“Impracticable, the collection of these taxes,” is one of the excuses for their non-imposition. The people have trusted Grover Cleveland with the power of executing the laws of the nation. The people believe that, as Lincoln, Jackson, and Jefferson, he will not be recreant to the trust reposed in him. He will collect the taxes; he will seize the property of the corporations; he will imprison the perjurers. He will perform the duties imposed upon him, in the high office of the nation to which the will of the people has called him. He will see that the mandates of the people are obeyed. This tremendous accumulation of fortunes must cease! A Vanderbilt leaves a hundred million to one son! At five per cent. per annum, the income is five millions each year. It is impossible for him to spend it. The difference between his expenses and his income is added to this mighty mass of money, which is concentrating each year more and more, compounding the interest thereon, in the hands of a few citizens of the Republic. Mr. Gould dies and leaves a hundred millions. If evenly distributed between his children, it would be impossible for the income to be spent, and it would simply accumulate, generation after generation. The Astors have adopted a habit, like most of the rich men of the nation, in imitation of English entailment, of leaving the bulk of their property to the eldest son, while apportioning off the younger children with a million or two. The impossibility of that elder son spending the income is perfectly apparent. The object is to accumulate, in the hands of a few families, the wealth of the nation. The tendency is exactly in that direction.
Not only is it un-American, but especially obnoxious to the people generally, as it tends toward the accumulation of wealth, not only to an unwholesome but to an alarming degree, in the hands of the eldest sons of these families. It is practically the entailment of the estate, without so announcing it. Let us take, for example, the Goulds, Vanderbilts, or Astors, and let this peculiar kind of distribution of their property continue, apportioning out the younger members of the family with a comparatively small sum, but leaving the bulk to the first son. Is it not concentrating wealth in the hands of one man, the income of which it is impossible that he should spend? The accumulation still goes on from generation to generation until, practically, the money power of our land lies within the grasp of the representatives of a few families. Let us imagine the condition of affairs a few hundred years hence, if we allow the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Rockefellers and Astors to apportion off, from generation to generation, the younger sons and daughters of the family, concentrating the vast accumulation from the interests of their tremendous fortunes in the hands of one representative of the family. Some dozen men of this great Republic, by a combination, could then practically control at all times the financial situation of the nation. There is no possibility of an equalizing process and the scattering of the wealth and accumulations of these families. From generation to generation, under this peculiar method of distribution and disposal adopted by our would-be nobility, there would be created a condition exactly similar to that existing in the pre-eminently commercial Venice, from which thraldom the Common People were only relieved by a foreign conqueror, Napoleon, whom they welcomed with unpatriotic joy because he brought relief from the discriminations with which the masses were cursed.
No one will deny that, under the existing laws, Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, the gentleman (?) who so forcefully and elegantly expressed himself in the utterance of his sentiments, “The public be damned,” had a perfect right, under the laws as they now exist, to leave the bulk of his property to his eldest son. Nay, he might have called him the Duke of Vanderbilt, if he pleased. By the pleasure of the people, he had the right to dispose of his possessions as to him seemed best.
WM. H. VANDERBILT,
Author of the Famous Speech, “The Public be D——d.”
This is all perfectly within the bounds of and consistent with the laws that the people have made; but remember, that these people who made these laws can UNMAKE them; they can require that a man’s property shall be equally divided among all of his children; they can tax it so that this infernal and ever-increasing income shall not create such an accumulation as to present a danger to the life and existence of the Republic. And this is not against the law. Good my lords, as the barons, the Common People will kill this “caste,” not by the headsman’s axe that decapitated the Stuart, not by the guillotine that drank the blood of a Bourbon; but they’ll do it with legislation, more peaceful, more quiet, and with more “general apathy;” but the result will be just as efficacious.
Now that the nation, composed of the Common People of America, has suffered the assumption, upon the part of these few families, of a sham aristocracy and attempted “caste” in this country; suppose, when the people have felt the power that lies in them, that they should rise in their might and decree that the support of the Federal Government shall come from that surplus income, instead of permitting it to accumulate in the hands of each succeeding generation of a few families in America. What, again it may be asked, can the sham aristocrats do about it?—you people of the Carnegie, Astor, Vanderbilt class. The people decree it, and you must bow your heads to their will.