communication between men in our republic has allowed them to pass under the control of selfish political schemers and corporate despotisms.

When a private citizen establishes a business of any kind, he is very careful to see that each part of the work is organized so as to fit closely into all other parts; that each person employed shall have a specific portion of duties assigned him, and that the rules for the government of all these persons shall be fair and uniform in their application, clearly made known to each one, and strictly enforced. But in the administration of our government affairs all these fundamental rules for the successful management of private business are ignored; and even this great function of government itself, - to secure and promote the most reliable and economical means for universal public intercommunication between all citizens, has been surrendered and turned over to Federal and State corporations, at once oppressing the people and embarrassing the government.

The Federal government has divided its sovereignty over the currency of the country with national banks, in violation of the Constitution; it has invited competition with the old coin-monopoly of foreign nations by impolitic discrimination in favor of gold for the payment of United States duties, thereby causing legal-tender notes to suffer a discount at the very time when treasury-demand notes receivable for duties were at par with ccin; it has granted away its supreme control over territorial and State highways to State and Federal railroad corporations created by Congress, and permits them to tax the travel and commerce on these interstate highways without any just limitations; it has granted to telegraphic monopolies the right to control on their lines the public and private intercommunication all over the country, and to levy such rates of tax therefor as the corporators choose, to the great injury of the citizens and the government, as if the members of Congress had owned in their own right the lands and moneys belonging to the people, with the power to donate them to banking, railway, or other corporations.

Many of the State governments also have granted away portions of their sovereign powers and vast amounts of State bonds and moneys belonging to their citizens to like corporate railway monopolies, which now arrogantly seek to control those State legislatures and judiciaries, as they do the Federal Congress and the judiciary, by the corrupt use of their great money-power and influence.

All these charters and gifts, fraudulently and corruptly procured from the State and Federal legislatures, should be resumed as soon as practicable by our governments; and if such corporations have acquired vested rights that cannot immediately be divested otherwise, then the State and Federal legislatures should establish regulations and rates of charges for them, to prevent their gross extortions and outrageous mismanagement and the daily reckless destruction of human life; and, as soon as practicable, their lands and railways should be declared subject to condemnation for public use, their value assessed by juries, and the assessments paid over to the owners, thus restoring the highways to the people.

It is a fundamental maxim, in the administration of a federative system of government like ours, that all the means whereby public intercommunication between the citizens of the several States and Territories is carried on, whether through a money medium, railways, telegraphs, police, or official newspapers, etc., should be subject to the exclusive control and direction of the Federal and State governments, according to their respective constitutional powers and jurisdictions, so as to secure to the citizens of each State and of the United States a perfect legal equality of rights, and prevent usury and extortion.

All existing corporations in the country that interfere with or obstruct the harmonious, full, and just administration of the respective State and Federal governments, established by their founders for the security and promotion of the common good and happiness of the people, should be abolished.

All existing laws tending to exempt any particular person, or combination of persons, from taxes or duties, or to create any privileged classes, corporations, or associations in any State, should be repealed, and a graduated income-tax substituted.

The Federal and State constitutions should be so amended that the respective legislatures should be prohibited from granting, leasing, or disposing of the whole or any portion of the sovereignty or franchises of any State; and from granting, selling, leasing, or disposing of any goods, rights, liens, lands, or things whatsoever, except upon public notice, under general laws.

No village, city, township, county or State in the republic should have any power to issue, sell, or negotiate any interest-bearing bonds;

and the national government itself should be prohibited from issuing hereafter any interest-bearing bonds.

In the management of our national finances, the supreme control having been vested by the Constitution in the Federal government, it is necessary for it to assume and exercise this control by enacting laws declaring what shall be the national money, to the exclusion of all other money, and make a sufficient quantity to redeem all bonds and pay all debts of the republic, so as to create a circulation that will be ample for the development of industries and the requirements of trade, and at the same time free the nation from the oppressive burden of interest.

By the adoption of this policy there will be but one kind of money in the country, secured for its conversion or redemption in every article offered for sale or export; in all the lands, natural wealth, products, taxes, and duties of the entire nation, now possessing larger, more available, and more valuable resources than any other in the world.

