increase his number should be resisted with all the means in our power,
until the plunder he is wanted to guard shall have found its way back to
its rightful owners.



IV.

We will now show how the principle of Confiscation should work in the
case of railroads. This class of property, by the way, should never have
been given over to private ownership to begin with. They are for the
convenience of the public, just as much as any harbor or navigation ever
was. And if it was right that the founders of the Republic should, in
the interests of the country's commerce, deny the right of private
ownership in our navigable waters, then it was wrong to concede the
right of private ownership in railroads. As for the capital to build
them with, it was just as easy to get it for that purpose as it was to
get capital to dredge harbors, build lighthouses, build forts or the
Stanford University. The first railroad, or even the twentieth, never
suggested to the leaders of those times any idea of what this rival of
the winds and tides would develop into in a few short years. Individual
greed has so little time, to spare from the building of its own nest
that politics in the United States, where the common good should be the
aim of all legislation, has become a hand-to-mouth affair, and the
morrow must shift for itself. Busy hunting for spoil, like our own
incompetents of to-day, the legislators of the past cared nothing for
the morrow; and, without knowing what they were doing really,
surrendered a principle to the railroad projectors that was but a spark
at the time, but which has spread until we find the blaze devouring us
to-day. The statecraft that never found time to look beyond the ringing