question what shall be the result. Is there room in a democratic country for such a combined monopoly? To the student of social problems there is no question more important than this: Shall the world's progress toward the amplest conditions for the freest individual development in civilized society be checked and balked by obstacles of its own creation? Shall the latter half of the nineteenth century behold such a desperate struggle for the destruction of commercial feudalism in the United States as Europe witnessed during the closing years of the eighteenth, in overthrowing the feudalism established by the sword?" Sir, I commend these questions to the most earnest consideration of this House, and of the whole country. I cannot hope, in the light of what I have seen here, that they will arrest the attention of the gentleman from New York [Mr. WHEELER], or even the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. GARFIELD], whose brief dialogue with the Chairman of the Pacific Railroad Committee ended in his happy reconciliation to the South Pacific Bill. But they cannot fail to be pondered by those who prize the equal rights of the people and the broad interests of the whole country, untrammeled by special influences.

The question presented by the railway power of the United States is the question of commercial feudalism. It is the question of democracy on the one hand, and aristocracy on the other, meeting in deadly conflict for the mastery. It is the question whether we shall have a government resting upon the policy of small farms, compact communities, free schools, and equality of rights, or a government owned and dominated by great corporations which never die, which band themselves together as a unit against the rights of the people, and will accept nothing short of imperial power over Congress, State Legislatures, and the courts. The railway, as one of the great forces of American politics, is new; but in this age of marvelous activities and commercial greed it already represents a larger moneyed interest than that through which three hundred thousand slaveholders so long and so absolutely governed the country. "It took generations to limit the baron's prerogative by law, but in less than twenty years the law' has been made the servant to do the bidding of the railway."

Sir, I ask gentlemen to take these startling facts home to themselves, and lay them to heart in season. I ask them to consider whether our hot-bed policy of building up towns and great cities, amassing vast private fortunes, and fostering luxurious and extravagant living, is not eating out the virtue of the people, and sapping the very life of our institutions? Democracy can only grow and

thrive in the sun and air of equal laws and equal opportunities. It gathers its vitality from the conditions which surround it. It must breathe the atmosphere of the whole people, and renew its life in the fertilizing dews of their common humanity. It needs to be cherished and strengthened by ceaseless discipline and care, like the life of the body, and must wither and die under the shadow of aristocracy and privilege in whatever form.

In theory ours is a government of the people; but in practice it is rapidly degenerating into an oligarchy of grasping capitalists, wielding their power through our constantly multiplying corporations. Since the formation of the Government we have sold in all only one hundred and sixty million acres of the public domain, a large proportion of which was bought by non-resident owners for merely speculative purposes, and is to-day held back from settlement by our homeless people; but we have allowed two hundred million acres to fall into the remorseless grasp of corporations, whose feudalization of land and labor I have indicated, while bills are now on the Speaker's table calling for the additional quantity of at least one hundred million acres. Can any thinking man face these facts and feel that the Republic is safe?

Can a government be called free whose citizens are made landless by its systematic policy? Can a republic, still in the day of its youth, be honestly lauded, in which the relative number of its landowners is constantly decreasing, while the obstacles to the acquisition of homes are constantly multiplied? Let it be remembered also that while these millions of acres are being surrendered to corporate wealth, and still other millions are passing into the hands of monopolists under the name of military bounties, college scrip, swamp land grants, and Indian treaties, Congress, as if the absolute slave of these monopolies, persistently refuses to legislate for the workingman and pioneer. A bill to prevent the further sale of the whole of our remaining public domain which is fit for tillage, except to actual settlers under the preemption and homestead laws, would prove a more beneficent and far-reaching-measure than even the Homestead Law itself. It would simply carry out the avowed policy of the administration, and make it impregnable. It would intrench it in the hearts and homes of the people, and insure the Republican party a new lease of its life. It would, I am sure, be welcomed by ninety-nine hundredths of the people of the United States, and condemned by those only who believe in the gospel of plunder and spoliation. I challenge any man, of any party, to give me a single reason why Congress should not pass

such an act at once. I challenge any man to account for the repeated votes in this body against this proposition, without reference to the corporate and special interests to which I have referred, and whose will has uniformly taken the shape of law. For years have I striven for it in this House, and with increasing earnestness, as I have seen the public domain melting away under the shamelessly prodigal policy of the government. The measure was voted down at the last session on the yeas and nays by a large majority, as it had been before, and I fear I shall not be able to try the question again at this session. We carried it as a measure applicable to a few States and Territories in July last, at the instance of their representatives, but our bill sleeps in the Senate Committee on Public Lands, and will know no waking, because it would inaugurate a policy threatening the profits which organized capital and financial rapacity hope to realize through still further raids upon the public lands. Let the people note the fact, and let their watchword henceforward be, the emancipation of the public domain, and the emancipation of themselves from their cruel and unnatural bondage to corporations and associated wealth.

