Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1911-09-20
GRANT COUNTY MAN
HAS BECOME FAMOUS
Continued from First Page.)

had some personal experience with the
problem of the great landlords.
Back there in England there is a
little cottage that my fathers grand.
father built more than hundred
years ago. My uncle still lives in
it, but he can never own it. It is
owned by great landholder, whose
taxes are so small that he can afford
to retain the ownership of vast tracts
of land which bring him in little or
no rent. But small as the rental is
that my uncle has to pay for the land
that cottage stands on he has been un-
able to pay it by himself. and my
father and | have had to contribute
every year to the rent of thi property
that our own people built We could
have bought the land any time in
these last twenty years, but the land
lord would not sell. With fair
system of taxation he would be com
PEELED to improve the property or put
it on the market--either would have
been better for my uncle and mis-
family.
Well, Progress and Poverty
gripped me just as it gripped Tom
Johnson, made me single taxer, just
as it has made. Lawson Purdy, presi-
dent of your New York city tax com
mission, single taxer-struck me,
in fact, with its undesirable truth.
just as it has struck millions of
others-and I came m to Oregon de-
termined to do what could to bring
about the conditions of equality that
Henry George advocated
ION the way across the Oakland
terry some one handed me a tract
about the initiative. / paid small
to it, for 1 didn' L see then
that this was the weapon had been
looking for.
HIS ARRIVAL IN OREGON.
I arrived in Oregon just as big
political battle between the people
and the political machines was going
1n-the fight for the secret Australian
ballot, as we called it then. I got
into the fight, and found myself as
ISOLATED with lot of good. earnest,
sincere people who were giving time
and energy to a movement that sp-
parently couldn't affect the personal
fortunes of any of them. We won
the fight. The victory interested Us
in the possibility of popular organiza-
ton. We talked single tax and tried
to figure out way to get it. Then
one day some one came alorg with
book that had just been published
telling how the paople Of Switzerland
had rid themselves Of corrupt political
conditions by the initiative and re-
farendum, and [ saw-we all saw
that the way to get the single tax
was the initiative and referendum.
Once give the people the power
actually to have enacted the laws
they really want, and when they
want the single tax they can have it
- that seemed perfectly plain to me,
and pretty soon there was large
group Of US that saw it. One of
them was Jonathan Bourne, now
United States Senator from Oregon.
Jonathan has been with us from the
start.
'FWell, we started out and organ
lied direct legislation league to get
the initiative and referendum.
People generally didn t know what
we were driving at, and the politi-
clans laughed at US. l opened up
headquarters at Salem and began to
try to lobby the proposition through
the Legislature. All we wanted was
t. have the initiative and referendum
submitted to the people, to vote on or
not as they desired l learned a lot
about the way legislation is done and
made a note of a good many reforms 1
intended to try for later, but dis
covered one thing -that the way tC
get reform accomplished is not tc
ask the politicians for favors. but tC
play their own game and beat them
at it. So the next year Jonathan and
l both got ourselves elected to the
! Legislature.
"I'm not going into details of tn,
fight we had. I'll admit we played