Page:The Battle for Bread (1875).pdf/20

12 back from sale for a quarter of a century, or lease them for ninety nine years. The public lands belong to the people. But Congress abdicates the people's sovereignty over a territory large enough for an Empire, in the interest of great corporations, which thus install a most gigantic and overshadowing system of feudalism in our Republic, whose founders believed they had escaped the monarchical principles of the Old World."

One man in New York is said to own three thousand houses in that city and an aggregate of wealth, amounting to two hundred millions of dollars; while another owns one hundred millions, and another seventy five millions, and all this while thousands and tens of thousands all around them—men, women and children—who have toiled hard all their lives, have no home, or shelter they can call their own, and if there were a hundred Homestead laws, giving them lands free in the great West, they could not spare a dollar from every-day's pressing needs, toward paying their transportation thither; and even, if they could reach there, would have no means to begin the laborious work of pioneering and building a home, While such things are transpiring, and only here and there a voice calling for justice, it may well fill the heart of every friend of his race, and every true patriot, with the deepest solicitude. For, as in the past, so in the future, all great national evils and crimes, must culminate in the giant throes of revolution, or in upheavals of Society that bring sorrow and desolation in their train.