I know the claim will be made that the wealth which the millionnaires could not carry away was truly theirs, and therefore that while they lived they had a right to dispose of it. But I deny it. In the highest sense of justice, it was not theirs, and even if it was, it was justly forfeited by their treason to humanity; for I hold that neither genius nor the business capacity that produces wealth ever releases a man from his obligations to society. In time of war to defend the city or State, we take every man’s property, so far as needed, and require him, in addition, to offer his life in battle to protect the community; and surely in the grand battle which every republic has to meet against its foes,—on the one hand oligarchy and despotism, and on the other social disorder and convulsions between capital and impoverished labor,—in this battle, I say, every man may be required to defend the republic with his money, his honor, and his life, if need be, and he should think himself very lightly released if society demands only to become his legatee, after he has provided for his family. He thus relinquishes what is nothing to him but everything to society.
Wealth is the product of the nation—of all its work of brain and muscle. No one man by himself ever accumulated wealth. But in the entangled social co-operation, struggle, and battle, wealth is scattered strangely and gathered in heaps like the money at a gaming table. One man seizes a gold mine, another seizes for a trifle a piece of parchment giving the title to land where a million are going to settle, and both become millionnaire princes at the expense of the commonwealth. There would be very few rich men if the real production of each was all that he could hold. To seize by a legal fiction a mine that yields a million annually is simply a robbery of the commonwealth. The robbery of the commonwealth and the toiler is our chronic condition. The urban population, strong in capital and skilful in combination and chicanery, has drained the agricultural regions, until agriculture,[4] toil, and poverty, are closely associated, while urban wealth displays its ostentatious ease, and farmers are driven by the million into a desperate political struggle for self-protection.
The great mass of accumulated wealth was all unearned. It was the donation of absurd law to monopolists,—to men who procured the titles to lands. Their value came from the entire community, created by the people, and when that amount is rescued from landlordism, the millions vanish and society reclaims its own. Thus do I assert the ownership of the community in millionnaire hoards. And when the tenant for life has gone, to whom the law has been by far too generous, and left his hoards, out of which he has already squandered more than he was entitled to—the commonwealth from which this wealth was gathered may rightly step in and reclaim it.
It is but a waif on the ocean of commerce—the jetsam and flotsam, of which the law must direct the disposal. The heirs, as they have been called, may come in to the wreck that lies on the shores of time, after the soul has gone to eternity—but law must decide whether these wreckers are entitled to the cargo,—to goods which they did not produce, and whether it is safe and patriotic to allow them to carry off what is substantially in the majority of cases morally and justly the property of the commonwealth. There may be some exceptions to these general statements as to property, but when we recollect how land monopoly and other monopolies have robbed the commonwealth, I hold that the commonwealth is bound to reclaim the stolen wealth wherever it can find it, and certainly wherever the commonwealth can find it abandoned by the claimant, the action of trover should come in when the tenant for life has ceased to exist.
Perhaps the devotees of precedent may be bold enough to call this robbery, but it is simply reclamation of that which has too long been lost or stolen. For the chief foundations of large fortunes, the chief source of the great flood of accumulated wealth, has been the taxation of the people by the monopoly of land and monopoly of mines—the monopoly by private individuals of what justly belonged to the commonwealth, but was captured by the sword or by law—aided by cunning financial operations which stand on no higher plane than gambling or fraud.
The British peerage draw an annual rental from their lands of $66,000,000, and the American princes draw far more, but I have not had time to find the statistics.[5] It will not be long before foreign landlords shall draw $50,000,000 annually from the United States, if they do not already, for they hold more than 20,000,000 acres, and on these they may practise the eviction of tenants in the Irish fashion. The wrongs of Irish tenants elicit universal sympathy, but they are far surpassed now in America without outcry or comment. About twenty-four thousand evictions occurred last year in the city of New York, and this indicated more than a hundred thousand human beings turned homeless into the streets, generally in a penniless condition! The distressing evictions of the great cities, and the selling out of thousands of western farmers under foreclosing mortgages, are preparing a terrible mass of discontented population to whom a social convulsion would not be alarming. Those who live under the pressure of a terrible social system will not be sorry if it is overthrown by violence.
A large portion of the city of New York is held at values ($50 a foot) which would make its annual ground rental over $100,000 a year for a single acre. When we think of the vast sums which have been accumulating for centuries in the form of rent—say, for example, the land rents of England, which, outside of mines, amount to $330,000,000 a year,—it will be apparent that the grand flood-tide of wealth, which has passed into the possession of private individuals who have been fortunate enough to acquire land titles long ago, and their successors, exceeds by more than a hundred times all the wealth that has not been squandered and remains in sight to-day.
But it is gone—squandered—and we never can reclaim it; and there is another mountain mass of wealth not quite expended yet, which came from corrupt financial monopoly, which has sometimes generated financial lords more rapidly than land monopoly. Upon questions of finance and political economy, our people have been as blind as they have upon the land question, and our entire financial legislation has been but a trap to catch the commonwealth and rob it, and the commonwealth has been caught, and robbed of far more than two thousand millions.[6]
The follies and crimes of the past cannot be readjusted—but its legacy of robbery to the present must submit to the arbitration of justice, and the demands of philanthropy. The millions exacted from the tenants of England and Ireland by the descendants of the robber barons and brigand soldiers, who took the soil by the sword, still cry aloud for justice.
If we grant that an individual may by his own exertions justly acquire a hundred thousand dollars, which is an ample competence, and that as an encouragement and reward for his industry, society may justly allow him to dispose of it by will, which I think is a liberal concession, I see no sufficient reason for extending his authority beyond that amount. All above that amount, I hold, should belong to the commonwealth in justice, for two reasons—first, because it was taken from the commonwealth, and second, because the commonwealth suffers from two dangerous classes, which ought not to exist,[7]—the tramps becoming demoralized and desperate, and the idlers, becoming demoralized and worthless, who think themselves a privileged class, born with a right to live in everlasting idleness upon the toil of those who are not thus well born. This division into the aristocracy, the proletariat, and the middle class struggling to become the aristocracy, does not make a republic. It is an ancient falsehood and injustice established by absurd laws of inheritance (as absurd as the Hindoo castes), which have cursed the world, and will continue to curse it until America shall establish democratic justice. Yet as experience shows that men’s opinions in all things are swayed by their interests, there must be but few of the patrician class who can perceive these truths, and we must rely for their appreciation upon the vast majority who are not born to wealth.