Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888

by Various

The second is, that no public man, let his honesty and influence be what they may, can menace the moneyed power of our land and remain in public life.

We are so accustomed to being fed on phrases that we lose in their use the object for which they were framed. Our fathers sought the shores of America to escape oppression at home. The sum total of the despotism was found in the fact that while they who produced all enjoyed nothing, they who produced nothing enjoyed all. In framing certain legal enactments, in the shape of a constitution that was supposed to be good against such inequality and injustice, the fathers thought to eliminate privileged classes by wiping out the laws of primogeniture and entail. They took no account, for they could not know, of the corporation, that has all the powers and privileges of the born aristocracy, and renders all the guarantees of the constitution of no avail.

Under the power of the corporation we have a hundred and fifty thousand miles of operating railway that has passed to the control and into the virtual ownership of less than sixty families. To this combination has gone an attribute of sovereignty found in the power to tax the people. As Senators Sherman, Conkling, and Windom said, in their famous report to the Senate, this railroad power can tax all the products of the country in a way Congress dare not attempt. This iron network of rails enters every man's business and pleasure, and is the taxation without representation that brought on the Revolution and gave birth to our government. The people lose through fraud all that they gained through violence; and, sad to say, generally with their own consent.

We have the telegraph, so necessary to our business, which science gave as the poor man's post, for it consists of a wire, a pole, a battery, and a boy, that is openly owned and operated as a luxury by one man.

The currency, the life-blood of trade, is farmed out to something over two thousand corporations, that, acting as one, contract or expand it to suit their own greed.

We are cursed with a system, called a tax, but which is in fact an extortion, that, under the plea of favoring certain moneyed interests, not only forces the consumer to support the burthens of a government kept upon a war footing nearly a quarter of a century after the war closed, but enables less than a million out of sixty millions to accumulate means until our rich men are marvels to mankind. The great Republic, through this process, has entered the avenues of private enterprise, and with its crushing weight reduces labor to starvation wages.

All these combined form trusts, as they are called, which, limiting production, shut out competition, and accumulate for the favored few while the masses suffer.

All then, united, make our government; for government is that power from which there is no appeal, upon which we depend for a recognition of our rights. This power elects our Congress, selects our Presidents, and intimidates our courts.

To meet it we have a government of parties. It is a cast-iron, immovable, insensitive concern, farther removed from popular control than any government on earth. The party once in power can perpetuate that power under the best of circumstances; but when backed by the monopolized wealth of the continent it cannot be displaced. History tells us that it called for bayonets and bloodshed to displace the Democratic party in '61, and we fear history will repeat itself when a long-suffering and outraged people come to recognize the source of their wrongs and the cause of their sufferings.

In addition to this, there is an ugly rock on which we once were nearly shipwrecked, upon which we are again driving. The sectional differences of '61 have been steadily cultivated for selfish partisan ends, and to-day the North is united, as far as a majority can unite, against a solid South. While recognizing the fact that it is only through a careful and jealous guardianship of the home governments found in the States that this wide continent can be held under one control as a nation, we have the dominant party fatally bent on a centralization of power in the political structure at Washington. The negro is the Chinaman of the South, and while Congress excludes through legal enactment the Mongolian from our midst, that same Congress presses the ignorant, vicious African upon the South. This means not only a subversion of political rights, but a social revolution that will make a San Domingo and an Ireland of half our territorial limits. The South cannot submit to this and live. The South has given a bloody pledge to its intent in this direction, that it would be well for us to remember. The North can welcome negroes to its firesides, may return them to office because of their color, for this means votes, and nothing more. But at the South it signifies a great deal more: it means the subjugation of the white race politically and socially to the domination of the most degraded and ignorant class known to humanity.