Chapter VIII (4)

The unmistakable danger that threatens free government in America, is the increasing tendency to concentrate in the Federal government powers and privileges that should be left with the States, and to create powers that neither the State nor Federal government should have. Let it be understood at once that in discussing this question I seek to revive no dead issue. We know precisely what was put to the issue of the sword, and what was settled thereby. The right of a State to leave this Union was denied and the denial made good forever. But the sovereignty of the States in the Union was never involved, and the Republic that survived the storm was, in the words of the Supreme Court, “an indissoluble Union of indestructible States.” Let us stand on this decree and turn our faces to the future!

It is not strange that there should be a tendency to centralization in our government. This disposition was the legacy of the war. Steam and electricity have emphasized it by bringing the people closer together. The splendor of a central government dazzles the unthinking—its opulence tempts the poor and the avaricious—its strength assures the rich and the timid—its patronage incites the spoilsmen and its powers inflame the partisan.

And so we have paternalism run mad. The merchant asks the government to control the arteries of trade—the manufacturer asks that his product be protected—the rich asks for an army, and the unfortunate for help—this man for schools and that for subsidy. The partisan proclaims, amid the clamor, that the source of largess must be the seat of power, and demands that the ballot-boxes of the States be hedged by Federal bayonets. The centrifugal force of our system is weakened, the centripetal force is increased, and the revolving spheres are veering inward from their orbits. There are strong men who rejoice in this unbalancing and deliberately contend that the center is the true repository of power and source of privilege—men who, were they charged with the solar system, would shred the planets into the sun, and, exulting in the sudden splendor, little reck that they had kindled the conflagration that presages universal nights! Thus the States are dwarfed and the nation magnified—and to govern a people, who can best govern themselves, the central authority is made stronger and more splendid!

Concurrent with this political drift is another movement, less formal perhaps, but not less dangerous—the consolidation of capital. I hesitate to discuss this phase of the subject, for of all men I despise most cordially the demagogue who panders to the prejudice of the poor by abuse of the rich. But no man can note the encroachment in this country of what may be called “the money power” on the rights of the individual, without feeling that the time is approaching when the issue between plutocracy and the people will be forced to trial. The world has not seen, nor has the mind of man conceived of such miraculous wealth-gathering as are every-day tales to us. Aladdin’s lamp is dimmed, and Monte Cristo becomes commonplace when compared to our magicians of finance and trade. The seeds of a luxury that even now surpasses that of Rome or Corinth, and has only yet put forth its first flowers, are sown in this simple republic. What shall the full fruitage be? I do not denounce the newly rich. For most part their money came under forms of law. The irresponsibilities of sudden wealth is in many cases steadied by that resolute good sense which seems to be an American heritage, and under-run by careless prodigality or by constant charity. Our great wealth has brought us profit and splendor. But the status itself is a menace. A home that costs $3,000,000 and a breakfast that cost $5000 are disquieting facts to the millions who live in a hut and dine on a crust. The fact that a man ten years from poverty has an income of $20,000,000—and his two associates nearly as much—from the control and arbitrary pricing of an article of universal use, falls strangely on the ears of those who hear it, as they sit empty-handed, while children cry for bread. The tendency deepens the dangers suggested by the status. What is to be the end of this swift piling up of wealth? Twenty years ago but few cities had their millionaires. To-day almost every town has its dozen. Twenty men can be named who can each buy a sovereign State at its tax-book value. The youngest nation, America, is vastly the richest, and in twenty years, in spite of war, has nearly trebled her wealth. Millions are made on the turn of a trade, and the toppling mass grows and grows, while in its shadow starvation and despair stalk among the people, and swarm with increasing legions against the citadels of human life.

But the abuse of this amazing power of consolidated wealth is its bitterest result and its pressing danger. When the agent of a dozen men, who have captured and control an article of prime necessity, meets the representatives of a million farmers from whom they have forced $3,000,000 the year before, with no more moral right than is behind the highwayman who halts the traveler at his pistol’s point, and insolently gives them the measure of this year’s rapacity, and tells them—men who live in the sweat of their brows, and stand between God and Nature—that they must submit to the infamy because they are helpless, then the first fruits of this system are gathered and have turned to ashes on the lips. When a dozen men get together in the morning and fix the price of a dozen articles of common use—with no standard but their arbitrary will, and no limit but their greed or daring—and then notify the sovereign people of this free Republic how much, in the mercy of their masters, they shall pay for the necessaries of life—then the point of intolerable shame has been reached.

