our free institutions. Doubtless the same objections was raised to the nation taking control of the postal system; yet this branch of public affairs, today, is almost a model of faithful and efficient public service.
It is true that the appointment by our chief executive of a million railway operatives would
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vest a dangerous power in one man; but this power should never be granted. A better and safer plan would be to elect three national railroad commissioners for a term of three years — one each year — each state to do likewise — each state thus having its board of commissioners who could appoint the operatives in its own state under the civil service regulations.An objection to incurring 10,000 millions dollars may be raised by ignorant prejudice; but we should remember that the people have already incurred the debt, while the assets are held by the boldest and most unscrupulous gang of adventurers the world has ever known. This gigantic obligation which has been fastened upon the commerce of the nation today is just as real as our war debt; for every branch of business is assessed, directly or indirectly, to pay ten per cent., interest on this appalling aggregation of capital.
But we should not forget that the railway is
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vest a dangerous power in one man; but this power should never be granted. A better and safer plan would be to elect three national railroad commissioners for a term of three years — one each year — each state to do likewise — each state thus having its board of commissioners who could appoint the operatives in its own state under the civil service regulations.An objection to incurring 10,000 millions dollars may be raised by ignorant prejudice; but we should remember that the people have already incurred the debt, while the assets are held by the boldest and most unscrupulous gang of adventurers the world has ever known. This gigantic obligation which has been fastened upon the commerce of the nation today is just as real as our war debt; for every branch of business is assessed, directly or indirectly, to pay ten per cent., interest on this appalling aggregation of capital.
But we should not forget that the railway is
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the mightiest factor in civilization; under our conditions we are dependent upon its agency for the existence of commerce. Yet the fact is beginning to dawn upon the minds of the intelligent people of America that we are "burning down our house to roast the fat pig."A band of railway janizaries have arisen in our midst who hold the key to our commerce. A few men in New York may meet at a wine supper and decree a reduction of wages for a million men, thus inviting a strike that might paralyse the industries of the whole nation, precipitating riots that might give a pretext for calling out national troops through the specious and elastic law of Interstate Commerce. A great civil war might any day be launched upon us by the avaricious folly of a band of half-drunken, wine bibing railroad magnates, who, intent only on self-aggrandizement, might plunge the nation into a gulf of woe and misery by one act of supreme selfishness.
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In the estimation of these janizaries the plundered public has become valuable only as a dividend-paying institution, which, like the Turkish peasant, may be bastinadoed by the tax collector out of his last piaster.
But the American janizary should learn wisdom from the fate of his Turkish prototype. The Janizary of Stamboul became at last such an intolerable scourge that one wily old Sultan trained his cannon upon them until not a Moslem son of that dreadful band escaped destruction.
Let us, therefore, transpose a good old maxim and decide that what can't be endured must be cured. Let us, too, train the cannon of public opinion upon the railway janizary and annihilate him and his system with a volley of free America ballots. The sovereignty of the American people must be invoked, and by the law of eminent domain the railroads can be acquired by the nation.
All law, it is said, is but the result of compromise.
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When it is not a surrender this usually is true.
Then let us compromise with the railroads by taking them at their valuation and pay for them with an issue of 5,000 million treasury notes and a like amount of national bonds at two per cent., thus lightening our burdens by fifty per cent., and removing the great danger of strikes, which are at present a menace to our peaceful prosperity.
It is true that the issue of such a vast sum in bonds and currency to the railway capitalist would apparently create a monied aristocracy of great power. But do not forget the cardinal fact that this class already exist, for they hold the property while we are assessed for the interest.
Let us reverse this condition as far as possible, by acquiring the property and assessing all for the interest. Then, while the same debt would still exist, the people would be possessed of real assets representing the obligation, which by careful management might be fully discharged at the
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end of one hundred years, leaving a grand heritage to posterity.Admitting the fact that 5,000 millions of nontaxable bonds were issued to the railroad kings in exchange for American railroads, does this indicate that this class would escape taxation? Not by any means. The provisions of the income tax would reach the majority of them with inexorable justice.
Under the present system they can evade taxation by raising the rates of shipping, thus shifting all their burdens onto the shoulders of the public. They ride over the continent in palace trains, but the public at length has to pay for their junket. They lavish hundreds of millions on attorneys fees, on legislative corruption and rebates to favorites — free passes to millions, jobbery and "knocking down" of fare, but all these are assessed up to the business of the country by watering the stocks and raising the freight to make the public pay the dividends.
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Under a national ownership all this would end. The postmaster who "knocks down" or issues franks to his friends speedily finds himself in Canada or in prison. The collector of a port who would make seven millions of rebate on customs to his favorites would quickly land in Sing-Sing or some other retreat, whose bars would play a sad refrain of solitude.
Then let us take possession of the railroads and thus transform our masters into public servants.
Convert our liabilities of 10,000 millions into veritable assets of ten billions of dollars. Transform a stupendous and frightfully increasing debt into a profitable and stable property. And, to state the problem in its essence, create ten billions of wealth to pay an existing debt of 10,000 millions by nationalizing the railroads and issuing five billions of legal tender and 5,000 millions of bonds for their payment.
A moment's reflection will convince us that the people already have incurred this debt, a monstrous
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obligation, to evade which we must either resort to civil war, with its appalling attendant evils — chaos, national debt and rivers of blood, sacked and plundered cities, famine, and devastation — or buy the railroads.The obstacles to the latter alternative, while very grave, are not insurmountable. Public opinion, when once convinced of the justice and expediency of a measure, is irresistible.
Then to the bar of public opinion we must appeal. When the railroad wrecker, the financial Janizary and the robber Barons of the highway, are confronted by an aroused public opinion they will gladly accept its liberal and just propositions.
The telegraph, telephone and express should become agents of the national postal system.
These functions could be assumed by the general government without disarranging business, or in any way interfering with the rights of the public.
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Uniformity and cheapness of service would thus be insured to the commonwealth.
The bonds issued for these purposes should be known as national railroad and telegraph bonds. The properties thus acquired should be charged with their interest and sinking funds. This would not impair the national credit, but would rather strengthen it.
The nation is threaded with unproductive lines of railroads; parallel lines have been built and maintained for years at a ruinous loss all through competition, that deadly blight on our civilization. This loss falls upon the public and can no longer be borne.
Let us nationalize our whole system, foreclose our mortgages on the Pacific roads, tear up all parallel lines unnecessary to our commerce and place them where they will become paying investments.
By the nationalization of railways we can make
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strikes upon our lines of travel as impossible as in our postal system today.While opposed on principle to issuing bonds to aid private corporations, yet in works of national utility they may serve to aid us in our effort to release ourselves from stupendous difficulties.
When we have been saddled with a great and constantly increasing debt we may acquire the property for the people, arrest the evil, and finally discharge the obligation by this method.
In this new mode of warfare we shall shed no blood, devastate no cities, cause no human misery; but build up and develop our national resources and avert the grave danger which now threatens the life of our commonwealth.
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Finance.
Metallic money, militarism and poverty are relics of a barbarous past.
Money should be a measure of value.
Intrinsic value may exist in gold, silver and diamonds; in wheat, land or lumber; but convenience alone at first must have recommended gold and silver to mankind as a medium of exchange. They become money when the stamp of the mint is affixed thereon by governmental authority.
The advocates of metallic money always are apparently sincere believers in the intrinsic value of money. But in admitting the intrinsic value of gold and silver should they deny the intrinsic value of feathers, coal and cod-liver oil? Even the most rabid monometallist or bi-metallist will not claim that a dollar's worth of gold or silver is worth more than a dollar's worth of wheat or beef.
