The foregoing should make plain how the principle of Confiscation will work in the case of railroads, and all other paper-represented property that can be, and is, owned elsewhere than where the property itself is found.
And there is no need of interfering with or changing any of the functions of the different branches of our Government in order to make Confiscation a part of our organic law any more than there would be to increase the duty on imported wool and to collect it. The machineries of the law making, judicial, and executive branches of our Government, are sufficient for any calls that Confiscation can make on them. Any other construction that may be put on what has been said heretofore or may be said hereafter, is all error. If insisted on, what then? Have we run up against the impassable? It is sufficient to say that what is ours is ours to change when the need is evident, and the Constitution itself is not, an exception to the truth of this.
The laws regulating the rising and the setting of the sun are not of our creating, and we cannot hasten or retard its coming and going one iota of time, and we do not live in the age when it could be done.
But the Constitution is a man-made thing, and when growth has made it a straight jacket then the time for ripping has come.
VI.
Once more resuming our pursuit of the millionaire whom we have dispossessed of his railroad plunder, we find the chase taking us into town, where Confiscation will find many problems which it alone can solve - where it will find his sixteen story building, for his hours of plotting, and his suburban palace for his hours of ease, and the hiving humanity between over whom he had to walk to reach either. Those palaces on the Nob hills of these United States are the toadstools of the decay that is going on in this Republic to-day.
The master crime of all ages was the building of those pyramids on the Egyptian sands, for they were useless, but the whim and the slaves and the lash of power were there, and the pyramids went up.
Let us see to it that the power of our pyramid builders is destroyed before it gets beyond five million dollar palaces.
-
When we apply the principle of Confiscation to the millionaire merchant and turn his excess into the public treasury, it will be no more destructive of the business of which he has had all the profits than it was of the railroads. There will be more business done in the same line than ever, but more will be doing it, and consequently more will share in the profits. But if our object is to break up these fabulous fortunes, which mean certain death to our liberties, and whose blight has paralyzed progress and development, there should be no reason why we should not allow the present owners to take a hand in the breaking up. If the merchant, or other millionaire, would rather divide his millions among his relatives (barring his wife and minors) and friends, than to resign it over to the public treasury, let him do so. Our aim will be attained whichever happens, which is simply to bring about a better distribution of the wealth of this country, and we know of no way of making this even distribution that will compare with Confiscation. Socialism, in all its forms, means the surrendering of individual liberty, and is a retrograde movement, and the outcome of it can be nothing more or less than despotism of the very worst kind.