We have read of the robber barons of the Rhine who from their castles sent a shot across the bow of every passing craft, and descending as hawks from the crags, tore and robbed and plundered the voyagers until their greed was glutted, or the strength of their victims spent. Shall this shame of Europe against which the world revolted, shall it be repeated in this free country? And yet, when a syndicate or a trust can arbitrarily add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of a single article of common use, and safely gather forced tribute from the people, until from its surplus it could buy every castle on the Rhine, or requite every baron’s debauchery from its kitchen account—where is the difference—save that the castle is changed to a broker’s office, and the picturesque river to the teeming streets and the broad fields of this government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? I do not overstate the case. Economists have held that wheat, grown everywhere, could never be cornered by capital. And yet one man in Chicago tied the wheat crop in his handkerchief, and held it until a sewing-woman in my city, working for ninety cents a week, had to pay him twenty cents tax on the sack of flour she bore home in her famished hands. Three men held the cotton crop until the English spindles were stopped and the lights went out in 3,000,000 English homes. Last summer one man cornered pork until he had levied a tax of $3 per barrel on every consumer, and pocketed a profit of millions. The Czar of Russia would not have dared to do these things. And yet they are no secrets in this free government of ours! They are known of all men, and, my countrymen, no argument can follow them, and no plea excuse them, when they fall on the men who toiling, yet suffer—who hunger at their work—and who cannot find food for their wives with which to feed the infants that hang famishing at their breasts. Mr. Jefferson foresaw this danger and he sought to avert it. When Virginia ceded the vast Northwest to the government—before the Constitution was written—Mr. Jefferson in the second clause of the articles of cession prohibited forever the right of primogeniture. Virginia then nobly said, and Georgia in the cession of her territory repeated: “In granting this domain to the government and dedicating it to freedom, we prescribe that there shall be no classes in the family—no child set up at the expense of the others, no feudal estates established—but what a man hath shall be divided equally among his children.”

We see this feudal tendency, swept away by Mr. Jefferson, revived by the conditions of our time, aided by the government with its grant of enormous powers and its amazing class legislation. It has given the corporation more power than Mr. Jefferson stripped from the individual, and has set up a creature without soul or conscience or limit of human life to establish an oligarchy, unrelieved by human charity and unsteadied by human responsibility. The syndicate, the trust, the corporation—these are the eldest sons of the Republic for whom the feudal right of primogeniture is revived, and who inherit its estate to the impoverishment of their brothers. Let it be noted that the alliance between those who would centralize the government and the consolidated money power is not only close but essential. The one is the necessity of the other. Establish the money power and there is universal clamor for strong government. The weak will demand it for protection against the people restless under oppression—the patriotic for protection against the plutocracy that scourges and robs—the corrupt hoping to buy of one central body distant from local influences what they could not buy from the legislatures of the States sitting at their homes—the oligarchs will demand it—as the privileged few have always demanded it—for the protection of their privileges and the perpetuity of their bounty. Thus, hand in hand, will walk—as they have always walked—the federalist and the capitalist, the centralist and the monopolist—the strong government protecting the money power, and the money power the political standing army of the government. Hand in hand, compact and organized, one creating the necessity, the other meeting it; consolidated wealth and centralizing government; stripping the many of their rights and aggrandizing the few; distrusting the people but in touch with the plutocrats; striking down local self-government and dwarfing the citizens—and at last confronting the people in the market, in the courts, at the ballot box—everywhere—with the infamous challenge: “What are you going to do about it?” And so the government protects and the barons oppress, and the people suffer and grow strong. And when the battle for liberty is joined—the centralist and the plutocrat, entrenched behind the deepening powers of the government, and the countless ramparts of money bags, oppose to the vague but earnest onset of the people the power of the trained phalanx and the conscienceless strength of the mercenary.

Against this tendency who shall protest? Those who believe that a central government means a strong government, and a strong government means repression—those who believe that this vast Republic, with its diverse interests and its local needs, can better be governed by liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people than by powers and privileges congested at the center—those who believe that the States should do nothing that the people can do themselves and the government nothing that the States and the people can do—those who believe that the wealth of the central government is a crime rather than a virtue, and that every dollar not needed for its economical administration should be left with the people of the States—those who believe that the hearthstone of the home is the true altar of liberty and the enlightened conscience of the citizen the best guarantee of government! Those of you who note the farmer sending his sons to the city that they may escape the unequal burdens under which he has labored, thus diminishing the rural population whose leisure, integrity and deliberation have corrected the passion and impulse and corruption of the cities—who note that while the rich are growing richer, and the poor poorer, we are lessening that great middle class that, ever since it met the returning crusaders in England with the demand that the hut of the humble should be as sacred as the castle of the great, has been the bulwark and glory of every English-speaking community—who know that this Republic, which we shall live to see with 150,000,000 people, stretching from ocean to ocean, and almost from the arctic to the torrid zone, cannot be governed by any laws that a central despotism could devise or controlled by any armies it could marshal—you who know these things protest with all the earnestness of your souls against the policy and the methods that make them possible.

What is the remedy? To exalt the hearthstone—to strengthen the home—to build up the individual—to magnify and defend the principle of local self-government. Not in deprecation of the Federal government, but to its glory—not to weaken the Republic, but to strengthen it—not to check the rich blood that flows to its heart, but to send it full and wholesome from healthy members rather than from withered and diseased extremities.