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Any commodity useful to man may possess an intrinsic value, yet none of these are money until sanctioned as such by legality. The precious metals, copper, nickel, wampum, leather, iron and paper each have passed current among civilized and barbarous nations when sanctioned by law.
Therefore we may logically infer that the stamp alone constitutes that useful measure of value which we call money.
A bushel or a gallon are but abstract measures of quantity; but when we deal in corn and oil they become concrete and represent definite measures of amount. The bushel of corn and gallon of oil possess intrinsic value, but the abstract bushel and gallon are valuable as measures only, possessing no intrinsic worth, yet unalterable in their dimensions, they are undeviating and stable as measures of quantity. Our laws prescribes that a given amount of space — so many cubic inches of air — shall constitute a
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bushel or a gallon. How indescribable then would be the confusion and injustice should our dealers resort to the trick of expanding or contracting those measures to suit their own interest.Our commercial system would be sadly disturbed if our government granted a monopoly of gallons, bushels and yards to a company of Jews. Then the man who conducts a wholesale or retail business would be compelled to hire a bushel, gallon or a yardstick from the Hebrew before waiting upon his impatient customers. Hunger, haste and pressing necessity alike would have to wait the pleasure and interest of the Jew, and at length all purchases would be burdened by the charge which he had asked for measuring the quantity of their goods. This state of affairs would certainly seem irrational and stupid should our government sanction such commercial insanity.
What then shall we say of a government which allows a company of Jews and Gentiles to monopolize the measures of value.
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If a bushel, yard, gallon or pound are but a valueless abstract quantity, why is not a dollar but an abstract measure of value? Money may be stamped on any substance, but specie of intrinsic value today is only represented by gold and silver. The abundance or scarcity of these govern the price of all commodities, and material values of all kinds are fixed largely by their volume of their circulation in a locality.
Yet, at last, we must acknowledge that they are but mediums of exchange.
The man who possesses money is no more comfortable than his less favored neighbor until he exchanges his money for labor or its representative — food, clothing and literature produced by others.
Then money is but a measure of values, valuable only on its final redemption in labor.
A dollar is but an order on the world for a dollar's worth of its products or services.
The possessor of money has rendered some
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service, or class legislation has decreed he has, entitling him to compensation. But we know absolutely that he does not receive final compensation until his order, the dollar, is redeemed in the purchase of articles of necessity or luxury.Then money in addition to being a measure of value, is the evidence of the indebtedness of mankind to its possessor.
Money, therefore, is a specific draft on the material wealth of the world.
When we buy a draft on a bank the order is not engraved on a gold plate or plaque of silver, but on cheap paper. It is not the intrinsic worth of the material on which it is written but the order for its redemption which alone gives it value in our eyes; its cheapness and great convenience and our confidence in its final redemption recommends it to our business sagacity as a proper way of transmitting money.
On analyzing money we discover it is but an abstract thing, becoming and valuable
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only on its redemption. Then why should money be conceded the quality of intrinsic value?Because tradition and superstition have invested it with an artificial nobility, similar to that of the Divine right of kings; because gold and silver are commodities which can be manipulated in their value by speculators and pirates of the financial world, and because, in the hands of the Rothschilds and their imitators the measure of values may be expanded or contracted to suit their interest, as the bushel and gallon, in the hands of the dishonest dealer, might be manipulated to cheat his patrons, did not the fiat of law fix the measures of quantity.
Metallic money is an agent of tyranny. Then fluctuating values of the precious metals is a disturbant factor in commerce, and the supply of silver and gold are inadequate to meet the wants of an expanding civilization. The present supply of specie, according to Mr. Leach, director of the mint, is as follows:
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| COUNTRY. | GOLD | SILVER. |
| United States | $302,018,860 | $482,071,346 |
| United Kingdom | 550,000,000 | 100,000,000 |
| France | 900,000,000 | 700,000,000 |
| Germany | 500,000,000 | 140,000,000 |
| Belgium | 65,000,000 | 55,000,000 |
| Italy | 140,000,000 | 60,000,000 |
| Switzerland | 15,000,000 | 15,000,000 |
| Greece | 3,000,000 | 4,000,000 |
| Spain | 100,000,000 | 125,000,000 |
| Portugal | 40,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Austria-Hungary | 40,000,000 | 90,000,000 |
| Netherlands | 25,000,000 | 65,000,000 |
| Scandinavian Union | 32,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Russia | 100,000,000 | 60,000,000 |
| Turkey | 50,000,000 | 45,000,000 |
| Australia | 100,000,000 | 7,000,000 |
| Egypt | 100,000,000 | 15,000,000 |
| Mexico | 5,000,000 | 50,000,000 |
| Central America | 500,000 | |
| South America | 45,000,000 | 25,000,000 |
| Japan | 90,000,000 | 50,000,000 |
| India | 900,000,000 | |
| China | 700,000,000 | |
| The Straits | 100,000,000 | |
| Canada | 16,000,000 | 5,000,000 |
| Cuba, Hayti, etc | 20,000,000 | 2,000,000 |
| Totals | $3,727,018,860 | $3,820,571,346 |
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A total of $7,547,590,215. This constitutes the volume of the metallic money of commerce. Estimating the population of the world at 1,600 millions, this gives only the sum of $4.71 per capita, a sum insufficient with which to transact the business of mankind on a bi-metallic basis. But as intrinsic value of money has become an accepted principle of the business world, any sudden departure from this standard might result in destroying enormous values now invested in gold and silver coin. Any depreciation of the world's wealth is to be deplored, as the loss entails suffering and misery; and should either gold or silver be demonetized a widely diffused loss would result therefrom, for when deprived of their monetary power and artificial values the price of the precious metals would depreciate fifty per cent., thus becoming reduced to the commercial level of commodities dependent upon the law of supply and demand. As the world today recognizes both gold and
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silver as money, it is evident that the demonetization of both would reduce the volume of specie by one-half; and as it is patent that the activity of commerce depends upon the money supply we should not restrict commerce by contracting the media, but endeavor to provide money in abundance to meet the requirements of business. How shall we best accomplish this without impairing the stability of our finances? We should coin all the products of American silver and gold at a ratio of sixteen to one — the holder of bullion should receive its value, less the seignorage, in its own kind — silver coin for silver and gold coin for gold bullion. Both silver and gold certificates should be redeemed and their future issue discontinued. This will allow the metallic money of the nation to circulate among the people on its own merits. Our coins should be minted from the product of our mines and become the only metallic money of federated America. We must not await England's298
pleasure on the silver question. The United States and Mexico produces 120 million dollars in silver annually, while Britain and her colonies produce only ten millions. America supplies the world with six-sevenths of the annual supply of silver, hence we should not discriminate by discrediting it in favor of gold. If we are to continue in the use of metallic money, give us both or none. The latter would be the better plan, and is inevitable in the future; but we are proposing compromises, not radical measures. Should England and Germany object to our bi-metallic system we may remind them that federated. America can settle its indebtedness to Europe by a balance of trade. The coffee of Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, the sugar and tobacco of Cuba, and the breadstuffs of the north, the cotton of the south, the wool and beef, the pork and hides of America will still be staples, subject to the laws of commerce, and Europe may be dependent299
upon us for these until our foreign debt is discharged. And when our Britonized Anglo-maniacs, our Astors and Carnegies, want the millions accruing to them from their American wealth let them accept our wealth or come home. Enough gold and silver can be produced in the Americas to afford a fair supply for a century yet; for it must be remembered that of the 14,675 million dollars in gold and silver produced during the last five hundred years, according to Mulhall, the American continent has supplied 11,550 millions — 4,250 millions of this was gold and 7,300 millions silver. The American can produce two hundred millions of silver and one hundred millions of gold annually under the stimulus of free coinage for the American product. This will be adding three hundred millions of artificial and intrinsic values to our national wealth.300
