People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1895 — Public Robber System. [ARTICLE]

Public Robber System.

When the railroads were granted the right of way under the right of “eminent domain” it was with the implied understanding that they should be operated for the public welfare. Some of the most eminent lawyers and jurists have maintained that when the roads cease to operate for the public welfare their franchises return to the people in whom the right of “eminent domain” originally vested. Who, not financially interested in railroads, will attempt to maintain that the railroads are not run on the system of changing all that the traffic will bear? They are a public robber system, squeezing out of the people the means to pay dividends on billions of watered stock. As an incident to their schemes they are in politics from President to pound - master. They have an army of henchmen, bribed in a score of ways to serve their will. They do'nt hesitate to smirch the judicial ermine to set aside law and prevent justice. So apparent is this becoming to the average man, that the henchmen of the railroads had better beware of the time when a thoroughly aroused people will not stop to buy the roads but will confiscate the whole business. There is a limit to human patience, and the corporations have pretty nearly struck the limit.—New Charter.

Beware of the armies of straw men that are arrayed before the people that their attention may be kept withdrawn from the real cause of their sufferings, the true source of their danger. Wonderful are the achievements of the race in science; wonderful its progress in the arts; wonderful its command, newly acquired, over some subtler forces in nature; but more wonderful, most wonderful, is the blindness of its leaders to the final, inevitable result upon the race of a governmental policy which instead of advancing the standard of wages and of living among the masses of the people, deliberately and persistently seeks to lower it. The reform party has for twenty years said that the money question was the paramount issue. The old parties claimed it was the tariff. Who was right? Both the old parties are a unit in demanding a reform of “the best currency system in the world.” And why? If the system was as good as claimed, it could not be bettered. Is it not time to suspect these financiers of either incompetency or dishonesty? Will their proposed change, which is an extension of the same old system that has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy, be better? Why not compare their system with that laid down in the Omaha platform?