The administration of our governments, State and Federal, has to a great extent ignored these general principles for the preservation of republican liberty and political equality, by permitting the growth of a class legislation that is slowly but surely absorbing our common franchises and liberties by the creation of privileged classes, of gigantic railway, banking, navigation, and telegraphic corporations, who will at length possess themselves of all the valuable powers of the government, and inevitably reduce the people to a state of slavery, unless measures of reform are adopted before these despotisms are too firmly established to be overthrown.

By adopting the amendments to our constitutions indicated in this chapter, and inaugurating an organization of our legislatures and judiciaries, State and Federal, on the principles sketched in the first part of this work, the people will become in reality the only source of political power in the republic, under wise, harmonious, and just systems of laws, and under a full representation of all individual citizens, from townships, villages, cities, and counties, in their primary capacities.

The other great problem, how the rights of each State, in a federative system like ours, and the proper supremacy of the Federal government, can be secured so as to administer the laws and the

governments for the common good, without tending towards centralization or disintegration, have also been examined in the first part of this book.

II.

The main purpose of this work is to show the defects in the administration of our present systems of government, and to suggest remedies therefor. The most remarkable instances of maladministration in our Federal affairs have occurred during the last ten years, some of which I now propose to notice by way of illustration.

The passage of an act of Congress, in 1863, for the creation of the national banks was directly in conflict with the general principles above given as those that should govern the management of the national finances.

In 1861 the government issued sixty million dollars treasury demandnotes, receivable for duties, so that they were equivalent to coin in the New York market during the war. In 1862 about two hundred million dollars in legal-tender notes were issued, receivable for all debts except duties. Notwithstanding the ridiculous inconsistency of making these legal tenders inferior to coin, and inviting, as it were, coin gambling and a decline in the value of the legal-tender currency, no serious depreciation of them occurred until the issue of large amounts of Federal bonds and the passage of the National-Bank Act, in the spring of 1863, to increase the currency. This new currency

was to be issued by the national banks upon the basis of Federal bonds deposited in the United States treasury, to secure redemption in legal tenders. There was no valid reason for adopting this scheme to increase the circulation. The natural and reasonable course would have been to issue more legal-tender notes if they were needed.

The national-bank expedient was infinitely worse in its effect upon our finances than a direct issue of one thousand million dollars of legal-tender notes would have been; for how could any sane man have supposed that national-bank notes issued by the treasury upon Federal bonds were better secured than legal-tender notes? This nationalbank issue was based upon the same national security, and was redeemable in legal-tender notes; but it was not a legal tender for debts, which made it an inferior currency. The whole commercial world regarded this scheme as a mere trick to bolster up the national

bonds, and the immediate effect was greatly to injure and impair the public credit.

It is marvellous how any honest man could have proposed the passage of the National-Bank Act to sustain the public credit, when by its terms the government agreed to pay such banks, when organized, twenty million dollars in coin per year for lending three hundred and thirty-three and one-third million dollars of second-class governmental currency to the people at the highest rate of interest, for their own profit. No spendthrift heir ever sold his inheritance at more ruinous rates. Valuing the twenty million dollars in gold paid those banks as a bonus, at the currency value in June, 1863, and estimating the interest thereon, compounded up to June, 1873, the banks would have realized a profit out of the bonus alone of nearly double their total circulation, and upon the circulation itself a further profit now estimated at nearly two thousand million of dollars.

These enormous amounts of money would have been saved to the people if the United States had issued the three hundred and thirtythree and one-third million dollars in legal-tender notes to meet war expenses in 1863, instead of chartering national banks to accomplish the same object in an indirect way, whereby the national credit was directly injured just in proportion as that notorious scheme of financial folly was manifestly unprofitable to the government; and accordingly it required, in July, 1864, about two hundred and seventy-five dollars in currency to buy one hundred dollars in gold, while the legal-tender demand notes, receivable for duties, were at par with coin, as the common greenbacks would have been if receivable at the custom-houses of the United States.

The creation of these great money-monopolies, with their extravagant largesses from the government, emboldened shrewd and grasping speculators to demand and obtain from Congress, soon afterwards, inestimably valuable railway charters for roads to the Pacific coast, and vast grants of public lands, for the private emolument of a few favored stockholders.

These two schemes for using the sovereign powers of Congress to create corporations, to use the public highways, the public credit, and the public lands for private profit, are the most gigantic in their results of any recorded in history. The stockholders and managers of those corporations have probably realized in money and in lands