This addition to our currency can be maintained at par by printing notes of no less denomination than $20.00. Gold should be limited in its denominations to coins of $15.00. These measures will have the effect of making silver the vehicle of all transactions below $15.00. Gold will become the agency of commerce in transactions of $15.00, and paper will represent the gigantic operations of the business world. If France can maintain 700 millions of coins with her population of thirty-eight millions the federated Americas can float three thousand millions. Silver will be the money of the people until they are educated to the true conception of an abstract dollar. By making no notes of less denominations than $20.00 the use of silver will become a necessity. To avoid carrying about that sum of silver and gold people will naturally resort to banking and
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the use of checks. This in turn will immeasurably swell the volumes of our currency and lead to thrift and frugality. Mining operations will become a staple branch of national prosperity and the resources for paying a possible balance of trade against us will be provided for all future time. But how shall we devise a safe paper currency with which to transact the enormous volume of American business? The national banks, as banks of issue, have seen their day. Yet safe banks of deposits are a necessity of our conditions. Then let them, or any other system of private banks remain, but hedge them about with safeguards so that depositors may be assured of absolute security. This may be facilitated by allowing the banks to issue stock to each depositor in full on his deposits. This stock should be good for a loan at any time for two-thirds of its amount, which will insure one-third of deposits for reserve. Embezzlement302
could be guarded against by compelling a bank of deposit to invest its capital in government railroad bonds, depositing the same at the U. S. treasury. Then two-thirds of the deposits might be loaned with safe profit, while the bond reserve would be a guarantee against loss by depositors in case of failure. The investment on those bonds would be paid to the bank, hence it would remain a safe and profitable investment. The one-third reserve should be allowed to remain with the banks. Under the present law, national bankers are required to keep their reserve in the great commercial centers. This gives a gang of operators and speculators the sinew of war in their raids on the productive industries of the country. Stock gambling and option dealing will die the death of financial starvation when the bank reserves are maintained not in the great cities but at home. Our nation, however, requires a paper currency that is absolutely safe in its final redemption,303
that is good for all public and private debts and of sufficient volume to transact, with facility, the astounding commerce of the most active business people on earth. This can be provided by the national government issuing a legal tender note whose final redemption is met by taxation. Let our nation issue 5,000 millions of legal tender notes in denominations of not less than $20.00, with which to make half of a payment on our purchase of the railroads and telegraphs (paying for the remaining fifty per cent., in bonds). Let these notes be good for all dues both public and private, and when the national revenues are collected these notes will accumulate in the national treasury to an amount representing the income of the government. When these notes are received by the treasury they should be recorded as redeemed, then they should be destroyed and new ones issued in their304
stead with which to meet the expenditures of the government. Supposing that our national expenses aggregate five hundred millions yearly. In ten years 5,000 millions would thus be redeemed and the like amount again re-issued. Thus our total currency would be redeemed once in ten years. This then is the great compromise on our financial system. We would thus become free from our thraldom to either our gold or silver basis, we would not impair the vested rights of capital in gold and silver money and our commerce and industries would soon feel the magic heart throbs of vitality. People would become gradually educated to the value of an abstract dollar without dangerously impairing enormous but fictitious values of metallic money. We should thus eventually come to look upon the dollar as a financial yard-stick, by which all values are measured; not an intrinsic value305
which can be made an agent of fluctuation to suit the capitalist but an edict of commerce, a draft on the resources and labors of the world — an undeviating standard by which all values are measured, as space is measured by the rules of linear measure.These propositions are not made for the benefit alone of the financial barons of Wall Street. They are the plain words of a plain issue, addressed to the world in the interest of the great, plain people. We, the people, to avoid the dangers of a near conflict with capital, make these overtures in a spirit of dignified compromise. We know our rights, we feel the conscience of public opinion will sustain us, but we are willing to make great concessions. We are willing to give up some portion of our beliefs. We are willing to grant more than justice to others that justice may done to us. We come before the American public with a financial compromise that does injustice to none. Out of our
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present chaos of financial perplexity we can emerge only through honest and sincere consideration of all interests. We do not throw down the gage of battle to the enemy, but we extend to him the olive branch of compromise. We aim to give capital and his elder brother, labor, an equal standing before the tribunal of brain and justice.The battle is no longer with Islam. We plead not for a handful of human beings, but for all the race. Earth's toilets turn a sea of white, wan faces wearily up to God. The world is ripe, humanity ready for a great change in civilization. New ideas are taking control of
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the mentality of the race. The forefoot of progress is trampling down traditional customs, reverent with age and environed with history. Discoveries are made inch by inch, the spirit of amenity to growth marks the age, therefore growth is certain.Common schools and cheap literature add to the growing intelligence and give a clearer conception of human rights. The people are looking for the grain of justice in the peck of chaff, and demanding that the hob-nailed boot and the golden slipper stand on a level. The subtle brain of man has brought the world into elbow touch. Reading rooms, literary societies and debating schools are bringing reason and philanthropy to the adjustment of difficulties, where our forefathers brought a musket and a brickbat. The arts that belonged exclusively to the palace adorn today our cottage walls. The knowledge, locked in ducal libraries or hidden in monastic cells for centuries, as something too rare and
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precious for the common herd, is in our day cheaper than coal and more common than pork and beans. Macauley, Huxley and Spencer are the daily companions of the coal heaver, the "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The harmonies of Handel and Mozart are heard where the delicacies of Delmonico are unknown. The spirit of antagonism and the haste to be rich are deplored and protested against. The rivets are drawn from the armour of feudalism. The tin horn, with which the wiley politician called his hounds and hunted his game, is taken away from him. Party lines are being obliterated and party fetters broken.The people are beginning to understand that loyalty to parties is treason to humanity, and that the strife between party politicians is the barking of two-legged dogs over a bone, the meat from which is inside their ribs. Meanwhile the burdens of labor are growing heavier, and the awakened intelligence of the toiler is keeping
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step with the wrongs inflicted by greed. The tragedy of want and rags, of bare ribs and broken spirit is being enacted, and private charity and public philanthropy at test but are putting new shingles upon the old house that must crumble before the awakened conscience of a God-fearing poplpe.Charity in the fourteenth century for the beggars of Florence and Naples was perhaps a necessity; but to-day the people need and will have not charity but Jusitce.
There are scholars and thinkers at the forge and the work-bench, and the rough-handed, grimy-faced miner, toiling deep in the darkened recesses of the earth, catches gleams of the morning, when the earth with its waters above and its mineral wealth below shall belong in usufruct to the living — a morning whose dawn even now is shinning faintly but clear over the hilltops of the future, when every toiler shall have access to the
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soil, and the ballot shall be the key that unlocks the garner where the birth-right lies."There is a gleam in the gloom and a light in the sky," and it is the manifest duty of every earnest man and woman to bring about by every means in their power not the millenium but that which can be.
To do this there must be restitution of the earth. The wills and deeds, the chartered grants and parchment scrolls, by which the dead deprive the living of their sustenance, must be destroyed as completely as God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
Back in the misty past King William gave a grant of land, comprising the vast iron region of Pennsylvania, to one of his followers. That land, an empire in wealth and area, has been handed down by the original grantee to three of his descendants, lily-handed sons of idleness, who have no title to this vast inheritance, the homes of thousands, save the grant of a robber king.
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There are vast tracts of fertile land in the Carolinas, given by Queen Elizabeth in Lord Raleigh's time to English adventurers, and this unused land is hedged about with such legal restrictions, the class legislation of today, as to render it impossible, because unsafe, for the poor, homeless black and white toilers of the South to settle upon and cultivate a patch of cotton or potatoes.
