To illustrate this distinction without a difference, take the island of Cuba, with its half million inhabitants, and suppose it to be ruled by an absolute monarch, who administers his commands through the usual attachés of the court and the noblemen of the island. Virtually owning the people, he commands them to labor, taking from them all their products, and merely feeding, clothing and sheltering them. In this case it would be the non-laborers who, without any circumlocution, directly obtain all the produced wealth, they simply expending their time and talent in its securing, while the lives of the people who produce it would be simply maintained.
Now advance one step toward popular government—to a constitutional monarchy. In this the same results to the producing people will be maintained, while the noblemen will share the wealth among themselves, allotting a certain share to the monarch.
Coming down to a representative government, of which personal liberty is the basis, the despotism of laws enacted in the interest of privileged classes are substituted for the personal despotism of monarchs and nobles. What the absolute monarch possesses himself of by the right of might, the privileged class in the popular government possess themselves of by the right of law, everything legal being held to be just.
Now is not that precisely the case in this country? Do not all the results of labor accrue to the privileged few? and are not the producing classes just as much enslaved to them as the subjects of an absolute monarch are to him?
With this mortification, however. In the last instance, they suffer from conditions over which they have no control; whilst in the former case the conditions by which they are enslaved are of their own formation. And I say, I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch than the willing slave of my own ignorance, of which advantage is taken by those who spend their time in endeavoring to prove to me that I am free and in singing the glories of my condition, to hoodwink my reason and to blind my perception.
And I further say, that that system of government by which it is possible for a class of people to practice upon my credulity, and, under false pretenses, first entice me to acquiesce in laws by which immense corporations and monopolies are established, and then to induce me to submit to their extortions because they exist according to law, pursuing none but lawful means, is an infernal despotism, compared to which the Russian Czar is a thousand times to be preferred.
