Year: 1874

legality OF the privileges which are held to be
oppressive the war is, in fact against certain
laws and as these laws were nominally made
by the people and the war against them is also
IN the name of the people, this aspect of the
coming struggle impugns the whole system OF
lawmaking by which the people, through their
representatives in the various State capitals,
frame laws, year after year, illimitable in
number the effects of which are simply to
surrender the people, bound hand and foot, to
incorporated oppressors and privileged classes
Does this statement assume the failure of
popular government? Such certainly appears
to be its logical starting point. Yet Mr.. w.
G. Flagg, of Illinois, from whose paper on the
grangers movement, read at the Social Sci
ence gathering, we have taken the sentence
which points to the abolition OF '1egal but
unjust privileges as the objective point of the
new agitation, couples his definition with an
expression OF faith in ''the forward movement
of the masses of humanity" and in the ''dem-
ocratc idea," and attributes TO ''all past ages"
not to ours, the denominations of tyranny that
kept the agricultural classes under the foot of
force and fraud


Everybody is free and equal and everybody
votes from the professors of mental philos-
ophy in the colleges down almost to the
mules, and certainly down to creatures whose
intelligence is just barely distinguishable from
good mule intelligence and the result of all
this voting is to create representative bodies,
clothed with the function of writing the laws
with such an equal bearing on all classes and
conditions that there shall be no privileges,
no exclusive rights in whatever is supposed to
be public, and so that every man shall have in
the operations of the political system and be-
fore the law the same equal value that his
vote has in determining the result. AS be-
tween Jack and his master the master
may have more sufficient knowledge on
many delicate problems of life he may know
better how to drive o. bolt in the side of ship,
and may give Jack some useful hints as to
shoeing horses, and even as to how he should
drain and plough and plant his land SO as to
improve his crops; but on such coarse and evil
dent subjects as the structure of government
and the operations of law in maintaining justice
and equality Jack is quite up to the standard
intelligence, and is not only as good as his
master, but BETTER in the exact proportion in
which he is more numerous People argued
stoutly once upon a time that this was Chi
mercal and Utopian. They said that Plato
and Sir Thomas More and Harrington and
other gentlemen who had sketched common
wealths on paper were mere Missionaries and
romance writers but our stout, patriotic an
cestors proved their case by establishing
government which carried the practice of
equality into further and more impossible
limits than Plato ever carried the theory in
that cast iron scheme of conservative tyranny
that he called his republic. Platos s'repub-
lic'' was the most elaborate distribution of hui
manity into classes that was ever contem-
plated, and Mr.. Wendell Phillips and gentle
men of that kind generally would open all
their batteries on its iniquity if it existed in
Arkansas or Utah or any other of the outlying
happy lands that fringe the mantle of our ma
tional greatness. Our government. is many,
many centuries beyond the Utopian dreams of
antiquity in its freedom and in its abolition of
everything that stands in the peoples way;
and we are glad to see, as we do by Mr.. Flaggs
paper, that faith in the democratic idea is still
fresh and perennial


But just as all this system Of absolute
equality and self f-government is in operation
just as we are wondering whether some mill
ions of money can be fraudulently abstracted
from the Treasury under cover of scheme to
celebrate the hundredth anniversary of our
great democratic success, there seems to be
extensive discomfort on the part of the people
with the operation of the government that is
oil their own. Mr. Flagg tells us that the
farmers movement means that there is IAN
unusual feeling of oppression and distress
resulting from the mischievous legislation of
the country and above he has told us that
there is injustice in our laws. 1t follows,
therefore, either that the people of this country
in making the laws contrive them SO that they
shall be unjust and oppressive to themselves
and shall favor monopolies and privileged
classes, or that the people of this country do
not make the laws and have no real share
whatever in making them, and that our So
called self-government is false pretence and
wretched sham that the central and
original notion of our system is utterly ex-
ploded and blown away and that our whole
great fabric as it stands IS a fraud.


Upon which point of this dilemma will the
grangers stand? They are the people of those
Western States now agitated on the subject Of
transportation, in which the railroad corpora
tions are the oppressors and enemies of the
people, as the grangers declare. Have they
deliberately and knowingly framed the laws
to favor this oppression and set up and con-
solidated this privileged power, or have they
through absolute incapacity to deal with the
problems of government stood innocently by
while the great functions Of making and ad-
ro;n;eter;no the law slipped awav from fhero