498

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

reduces both the price and the profits, until the invested capital usually receives only a fair rate of interest, and the effect of this is to so stimulate all industry that it opens up new avenues to commerce, subdivides labor, and lifts the standard of living, until this increasing demand for more and more wealth finally increases the demand for land—the original source of all wealth.

This increasing demand for land has led to great improvements in rapid and cheap transportation, in order to bring rich but distant land into use; so today railroads, built mostly of cheap steel, light and strong, trains can move with great swiftness and com­parative safety. Our railroads are the greatest labor-saving machines we have, and as instruments of traffic they are a blessing inestimable to all. It is only in their franchise that they are monopolies, and in the power of land held out of use that they are able to grind the lives of their employes. Our best roads can, and do, carry at a profit a ton of freight a mile for less than one cent. Neither is it in doing things on a large scale that constitutes a monopoly. By means of modern inventions, by manufacturing in large quantities, sugar is produced at a profit of only one-sixteenth of a cent a pound. By recent improvements in agricultural implements, steam-plows, reaping, sowing and threshing machines, three men can in a year produce grain enough to feed one thou­sand. In short, there is hardly an industry that can not, in six months’ time, supply the market for a year, so that the great cry today is over-production. There was too much wheat raised last year, too much cotton, too many shoes made; our iron, copper and coal mines all have to shut down because there is an over-supply. Why, then, do not these men, toiling in mine and mill, stop and rest awhile, if they are producing too much? Why do not the thirty thousand women and seventy-five hundred children in the cotton factories of Massachusetts take a vacation? Who is it that turns pale at a talk of a shut-down for six weeks? Why is it that men consider it a privilege to work long and hard, often where life is in danger, and yet they cling to their places as a drowning man clings to a floating spar in mid-ocean, if it be not that the land has been pulled out from under them, while the machines are doing their labor?

We have already reached a time when the small farms are rapidly disappearing and land is being concentrated into the hands of a few. In the West, farms of thirty thousand acres are quite common. Foreign noblemen already own land enough to give one hundred and fifty thousand families one hundred and sixty acres apiece. There is much said, lately, about America for Americans. What we ought to claim is American soil for American citizens. In this way we shall soon be paying to English landlords a greater tax than that we refused to pay to King George III. ’Tis said that four millionaires own land enough to form for each a state the size of Massachu­setts. This concentration of land in the hands of a few produces a seeming scarcity; yet, if the inhabitants of the globe were placed in the United States alone, the popula­tion to the square mile would not be nearly as great as today in Belgium. Notwith­standing the vast extent of land now owned by private individuals or large monopolies, the injury to the masses is not felt in inclosing from them vast tracts of land so much as from shutting them out from the more bountiful portions of nature— such as richiDil or mineral lands, or giving them no share in the valuable trading sites in every large city which their presence has helped to create. No one expects to divide the land equally, or to prevent it from being bought and sold as now, or to take it away from anybody. Yet affairs must be so adjusted that the veriest little sickly girl baby, born in a five-story tenement house next month, shall have her right to an equal share with all others in the value of the land where God has placed her. To deny her this is to deny her right to the wealth which her Heavenly Father has cre­ated for her. Here is a steamboat plying between New York and Liverpool. Its owner recently died, and left this property to his sons and daughters. If they divide it into equal parts they will destroy it; but if they allow it to sail back and forth, and divide its annual earnings equally they will each share alike. So we are sailing upon a boat through space, rushing at the rate of sixty-eight thousand miles an hour. Our boat is loaded down with the materials of untold and inexhaustible wealth. This