We have read of the robber barons of the Rhine who from their castles sent a shot across the bow of every passing craft, and descending as hawks from the crags, tore and robbed and plundered the voyagers until their greed was glutted, or the strength of their victims spent. Shall this shame of Europe against which the world revolted, shall it be repeated in this free country? And yet, when a syndicate or a trust can arbitrarily add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of a single article of common use, and safely gather forced tribute from the people, until from its surplus it could buy every castle on the Rhine, or requite every baron’s debauchery from its kitchen account—where is the difference—save that the castle is changed to a broker’s office, and the picturesque river to the teeming streets and the broad fields of this government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? I do not overstate the case. Economists have held that wheat, grown everywhere, could never be cornered by capital. And yet one man in Chicago tied the wheat crop in his handkerchief, and held it until a sewing-woman in my city, working for ninety cents a week, had to pay him twenty cents tax on the sack of flour she bore home in her famished hands. Three men held the cotton crop until the English spindles were stopped and the lights went out in 3,000,000 English homes. Last summer one man cornered pork until he had levied a tax of $3 per barrel on every consumer, and pocketed a profit of millions. The Czar of Russia would not have dared to do these things. And yet they are no secrets in this free government of ours! They are known of all men, and, my countrymen, no argument can follow them, and no plea excuse them, when they fall on the men who toiling, yet suffer—who hunger at their work—and who cannot find food for their wives with which to feed the infants that hang famishing at their breasts. Mr. Jefferson foresaw this danger and he sought to avert it. When Virginia ceded the vast Northwest to the government—before the Constitution was written—Mr. Jefferson in the second clause of the articles of cession prohibited forever the right of primogeniture. Virginia then nobly said, and Georgia in the cession of her territory repeated: “In granting this domain to the government and dedicating it to freedom, we prescribe that there shall be no classes in the family—no child set up at the expense of the others, no feudal estates established—but what a man hath shall be divided equally among his children.”
We see this feudal tendency, swept away by Mr. Jefferson, revived by the conditions of our time, aided by the government with its grant of enormous powers and its amazing class legislation. It has given the corporation more power than Mr. Jefferson stripped from the individual, and has set up a creature without soul or conscience or limit of human life to establish an oligarchy, unrelieved by human charity and unsteadied by human responsibility. The syndicate, the trust, the corporation—these are the eldest sons of the Republic for whom the feudal right of primogeniture is revived, and who inherit its estate to the impoverishment of their brothers. Let it be noted that the alliance between those who would centralize the government and the consolidated money power is not only close but essential. The one is the necessity of the other. Establish the money power and there is universal clamor for strong government. The weak will demand it for protection against the people restless under oppression—the patriotic for protection against the plutocracy that scourges and robs—the corrupt hoping to buy of one central body distant from local influences what they could not buy from the legislatures of the States sitting at their homes—the oligarchs will demand it—as the privileged few have always demanded it—for the protection of their privileges and the perpetuity of their bounty. Thus, hand in hand, will walk—as they have always walked—the federalist and the capitalist, the centralist and the monopolist—the strong government protecting the money power, and the money power the political standing army of the government. Hand in hand, compact and organized, one creating the necessity, the other meeting it; consolidated wealth and centralizing government; stripping the many of their rights and aggrandizing the few; distrusting the people but in touch with the plutocrats; striking down local self-government and dwarfing the citizens—and at last confronting the people in the market, in the courts, at the ballot box—everywhere—with the infamous challenge: “What are you going to do about it?” And so the government protects and the barons oppress, and the people suffer and grow strong. And when the battle for liberty is joined—the centralist and the plutocrat, entrenched behind the deepening powers of the government, and the countless ramparts of money bags, oppose to the vague but earnest onset of the people the power of the trained phalanx and the conscienceless strength of the mercenary.
Against this tendency who shall protest? Those who believe that a central government means a strong government, and a strong government means repression—those who believe that this vast Republic, with its diverse interests and its local needs, can better be governed by liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people than by powers and privileges congested at the center—those who believe that the States should do nothing that the people can do themselves and the government nothing that the States and the people can do—those who believe that the wealth of the central government is a crime rather than a virtue, and that every dollar not needed for its economical administration should be left with the people of the States—those who believe that the hearthstone of the home is the true altar of liberty and the enlightened conscience of the citizen the best guarantee of government! Those of you who note the farmer sending his sons to the city that they may escape the unequal burdens under which he has labored, thus diminishing the rural population whose leisure, integrity and deliberation have corrected the passion and impulse and corruption of the cities—who note that while the rich are growing richer, and the poor poorer, we are lessening that great middle class that, ever since it met the returning crusaders in England with the demand that the hut of the humble should be as sacred as the castle of the great, has been the bulwark and glory of every English-speaking community—who know that this Republic, which we shall live to see with 150,000,000 people, stretching from ocean to ocean, and almost from the arctic to the torrid zone, cannot be governed by any laws that a central despotism could devise or controlled by any armies it could marshal—you who know these things protest with all the earnestness of your souls against the policy and the methods that make them possible.