Through land grants made to the Pacific railroad, a New York daily styles the imperial state of California "the plantation of C. P. Huntington." The grazing lands of Wyoming, Nevada and Montana are held by English cattle barons, fenced with barb wire and the entrances thereto guarded by armed men — lest perchance some travel worn emigrant, whose pallid wife and little children can bear the exposure of the road no longer, should east his eyes upon the broad and green expanse and take possession of the heritage which God intended should be his.
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Twenty-seven foreign syndicates own on an average 73,000 acres of land apiece, and a recent writer in the "North American Review" asserts that there are six down town wards in the city of New York, where the population is so densely crowded that decency is unknown, virtue an impossibility, and starved and wolf-reared humanity is breeding cripples, criminals and paupers — a menace to safe government and public welfare. And let it not be forgotten that in New York city, where the spires of costly cathedrals pierce the stars, the city of schools, churches and educational institutions, 41,000, human beings "ransomed," as the preachers say, "with the blood of Christ" — yearly rot and die that one fair Vanderbilt lily may bloom.
Lord John Scully takes out of Illinois annually $200,000 rent money; and a little less from Kansas, and not one acre of his vast tracts of land can ever become the home of an American citizen, and not one bushel of corn, potatoes, or other
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products of the soil can be gathered or sold under penalty of legal liability, until the rent is first paid to this alien land holder.The laws of primogeniture and legal entail that oppress the English people, are surpassed in this country by the laws that create and sustain monopoly of natural bounties. Enforced increase of debt and usury — the three great crimes of our nineteenth century civilization — and the grave wrongs which result from them, are the mistakes of man's ignorance rather than malevolence.
The development and material grandeur of state, the perpetuity of its power, the happiness that consecrates, the patriotism that defends, rests upon the home. Home is the foundation of government, the foundation of a nation's greatness. Where there are no homes for babies there is no security in time of peace, no safety in time of war.
Society, fed upon false theology, is directly responsible for the crime, the corruption, the
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suffering of today. For nearly 2,000 years the prayer which the Nazarene taught his followers has been answered by the bounty of God and denied by the greed of man. The church and society must demand a change, for it is an insult to a beneficent God to pray "Give us this day our daily bread" while robbing fellow man of the bread which God supplies.Our government made a terrible mistake when it permitted monopoly to overshadow the land, and gave to the cunning conspirators the key to nature's bounties. This mistake must be remedied. Less than one-twentieth of our land is cultivated. Home and foreign speculators hold the lands of the people and defile that which they cannot take away by rent and usury.
The two sins expressly forbidden in that theocracy whose constitution was direct from God, money monopoly and land monopoly, are bringing a curse upon the land. We cannot escape the penalty of wrong doing.
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In the economy of God there is no room for a usurer or a landlord.
Reclaim and restore by congressional action the unearned lands given with lavish prodigality to the railroads.
Limit landholdings to naturalized citizens, and repurchase — or confiscate — the homes of the people upon which the vampire of English land-lordism, rack-rent tenantry and eviction, now fatten. Accessibility to the land, with government aid to the dependent classes until they become self-supporting, and enforcement of that sensible maxim: "If a man shall not work neither shall he eat."
The French revolution that wrote the declaration of human rights in fire and blood and thundered it to the world with flame and smoke, resulted at least in one particular in great benefit to the people. Previous to this uprising the lands were held by the few. The priests held the greater part of it and rented it to the people. Women
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and babies might starve, but these rents must be paid to support the worthless, idle dignitaries of church and court; but the pendulum of time swung the hour of justice. Priests and nobles were driven from the country. Their lands were confiscated, assignats issued and made redeemable in lands. The peasantry invested their assignats in land — securing themselves small farms which no government has since dared to take from them. They own these farms in fee simple, they have no rents to pay, what they make upon them is their own. They make and save money, they are prosperous and contented, they love their country and love their homes. When the first immunity was paid by France to Germany at the close of the Franco-Prussian war these small farmers advanced two hundred and fifty millions of dollars to their government, and this loan is known in history as the "stocking fund" which the government converted into legal tender notes, the money of France. No syndicate319
negotiated this loan — no Wall street broker received commission thereon — no hook-nose harpies of the House of Heber flew in upon feasts to which they were not bidden. No interest bearing bonds were sold in a foreign market to enslave the French people and their children's children. The French peasants, owning their lands — brought their savings from their stockings where they were hidden away, and paid the war indemnity of a thousand million dollars in four years less time than the contract with Germany called for.Needless to remark that a "stocking loan" in England or the United States would be impossible, because the demon of rent and usury is taking our land.
We are not only a debtor nation, but a nation, as gleaned from the eleventh census report, of tenant serfs, and our illustrious President — Grover the First — a marvel of profundity and rotundity, the agent of Jewish bankers and
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British gold, recommends in his recent message the "formation of regimental batallions," the increase of armed force, that capital may put the knife to the throat of a brother, forgetting that the people, whom they would oppress and slay, placed the angel of immortality on the fields of Bunker Hill, made smoke of human bones at Smithfield, and reddened the clay at Marston Moor, that the majesty of human right, liberty of conscience and justice might be evolved.Then, as now, the great common people had faith in the right and saw the issue, as the old prophet saw the Messiah; for the one lesson gleaned from the history of right and wrong since the world began proves that however much wrong may triumph for a time, right in the end prevails.
History is but a catalogue of evolutions, its pages are marked with the debris of empire, the chaos of revolution. The conflict of ideas, the confusion and destruction of warring forces, strew
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its records as thickly as bones along the Appian Way, but ever above the tumult and death, the confused hurrying and seemingly triumphant wrong, we can trace unerringly the hand of God, guiding and directing the destinies of men.When civilization lay prostrate beneath the trampling of barbaric hordes, when the torch of liberty was well nigh extinguished, when greed had strangled trade and commerce, and vice and superstition reigned paramount and selfishness was the only instinct compatible with safety, God, who had guided the children of Israel in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, inspired Columbus to turn the frail prows of his slender bark toward the New World, bearing with him the fortunes of mankind.
And here in our land, here in America, the eternal truths which the embassadors of God had preached along the shores of Gallilee and amid the huts of Capernium, became the basis of constitutional liberty, the foundations of a
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republic destined to be the refuge of the world's oppressed — a true republic, bounded by no British possessions on the north, confronted on the south by no crumbling creed or mumbling superstition of a worn out monarchy, but a federated America, extending from the north to the south pole, and washed on the east and west by restless oceans.There are no more lands to discover. Humanity has spanned the globe, but there are lands to develop, lands to cultivate, homes for the millions, rest for the burdened, light for the darkened, knowledge for the ignorant, liberty to the oppressed, affluance for the impoverished, and justice for all. Where and how shall we begin? By education of the masses and agitation of the economic problems of the day.
Introduce the ethics of Christ into every discussion, believing with Benjamin Franklin that Christly ethics will revolutionize the world. This age is the outcome of all that have preceded
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it, and its problems are more momentous than any.The genius brain has outstripped the present and enslaved humanity. Nationalization of the toll gates through which the wealth producers must pass; nationalization of railroads, telegraphs, public utilities and labor-saving machinery, now owned and operated by greed, will emancipate industry and make capital respect and fraternize with his elder brother, labor.
The legal tender treasury notes, based not upon a decreasing gold supply nor hope of a gold redemption, will free us from the exaction of the usurer.
The tyranny of the bondholder, and the century old trick of the money lender to make money scarce and dear and flesh and blood cheap. To deny the efficiency of treasury notes to tide us safely to prosperity and financial stability is to deny our past experience.
