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
of the curfew bells would have starved to death had it to compete with
those who were then working the lobby, while it was splitting hairs over
the Constitution and accepting the "stuff" that would do it "the most
good." No class of property shows the justice, and therefore the need,
of Confiscation as much as railroads. No class of property has done as
much toward absorbing and transferring the whole country into the hands
of a comparatively few men as railroads.
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