Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/96

 88 THE LAND QUESTION.

Last winter I was in San Francisco. There are in San Francisco citizens who can build themselves houses that cost a million and a half ; citizens who can give each of their children two millions of registered United States bonds for a Christmas present; citizens who can send their wives to Paris to keep house there, or rather to "keep palace" in a style that outdoes the lavishness of Russian grand dukes ; citizens whose daughters are golden prizes to the bluest-blooded of English aristocrats ; citizens who can buy seats in the United States Senate and leave them empty, just to show their grandeur. There are, also, in San Francisco other citizens. Last winter I could hardly walk a block without meeting a citizen begging for ten cents. And, when a charity fund was raised to give work with pick and shovel to such as would rather work than beg, the applications were so numerous that, to make the charity fund go as far as possible, one set of men was discharged after having been given a few days' work, in order to make room for another set. This and much else of the same sort I saw in San Francisco last winter. Likewise in Sacramento, and in other towns.

Last summer, on the plains, I took from its tired mother, and held in my arms, a little sun-browned baby, the youngest of a family of the sturdy and keen Western New England stock, who alone in their two wagons had traveled near three thousand miles looking for some place to locate and finding none, and who were now returning to where the father and his biggest boy could go to work on a railroad, what they had got by the sale of their Nebraska farm all gone. And I walked awhile by the side of long, lank Southwestern men who, after similar fruitless journeyings way up into Washington Territory, were going back to the Choctaw Nation.

This winter I have been in New York. New York is the greatest and richest of American cities the third city

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