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End the crusade of the crust, the tragedy of hunger and rags by placing the congested population of the great cities upon the unused lands in the hands of alien speculators, the lands held by railroads and the fertile lands of the tropics. Give the people an opportunity to become self-sustaining by extending to the colonists colonial loans on fifty years' time at two per cent., interest, thus converting a dangerous class that swell the lists of imbecility, inebriety, pauperism and crime, into self-sustaining, self-respecting, prosperous and contented citizens, the guardians and the sure foundation of a nation's grandeur.
As we have departed from justice, and forgotten or ignored the ties of brotherhood, we have
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invited this disintegration of government, anarchy and revolution. The vices of power and servitude have begotten the blood-hounds of bigotry and battle, and the discontented, despairing masses who have failed to obtain fair play through the ballot will eventually resort to dynamite, and the bullet.It is the task of intellect, the test of religion, to avert and correct this, to rebuke the shameful wrongs, and combine with the truths of Christianity that love of humanity which Christ taught. Revolution or evolution is inevitable. Industry, denied employment, compelled to tramp, beg and steal, swarms like Egyptian vermin in our nineteenth century blanket. Where babes are starved, manhood pauperized, womanhood degraded, there is sure to be an imperative demand for gunpowder, forts and federal troops, and God is not always on the side of the "strong battalions." It is time for Christians to make a flank movement on the devil, and begin to practice
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what the pulpit has been thundering for nearly two thousand years."Bear ye one another's burdens." "Do as ye would be done by," is accepted by all good citizens — accepted, but not practiced. If nine out of every ten who profess to be Christians would practice their creed of faith, the solution of every problem would become easy; the faintest suggestion to relieve a needy one welcomed and acted upon and the golden rule could be carried out in a simple, straightforward manner. There can be no Arcadia, in the future where the awful varieties of Christianity are ignored, or where disregard is manifested for that ancient maxim: "Do unto others as ye would they should do to you."
The social cannibalism, the cruelly, pitiable child-labor and child vice, the wage slavery that has taken the place of chattel slavery, must go. War, with its attendant horrors and intolerable burdens, must cease when an intelligent people
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become Christians indeed as well as Christians in creed. There is no time to be lost! Guy Fawkes is here; his matches lighted, his powder dry!Politics and beer are kindred souls. The patriotism of Webster, Clay and Lincoln has degenerated into a ham sandwich, free lunch, cocktail article, for sale to the highest bidder.
An army of deadbeats, corrupt public officials and chronic office seekers swarm everywhere.
From the crown of their head to the sole of their feet this people are ailing. The dependent, defective and delinquent classes are increasing — festering lepers whose disease is incurable — save by the application of justice, that omnipotent factor of Christian faith.
It is sometimes hinted at that mitred dignitaries, who in years gone by chanted Te Deums when robber barons returned reeking from their pillaging exploits, have their prototype in the pulpits of to-day, and that for the common people
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they reserve their thunders and their back seats. They are charged with cowardice in attacking wealth and power, and they say that the parable of the needle's eye and the doctrine of the stewardship of wealth, is but seldom, if ever, discanted upon in churches where the light falls softly through stained glass windows, and the bondholder, the usurer and the gambler in stocks and grain occupy a front pew. Be this as it may the church of God, and men and women who profess to be her followers, must choose this day between Christ or Barrabas, must lead or leave in this great movement to emancipate the race. There will be opposition, falsehood and persecution, the scourging at the pillar, and the crowning of thorns, for:When Christ declared the eternal truth that
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the weak and the strong are equal in the sight of God, and taught the dispensation of moral equality, the strangeness of the new teaching fell like a thunder-bolt in the gardens of Herod and the halls of Pilate. The powerful Sanhedran counseled in its wrath, for they foresaw that the spread of the doctrine of moral equality would, in the progress of ideas, lead to a desire for social and political equality, and the inevitable destruction of every form of government based upon injustice. The blood of the Saviour paid the penalty of progress, and placed the seals of perpetuity upon a religion that must regenerate the world or civilization will perish.America is the outgrowth of Christian faith, and the church that has already done so much for the world must become a colossal Cromwell to destroy the monarchy of monopoly.
God, give us men and women who will preach and practice the Christian faith, for it is the one fact in history, the one force in philosophy, that
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the religion of Jesus Christ stands sublimely solitary in recognizing the rights of the people, and placing justice as the prime factor in the everyday affairs of man. It constitutes humanity, justice and freedom. Acknowledged or disavowed the high and holy teachings, the pure philosophy of Christ, appeals to every heart. Put in practice, no woe shall desolate the land, no chariot of iron shall roll through our highways, no galley ship shall dip its oars upon the streams, no human butcher shall be rewarded living or honored dead, no man-of-wars shall float upon our harbors, for Christian ministers will impress upon the hearers that the unused gold of the idle rich must defend the common-wealth and that human beings shall not be slaughtered while riches are exempt. Thus will the fierce world struggles be ended, and the sons and daughters of God shall catch an infinite strain of harmony and chant the new song whose key note is love.335
The Commonwealth the Mortmain of the Masses.
The American colonization of nearly one hundred millions of people at first thought seems impracticable, colossal and wholly impossible. It will require a vast outlay in money, and this alone, under our antiquated system of finances, may look like bankrupting the nation.
How then are we to provide the means to carry out the most gigantic enterprise ever undertaken either in ancient or modern times?
We must resort to that new power in civilization — that potent factor of a new era — the abstract dollar. This sublime symbol of co-operation, this pledge of the wealth of the richest nation the world has known, will be evolved from the political triumphs of the new movement for the freedom of the masses of America.
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Recognizing that labor is wealth, we will issue a true measure of value, a medium of exchange, known as legal tender notes, redeemable by taxation, this will give the nation a stable, reliable measure of value for all wealth, which is but stored labor. By this method we may put idle men at work; we may reclaim and improve new territories and perfect public improvements. The wealth now lost to the nation through idleness on the part of millions of the people, who, by lack of employment, are forced to tramp, beg, steal or starve, is at length borne by the commonwealth, but another name for national labor.
As national labor is commonwealth, the taxable property of the community, it is evident that anything that promotes labor likewise adds to national wealth. But widespread idleness is caused by either a lack of enterprise or a want of money.
No one has ever accused the people of our country of a lack of energy or enterprise, therefore
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the lack of money and avenues of profitable employment of labor must be assigned as the true reasons of our industrial depression.But when the American movement rides into power on a wave of awakened intelligence (my friend, you already feel the throb of the mighty tide), we shall effect and eternize the ethics of paternalism. We shall recognize the fact that labor has built up a mighty nation within the past century — a nation the wonder of the earth, but now the heritage of a few. We shall make it a heritage for all, not by confiscation, not by anarchism or war, but by acknowledging the cardinal fact "that the laborer is worthy of his hire;" that the country is the result of labor; therefore the laborer, be he ever so poor, has a claim on its protection. The true basis of the nation's wealth is muscle and brain. Should we not therefore defend, foster and utilize these to our and their utmost use?
How can we best accomplish this end?
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We can own that labor lost is wealth lost, and that labor performed is added wealth; we can by co-operation, by issuing an abstract dollar, put idle labor to work in profitable channels, thus adding to the assets of the commonwealth.Wealth is the digested substance of labor, the vital fluid of industry.
When congestion occurs, when the circulation of the vital fluid is arrested the results are pernicious to the whole body. The hand that labors for food, the brain that directs its preparation has, a natural right to its nourishment. The heart and stomach that would deny this equity would speedily perish through the operation of natural laws.
If idle labor is wasteful to the commonwealth then is not idle wealth baneful to labor?
Common wealth is national wealth. National wealth is national credit. National wealth is the result of labor; therefore labor has an equity in national credit.
