Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/345

of industrial unrest, will not overlook either the land question or the gold-depreciation question. I am certain that it will not do so if it is earnestly seeking to remove the fundamental causes of unrest.

Summarizing, I will say that the present discontent is due, primarily, to great economic wrongs accentuated by gold depreciation—that is, by the high and rising cost of living and of doing business.

To right those wrongs and to bring peace and contentment on earth, we should:

1. Stabilize gold or adopt some other standard of value.

2. Take land values for public purposes.

3. Establish free trade between all countries.

4. Establish public ownership of all public utilities—railroads, street railways, telephones and telegraphs, electric light and gas companies, etc.

5. Liberalize our patent laws so that they will more promptly and fully benefit the masses and no less fully reward inventors.

6. Keep the initiative, referendum and recall in force at all times. Direct legislation not only safeguards the rights and liberties of the people, but is valuable for its educational features. It practically forces the voters to study public questions. It is as necessary in a republic as are public schools.

I am not alone in holding these views as to the fundamental causes of discontent and wars and as to how to remove them. It is true that not many of those who are now most in evidence in our newspapers and magazines are discussing what I regard as the real causes of wars. For the most part, they are putting the blame for wars on big armaments and military preparedness; on the desire of growing nations to expand, to have colonies, etc.; and on governmentalism or "monarchial governments," as Charles W. Eliot calls it. It is true that some of these writers mention popular government and free trade as possible preventions for wars, but very few of them lay stress on these ideas and still fewer mention or discuss the land monopoly as the greatest of all causes of discontent and, therefore, of wars. Only Free Traders, Single-Taxers and Socialists appear to have any comprehension of the real underlying causes of unrest and wars.

I will quote a few authorities on tariffs as a cause of wars.

Jacob H. Schiff, in his discussion with Charles W. Eliot, printed in the New York Times of December 20, said:

The perpetual cessation of all war between the civilized nations of the world can, as I see it, only be brought about in two ways, both Utopian and likely impracticable for many years to come. War could be made only to cease entirely if all the nations of Europe could be organized into a United States of Europe and if free trade were established throughout the world. In the first instance, the extreme nationalism which has become so rampant during the past fifty years and which has been more or less at the bottom of every war, would then cease to