A Man-Made Wilderness
Within a ten hours' journey of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Minneapolis there is a desolate jungle covering almost a million acres of land. Not so very many years ago this territory was covered with a magnificent forest worth millions of dollars. All this wealth belonged to the people of Wisconsin. It was common wealth.
In the city of Madison, Wis., there stands a great building called the state capitol. This, too, is the property of the people. And in this building for over half a century the representatives of the people have met, ostensibly to administer to the well-being of the entire citizenship.
The voters were not very careful in the selection ct their representatives. Neither did they pay them wages which would attract men capable of being administrators of great estates. Two hundred and fifty dollars per year is all that Wisconsin could afford to pay its lawmakers. To do the biggest kind of jobs the state selected cheap $250 a year men; too cheap to be good, as the saying goes.
With every opening of the legislature other men came to Madison. There was nothing cheap about them. They stopped in the finest hotel and apparently had money to throw away. They were a fine looking, well groomed, shrewd, highly educated set, and their salaries ran into the tens of thousands. These were the representatives of eastern corporations, the seekers of special privileges. And the big $10,000 men representing capital met the little $250 men representing the people. Let's see what happened.
In the early days of Wisconsin the people needed railroads. One way to get them would have been for the government to issue bonds, use the proceeds to construct the roads and then sell the adjoining public land for enough to pay of the bonds. In this manner the people would have acquired their own railroads. But the big eastern men persuaded the little lawmakers of Wisconsin that the proper way to do this thing was for the people to bond themselves, turn the money and the public land over to the corporations, who then, with the people's wealth, would build the railroads for themselves. This method is called "getting something for nothing," and it is the easiest way to get rich without work.
For many years afterwards the railroad bonds issued by the state, counties and towns of Wisconsin made their reappearance in the tax bill of every sovereign citizen. So, after all, it was not the state, but the dear people, who paid for the railroads belonging to the eastern crowd.
The railroad companies obtained the land for nothing, then they sold it to the lumber companies for something, who sold it to the land companies for a little bit more, who sold it to the settlers for a good, stiff price. Everybody was made
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