C. C. Edmonson, Grand View, Ark.
Populist is the synonym of right. Success to your magazine.
John Medert, Indianapolis, Ind.
The million and a half of voters who were freed from party thralldom by the Populist movement have made it impossible for the Democratic Party to get back to Clevelandism, or for the Republican Party to “stand pat” on anything. The Senators who “grinned like Cheshire cats” at Senator Allen when he made charges against them, are having troubles of their own. The outlook is hopeful, and the law of disintegration is still at work.
Thomas Wybrants Lodge, Ha Ha Tonka, Mo.
I am, and intend to remain, a regular subscriber and reader of your fearless and honest Magazine, which, along with Post’s Public, are the only papers I care to read, and see you also consider Post’s paper “excellent.” I do not think you are just to Tolstoi, and so enclose you his own letter of April 27, 1894. In your editorial of October you confound “ownership” with “possession.” If you will read chapters XVIII and XIX of “Social Problems” the great essential difference will be clear to you. Neither George nor Tolstoi ever proposed any division or partition of the land—nothing of the sort. George indeed, in chapter II, book VIII of “Progress, and Poverty” makes this most plain, saying “I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land.” But surely, Mr. Watson, if you have not, carefully, without bias read these incomparable works, you ought to do so; he expressly disclaims his “fundamental reform” as being any “panacea;” he fully recognizes and so does Tolstoi “that even after we do this, much will remain to do.” I am an old and very poor man of 73. Had I the means I’d buy and send you George’s “Condition of Labor.” No honest Christian after reading that little, but truly logical and ethically admirable “Open Letter to the Pope,” could say, much less maintain, that Nature (God) did not intend the Rent of Land—Land values—for the use and the support of human Governments. I hope you will honestly “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” George’s works. You then would see and own that “The Land Question is the Labor Question” and far more important than “The Money Question,” serious though that certainly is. I subscribe myself your earnest and true admirer.
Dorrance B. Currier, Hanover, N. H.