The man who kindles the fire on the hearthstone of an honest and righteous home burns the best incense to liberty. He does not love mankind less who loves his neighbor most. George Eliot has said:

“A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native
land where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of
the earth, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, a spot
where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with
affection, and spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection,
but as a sweet habit of the blest.”

The germ of the best patriotism is in the love that a man has for the home he inhabits, for the soil he tills, for the trees that gives him shade, and the hills that stand in his pathway. I teach my son to love Georgia—to love the soil that he stands on—the body of my old mother—the mountains that are her springing breasts, the broad acres that hold her substance, the dimpling valleys in which her beauty rests, the forests that sing her songs of lullaby and of praise, and the brooks that run with her rippling laughter. The love of home—deep rooted and abiding—that blurs the eyes of the dying soldier with the vision of an old homestead amid green fields and clustering trees—that follows the busy man through the clamoring world, persistent though put aside, and at last draws his tired feet from the highway and leads him through shady lanes and well-remembered paths until, amid the scenes of his boyhood, he gathers up the broken threads of his life and owns the soil his conqueror—this—this lodged in the heart of the citizen is the saving principle of our government. We note the barracks of our standing army with its rolling drum and its fluttering flag as points of strength and protection. But the citizen standing in the doorway of his home—contented on his threshold—his family gathered about his hearthstone—while the evening of a well-spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest—he shall save the Republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are exhausted.

This love shall not be pent up or provincial. The home should be consecrated to humanity, and from its roof-tree should fly the flag of the Republic. Every simple fruit gathered there—every sacrifice endured, and every victory won, should bring better joy and inspiration in the knowledge that it will deepen the glory of our Republic and widen the harvest of humanity! Be not like the peasant of France who hates the Paris he cannot comprehend—but emulate the example of your fathers in the South, who, holding to the sovereignty of the States, yet gave to the Republic its chief glory of statesmanship, and under Jackson at New Orleans, and Taylor and Scott in Mexico, saved it twice from the storm of war. Inherit without fear or shame the principle of local self-government by which your fathers stood! For though entangled with an institution foreign to this soil, which, thank God, not planted by their hands, is now swept away, and with a theory bravely defended but now happily adjusted—that principle holds the imperishable truth that shall yet save this Republic. The integrity of the State, its rights and its powers—these, maintained with firmness, but in loyalty—these shall yet, by lodging the option of local affairs in each locality, meet the needs of this vast and complex government, and check the headlong rush to that despotism that reason could not defend, nor the armies of the Czar maintain, among a free and enlightened people. This issue is squarely made! It is centralized government and the money power on the one hand—against the integrity of the States and rights of the people on the other. At all hazard, stand with the people and the threatened States. The choice may not be easily made. Wise men may hesitate and patriotic men divide. The culture, the strength, the mightiness of the rich and strong government—these will tempt and dazzle. But be not misled. Beneath this splendor is the canker of a disturbed and oppressed people. It was from the golden age of Augustus that the Roman empire staggered to its fall. The integrity of the States and the rights of the people! Stand there—there is safety—there is the broad and enduring brotherhood—there, less of glory, but more of honor! Put patriotism above partisanship—and wherever the principle that protects the States against the centralists, and the people against the plutocrats, may lead, follow without fear or faltering—for there the way of duty and of wisdom lies!

Exalt the citizen. As the State is the unit of government he is the unit of the State. Teach him that his home is his castle, and his sovereignty rests beneath his hat. Make himself self-respecting, self-reliant and responsible. Let him lean on the State for nothing that his own arm can do, and on the government for nothing that his State can do. Let him cultivate independence to the point of sacrifice, and learn that humble things with unbartered liberty are better than splendors bought with its price. Let him neither surrender his individuality to government, nor merge it with the mob. Let him stand upright and fearless—a freeman born of freemen—sturdy in his own strength—dowering his family in the sweat of his brow—loving to his State—loyal to his Republic—earnest in his allegiance wherever it rests, but building his altar in the midst of his household gods and shrining in his own heart the uttermost temple of its liberty.

Go out, determined to magnify the community in which your lot is cast. Cultivate its small economies. Stand by its young industries. Commercial dependence is a chain that galls every day. A factory built at home, a book published, a shoe or a book made, these are steps in that diffusion of thought and interest that is needed. Teach your neighbors to withdraw from the vassalage of distant capitalists, and pay, under any sacrifice, the mortgage on the home or the land. By simple and prudent lives stay within your own resources, and establish the freedom of your community. Make every village and cross-roads as far as may be sovereign to its own wants. Learn that thriving country-sides with room for limbs, conscience, and liberty are better than great cities with congested wealth and population. Preserve the straight and simple homogeneity of our people. Welcome emigrants, but see that they come as friends and neighbors, to mingle their blood with ours, to build their houses in our fields, and to plant their Christian faith on our hills, and honoring our constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm the simple beliefs in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children. Stand by these old-fashioned beliefs. Science hath revealed no better faith than that you learned at your mother’s knee—nor has knowledge made a wiser and a better book than the worn old Bible that, thumbed by hands long since still, and blurred with the tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of your family and the heart and conscience of your homes.

