The individual manages his private property or he employs an agent to manage it for him. And he holds this agent to a strict account. If the agent appropriates the income from the use of his private property the law steps in and justly punishes him. Acting collectively, the individuals elect by ballot a mayor and board of aldermen and members of the State legislature as agents to manage their franchise property for them.
“Wheresoever the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” In every large city there is a fat carcass of franchise wealth, and there you find the corporation eagles, and the political eagles gathered together to gorge themselves on it. The corporation eagles deceive the unsuspecting citizens by a pretended desire to serve them. They call themselves “public service corporations.” There never was a worse misnomer than this. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. They fatten on the people’s franchise wealth and serve no one except themselves and their congeners, the political eagles. So far from being _servants_ they become the masters of the people whose property they have obtained by every corrupt device that the vulpine instinct of man can invent.
The political eagles that feed on the franchise carcass have a different way of deceiving the people. They organize themselves into what they call a political party, and, by working three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, while other men are attending to their legitimate businesses, they get control of the legal political machinery of one of the great national parties. The name by which they call their organization will depend on the particular city they are operating in. In New York, for instance, they call themselves Democrats, not because they know or care anything about the principles of Democracy, but because a majority of the independent voters are Democrats, and then they secure the votes to elect their candidates from the very people they intend to despoil once they get in. For a similar reason the political eagles of Philadelphia call their organization Republican. If the majority of the voters of any city favored prohibition, you would have that city’s organized political eagles calling themselves Prohibitionists. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, every city in this country which has a fat franchise wealth carcass, has its corporation and political eagles gathered together to devour it.