>"Transportation being a means of exchange and
> a public necessity, the government should own
> and operate the railroads in the interests of
> the people."
>
>Ignatius Donnelly
>St. Louis
>Preamble to the Populist Party Platform, 1892
Don't forget:
>That we condemn the fallacy of protecting American labor under the
>present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal
>classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners; and we
>denounce the present ineffective laws against contract labor, and
>demand the further restriction of undesirable immigration.
I've never said populism, whatever it is exactly, is a Bad Thing. I've said it's a very mixed bag, contradictory and all over the place - reflecting the material interests of petty producers, who often hate the big guys, but are not notable for the sympathy of the "pauper and criminal classes" below them.
By the way, many web versions of the preamble contain this:
>We declare that this Republic can only endure as a free government
>while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for
>the nation; that it cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the
>civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which grew
>out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are
>in name, one united brotherhood of free [men].
Why the bracketed [men]? Is something being elided, or was the word missing?
Doug