Honor and emulate the virtues and the faith of your forefathers—who, learned, were never wise above a knowledge of God and His gospel—who, great, were never exalted above an humble trust in God and His mercy!

Let me sum up what I have sought to say in this hurried address. Your Republic—on the glory of which depends all that men hold dear—is menaced with great dangers. Against these dangers defend her, as you would defend the most precious concerns of your own life. Against the dangers of centralizing all political powers, put the approved and imperishable principle of local self-government. Between the rich and the poor now drifting into separate camps, build up the great middle class that, neither drunk with wealth, nor embittered by poverty, shall lift up the suffering and control the strong. To the jangling of races and creeds that threaten the courts of men and the temples of God, oppose the home and the citizen—a homogeneous and honest people—and the simple faith that sustained your fathers and mothers in their stainless lives and led them serene and smiling into the valley of the shadow.

Let it be understood in my parting words to you that I am no pessimist as to this Republic. I always bet on sunshine in America. I know that my country has reached the point of perilous greatness, and that strange forces not to be measured or comprehended are hurrying her to heights that dazzle and blind all mortal eyes—but I know that beyond the uttermost glory is enthroned the Lord God Almighty, and that when the hour of her trial has come He will lift up His everlasting gates and bend down above her in mercy and in love. For with her He has surely lodged the ark of His covenant with the sons of men. Emerson wisely said, “Our whole history looks like the last effort by Divine Providence in behalf of the human race.” And the Republic will endure. Centralism will be checked, and liberty saved—plutocracy overthrown and equality restored. The struggle for human rights never goes backward among English-speaking peoples. Our brothers across the sea have fought from despotism to liberty, and in the wisdom of local self-government have planted colonies around the world. This very day Mr. Gladstone, the wisest man that has lived since your Jefferson died—with the light of another world beating in his face until he seems to have caught the wisdom of the Infinite and towers half human and half divine from his eminence—this man, turning away from the traditions of his life, begs his countrymen to strip the crown of its last usurped authority, and lodge it with the people, where it belongs. The trend of the times is with us. The world moves steadily from gloom to brightness. And bending down humbly as Elisha did, and praying that my eyes shall be made to see, I catch the vision of this Republic—its mighty forces in balance, and its unspeakable glory falling on all its children—chief among the federation of English-speaking people—plenty streaming from its borders, and light from its mountain tops—working out its mission under God’s approving eye, until the dark continents are opened—and the highways of earth established, and the shadows lifted—and the jargon of the nations stilled and the perplexities of Babel straightened—and under one language, one liberty, and one God, all the nations of the world hearkening to the American drum-beat and girding up their loins, shall march amid the breaking of the millennial dawn into the paths of righteousness and of peace!

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THE FARMER AND THE CITIES.

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MR. GRADY’S SPEECH AT ELBERTON, GEORGIA, IN JUNE, 1889.

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:—For the first time in my life I address an audience in the open air. And as I stand here in this beautiful morning, so shot through and through with sunshine that the very air is as molten gold to the touch—under these trees in whose trunks the rains and suns of years are compacted, and on whose leaves God has laid His whispering music—here in His majestic temple, with the brightness of His smile breaking all about us—standing above the soil instinct with the touch of His life-giving hand, and full of His promise and His miracle—and looking up to the clouds through which His thunders roll, and His lightnings cut their way, and beyond that to the dazzling glory of the sun, and yet beyond to the unspeakable splendor of the universe, flashing and paling until the separate stars are but as mist in the skies—even to the uplifted jasper gates through which His everlasting glory streams, my mind falls back abashed, and I realize how paltry is human speech, and how idle are the thoughts of men!

Another thought oppresses me. In front of me sit several thousand people. Over there, in smelling distance, where we can almost hear the lisping of the mop as it caresses the barbecued lamb or the pottering of the skewered pig as he leisurely turns from fat to crackling, is being prepared a dinner that I verily believe covers more provisions than were issued to all the soldiers of Lee’s army, God bless them, in their last campaign. And I shudder when I think that I, a single, unarmed, defenseless man, is all that stands between this crowd and that dinner. Here then, awed by God’s majesty, and menaced by man’s appetite, I am tempted to leave this platform and yield to the boyish impulses that always stir in my heart amid such scenes, and revert to the days of boyhood when about the hills of Athens I chased the pacing coon, or twisted the unwary rabbit, or shot my ramrod at all manner of birds and beasts—and at night went home to look up into a pair of gentle eyes and take on my tired face the benediction of a mother’s kiss and feel on my weary head a pair of loving hands, now wrinkled and trembling, but, blessed be God, fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal women, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man, as they laid a mother’s blessing there, while bending at her knees I made my best confession of faith and worshiped at the truest altar I have yet found in this world. I had rather go out and lay down on the ground and hug the grass to my breast and mind me of the time when I builded boyish ambitions on the wooded hills of Athens, than do aught else to-day. But I recall the story of Uncle Remus, who when his favorite hero, Brer Rabbit, was sorely pressed by that arch villain, Brer Fox, said:

“An’ Brer Rabbit den he climb’d a tree.” “But,” said the little boy, “Uncle Remus, a rabbit can’t climb a tree.”

