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It is evident (and will be made more evident in what follows) that under such a state of things the poor will become poorer, and the rich richer by degrees. It is further easy to see that such a state of things cannot prevail, where a majority of the workers own their means of labor, or may acquire them within a few years, by diligence and economy. But in the United States—it will be said—the majority do own their means of labor.
Let us see if this is the fact! Some of us will remember the time when it was a fact. The fathers of our Republic took care (by Jefferson's Ordinance of 1787) that the public domain be parceled out to men of small means at a nominal price, so that every new settler might be his own landlord. They exempted homesteads to a certain value from being seized for debt, and rendered it easy for bankrupts to shake off a load of debt, so as to begin afresh and quickly a new life of prosperity. Everywhere at the North, the policy then prevailing was to break up large landed estates and banking privileges, and at the beginning of the civil war, the existing homestead law was passed. The fathers of the republic bought, from foreign powers, extensive territories in order to open them for independent settlers and to create a rapidly-growing, sturdy, and well-to-do yeomanry.
Could they have foreseen that a time would come, when, through an unheard of growth of the population, all the valuable portions of our public lands would be taken up and held as private property, so as to raise the price of land for all late comers to figures far beyond the means of a majority? Could they have imagined that the system of Capitalistic Production, which then was in its infancy, would, within a century, distribute the national riches so unequally, as we now see it,—a few hundred millionaires and a few dozen share companies, owning each from ten to several hundred millions, some hundreds of thousands owning all the way up from a competency to a million, and the rest of about nine million voters about equally divided into small farmers and independent trades people on the one hand, and as many wages laborers on the other, the former growing poorer always, the latter already staring slow starvation in the face? Who could have foreseen such results of a benevolent and wise statesmanship? Are there not even now-a-days many wiseacres pretending that they cannot see the facts as they really are? who even now insist that "everybody can, in this country, be a capitalist, whenever he chooses?" (New York Tribune, August, 1877.) But let us look at some statistical facts!
Within a dozen years the expenses toward public charities have increased tenfold in the few states which dare to publish their statistics in this respect, to-wit, in Massachusetts from less than $200,000 to more than three million a year;
