We have had free trade in land; we have had in our American farmer, owning his own acres, using his own capital, and working with his own hands, something far better than peasant proprietorship. We have had, what no legislation can give the people of Great Britain, vast areas of virgin soil. We have had all of these under democratic institutions. Yet we have here social disease of precisely the same kind as that which exists in Ireland and England. And the reason is that we have had here precisely the same cause that we have made land private property. So long as this exists, our democratic institutions are vain, our pretense of equality but cruel irony, our public schools can but sow the seeds of discontent. So long as this exists, material progress can but force the masses of our people into a harder and more hopeless slavery. Until we in some way make the land, what Nature intended it to be, common property, until we in some way secure to every child born among us his natural birthright, we have not established the Republic in any sense worthy of the name, and we cannot establish the Republic. Its foundations are quicksand.