“Doan you min’ dat, honey. Brer Fox pressed dis rabbit so hard he des bleeged to clim’ a tree.”

I am pressed so hard to-day by your commands that I am just “bleeged” to make a speech, and so I proceed. I heartily invoke God’s guidance in what I say, that I shall utter no word to soil this temple of His, and no sentiment not approved in His wisdom; and as for you, when the time comes—as it will come—when you prefer barbecued shote to raw orator, and feel that you can be happier at that table than in this forum, just say the word and I will be with you heart and soul!

I am tempted to yield to the gaiety of this scene, to the flaunting banners of the trees, the downpouring sunshine, the garnered plenty over there, this smiling and hospitable crowd, and, throwing serious affairs aside, to speak to you to-day as the bird sings—without care and without thought. I should be false to myself and to you if I did, for there are serious problems that beset our State and our country that no man, facing, as I do this morning, a great and intelligent audience, can in honor or in courage disregard. I shall attempt to make no brilliant speech—but to counsel with you in plain and simple words, beseeching your attention and your sympathy as to the dangers of the present hour, and our duties and our responsibilities.

At Saturday noon in any part of this county you may note the farmer going from his field, eating his dinner thoughtfully and then saddling his plow-horse, or starting afoot and making his way to a neighboring church or schoolhouse. There he finds from every farm, through every foot-path, his neighbors gathering to meet him. What is the object of this meeting? It is not social, it is not frolic, it is not a pic-nic—the earnest, thoughtful faces, the serious debate and council, the closed doors and the secret session forbid this assumption. It is a meeting of men who feel that in spite of themselves their affairs are going wrong—of free and equal citizens who feel that they carry unequal burdens—of toilers who feel that they reap not the just fruits of their toil—of men who feel that their labor enriches others while it leaves them poor, and that the sweat of their bodies, shed freely under God’s command, goes to clothe the idle and the avaricious in purple and fine linen. This is a meeting of protest, of resistance. Here the farmer meets to demand, and organize that he may enforce his demand, that he shall stand equal with every other class of citizens—that laws discriminating against him shall be repealed—that the methods oppressing him shall be modified or abolished—and that he shall be guaranteed that neither government nor society shall abridge, by statute or custom, his just and honest proportion of the wealth he created, but that he shall be permitted to garner in his barns, and enjoy by his hearthstone, the full and fair fruits of his labor. If this movement were confined to Elbert, if this disturbing feeling of discontent were shut in the limits of your county lines, it would still demand the attention of the thoughtful and patriotic. But, as it is in Elbert, so it is in every county in Georgia—as in Georgia, so it is in every State in the South—as in the South, so in every agricultural State in the Union. In every rural neighborhood, from Ohio to Texas, from Michigan to Georgia, the farmers, riding thoughtful through field and meadow, seek ten thousand schoolhouses or churches—the muster grounds of this new army—and there, recounting their wrongs and renewing their pledges, send up from neighborhoods to county, from county to State, and State to Republic, the measure of their strength and the unyielding quality of their determination. The agricultural army of the Republic is in motion. The rallying drumbeat has rolled over field and meadow, and from where the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf, and the clover carpets the earth, and the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains—everywhere that patient man stands above the soil, or bends about the furrow, the farmers are ready in squads and companies and battalions and legions to be led against what they hold to be an oppression that honest men would not deserve, and that brave men would not endure. Let us not fail to comprehend the magnitude and the meaning of this movement. It is no trifling cause that brings the farmers into such determined and widespread organization as this. It is not the skillful arts of the demagogue that has brought nearly two million farmers into this perfect and pledge-bound society—but it is a deep and abiding conviction that, in political and commercial economy of the day, he is put at a disadvantage that keeps him poor while other classes grow rich, and that bars his way to prosperity and independence. General Toombs once said that the farmer, considered the most conservative type of citizenship, is really the most revolutionary. That the farmers of France, flocking to the towns and cities from the unequal burdens of their farms, brought about the French Revolution, and that about once in every century the French peasant raided the towns. Three times the farmers of England have captured and held London. It was the farmers of Mecklenburg that made the first American declaration, and Putnam left his plow standing in the furrow as he hurried to lead the embattled farmers who fought at Concord and Lexington. I realize it is impossible that revolution should be the outcome of our industrial troubles. The farmer of to-day does not consider that remedy for his wrongs. I quote history to show that the farmer, segregated and deliberate, does not move on slight provocation, but organizes only under deep conviction, and that when once organized and convinced, he is terribly in earnest, and is not going to rest until his wrongs are righted.

