"We do not take possession of our ideas, but are possessed by them. They master us and force us into the arena,

Where, like gladiators, we must fight for them."

THE

PROPERTY OF SOVEREIGNTY.

HE right to accumulate wealth, the power to retain and transmit property, and the moral force required to direct. its use, are questions more intently studied in the beginning of this century than all other issues combined. So closely connected with morality is the question of private and public ownership of property that it elicits the daily attention of the ministry, the Church, and the religious element of all communities. So intimately associated is it with political power and political preferment that the party platforms, when closely analyzed. are based almost exclusively upon this issue.

Our schools and colleges, our commencements and endowment of chairs at universities, all point to the ethics of "money making." Trades-unions and labor organizations watch jealously the rightful and wrongful accumulation of property. In this materialistic America of the twentieth century, president and preacher, statesman and lawyer, judge and professor, trust magnate and trust victims, and labor leaders, are all students. as well as expositors of the one absorbing theme of the rights and wrongs of "money making" and "money holding." As long as millions of men are making a dollar or less per day, and one man is making his millions in the same twenty-four hours, as we witnessed during the Ides of November last, following the Presidential election, this agitation will continue

and its intensity will be increased in a ratio commensurate with this ever-widening divergence.

John Stuart Mill has stated that "the distribution of wealth is a matter of human institution solely." Let us analyze this proposition. The distribution of "wealth," as here used, includes the opportunity to accumulate or to participate in the distribution. Instead of using the term "human institution," let us use the better understood synonym-"the State," or "government." And the corollary, translated into modern language, is as follows: "The accumulation and distribution of wealth, or money making, is a matter controlled, suffered, or permitted by the government." If there be serious abuse, and wealth is too rapidly concentrated in the hands of a Morgan, a Vanderbilt, or a Rockefeller, until less than one per cent. of the people of the United States own fifty-eight per cent. of all its wealth, it must be checked by the government. The rightful distribution of wealth becomes then a matter of national conscience. Whatever corrupts or debauches that conscience debauches that government.

Taking this wide view of the proposition, it is interesting to see what efforts governments and sovereignties have made to prevent abuse of the power of accumulation. It was uppermost in the minds of the delegates that drew up and ratified the articles of confederation, as promulgated from Philadelphia on the 9th day of July, 1778. There was some reason why the confederacy of the eighteenth century should never grant letters of marque and reprisal unless nine of the thirteen States assented thereto. Letters of marque were often legalized piracy upon the high seas. It was a commission granted by the government, in time of war or of peace, to the commanders of merchant ships to seize upon their rival's cargo for reparation of damages, often imaginary. It was the "survival of the fittest" in commerce without court or jury's intervention. One law writer made it synonymous with privateering. It was not by accident that such terms were used by our constitutional founders.

Privateering, by the law of nations, is the offense of taking

a ship on the high seas from the possession or control of those who are rightfully entitled to it, and carrying away the ship, the cargo and tackle, under circumstances that would have been robbery if the act had been done upon land. Taking property on the part of one transportation company from a competitor has long been held a crime and a misdemeanor when committed upon the high seas. Nations that have emerged from barbarism have long recognized this as a grave penal offense. And what is the gist of the offense in piracy, or letters of marque and reprisal? Is it not taking property of your rival by some kind of force that overpowers the weaker one? Is it not taking his ship, his tackle, his cargo, at your own terms-either with or without your rival's life?

This is a progressive age. We amputate limbs and take out eyes by keen knives after the application of an anesthetic. We no longer take life by crucifixion, or even by the hangman's rope, but by a more civilized and refined method by the use of the dynamo and the electric chair. In either case, however, the victim's body is sent to the morgue as much a corpse as when taken from the cross or cut down from the rope. So in piracy the resultant effect, the consummation, the real gist of the action or wrong was the taking of the property of a rival or a competitor and enriching the pirate, the highwayman, the robber, and impoverishing the despoiled, the victim of the rival; and after all the crime was against society, against the community, against property, and against the person despoiled. To prevent this wrong, which the individual could not guard against, was that which induced the forefathers to incorporate in the articles of confederation restrictions against piracy; and ten years later the delegates assembled to frame our Federal Constitution reaffirmed the same and endowed Congress with the power to define and punish piracies and felonies committed upon the high seas.

In order to establish justice and insure domestic tranquillity and to promote the common welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, our fathers incorporated in the Constitution the right to regulate commerce

among the several States and establish courts to enforce such laws. This powerful agency is the franchise granted to a corporation to carry on commerce or to use the public highways, and requires governmental supervision as clearly and as distinctly as it did for the sovereignty to preserve the right to coin money and issue bank notes or emit bills of credit and regulate the value thereof. It was as important as the fixing of weights and measures. It was as vital as the authority to levy and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises. It was as potent as the right to provide for the common defense of the United States. This regulation of commerce by Congress ranks in prominence and importance with the right to declare war or to provide a navy.

It was important enough to insert in this same Constitution another safeguard, viz., that no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any State. Yet by transportation charges and freight rate manipulations, by means of the combinations of railway companies, an actual tax or duty is levied upon the immediate States by excessive charges of freight-thus violating this principle in building up New York City or Chicago at Ohio and Indiana expense. It provided also that no preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one State over those of another. No vessel shall pay duty to or from one State or port to another. It prevents States from levying imposts or duties on imports or exports except for inspecting purposes; yet freight-line companies and pipe-line companies do this very thing, and under another form of law violate this principle.

I cite these fundamental principles in our Federal Constitution to impress upon the reader's mind the importance of these provisions of the Constitution in reference to commerce between the States and the reserved rights to the States of control in these vital affairs. Equal if not superior to the right of ownership of landed property are those franchises, held and granted, regulating transportation or the right to use the public highways. Toll-gates and private ownership of public highways have always been obnoxious to the liberty-loving American

race. Our forefathers, with ox-team and chains, would drag down the toll-gate and break the law to have the freedom of the highways. Place an embargo of toll-gates around a man's home or his farm, and you can sap the life out of his investment. Build a wall around your city and put a tax-gatherer at. the gates of ingress and egress, with unlimited authority, and this interloper could transfer your business blocks and houses from your possession to his. Allow me to place a gate across your sidewalk or main thoroughfare, and to levy a tribute upon every passer-by, and I can soon pay a dividend upon 1,000 times the cost of the gate. Or leave me with the power untrammeled by the city, State, or nation, and permit me to regulate the commerce of any highway; give me that franchise, power, and right with the willingness of the courts to punish every one who refuses to pay the tribute to my gate-keepers, and I will not ask for any other letters of marque or reprisal; I will not ask to knock you down to take all you have at one time; I will simply levy "what the traffic will bear" and permit you to pass and repass. The more the merrier, so long as you allow me to control the charges for passing.

To carry this simple illustration further, suppose my fellowcitizens saw that my tribute was impoverishing them and making a millionaire out of me, and they attempted to open up another street for passage and a rival put up a toll-gate at reduced rates, and I began to lose my trade. Then toll-master No. I could adopt one of several methods: first, apply to the courts for delay by injunction upon all imaginary grounds that would be possible to prevent toll-master No. 2 for months, perhaps years, from getting started; if he finally got a court to dissolve the injunction, pack the convention that nominated the court's successor; buy all the salable papers to cultivate public sentiment in favor of the injunction; start another suit, and another; -this usually would win against weak opponents, for the money I make on my monopoly in transportation charges pays for all litigation and delays. If this does not finally succeed, blow up his toll-gate; if that fails, buy him out at half price. If that fails, bribe the employees to wreck it; in the meantime