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Can the maw of monopoly, the heart of corruption, dare longer defy the laws of nature by denying to brain and labor this inalienable title to public credit.
Let corporate greed keep its private property, won though it be through fraud and oppression, but we will, never surrender our equity in the commonwealth. A few thousand men to-day hold the bulk of private property in this nation.
For this evil we offer a compromise: let them keep their private gains. The commonwealth is the mortmain of the masses.
The commonwealth — national wealth, national credit — of the United States exceeds that of any nation on earth. This public credit belongs to the masses of the nation. It is their inalienable estate. Shall we allow it to remain idle while the hand and brain of labor perish for lack of nutrition?
No, it would be folly and injustice to starve those useful members of the politic body when
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the vast magazine of national wealth — of stored labor, remains a prey to Wall Street rats and corporate cormorants.Let us utilize national wealth or credit to relieve the poor, not by alms but by aid.
Let us in a useful form maternalize this dormant wealth by issuing legal tender notes, redeemable by taxation, and loan this to colonists to enable them to create additional commonwealth.
As an abstract dollar is but the measure of wealth — of labor — this new measure of value would only represent our idle reserve of stored labor which has resulted in 60,000 millions of national wealth. This wealth would be its security, taxation, a draft on labor and private wealth would be its redemption.
Suppose we should be required by law to furnish transportation and other means of access to the countries of the tropics, to three million families yearly for the next ten years. This might necessitate an outlay by the government of
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five hundred millions yearly for the next ten years. But bear in mind this would be only a loan — not a loss such as was entailed by the war of the rebellion when we freely expended many times that amount yearly.Private property of the nation would be protected against increase of taxation by the repayment in two per cent., payments. The whole debt would be extinguished in fifty years, and at the end of that period the national wealth would really be doubled by this one operation, for the colonial plantations, with possibly 120 millions of people, would be added to the national domain.
The Latin American states could readily be induced to co-operate by furnishing the lands and tenantry on the same principle of loans to tenants, and by ceding or selling the lands to the United States. It might require a thousand dollars to each family of colonists the first ten years of their plantation life, yet possibly half of
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that sum would be sufficient to enable the poor white, with his industrious and inexpensive tenantry, to become not only self-sustaining but also a contributor to the national revenues by the regular payment of his taxes, interest and principal.The issue of such a vast sum of paper money might at first seem to us a rash act, but when we bear in mind that it would be redeemed yearly as revenues of the government in a sum equaling about ten per cent, of its volume — that is finally redeemed when paid into the national treasury, a new one always being issued for the expenses of the government, and that instead of a nation of sixty-five millions, federated America would aggregate more than two hundred million of people with this money for their principal currency, the amount of even ten thousand millions would not be in excess of our wants.
Half of this would be drawing the government two per cent., annually for its loan to the colonists.
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All dues, public and private, would become payable with the legal tender notes, gold or silver at the option of the debtor, hence metallic money could not go to a premium; or should a clique of brokers corner either gold or silver, we could demonatize it at once, thus putting an end to a false measure of value.
We would have no additional need of a gold reserve, for our currency would be redeemable by taxation. We should at once get rid of our present system of legal tender and our gold and silver certificates by destroying them when they come into the treasury, and pay our government obligation hereafter in the new emblem of national co-operation — the abstract dollar — redeemable again through the channel of government revenue.
During the War of the Rebellion our nation of about thirty millions of people issued in four years the aggregate of 3,309 millions of dollars, yet to-day this money is as good as gold, and nearly all of it has been redeemed.
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To-day, with more than twice the population and wealth of the nation of that period, we could safely issue and keep afloat at par three fold that amount. From 1860 to 1870 was a decade of marvelous prosperity for the nation, notwithstanding we prosecuted one of the greatest wars of history. This prosperity was caused largely by the vast volume of paper money then in circulation.
The peaceful settlement of the problem of poverty may seem appalling and impossible from its very cost. But this is a misconception of the proposition herein made. It will cost nothing but the issuing of the legal tender notes. The colonists will repay the whole amount of money advanced, interest and principal, in fifty years.
We would only be lending the national credit to the poor, who from lack of means cannot co-operate in seeking new channels of labor. We should thus only be utilizing the stored labor of the commonwealth by issuing a Labor Certificate
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instead of a gold or silver certificate — a draft based upon the mortmain of the masses, their inalienable estate, the public credit, and redeemable through their own labor in interest, principal and taxes of the government.Is it not wiser to settle this grave question peaceably than by war, riot, and final anarchy?
In the past forty-five years Christendom has wasted 14,000 million dollars, and caused the death of 1,868,000 men by warfare.
We can colonize half of mankind, and add one hundred per cent, to the world's wealth, and save instead of destroying lives, through the paternalistic policy of colonial loans, which will in the end cost us nothing but unselfish co-operation.
This is the means to the end. Can we never accomplish these grand results of philanthrophy until we combine? Never!
But by enlisting the attention of the poor, by agitating these economic questions night and
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day, by laying aside our partisan politics and laboring for the good of all we can place a president in the White House and our representation in full control at Washington in 1896.American people, be men and women! Throw aside the lethargy of despair, and let us assert the right to our inheritance, the inalienable estate of the commonwealth. Let us move out to the wilderness to worship Israel's God. There is a home for the homeless, comfort and plenty for all, rest from hardship and trouble. Follow the banner of Americanism, it leads to pleasant fields! A new system, grand and gigantic, will dawn upon us when Tropical Colonization, armed with co-operation and scripped with the abstract dollar, moves its clanking legions away to the Southland, when the sin of poverty, may be washed away in a new and glorious Jordan.
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Tropical Tenantry.
How shall we secure tenantry for the tropical plantations?
Caucasian colonies in the tropics hitherto have been failures, when the labor of inferior races was unobtainable. The heat of a tropical climate seems fatal to the unacclimated white laborer, but in the past this has been avoided through slavery, that blot on the history of America, which now, thanks to the awakened intelligence or conscience of Christendom, is a thing of the past. But the white man, removed from the cold north, would be unable to perform hard manual labor under the equatorial sun. For a generation at least the Caucasian planter in the tropics would be compelled to rely on the labor of the inferior races. Slavery is an impossibility, hence tenantry is a necessity. As tropical colonization must be effected
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through a co-operation of legislation and inventives, the same agencies will have to be employed in securing tenantry for the tropical plantations. When Americanism prevails in our government the necessary legislation may be readily secured by enacting laws on the subject, by forming treaties, by co-operating with the southern members of federated America and in making liberal appropriations of money.Where can we find a numerous class, inured to labor under a tropical sun, who could be induced to take the place of laborers on the plantations?
The orient certainly presents the best field, not only from, the fact that its tropical or sub-tropical climate resembles that of Latin America, but also on account of its dense and enormous population, which has become acclimated by countless generations of hard labor in the torrid valley of the Ganges; the warm, moist, alluvial plains of Central China; the hot, humid Southern Japan, and the tropical Islands of Malaysia.
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This portion of the world contains nearly half of the population of the globe. India and her dependencies constitutes a vast swarm of humanity, aggregrating nearly 300 millions, all huddled together on one and a half millions square miles of territory, much of which is worthless land.
China — that mighty and mysterious agglomeration of one branch of the human family — approximates a population of 400 millions. So dense is this country, peopled that an empire might be populated from the families that having failed to find room on land, throng her rivers and inlets on boat-houses, junks and rafts.
Siam, Anam, Southern Japan and Malaysia, all tropical or sub-tropical countries, contain an aggregate of 100 millions more, thus, with India and China, constituting fully half the world's population, a vast reservoir of stagnant labor, valueless in a great measure to themselves and the world for of land and opportunity.
