possible, but actually practised. Assessments being uniform, notices of deaths and collections made monthly, at the close of every month, and to the lodges only, the correspondence and work of the endowment-fund secretary is so much simplified that a few leisure hours are quite sufficient to do it promptly and well, and a very competent member can be easily induced to do it for a comparatively small compensation. But even in the Cincinnati Mutual Endowment Association, I. O. B. B., consisting of a voluntary membership of about twelve hundred and fifty individuals, the total expenditures of management have been, during the ten years of its existence, only $10,501, during which time it has paid to the families of its deceased members $181,220; or, in other words, the expenses amount to but five per cent of the benefits. They should not amount to more. Let no promises of future great results, of increase in benefits by the accession of new members, let no taunts about misguided economy deceive you. Even misguided economy is better than waste and corruption. Any endowment association where the cost of management is considerably larger than five per cent and in some it is almost equal to the benefit is no better than most of the life-insurance companies were which have lately passed out of existence.

"Truly benevolent fraternal societies have no need of hired agents, who are paid commissions for soliciting and obtaining new members, or rather new risks, whose qualifications consist in the medical examiner's certificate. Organizations using such adjuncts were justly refused to be recognized as truly benevolent associations, to whose primary objects of brotherly love a feature of mutual insurance may well be added, and who are not and will not be interfered with by either courts of law or legislatures."

The large amount of money invested in these life-insurance companies may be gathered from the following table:

Over fourteen hundred million dollars, on which the hopes of millions of families depend!

And finally, an end should be put to the abominable patent-right system, as it exists at present, which allows inventors to apply for an extension of their patents — the original term of which is fixed by law at seventeen years for seven years longer, and then again for another seven years, and so on, ad infinitum, upon payment of $50. This system has given rise to the most monstrous monopolies, of which I need only instance the Singer Sewing-Machine Company and the McCormick Reaper Company; and, besides levying cruelly oppressive taxes on the public, has fostered an outrageous system of bribing the Congress of the United States. When it is considered

that this patent business has doubled within the last thirteen years, the danger threatened by continuing the present system becomes at once apparent. It is right enough to secure the applicant a patent for a limited number of years in his invention, but after the expiration of that term there should be no reissue or extension. The following table shows the growth of the United States patent-office business from 1837 to 1878:

CHAPTER IV.

THE TARIFF.

Now, the tariff is nothing but precisely such another indirect mode of taxation, and has its chief support in the absurd reluctance of men to look things boldly in the face and tax themselves directly for their necessary expenses. The other notion which sustains it that it is a means of protection to the manufactures of a State - is simply an error of judgment; but the notion, that it is a legitimate means of raising revenue, is sheer absurdity. Both of these notions will have to be swept away with all other superstitions; and commerce between nations must be made as free as it is between our separate States, and as it was originally, before despots found it a very effective means in an indirect way to increase the revenues of direct taxation and plunder.

So far as our own country is concerned, we can effect this even now, at any time. It only needs courage. So far as other nations are concerned, the adoption of my international code by such nations .as are desirous to join the proposed international federation would surely pave the way for free trade over the whole extent of the globe. The Geneva arbitration, in its settlement of the fishery question, has already shown what, indeed, Cobden's Anglo-French alliance had before demonstrated that this is not a visionary proposition, but easily made actual, and sure to result in prosperity for the people.

Indeed, it may be laid down as an axiom, that the prosperity of a country increases in proportion as all shackles on commerce and interchange between men are removed. The issue of paper money, such as I propose, is one of the means to remove them; the control of railroads, establishment of canals, and improvements of rivers and lakes is another; and the abolition of all duties, in every shape, is the third. It has so proved in the cases of England and France, as it has proved in our own case among the several States.

Indeed, one of the strongest arguments brought forward in behalf of this Union, at the time of its establishment, was, as I have stated before, that it would cement all the States together into one commercial free-trading body, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and along every point of the mighty Mississippi River Valley. Now, if there were any truth in the protection theory, would not this, our commer

cial unity, of which we so loudly boast, be an unbearable curse? Ought not every State, nay, every county and every city in every State, be allowed to form a commercial unity of its own, and levy a tariff or octroi of its own, for its own exclusive benefit?

But if this

is not so, and if free trade is the proper principle for the thirty-eight States and ten Territories of this republic of ours, then it must also be the proper principle for our commercial intercourse with the other nations of the earth.

Originally, the tariff system was adopted by the founders of our republic in order to pay, by its means, all the expenses of government, without making the then new Union odious in the minds of the people by a direct taxation. It was this fear of directness which led to the establishment and continuance of the tariff. During the war of 1812, duties were increased to pay the expenses resulting from it, but soon after they were again lowered; and this policy was continued until 1860, when the average duties did not exceed fourteen per cent, a little higher than those of Great Britain, whereas now the average duties are fifty per cent, or nearly four times as much, most excessive and burdensome tax, levied in a burdensome manner upon the people, and costing many millions of dollars to collect.

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It was the late civil war that again led to this excessive increase of duties, which now average fifty per cent on all dutiable articles, and weigh most oppressively upon the laboring classes of the country. Nor were the manufacturing interests slow to avail themselves of this new policy, and to accumulate vast fortunes by the profits thus opened to them.

These profits were naturally a tribute levied upon the people that had to purchase the manufactured wares. The people thus had to pay, and continue to pay, a double tax, —one to the government in the shape of duties, and another one to the manufacturers in the shape of increased cost of productions.

It is this inequitable phase of the tariff that has made it so odious as finally to arouse the people to emphatic protest against its continuance, and to a demand for the immediate removal of all shackles upon the commercial intercommunication of the various nations of the world.

To illustrate: In the State of Illinois there are 376,441 persons engaged in agriculture and 58,852 in manufacture, while in the State of Massachusetts 279,380 persons are engaged in manufacture, and