Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 May 1885 — Something Must Drop. [ARTICLE]

Something Must Drop.

The following from an exchange gives the situation in a nut-shell: Something must drop, and drop like shot, in this country in a very few years. Land has been given away to corporations equal to the area of all New England and the Middle States. The amount of property in the hands of producers has decreased from about 27 per cent, to 10 per cent, in less than a generation. The currency has contracted in twenty years from near $36 per capita to actually less than $10: many millions being rapidly taken out of circulation, and millions of greenbacks are stored away in the vaults of the treasury. . One man in the United States (Jay Gould) recently took a whim to reduce the wages of over twenty thousand men, and only by their own intelligence and efforts was bloodshed averted. Five men in this country can beggar half the farmers or destroy the prosperity of a state by a word. — More than one man owns more wealth than there is in the State of Oregon, and is not considered verv rich either.

Farmers are burning food for fuel, miners are freezing and starving five hundred miles away, neither able to obtain with coal the food they need, nor able to get living wages for mining. Women skilled in sewing earn two dollars a week in New York and trained artisans beg for bread. These are pointers showing the way we are going. When ninetyfive per cent, of the wealth of this country concentrates into the hands of five per cent, of the people, liberty will be a corpse. No country has ever been prosperous when five per tent. of the people owned ninetenths of the property. When 200 Roman nobles owned the world, Rome died. Something must break. Either the sickly liberty we have must die, or the cankerous monopolies feedin on her must be cut out. The “cankerous monopolies” will soon realize the fact that there is a God in Israel, and a Democratic party in the United States, and the country will then prosper. Monopolies must “git up and dust.”— Jay Gould recognized a warning voice last fall.

H. S. Lobdell, of the firm of Gilbert & Lobdell, Troy, Ohio, is here again with his agents, Messrs. Arnold and Siler, to canvass this and Newton counties. — Now is the time for Farmers to set out new orchards, and rejuvenate the old, and for city residents to secure choice fruits for their lots and handsome flowers, evergreens and shrubbery for their lawns and yards, when they can procure them from a reliable firm that always keeps its promise and fills its contracts.