Now, here we are confronted with the most thorough and widespread agricultural movement of this or any other day. It is the duty alike of farmers and those who stand in other ranks, to get together and consult as to what is the real status and what is the patriotic duty. Not in sullenness, but in frankness. Not as opponents, but as friends—not as enemies, but as brothers begotten of a common mother, banded in common allegiance, and marching to a common destiny. It will not do to say that this organization will pass away, for if the discontent on which it is based survives it, it had better have lived and forced its wrongs to final issue. There is no room for divided hearts in this State, or in this Republic. If we shall restore Georgia to her former greatness and prosperity—if we shall solve the problems that beset the South in honor and safety—if we shall save this Republic from the dangers that threaten it—it will require the earnest and united effort of every patriotic citizen, be he farmer, or merchant, or lawyer, or manufacturer. Let us consider then the situation, and decide what is the duty that lies before us.

In discussing this matter briefly, I beg the ladies to give me their attention. I have always believed that there are few affairs of life in which woman should not have a part. Not obtrusive part—for that is unwomanly. The work falling best to the hand of woman is such work as is done by the dews of night—that ride not on the boasting wind, and shine not in the garish sun, but that come when the wind is stilled and the sun is gone, and night has wrapped the earth in its sacred hush, and fall from the distillery of the stars upon the parched and waiting flowers, as a benediction from God.

Let no one doubt the power of this work, though it lack pomp and circumstance. Is Bismarck the mightiest power of this earth, who is attended by martial strains when he walks abroad, and in whose path thrones are scattered as trophies? Why, the little housewife alone in her chimney-corner, musing in her happiness with no trophy in her path save her husband’s loving heart, and no music on her ear save the chirping of the cricket beneath her hearthstone, is his superior. For, while he holds the purse-strings of Germany, she holds the heart-strings of men. She who rocks the cradle rules the world. Give me then your attention, note the conflict that is gathering about us, and take your place with seeming modesty in the ranks of those who fight for right. It is not an abstract political theory that is involved in the contest of which I speak. It is the integrity and independence of your home that is at stake. The battle is not pitched in a distant State. Your home is the battle-field, and by your hearthstones you shall fight for your household gods. With your husband’s arms so wound around you that you can feel his anxious heart beating against your cheek—with your sons, sturdy and loving, holding your old hands in theirs—here on the threshold of your house, under the trees that sheltered your babyhood, with the graves of your dead in that plain enclosure yonder—here men and women, heart to heart, with not a man dismayed, not a woman idle—while the multiplied wolves of debt and mortgage, and trust and monopoly, swarm from every thicket; here we must fight the ultimate battle for the independence of our people and the happiness of our homes.

Now let us look at the facts: First, the notable movement of the population in America is from the country to the cities. In 1840—a generation ago, only one-twelfth of the American people lived in cities of more than 8000 people. In 1850, one-eighth; in 1860, one-sixth; in 1870, one-fifth; in 1880, one-fourth. In the past half-century the population of cities has increased more than four times as rapidly as that of the country. Mind you, when I say that the city population has increased in one generation from 8 per cent. to 25 per cent. in population, I mean the population of cities of more than 8000 people. There is not such a city in this congressional district. It is the village and town population, as well as that of the farms, that goes to swell so enormously the population of the great cities. Thus we see diminishing with amazing rapidity that rural population that is the strength and the safety of the people—slow to anger and thus a safeguard, but terrible in its wrath, and thus a tremendous corrective power. No greater calamity could befall any country than the sacrifice of its town and village and country life. I rejoice in Atlanta’s growth, and yet I wonder whether it is worth what it cost when I know that her population has been drawn largely from rural Georgia, and that back of her grandeur are thousands of deserted farms and dismantled homes. As much as I love her—and she is all to me that home can be to any man—if I had the disposal of 100,000 immigrants at her gates to-morrow, 5000 should enter there, 75,000 should be located in the shops and factories in Georgia towns and villages, and 20,000 sent to her farms. It saddens me to see a bright young fellow come to my office from village or country, and I shudder when I think for what a feverish and speculative and uncertain life he has bartered his rural birthright, and surrendered the deliberation and tranquillity of his life on the farm. It is just that deliberate life that this country needs, for the fever of the cities is already affecting its system. Character, like corn, is dug from the soil. A contented rural population is not only the measure of our strength, and an assurance of its peace when there should be peace, and a resource of courage when peace would be cowardice—but it is the nursery of the great leaders who have made this country what it is. Washington was born and lived in the country. Jefferson was a farmer. Henry Clay rode his horse to the mill in the slashes. Webster dreamed amid the solitude of Marshfield. Lincoln was a rail splitter. Our own Hill walked between the handles of the plow. Brown peddled barefoot the product of his patch. Stephens found immortality under the trees of his country home. Toombs and Cobb and Calhoun were country gentlemen, and afar from the cities’ maddening strife established that greatness that is the heritage of their people. The cities produce very few leaders. Almost every man in our history formed his character in the leisure and deliberation of village or country life, and drew his strength from the drugs of the earth even as a child draws his from his mother’s breast. In the diminution of this rural population, virtuous and competent, patriotic and honest, living beneath its own roof-tree, building its altars by its own hearthstone and shrining in its own heart its liberty and its conscience, there is abiding cause for regret. In the corresponding growth of our cities—already center spots of danger, with their idle classes, their sharp rich and poor, their corrupt politics, their consorted thieves, and their clubs and societies of anarchy and socialism—I see a pressing and impending danger. Let it be noted that the professions are crowded, that middlemen are multiplied beyond reason, that the factories can in six months supply the demand of twelve—that machinery is constantly taking the place of men—that labor in every department bids against itself until it is mercilessly in the hands of the employer, that the new-comers are largely recruits of the idle and dangerous classes, and we can appreciate something of the danger that comes with this increasing movement to strip the villages and the farms and send an increasing volume into the already overcrowded cities. This is but one phase of that tendency to centralization and congestion which is threatening the liberties of this people and the life of this Republic.

