Confiscation; An Outline

by William Greenwood

But, it will be asked, will not a fifty times millionaire give employment to as many men as will 500 men with $100,000 each. No. Not even if madam and himself are at home from toadying up and down through Europe in search of a princeling. (Stop this fad of the spoiled darlings of fortune and you stop a leak through which over $1,000,000,000 of American money has already disappeared. We will sustain this with facts in its proper place.) One million dollars divided among ten men will do ten times more good than if owned by one man. One million dollars owned by one man is like one million acres owned by one man. He will certainly make some kind of use of his acres, but the very best he can do will be as nothing compared to the use a thousand men or more can make of them. It is the same with a million of money. And an enterprise calling for one million dollars of capital can be carried on just as well if that capital is owned by fifty men, as it could if it is owned by one man. We will have more to say on this point before we are done.

The American millionaire has also the power to squander outside of our own territory that which is much needed in his country. And the thousands in money which he sends to Europe for something to hang on his walls would pay for a much needed improvement in some city or town in the country where the money was made.

The American millionaire is a detriment to his own country any way you take him, although a great many people are thoughtless enough to say that we cannot get along without the millionaire. The capital which he controls will be still here after he is legislated out of office, just as it is when Father Time gathers him in.

He not only injures our country by taking its capital away, but he checks development by tying up the resources which he has got title to. He incloses thousands of acres for a few deer or some such to browse in when the whole should be thrown open, and those in need of homes allowed to settle it. There can be no doubt but what this is a great waste of land when we remember how rapidly those reservations were settled when they were thrown open within the last few years. Those large inclosures may or may not contain land suitable for those in need of homes, but a look through the foothills and mountains of California will show that homes can be made among the rocks and canyons even - when people are forced to it. And it is this power of millionaire to compel us to takes his refuse that we have to do with here, and not with the quality of the land in his game preserves. Strip him of this power and you make the "decoration for his wall." the "deer park," and the "princeling" impossible, and the people will once more have come into their own. Let him retain it and he will soon drive us to beat the bush for game that he himself will bag, as he has already bagged the wealth we produced. Let him retain it, and his sixty miles of fencing may or may not inclose worthless land, but it will not be the land, but the idea represented by the deer inside, that will set us to thinking of the aristocratic parasite and of the pauperism and slavery that is a part of his belongings where-ever he is found. Let him retain it a little while longer, and the soldier, who is steadily working his way on to the scene, will be here, and then the power to help ourselves will be gone, for the grip will be at our throats.

Those who are watching the mighty drama that is slowly unfolding itself on the world's stage of to-day, saw during the strike of last summer with what astounding ease a great people can be subjugated by a few disciplined men. And we no longer labor under the mistake of thinking that because they are our own people they will not shoot to kill. Put your brother - aye, your son - into a uniform, and he needs but the word to snuff you out as quick as he would a red handed Apache. He has been drilled to believe that he himself would be snuffed out if he disobeyed. And this result of disobedience is ever present with the man in uniform, and has been engraved into his very soul, for his only God is the drum-head court-martial. This is the creature that has made the aristocratic parasite a fixture in Europe, and he is all that is needed to make the same curse a fixture in our own country, and every attempt to increase his number should be resisted with all the means in our power, until the plunder he is wanted to guard shall have found its way back to its rightful owners.

IV.

We will now show how the principle of Confiscation should work in the case of railroads. This class of property, by the way, should never have been given over to private ownership to begin with. They are for the convenience of the public, just as much as any harbor or navigation ever was. And if it was right that the founders of the Republic should, in the interests of the country's commerce, deny the right of private ownership in our navigable waters, then it was wrong to concede the right of private ownership in railroads. As for the capital to build them with, it was just as easy to get it for that purpose as it was to get capital to dredge harbors, build lighthouses, build forts or the Stanford University. The first railroad, or even the twentieth, never suggested to the leaders of those times any idea of what this rival of the winds and tides would develop into in a few short years. Individual greed has so little time, to spare from the building of its own nest that politics in the United States, where the common good should be the aim of all legislation, has become a hand-to-mouth affair, and the morrow must shift for itself. Busy hunting for spoil, like our own incompetents of to-day, the legislators of the past cared nothing for the morrow; and, without knowing what they were doing really, surrendered a principle to the railroad projectors that was but a spark at the time, but which has spread until we find the blaze devouring us to-day. The statecraft that never found time to look beyond the ringing of the curfew bells would have starved to death had it to compete with those who were then working the lobby, while it was splitting hairs over the Constitution and accepting the "stuff" that would do it "the most good." No class of property shows the justice, and therefore the need, of Confiscation as much as railroads. No class of property has done as much toward absorbing and transferring the whole country into the hands of a comparatively few men as railroads. But when Confiscation gets through with these monarchs of all they survey, the town or section through which these railroads run will not find themselves like a sucked orange by the wayside.

Taking the Southern Pacific Railroad, we find that it runs through Madera County, California, but it is doubtful if ten cents worth of its securities are owned there. Madera County, then, has property within her borders that earns an income, not one cent of which goes to the county where it was earned.[1] The property is there, but the income from it is taken elsewhere. This is the one great flaw in our present economic life, and is the very root of our present troubles.

The income from property is taken from the locality where it was earned. And the farmer's wagon sinks to the hubs for want of money to build good roads. And the laborer is robbed of the income that his labor earned, and he sinks his manhood at the soup-house door. We repeat it: The great defect in our economic life is the taking of the income from the locality where it was earned, and from the laborer, the source of of it all. This does not mean that the laborer must spend his income or wages where it was made. It does not mean that the income from property must be spent in the particular locality where the property is located. It does not mean, in short, that there shall be any restrictions placed upon the individual in any way outside of limiting him to the ownership of $100,000. With that he can do as he likes, and go where he likes - title-hunting if he wishes, when he will be sure to find many bargains, for it is our impression that there will be a slump in that market when the American millionaire is no longer found among the bidders.

To the United States Government must be left the winding up of the affairs of the railroads, and all other paper-represented property, as it is obvious that she can do it much better than the many States of which the country is composed; and the before mentioned excess shall then be turned over to the different counties where the railroads are located, each county to receive in proportion to the value of the railroad property within her limits, and not according to the number of miles.