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The condition of these people must be appalling. We read calmly of a famine in India, of thousands, even millions dying of starvation, but until we fail to realize what gigantic proportions human suffering may assume, until we recall the famine in Ireland, a calamity that thrilled all Christendom with horror and pity; and when we remember that India's population is sixty fold that of Ireland's we catch a faint conception of the hideous magnitude of the great calamity, of the unfathomable anguish that results when 300 millions of people are stricken with famine.
The wires flash the news over civilization that some great Chinese river, bursting its levied banks, has swept away ten, fifty, or a hundred thousand people in its turbid flood. We pass the news calmly by, forgetting the mighty moan of human suffering that commingled with the loud clamor of the yellow waves as great fleets of frail crafts freighted with human souls — because the earth denied them any other home — were dashed
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to destruction, and poor human families without number were swallowed up by the ravening waters.Then take the condition of the oriental female. Can we realize what misery, degradation and despair would result should all our mothers, wives and daughters — all the women of western civilization be deprived of liberty — be compelled to deep seclusion for life, remain veiled in the presence of men, have no choice in the selection of their husband or friends, be denied medical assistance in sickness, because female doctors are unknown and male doctors for women, indelicate? Be regarded as little better than brutes by mankind, kept in ignorance and denied education, and female children drowned at birth like useless cats? The chivalry and sense of justice of the Caucasian would revolt at such barbarism, yet this is the condition of womankind in the orient — of half of all the humans.
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For hundreds of years the Christian missionary has labored to enlighten the pagan people, but as yet only impenetrable darkness enshrouds their condition. In their own land, enslaved by custom and barbarous laws, they can never be enlightened. Ten thousand years of missionary work, as now conducted, would be necessary to Christianize and elevate the masses of India, China and Malaysia.
Yet, these strange, fantastic, patient creatures have human hearts like our own; they feel, think, suffer and reason; they have gifts of intellect to improve and immortal souls to save. They are the talents given to our stewardship by the Master who will one day call the mighty Caucasian to a stern accounting for his employment of the grand intelligence, the masterly genius and prodigious vitality, that has placed him at the head of the human family.
It manifestly is our duty and destiny to become the guardian of the inferior races. We must
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labor to improve his physical, moral and spiritual being.But foreign missions, conceived in religious fervor, and applied in a spirit of heroism and self-sacrifice, are yet lacking in reason and philosophy. The sooner we acknowledge and remedy the defect the nearer we will approach success in reclaiming the heathen.
It is well nigh useless to send frail but heroic women or even strong, lion-like men alone into the heart of China or India to rescue the benighted inhabitants; the difficulties and jeaulousies encountered there; the obstacles presented by their hostile rulers and a powerful priestcraft, the iron rules of custom and caste, neutralize the most heroic and patient efforts of the missionary.
As it is very difficult to remove these obstacles let us proceed to remove the native. Let us bring him away from his native heath and surround him with comfort and Christian influence. Let us place him us a tenant on a tropical plantation
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in federated America, under the supervision of a Caucasian planter, where he may come in contact with western civilization, and it is possible that at the end of fifty years he may become a Christian citizen on his own plantation.Let us legislate the means of transporting him away from the obstacles to his enjoyment, comfort and advancement, and use the incentive of giving him a free home for himself and family — a tract of land free by occupancy — to induce him to emigrate to America.
When we recall the stringent measures we have recently enacted to prevent the orientals from flooding the United States with their cheap labor, we may realize that it will be a difficult matter to induce vast numbers of them to flock to America when we assure them of protection, a free home and free transportation. We know that the oriental is patient and industrious. The Chinese of California have proved to be excellent laborers in the orchards and vineyards of that State.
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They, as well as the natives of India and Japan, are excellent though primitive agriculturists. They would be valuable inhabitants for tropical America. They would make an empire grander than India of the Amazon valley, greater than China of the Plateux of Brazil, Central America and Guyana. They would supply the needed labor — acclimated to a fervid sun — for the development of a new system and of great, new, tropical empires, a heritage forever for the homeless Caucasian and his equally deserving but mentally inferior brother of the orient.
When Americanism comes into power — the day is coming — you, the millionaire or proletariat will speed it on with heart and voice, we shall institute a new system, one that Europe will quickly follow. We will ruralize the poor of our great northern cities by holding out to them the incentives of a life free from manual labor in the tropics, planters by occupancy with their people as their tenantry for fifty years.
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Both planter and tenant should be supervised carefully by government agents. The products of the labor of the tenants, of which three families to one white family must be provided, should be carefully divided equally between the tenants and planter. Taxes equal to the average for the nation should be assessed upon the products; the land being government property necessarily would be untaxable.
The two per cent., annual interest and two per cent., annual payment would be very light indeed, possibly twenty dollars yearly for each family. This would bring the government a great revenue in return for the aid extended the colonies and tenants in loaning them legal tender notes redeemable by taxation. Thus while the cost to the government would be inconsiderable it would return an income equalling that of the present revenues of our nation.
To induce the oriental to leave the scenes of his degradation, to quit his native shores, we
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might be required to send back thousands of Chinamen to China, Japanese to Japan, and capable agents to India to acquaint them with the inducements we would offer them on a tropical plantation.We should clearly state that they and their families would be transported here free of charge, or that their passage money would be a loan on fifty years' time at two per cent.; that we would supply them with the means to begin life on a tropical plantation, under the direction of the planter, whose duty it would be to instruct them in their new mode of life, who would plan for them to execute, that the labors of all would co-operate in building, clearing and planting, and that the products of all should be divided in two equal parts, one-half going to the Caucasian and the other portion to the tenants to be divided equally.
We should send out squadrons of great sailing vessels to the orient loaded with our products and
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return freighted with tenantry. We should hire agents (natives) in every city and part of the oriental country, and we should not neglect to make treaties with the governments of those countries, guaranteeing us the privilege of securing tenantry in abundance.Supposing that twenty or even thirty millions of people from Canada and the United States should go to Latin America to become planters. This will necessitate the employment of from sixty to ninety millions of tenantry, counting three tenants to each white person.
But we must bear in mind that America can provide not less than ten million negroes and possibly thirty million of the mixed races and Indians, Mexico, South and Central America will supply the latter, while West India, Brazil and the United States will provide the negroes. This will supply about half the number necessary for from five to six million plantations —
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only one-fifth or one-third of the area of Spanish America.The negro of America is a homeless being and he could be easily induced to settle the vexed race question, which is perplexing our nation, by going to the tropics as a tenant. This might cause a scarcity of labor in the South, doubtless it would, but then the southern people could divert an energy now so largely employed in the vain effort to sustain their ante-bellum aristocracy.
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Poverty — The Remedy.
It is no longer possible even were it desirable to ignore the fact that pauperism in the United States is constantly and largely on the increase. It is the skeleton in our national closet and its intricate problems, affecting so vastly the weal or woe of humanity, clamors loudly for national solution. The insane financial policy pursued by the government for the past few years has impoverished and depopulated the agricultural communities to an alarming extent. The profits of usury being so much greater than the profits of agriculture or industrial enterprise the rural population has been compelled, because of ever-increasing debt, to desert their homes; and the fatal but inevitable tendency of population is towards the cities, where frightful congestion and appalling poverty is the legitimate result. A great host of honest, hard working men and
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women who are willing to work and delve a healthy, happy living from the farm, were farm life made endurable by the removal of debt and legislative toll, are annually driven to the cities to compete with the vicious and the unscrupulous in the struggle for bread. Thus, economic conditions, mismanagement, misfortune, ill health, a thousand causes for which they are not responsible and over which they have no control, have contributed to reduce to a condition of chronic want, a great army of deserving poor, who stand no chance in the battle for existence of obtaining a fair share of the spoils; for, under our cannibalistic competitive system, "the world is the patrimony of the most dextrous scoundrels." In spite of the organized charities, the misdirected philanthropy, the crumbs of pity that fall from jeweled hands, the blanket of our nineteenth century civilization is swarming with human vermin, and the attendant evils of pauperism,367
suicide, insanity, intemperance and crime are increasing with frightful rapidity.Distinct from that class of paupers who have worked and are willing to work, but for whom there is no employment, we find hereditary paupers, the victims pf a disease as pronounced and not less fatal than small-pox or yellow fever, air-poisoned, pallid-faced, blear-eyed wretches, the product of society's sin, the savages of our civilization, the shadow-pictures on the wall of costly churches, whose ministers do not, dare not preach the awful truths of Christianity or proclaim the doctrine of the stewardship of wealth.