Now, let us go one step further. What is the most notable financial movement in America? It is the mortgaging of the farm lands of the country—the bringing of the farmer into bondage to the money-lender. In Illinois the farms are mortgaged for $200,000,000, in Iowa for $140,000,000, in Kansas for $160,000,000, and so on through the Northwest. In Georgia about $20,000,000 of foreign capital holds in mortgage perhaps one-fourth of Georgia’s farms, and the work is but started. Every town has its loan agent—a dozen companies are quartered in Atlanta, and the work goes briskly on. A mortgage is the bulldog of obligations—a very mud-turtle for holding on. It is the heaviest thing of its weight in the world. I had one once, and sometimes I used to feel, as it rested on my roof, deadening the rain that fell there, and absorbing the sunshine, that it would crush through the shingles and the rafters and overwhelm me with its dull and persistent weight, and when at last I paid it off, I went out to look at the shingles to see if it had not flopped back there of its own accord. Think of it, Iowa strips from her farmers $14,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it to New York and Boston to be reloaned on farms in other States, and to support and establish the dominion of the money-lenders over the people. Georgia gathers from her languishing fields $2,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it away forever. Could her farmers but keep it at home, one year’s interest would build factories to supply at cost every yard of bagging and every pound of guano the farmers need, establish her exchanges and their warehouses, and have left more than a million dollars for the improvement of their farms and their homes. And year after year this drain not only continues, but deepens. What will be the end? Ireland has found it. Her peasants in their mud cabins, sending every tithe of their earnings to deepen the purple luxury of London, where their landlords live, realize how poor is that country whose farms are owned in mortgage or fee simple by those who live beyond its borders. If every Irish landlord lived on his estate, bought of his tenants the product of their farms, and invested his rents in Irish industries, this Irish question that is the shame of the world would be settled without legislation or strife. Georgia can never go to Ireland’s degradation, but every Georgia farm put under mortgage to a foreign capitalist is a step in that direction, and every dollar sent out as interest leaves the State that much poorer. I do not blame the farmers. It is a miracle that out of their poverty they have done so well. I simply deplore the result, and ask you to note in the millions of acres that annually pass under mortgage to the money-lenders of the East, and in the thousands of independent country homes annually surrendered as hostages to their hands, another evidence of that centralization that is drinking up the life-blood of this broad Republic.

Let us go one step further. All protest as to our industrial condition is met with the statement that America is startling the world with its growth and progress. Is this growth symmetrical—is this progress shared by every class? Let the tax-books of Georgia answer. This year, for the first time since 1860, our taxable wealth is equal to that with which, excluding our slaves, we entered the civil war—$368,000,000. There is cause for rejoicing in this wonderful growth from the ashes and desolation of twenty years ago, but the tax-books show that while the towns and cities are $60,000,000 richer than they were in 1860, the farmers are $50,000,000 poorer.

Who produced this wealth? In 1865, when our towns and cities were paralyzed, when not a mine or quarry was open, hardly a mill or a factory running; when we had neither money or credit, it was the farmers’ cotton that started the mills of industry and of trade. Since that desolate year, when, urging his horse down the furrow, plowing through fields on which he had staggered amid the storm of battle, he began the rehabilitation of Georgia with no friend near him save nature that smiled at his kindly touch, and God that sent him the message of cheer through the rustling leaves, he has dug from the soil of Georgia more than $1,000,000,000 worth of product. From this mighty resource great cities have been builded and countless fortunes amassed—but amid all the splendor he has remained the hewer of wood and the drawer of water. He had made the cities $60,000,000 richer than they were when the war began, and he finds himself, in the sweat of whose brow this miracle was wrought, $50,000,000 poorer than he then was. Perhaps not a farmer in this audience knew this fact—but I doubt if there is one in the audience who has not felt in his daily life the disadvantage that in twenty short years has brought about this stupendous difference. Let the figures speak for themselves. The farmer—the first figure to stumble amid the desolate dawn of our new life and to salute the coming day—hurrying to market with the harvest of his hasty planting that Georgia might once more enter the lists of the living States and buy the wherewithal to still her wants and clothe her nakedness—always apparently the master of the situation, has he not been really its slave, when he finds himself at the end of twenty hard and faithful years $110,000,000 out of balance?