REVIEW OF CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS.

CLOSING REMARKS AT DUBLIN, OCTOBER 25, 1868.

[This brief political autobiography fitly enough followed the Congressional canvass of this year. If its language, in some instances, should seem severe, the extraordinary character of the opposition which provoked it ought to be considered. In each successive contest, the warfare against Mr. Julian had increased in bitterness as it declined inpower; and when, all other methods having failed hopelessly, the attempt was made to get rid of him by re-districting the State so as to deprive him of the great body of his friends, and he was about to succeed in the new district, the most shameless example of organized ballot-stuffing by pretended Republicans which followed, and has since been judicially proved, furnished some excuse for the use of expressive words.]

MY FRIENDS, Allow me now to dismiss the subject of our general politics, and beg your indulgence in some local and personal references which seem naturally to be suggested by the Congressional canvass just closed. My political career among you has been a long one, and, in some respects, quite peculiar in its character; and your intimate connection with it must invest the subject with an interest in some considerable degree common to you and to me. In what I shall say, I must disregard the injunction to "Let by-gones be by-gones," because I do not think it applicable to the case in hand.

My first connection with the general politics of the Burnt District was in 1848. Up to that time I was a member of the Whig party, but the nomination of a large, Louisiana slaveholder for the Presidency brought me to a dead halt. I could not support him without doing violence to the most decided and deep-rooted convictions of duty, earnestly as I desired to live in peace and unity with my old party friends. Very naturally, therefore, I became identified with the Free Soil organization, which was then springing into life in Wayne County, and which sent me as a delegate to the Buffalo Convention. Subsequently I was made an Elector for the district, and as such I made by far the most vigorous canvass of my life, encountering, at every stage of it, an amount of partisan rancor and personal abuse which have seldom, if ever, fallen to the lot of any politician. I never, for a single moment, doubted that I was in the right; and, having a good constitution

and an excellent pair of lungs, I made the hills vocal with my Free Soil speeches, speaking two to three times per day, and "fought it out on that line" to the end. My opponents used to say that my audiences consisted of "eleven men, three boys, two women, and a negro," and there was sometimes more truth than poetry in this inventory; but I despised not the day of small things. Our independent movement did not carry the electoral vote of a single State, and our standard-bearer himself was unworthy the support of honest men, as subsequent events have more than proved; but this organized stand for the right, and protest against the wrong, produced some very remarkable results. It saved Oregon from slavery. It gave cheap postage to the people. It launched the policy of free homes on the public domain which prevailed years afterwards; and as "the child is father to the man," so this movement was the progenitor, certainly the forerunner and pathfinder, of the mightier one which rallied its hosts. under Fremont in 1856, elected Lincoln in 1860, and carried the nation safely through the grandest civil conflict that ever convulsed a great people.

The triumph of the Whigs in this contest, paved the way for their utter rout and ruin in 1852, but they were temporarily elated, and showed no disposition whatever to conciliate and win back to their ranks those who had separated from the party and joined the Free Soil movement.

The supporters of this movement fully reciprocated the unfriendly feeling; and as early as the close of the year 1848 they declared their continued independence by nominating me for Congress. The Democrats, smarting under their defeat on the deceptive issue of the Nicholson Letter, and politically powerless in the District, were quite ready to take advantage of the angry feeling between the Whigs and Free Soilers which the Presidential canvass had aroused. Accordingly, in the spring of 1849, they were overtaken by an apparent spasm of anti-slavery virtue, which led them to mount the Free Soil platform, and zealously join hands with my radical friends in electing me to Congress. This led to the oft-repeated charge of a bargain between them and me, which I have so often explained to you as simply an agreement that if they would stand straight up and down on my platform, and proclaim it as their political gospel, I would allow them to vote for me for Congress, which arrangement was carried out in good faith on both sides. My election was a surprise alike to all parties, and the canvass sowed the seeds of bitterness which still rankles in the