we the People Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Co-operation and Coal OUR WEALTH IN COMMON. IN a letter which I wrote to be read at a public meeting about the coal strike, I said that the Pennsylvania st... more »rike led the way directly for the only logical solution, the ownership of the coal properties by the State of Pennsylvania, or eventually by the nation. It is really pathetic to see on how many sensible people this idea falls as if it had never been broached before. I may say, of course, that the great majority of thinking men have studied the importance of such a solution; but a good many people whom you would class among thinking men have spoken to me of the suggestion as if it were an absolute novelty. To New Englanders in particular the suggestion is not a novelty, and you are happy to find that it is generally peoplewhohave been educated under absolute governments or under feudalism who think of it as a novelty. Not always, but generally. The truth is that so soon as the mentrained to English views of freedom landed here and could kick off the superstitions of feudalism, as Winthrop and Winslow and the people of both colonies did at once, they went into the government ownership of the essentials. The government owned the roads from the beginning and almost to the end of the eighteenth century. For a little while turnpikes owned by incorporated companies were the fashion; but their failure was so apparent that most of the turnpikes of the country are now a part of the public property. Originally, all churches were the property of the public, all schoolhouses were, as schoolhouses are to this hour. Indeed, in practice every church edifice is now so far a part of the public property that no tax is imposed upon it—more than would a tax be imposed upon the State house or court house. It is interesting to see that the...« less