Now, let us review the situation a moment. I have shown you, first, that the notable drift of population is to the loss of village and country, and the undue and dangerous growth of the city; second, that the notable movement of finance is that which is bringing villages and country under mortgage to the city; and third, that they who handle the products for sale profit more thereby than those who create them—the difference in one State in twenty years reaching the enormous sum of $110,000,000. Are these healthy tendencies? Do they not demand the earnest and thoughtful consideration of every patriotic citizen? The problem of the day is to check these three currents that are already pouring against the bulwarks of our peace and prosperity. To anchor the farmer to his land and the villager to his home; to enable him to till the land under equal conditions and to hold that home in independence; to save with his hands the just proportion of his labor, that he may sow in content and reap in justice,—this is what we need. The danger of the day is centralization, its salvation diffusion. Cut that word deep in your heart. This Republic differs from Russia only because the powers centralized there in one man are here diffused among the people. Western Ohio is happy and tranquil, while Chicago is feverish and dangerous, because the people diffused in the towns and the villages of the one are centralized and packed in the tenements of the other; but of all centralization that menaces our peace and threatens our liberties, is the consolidation of capital—and of all the diffusion that is needed in this Republic, congesting at so many points, is the leveling of our colossal fortunes and the diffusion of our gathered wealth amid the great middle classes of this people. As this question underruns the three tendencies we have been discussing, let us consider it a moment.

Few men comprehend the growth of private fortunes in this country, and the encroachments they have made on the rest of the people. Take one instance: A man in Chicago that had a private fortune secured control of all the wheat in the country, and advanced the price until flour went up three dollars a barrel. When he collected $4,000,000 of this forced tribute from the people, he opened his corner and released the wheat, and the world, forgetting the famishing children from whose hungry lips he had stolen the crust, praised him as the king of finance and trade. Let us analyze this deal. The farmer who raised the wheat got not one cent of the added profit. The mills that ground it not one cent. Every dollar went to swell the toppling fortunes of him who never sowed it to the ground, nor fed it to the thundering wheels, but who knew it only as the chance instrument of his infamous scheme. Why, our fathers declared war against England, their mother country, from whose womb they came, because she levied two cents a pound on our tea, and yet, without a murmur, we submit to ten times this tax placed on the bread of our mouths, and levied by a private citizen for no reason save his greed, and no right save his might. Were a man to enter an humble home in England, bind the father helpless, stamp out the fire on the hearthstone, empty the scanty larder, and leave the family for three weeks cold and hungry and helpless, he would be dealt with by the law; and yet four men in New York cornered the world’s cotton crop and held it until the English spindles were stopped and 14,000,000 operatives sent idle and empty-handed to their homes, to divide their last crust with their children, and then sit down and suffer until the greed of the speculators was filled. The sugar refineries combined their plants at a cost of $14,000,000, and so raised the price of sugar that they made the first year $9,500,000 profit, and since then have advanced it rapidly until we sweeten our coffee absolutely in their caprice. When the bagging mills were threatened with a reduced tariff, they made a trust and openly boasted that they intended to make one season’s profits pay the entire cost of their mills—and these precious villains, whom thus far the lightnings have failed to blast, having carried out their infamous boast, organized for a deeper steal this season. And so it goes. There is not a thing we eat or drink, nor an article we must have for the comfort of our homes, that may not be thus seized and controlled and made an instrument for the shameless plundering of the people. It is a shame—this people patient and cheerful under the rise or fall of prices that come with the failure of God’s season’s charge as its compensation—or under the advance at the farm which enriches the farmer, or under that competitive demand which bespeaks brisk prosperity—this people made the prey and the sport of plunderers who levy tribute through a system that mocks at God’s recurring rains, knows not the farmer, and locks competition in the grasp of monopoly. And the millions, thus wrung from the people, loaned back to them at usury, laying the blight of the mortgage on their homes, and the obligation of debt on their manhood. Talk about the timidity of capital. That is a forgotten phrase. In the power and irresponsibility of this sudden and enormous wealth is bred an insolence that knows no bounds. “The public be damned!” was the sentiment of the plutocrats, speaking through the voice of Vanderbilt’s millions. In cornering the product and levying the tribute—in locking up abundant supply until the wheels of industry stop—in oppressing through trusts, and domineering in the strength of corporate power, the plutocrats do what no political party would dare attempt and what no government on this earth would enforce. The Czar of Russia would not dare hold up a product until the mill-wheels were idle, or lay an unusual tax on bread and meat to replenish his coffers, and yet these things our plutocrats, flagrant and irresponsible, do day after day until public indignation is indignant and shame is lost in wonder.