With these reforms in operation, millionaires would cease to multiply and fewer Americans would be paupers. Trusts would not tyrannize over the laborer and the consumer, Corporations could not plunder a people whose political leaders they have bought. Some statesman might again declare as Legaré declared twenty years before the Civil War: “We have no poor.”
English travelers might have no occasion to say, as Rider Haggard said last year, that our condition was becoming so intolerable that there must be reform or revolution. On the contrary, the English travelers might say once more, as Charles Dickens said in 1843, that an Angel with a flaming sword would attract less attention than a beggar in the streets.
And with these reforms accomplished any man in America who wanted to work a farm of his own could do it.
I cannot promise that he would get one of the corner lots of the Astor estate, but I have no doubt whatever that if he really wanted a farm, and were willing to take it a few miles outside of the city, town, or village, he could get just as much land as he cared to work.
Random Comment
Sir Walter Scott used to say that he had never met any man from whom he could not learn something. No matter how ignorant the humblest citizen may appear to be, the chances are that he knows a few things which you do not know; and if you will “draw him out” you will add to your knowledge.
The Virginia negro who happened to pass along the road while the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States was puzzling his brains over the problem of mending his broken sulky-shaft, knew exactly the one thing which John Marshall did not know.
The great lawyer was at his wit’s end, helpless and wretched. How could he mend that broken shaft and continue his journey? He did not know and he turned to the negro for instruction.
With an air of superiority which was not offensive at that particular time, the negro drew his pocket-knife, stepped into the bushes, cut a sapling, whittled a brace and spliced the broken shaft.