True, there are many of our ambitious farmers who can’t secure enough laborers to make enough cotton to get rich as fast as they would, but they’ll get rich quick enough in using our present available labor, thereby raising less cotton, getting more for it, and, at the same time, either resting their lands or sowing it in small grain. And when these wealthy farmers plant less cotton, they benefit every poor fellow, standing between the plow handles, in the entire South.
And this one or two horse farmer is the ideal citizen, anyway. The best communities are those made up of small farmers. The churches, schools and social conditions in a community, in which one man owns all the land and runs forty plows, are not as good as one with forty land owners. Oglethorpe county would, no doubt, be a better county today, if Jim Smith had never been born, and this is not said with the spirit of criticising a single act of his life, either.
It’s all right for immigrants to build our cities, our railroads, our manufacturing enterprises or to labor in the cities, on the railroads, in the factories or even take servants’ places, but the South doesn’t need any more cotton raisers.—Gwinnett (Ga.) Journal.
The Railroad Power.
The railroad magnates have divided up the lines in this country among nine families of plutocrats, who by controlling transportation of passengers and freight, can control the Government. They are divided as follows:
| Harriman | 22,276 |
| Vanderbilt | 20,493 |
| Pennsylvania | 20,138 |
| Hill | 19,407 |
| Morgan | 18,789 |
| Gould | 13,789 |
| Moore | 13,028 |
| Rockefeller | 10,293 |
| Santa Fe | 7,809 |
| Total | 146,112 |
That is three-fourths of the mileage of the country and the control of the main lines in every state and territory. It puts into the hands of these men a greater power than was ever exercised by any group of kings, lords and dukes who ever formed a community of interests. In all past history, to overthrow such a power as that, a resort to long and bloody wars was the only recourse. It remains to be seen whether the great peace movements of the last few years, for which Andrew Carnegie has built a temple at The Hague, will produce a sentiment strong enough to settle this question peaceably. Would Andrew Carnegie encourage anarchistic disorders if he thought there was a danger of a reduction of the tariff on steel? Railroad combination and robber tariffs are only another manifestation of what we once called the “money power.”—Omaha (Neb.,) Investigator.