Go to the monkey, thou voter! Consider his ways and be wise.
Do the monkeys pay ground rent to the descendants of the first old ape who discovered the valley where the monkeys live?
Do they hire the trees from the chimpanzee who first found the forest?
Do they buy the coconuts from the great-great-grandchildren of the gorilla who invented a way to crack them?
Do they allow two or three monkeys to form a corporation and obtain control of all the paths that lead through the woods?
Do they permit some smart young monkey, with superior business ability, to claim all the springs of water in the forest as his own, because of some alleged bargain made by his ancestors 500 years ago?
Do they allow a small gang of monkey lawyers to so tangle up the conceptions of ownership that a few will obtain possession of everything?
Do they appoint a few monkeys to govern them and then allow those appointed monkeys to rob the tribe and mismanage all its affairs?
Do they build up a monkey city and then hand over the land, and the paths, and the trees, and the spring, and the fruits of a few monkeys who sat on a log and chattered while all the work was going on?
No, my friend, monkeys have a wiser system of municipal government than that.
Although Kipling speaks of them in his jungle book as “the people who have no law,” yet they have laws enough to prevent the private ownership of public franchises.
If Professor Garner, who claims to have learned 40 words of the monkey language, were to escort some reflective chimpanzees around one of our cities, the professor would find it rather difficult to explain some of the manners of a civilized nation.
The chimpanzee would be amazed to see a $500,000 house, with 40 rooms, contain only a millionaire and his wife and ten servants, while a $10,000 tenement, with twenty rooms, contained forty people and no servants.
He would be still further astonished to see the warehouse district, where an abundance of everything was stored, close to the slum district, where the people lacked the barest necessities of life.
He would be shocked to see an entire street railroad system, with hundreds of miles of tracks, thousands of cars and employees, and carrying millions of passengers every year, absolutely owned and controlled by three or four men who never built a car or drove a spike.
But when the professor would explain to him that nine-tenths of the people in the city were quite content to endure such evils, and, in fact, grew angry with anyone who proposed to remove them, the chimpanzee would say: “Take me back to the forest, and may the Good Spirit deliver us from civilization.”
—The Coming Nation.
quoted in 1898-12-10 Oakland Tribune, Edgar Pomeroy's column. Shorter versions, ending with "Do they build up a monkey city and then hand over the land, and the paths, and the trees, and the spring, and the fruits of a few monkeys who sat on a log and chattered while all the work was going on?" have appeared in various places.
Henry George's book The Land Question has a chapter entitled "The Great-Great-Grandson of Captain Kidd," (page 37) which made some similar points about vested interests and privilege. See also Uncivilized, and a few entries down from this one, Squirrel Island. In the same spirit, look for Bolton Hall's parables.
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