combined and produced a condition without parallel in the pathology of nations resulting in the all-abounding Upas, Leprosy of Trust, from whose loins springs Imperialism. PRESIDENT: The Democrats are for heroic treatment. Statesmen should probe to the causes and conditions which have produced Trust. SENATOR: That will require a prodigy in political pathology. What you term a disease I regard as the noble plot of a magnificent drama to overturn the Constitution. PRESIDENT: Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man may rest his head. My doctrine of political metamorphosis is not a sarcasm; it affords the simple explication of Trust. It needs no great intellectual magician to discern the foundation upon which this bold and imposing national structure rests. SENATOR: Strange that the sapient calumniators of Trust should not have discovered it. In regard to Trust there seems to have been no attempt to apply economic principles or recognize the great laws of societary evolution. PRESIDENT: The difficulty lies in winnowing the wheat from the chaff of controversy. The genesis of Trust must be traced by potential facts, not traversible by the windy suspiration and enforced breath of an oracle and orator who, like the platform Demosthenes of New York, starred the country in 1896 for a professional fee. SENATOR: The facts of economic productivity have many problematic aspects: overcapitalization; effect upon middlemen; cheapened product; economic independence; traveling men; organization of labor; competition; combination; and their limitations; tariff; protection; foreign markets; classes based on wealth; rights of individuals; centralization; discrimination in freight, and a multitudinous array of others so frequently presented by demagogues. PRESIDENT: Had you first instanced that of the demagogue you could have safely omitted the aspect of all other kindred problems co-related to the unequal distribution of wealth, attributable under foreign governments, founded on the inequality of man, to the unequal distribution of brains. The equality of man, which is the bedrock civilization of the American state, in some measure compensates for inequality of brains by equality of votes. I mean to say the facts of modern experience, which are the court of final appeal, are the fundamental facts of Indirect and Direct Taxation based on democratic industry. They furnish the keynote to the arch of our economic science and trace the trail of Trust. SENATOR: To what facts of modern experience do you refer? PRESIDENT: Mr. Sparks' figures show 1 per cent. of our families receive nearly one-fourth of the national income, while 50 per cent. receive barely one-fifth. 125,000 families receive... 1,375,000 families receive. 5,500,000 families receive.. 5,500,000 families receive.. .$33,000,000,000 23,000,000,000 8,200,000,000 800,000,000 That is, the richest class, which constitutes only 1 per cent. of the population, possesses 50.8 per cent. of the property of the nation. The middle and the poor classes, together comprising 88 per cent. of the population, possess only 13.8 per cent. of the property. The annual income is distributed nearly as unequally. SENATOR: What is the key to the vastness of this unequal distribution? The subject is too subtle and complex for the human understanding. When I reflect that economic interdependence and social individuality is a criterion of a civilization founded upon the doctrine of the equality of man before the state, and that industrial pros perity is the cause and not the result of our free institutions, that value is not the exchange ratio of things to things, but of things to man, it will require a thousand years of the intelligent generalization of scientific statesmanship to solve the most momentous condition of inequality which historical economics has exhibited. PRESIDENT: The incomparable genius, Mark Hanna, has already achieved the task of a thousand years in one word-Taxation! The very pith and marrow of the internexus of this colossal phenomena is Indirect Taxation. Outside taxation the battle of the giants is over leather prunella. The machine-using industries and all other branches of the science of wealth which have been worked so efficiently have produced in intensely democratic America sixty-five thousand millions for practically 125,000 families. The silent working of the Napoleonic-confidence game of Taxation has been the subtle scheme by which Republican legislation has thimble-rigged 50 per cent. of our families so cleverly that they, whose democratic industry has produced all, have received barely one-fifth of the national wealth, while one-eighth of the Republican Power-holding Class receives more than one-half of the aggregate national income, and the richest 1 per cent., a larger income than the poorest, 50 per cent. SENATOR: Republican Taxation should be the sole issue of this campaign. If our adversaries saw it in so clear a light as our smooth-shaven respectabilities who work the game, how they would ring the changes upon Indirect Taxation! PRESIDENT: That august anti-imperialistic constitutionalist, Senator Hoar, let the Taxation cat out of the bag, completely disguised, in the very presence of the democratic mice, In his memorable speech in the Senate Mr. Hoar said our majority in the Senate for at least four years is assured. In his more recent statement he declared that Mr. Bryan's election would mean the overturning of the protective system, now happily established, and the wonderful prosperity it has brought to all classes of the people, and a dangerous assault on property. No one knows better than Mr. Hoar that if Mr. Bryan were elected President no changes in our tariff system or our currency laws could be made with a Republican majority in the Senate assured for at least four years. George Washingtonism, Aguinaldoism, Cæsarism, Militarism, and Constitutionalism entered on the downward stage toward disintegration when the Bostonian realized the imminence of a "dangerous assault on property." By the term property Senator Hoar intends the right of the Power-holding Class to unlimited Indirect Taxation upon industry. SENATOR: The deliberate effectiveness of physiological capital was sublimely illustrated by our hero of San Juan, Teddy, who cried, "Give them hell, boys! give them hell!" and as Secretary of War dodged his New York taxes by claiming a residence in Washington. Senator Depew said at his nomination: "We call him Teddy. He was the child of New York-New York City-the place that you gentlemen from the West think means coupons, clubs, and eternal damnation for every one. Teddy, this child of Fifth Avenue-he was the child of the clubs, he was the child of exclusiveness of Harvard College. وو This couponed club child of Fifth Avenue and the exclusiveness of Harvard, metamorphosed from a dude to a gentleman, from a cowboy to a hero rushing up hill with a pistol in hand, was nevertheless a gigantic failure when he faced Direct Personal Taxation. Teddy's escape from tax ation recalls a verse repeated recently at a London dinner and applied to another eminent representative of nouveaux riches that had just blossomed from the Imperial tree of Newport: "Boastful and rough, your first son is a squire; Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave." Some one asked how a society diplomat who presided over a railroad at £10,000 a year was also president of a Chicago abattoir at £5,000. An invidious American with aquiline eye and beak replied as an electro-elocutionist of men and measures at Albany, where his simplicity is never suspected. PRESIDENT: But for the constitutional limitations defining treason, Senator Hoar's argument upon my usurpation of unconstitutional powers would have jeopardized if not justified my impeachment. Republicans will never forgive the Senator's attempt to overthrow my administration. He was more cruel than a Scythian, more irreconcilable than a tiger, and his trumpet-call of the dead equaled the pageantries of the Pantheon. SENATOR: The Senator's patriotism and Christianity fell when he saw the platform of the Nebraskan. Mr. President, you are so full of colloquial and classical charms we skip from the record. Let us return to the almost invisible embodiment of Taxation; those powers beneficent to the Power-holding Class, but to the plain people their irresistible oppressors, a perpetual succession of monster after monster, with no cessation in the dreadful line of succession but the Currency Bill. PRESIDENT: It will not aid our researches to bombard |