What is the remedy? To exalt the hearthstone—to strengthen the home—to build up the individual—to magnify and defend the principle of local self-government. Not in deprecation of the Federal government, but to its glory—not to weaken the Republic, but to strengthen it—not to check the rich blood that flows to its heart, but to send it full and wholesome from healthy members rather than from withered and diseased extremities.
The man who kindles the fire on the hearthstone of an honest and righteous home burns the best incense to liberty. He does not love mankind less who loves his neighbor most. George Eliot has said:
“A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blest.”
The germ of the best patriotism is in the love that a man has for the home he inhabits, for the soil he tills, for the trees that gives him shade, and the hills that stand in his pathway. I teach my son to love Georgia—to love the soil that he stands on—the body of my old mother—the mountains that are her springing breasts, the broad acres that hold her substance, the dimpling valleys in which her beauty rests, the forests that sing her songs of lullaby and of praise, and the brooks that run with her rippling laughter. The love of home—deep rooted and abiding—that blurs the eyes of the dying soldier with the vision of an old homestead amid green fields and clustering trees—that follows the busy man through the clamoring world, persistent though put aside, and at last draws his tired feet from the highway and leads him through shady lanes and well-remembered paths until, amid the scenes of his boyhood, he gathers up the broken threads of his life and owns the soil his conqueror—this—this lodged in the heart of the citizen is the saving principle of our government. We note the barracks of our standing army with its rolling drum and its fluttering flag as points of strength and protection. But the citizen standing in the doorway of his home—contented on his threshold—his family gathered about his hearthstone—while the evening of a well-spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest—he shall save the Republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are exhausted.
This love shall not be pent up or provincial. The home should be consecrated to humanity, and from its roof-tree should fly the flag of the Republic. Every simple fruit gathered there—every sacrifice endured, and every victory won, should bring better joy and inspiration in the knowledge that it will deepen the glory of our Republic and widen the harvest of humanity! Be not like the peasant of France who hates the Paris he cannot comprehend—but emulate the example of your fathers in the South, who, holding to the sovereignty of the States, yet gave to the Republic its chief glory of statesmanship, and under Jackson at New Orleans, and Taylor and Scott in Mexico, saved it twice from the storm of war. Inherit without fear or shame the principle of local self-government by which your fathers stood! For though entangled with an institution foreign to this soil, which, thank God, not planted by their hands, is now swept away, and with a theory bravely defended but now happily adjusted—that principle holds the imperishable truth that shall yet save this Republic. The integrity of the State, its rights and its powers—these, maintained with firmness, but in loyalty—these shall yet, by lodging the option of local affairs in each locality, meet the needs of this vast and complex government, and check the headlong rush to that despotism that reason could not defend, nor the armies of the Czar maintain, among a free and enlightened people. This issue is squarely made! It is centralized government and the money power on the one hand—against the integrity of the States and rights of the people on the other. At all hazard, stand with the people and the threatened States. The choice may not be easily made. Wise men may hesitate and patriotic men divide. The culture, the strength, the mightiness of the rich and strong government—these will tempt and dazzle. But be not misled. Beneath this splendor is the canker of a disturbed and oppressed people. It was from the golden age of Augustus that the Roman empire staggered to its fall. The integrity of the States and the rights of the people! Stand there—there is safety—there is the broad and enduring brotherhood—there, less of glory, but more of honor! Put patriotism above partisanship—and wherever the principle that protects the States against the centralists, and the people against the plutocrats, may lead, follow without fear or faltering—for there the way of duty and of wisdom lies!
Exalt the citizen. As the State is the unit of government he is the unit of the State. Teach him that his home is his castle, and his sovereignty rests beneath his hat. Make himself self-respecting, self-reliant and responsible. Let him lean on the State for nothing that his own arm can do, and on the government for nothing that his State can do. Let him cultivate independence to the point of sacrifice, and learn that humble things with unbartered liberty are better than splendors bought with its price. Let him neither surrender his individuality to government, nor merge it with the mob. Let him stand upright and fearless—a freeman born of freemen—sturdy in his own strength—dowering his family in the sweat of his brow—loving to his State—loyal to his Republic—earnest in his allegiance wherever it rests, but building his altar in the midst of his household gods and shrining in his own heart the uttermost temple of its liberty.
Go out, determined to magnify the community in which your lot is cast. Cultivate its small economies. Stand by its young industries. Commercial dependence is a chain that galls every day. A factory built at home, a book published, a shoe or a book made, these are steps in that diffusion of thought and interest that is needed. Teach your neighbors to withdraw from the vassalage of distant capitalists, and pay, under any sacrifice, the mortgage on the home or the land. By simple and prudent lives stay within your own resources, and establish the freedom of your community. Make every village and cross-roads as far as may be sovereign to its own wants. Learn that thriving country-sides with room for limbs, conscience, and liberty are better than great cities with congested wealth and population. Preserve the straight and simple homogeneity of our people. Welcome emigrants, but see that they come as friends and neighbors, to mingle their blood with ours, to build their houses in our fields, and to plant their Christian faith on our hills, and honoring our constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm the simple beliefs in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children. Stand by these old-fashioned beliefs. Science hath revealed no better faith than that you learned at your mother’s knee—nor has knowledge made a wiser and a better book than the worn old Bible that, thumbed by hands long since still, and blurred with the tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of your family and the heart and conscience of your homes.