The paupers of the slums will not work for any wages. They are content with laziness with or without plunder. A bed with the rats in the cellar is their ideal of home, a companion in infamy in the grog-shop their conception of heaven. They are the social Huns, the festering lepers of out system, from whose ranks the inmates of penal institutions and the material for the hangman
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are recruited. The conspiracies against law and decency, the vile outrages and dark deeds against society and morality germinate in the fetid atmosphere of hereditary pauperism. They are not wholly to blame. Cooped in vice and dirt, they become Ishmaelities whose fierce spirit of revolt and ripened passions of brutality are a menace to civilization and human rights.It is dawning upon the awakened conscience of the nation that we must call to our aid religion, intelligence and justice, and remembering the ties of common brotherhood, settle the great problems that confront us on the basis of intelligent investigation and business sagacity.
The condition of pauperism that stands an obstacle in the path of the nation's progress must be met and can be remedied. A few years ago the black swamp lands of Ohio were uninhabitable because of malaria, but a knowledge of cause and effect came to the rescue. The lands were tiled and drained, and are today among the
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most healthful and fertile lands of the state. Year after year the yellow death devastated the cities of New Orleans and Memphis. Thousands perished annually, the victims of ignorance and superstition. Homes were blighted, hearts broken, the nation mourned its dead, and the world stood aghast. But a knowledge of sanitary conditions was put into practical operation. It was discovered that the fell germs of the plague were held in decaying animal and vegetable refuse. Rigid cleanliness was enforced. Sanitary precaution entered municipal affairs. The death angel breathed no more upon terror stricken wretches. Swamps were drained, streets cleaned, decaying garbage burned, water purified, and Memphis and New Orleans became health resorts. We were apathetic in regard to the sin and horror of human slavery, but God sent forth from battle fields, all crimsoned with the blood of loved ones, the rolling thunders of his, wrath to teach us our responsibility.370
Opening the lids of that wonderful old book, the Bible, we find that when Nehemiah went to govern over Judea that the laborers then were oppressed and poverty stricken because their homes had fallen into the hands of Shylock. Their lands were mortgaged, their sons and daughters were slaves to debt, for this system that prevails today of enslaving people to debt is an old, old trick of the money lender. Ah, it is a hopeful sign of the times that our ministers are studying Nehemiah and imitating his fearless example. The old prophet straightway demanded the return of the lands, the vineyards, the olive groves and the houses and the hundredth part of the money, the corn, the wine and oil, and he enacted a promise from the usurers and made them swear that they would comply with his demands and he shook his lap and said: "So God shake out every man from his house and from his labor that performeth not his promise, even thus be he shaken out and emptied."
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Love and goodness, backed by the strong force of the state, must go down into the dens where the human wild beasts of society hide from the light of day, and empowered by that wise legislation that removes the leper or prevents the smallpox patient from contaminating his fellow beings remove the social Huns of the cities to lands set aside and purchased by the government for their use, subjecting them to such medical inspection and treatment as will check the reckless propagation of criminals and devitalized humanity. The pauperized class should be given an opportunity to work out their own fortunes under favoring conditions. Our first care should be to send them cut under supervision of agents who could supervise large plantations, the tillage of which could be overseen and made profitable for them; having all their work planned for them by the agent, they would in time learn thrift and business capacity. Eventually they would become proprietors, reaping the incentive of all
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labor, just remuneration. The purchase of lands, medical inspection and government agencies would cost the state less than the never-ending expense now entailed for inadequate police protection arid the erection and equipment of buildings that are constantly over-filled by a constantly increased army of criminals.Stem the current of corrupt humanity by removing the fount from which it flows, make the vicious and idle dependent upon their own efforts with the incentive of compensation, all the compensation that life holds if they succeed and the alternative of annihilation if they fail to put forth honest effort when the helping hand is extended, for while God was severe in his denunciations of those who oppress the laborer he was none the less severe in his denunciation of the idler. "If a man shall" not work neither shall he eat."
By ending class legislation in America we may mitigate their poverty, but the ever increasing
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improvements in machinery, by the operations of which vast numbers of honest workmen only skilled in one pursuit are thrown out of employment, the poverty resulting from business disaster, and ending in hopeless self-destruction and loss of courage, the lack of business judgment that people our land with failures, are producing a class whose misfortunes must be met and mitigated. The deserving poor, the honest men and women who are willing to work but to whom work has been denied, can be rescued from their poverty not by legislating them away to the tropics but by legislating a way for them to reach the promised land. Their salvation lies with themselves. They are intelligent, earnest, honorable people, they comprise a vast majority of the American voters. By a realization of the supremacy of numbers, they could control every voting precinct in the Union. Every state would own their rule and a president and congress could be theirs, would they but combine in their374
own interests and defense. A new and powerful political movement must be the initial step in the direction of relief. The recent land slides, political tide waves, and avalanches of the past few years indicate that the great mass of our voting population are independent in their party affiliations. They are ripe for the union of reform forces, ripe for a political movement, that while conservative in spirit will redress the wrongs in our system and arrest the evils of increasing poverty and excessive wealth.Then let all who love mankind more than millionaires unite for the common welfare. We will introduce the initiative and referendum, nationalize our railroads and labor saving machinery, issue paper money redeemable by taxation and remonetize silver. In federated America we will tear up our competing lines of railways and extend them out to the Amazon, Orinoco and the Parana, and pour down a flood of colonists to people millions of plantations from
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the Rio Grande to the LaPlatte. Aid all willing workers, coerce none but the chronic beggars. We will thus repay Labor for its up building of the mightiest nation since the days of Rome. We will form treaties with the orient for tenantry and China.India and Japan will furnish scores of millions of laborers who we will rescue from starvation and paganism by a careful, prayerful application of the divine principles of the brotherhood of man. The unused lands of federated America should be thrown open. Colonies in every town, hamlet and city may then form and communicate with an American bureau of colonization where all maps with desired information may be obtained, together with loans on fifty years' time when a location is affected, thus through incentive and aid they may raise to independence and honor. The pauperized laborer will cease to be a competitor in the crowded marts of labor when he becomes a producer of his own necessities of
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life. When he casts behind him the wants of an artificial civilization he will apply himself to the task, an easy delightful occupation of providing for himself and family the luxuries and primitive comforts produced by a bountiful nature. A few may hesitate, many even refuse to accept the advantages of colonization but this does not detract from the merit of a plan to alleviate the hard lot of the unemployed, for when the glorious day of jubilee arrives the exodus will be so great that all who prefer to remain may find profitable employment.The ruralization of congested city population would tend to arrest crime, competition and public danger. This can be effected by legislation and incentive, but great and beneficial results will never be effected until the masses of America form a strong political combination to obtain the needed legislation through the principles of fraternity. Let us be up and away for the day is breaking. The blood of justice crimsons the