And can it be true that other Socialists not only want to share in this “robbery,” but want it so bad they will compete for it?
Dear me! I didn’t know that Socialism was like that. If it is, I believe I’ll take some stock in it myself.
My impression has been that the Socialists were opposed to private ownership of land. I have had forcible reminders of that fact in letters which came hot from the enraged writers. Private ownership is “robbery”; that’s the way they write to me. Did I not see a Socialist orator wave his small, white hand gracefully at all the stores, factories and dwellings in St. Louis, in the summer of 1904, and did I not hear him say in his musical voice to the assembled laborers: “All that is yours; go and take it!” Then, with a silk handkerchief he, with courtly gesture, wiped the moisture from his marble brow, and continued: “Don’t take a part of it, take it all. Don’t be satisfied with a loaf, take the whole bakery.”
Then he froze me and Joe Folk with a glare of merciless severity, and continued, “These men”—indicating me and poor Joe, with a supercilious gesture—“these men talk to you about shorter hours of labor, and the Eight Hour day. I don’t want any Eight Hour day: what I want is to live in the best possible manner on the least possible work.”
And now Wayland is going to spoil all this. He is going to quicken the appetite of Socialists for private property. Instead of feeding a million men on the definite expectation of getting a slice of the Astor Estate, at some indefinite time, he is going to reverse the process and feed as many as qualify, on a definite slice of Florida land right now.
I make this prediction: As fast as Wayland makes home-owners out of his followers he will lose crusaders.
Beware Capua, friend Wayland!
A zealous Socialist, who owns nothing, but who is spurred on by that God-given desire for private property, will eagerly compete for Wayland’s prize and will win it. He will pocket the deed, and move to his land. He will find, perhaps, that it does not quite come up to representation; but it is too late to back out. He settles on his seventy acre tract. If it has no house, he builds. If he has one already, he does all that he can to make it more attractive. It is his. When the storm beats without, he snuggles close to his fireside, and thanks God that this is his shelter from the wild night. His wife will lay her loving touches here and there, and the house will take on a look which reflects the individuality of the owners. Flowers in the front yard, vines clinging about the porch, bright pictures on the wall, ferns and grasses in the vase over the mantel, a climbing rose, perhaps, to race for the cone of the house and to throw out its crimson colors from the roof. Toil which one loves will be freely spent on garden and field, for the toiler is working for those he loves best. In a few years, under the care of home-owners, the neighbors will say, “It doesn’t look like the same place.”
And it isn’t the same place. The owners have transformed it. They have put elements of value and beauty there which nature did not supply. They have so directed their labor, their judgment, their good taste, their tender interests, that the home which they have created is as different from the wild land, as the noble watch-dog at the door differs from the gray wolf of the wilderness.
Do you suppose that this man and his wife and his children can ever be made to believe that they have “robbed” some body of that land, and that it is wrong for them to hold it as private property?