eral enjoy no more liberty at present than under the arbitrary governments during the most flourishing period of the seventeenth century.

SENATOR: How will that affect the independent voter of the well-to-do classes and the people?

PRESIDENT: He will disregard party platforms and vote not as a Republican nor Democrat, but as an American. He will answer the argument of Trust in justification of its enslavement of the Public with the famous reply of the first Republican President to the Slavocracy:

These arguments that are made, that the inferior races are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow-what are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of kingcraft were of this class; that they always bestrode the necks of the people; not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. Turn it whatever way you will, whether it come from the mouth of a king, an excuse for enslaving the people of the country, or from the mouth. of men from one race for enslaving the men of another, it is all the same old serpent.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under the rule of a just God cannot long retain it.

SENATOR: If fifty-five out of sixty-five billions of national wealth is divided between the power-holding and well-to-do classes, thirty-three to the former and twentytwo to the latter, one would think that not even Scythian slaves could be so blind as not to perceive the remaining eighty millions have nothing but a minimum wage fund left for the consumption of 150,000,000 of production, Distribution is the handmaid of Production.

PRESIDENT: Instead of production for 150,000,000 being consumed by 75,000,000 Americans, as Mr. Thurber assumes, only a million and a half out of the 80,000,000 have incomes which enable them to consume beyond the iron law of salaries and wages.

National underproduction meant National overconsumption at a time when a reduction of prices afforded a means of obtaining ready cash for products rendered unsalable because of the greatly diminished purchasing and consuming power of the nation as a whole. In this way manufacturers found it possible to keep their plants in operation and their labor employed during a long and trying period of deadly depression.

An addition of five cents a day to seventy millions of human beings would mean an annual increase of the total national income to $1,277,500,000; add to the five cents the additional taxation of Funded Debt, National Bank, High Tariff, and the Gold Standard. Thought fails to grasp such a resultant; it would require many ciphers following the dollar and unit mark. Consider what it would mean if the average wage of the nation was reduced by this system of indirect taxation 25 per cent. This aspect of taxation is appalling. It is not difficult by such greedy purveyors of taxation to account for the distribution of thirty-three billions to one hundred and twenty-five thou sand families.

SENATOR: All economists know that overproduction is a mere sheer political parrot-croaking. Our financial distresses since 1873, instead of being charged to the indirect taxation of Funded Debt, National Bank, High Tariff, and the Gold Standard, have been artfully attributed by the Scythians to overproduction. If under equitable conservative laws indirect taxation had not piled up fiftyone billions of the national wealth into the hands of a

million and a half, we should never have heard of overproduction, which led to the imperious necessities and fierce strife of competition which knew no law but the survival of the fittest.

PRESIDENT: Trust is survivor.

SENATOR: What remedy have the people?

PRESIDENT: The people and even partisans of the wellto-do perceive that no one statesman can formulate a universal remedy. So momentous a subject will require a code of laws which will tax the conservative wisdom of our lawmakers to frame.

To do nothing means simply to let the immense blind social forces now at work operate without interruption. Our laws have been strong for the weak and feeble for the strong. Under right conditions competition is a permanent social force. If a mass of capital can alone produce a monopoly, there ought to be some discoverable ratio between the mass of capital and monopoly forces when we are brought face to face with an aggregation of trust capital of nine billions. The first problem is a monopoly problem; second, a problem of industrial concentration; third, a problem of wealth concentration; fourth, a problem of distribution of taxation; and, fifth, a problem of wealth distribution by income and progressive inheritance tax.

The Trust is the highest order of business talent and executive ability. It is at once a monument to American genius and a symbol of American rapacity. In 1711 the English Court said that "to obtain the sole exercise any known trade throughout England is a complete monopoly and against the policy of the law." As soon as the criminal liabilities, obligation: and limitations of Trust are defined by State and national legislative statutes, the farseeing management, splendid talent, unscrupulous methods, and insatiable greed of the Power-holding Class will

perceive the law has hold of them. recalls Sir John Culpepper's speech,

Already our public (Reads:)

Of monopolies and "pollers of the people," they are a nest of wasps a swarm of vermin which have overcrept the land. Like the frogs of Egypt, they have gotten possession of our dwellings, and we have scarce a room free from them. They sup in our cup; they dip in our dish; they sit by our fire. We find them in the dye-fat, washbowl, and powdering-tub. They share with the butler in his box. They will not bate us a pin. We may not buy our clothes without their brokerage. These are the leeches which have sucked the commonwealth so hard that it is almost hectical.

It has been truly said that most of the great English struggles for constitutional liberty have grown out of unjust exactions of money from the people. The mutterings of discontent started and grew from deep down among the yeomen, the mechanics, and the laboring men. The same causes that were at work then are at work now. The storm is brewing. It will be wise for those who are in its pathway to beware.

The imperative initial step, however, is to transfer the control of the national Government to the conservative representatives of the well-to-do and industrial classes, and no longer suffer the vast problems of our fiscal policy to be manipulated by the representatives of one hundred and twenty-five thousand corsairs of commerce.

SENATOR: Magna Charta was reenacted thirty times. My only fear is that the public may require and demand a renewal of their indubitable rights and liberties under a Democratic Administration.

PRESIDENT: When concentrated wealth and monopoly invaded the rights of the Frenchman, that great statesman, Turgot, prepared an edict which was issued by Louis

XVI. in the year of the declaration of American Independence. (Reads:)

God, in creating man with necessities, has compelled him to resort to labor and has made the right to labor the sacred unproscribable right of man. Therefore it is ordained that the arbitrary institutions which prevent the indigent from living by work; which extinguish emulation and industry and make useless the talents of those who do not belong to a corporation or company; which load industry with burdens onerous to the subject without benefit to the state; which by the facility which they afford to the combination of the rich to force the poor to submit to their will and to create conditions that enhance the price of the most necessary articles of subsistence, be abrogated.

SENATOR: There is wisdom enough in the crude speeches, debates, and resolutions of the Chicago Conference on Trusts, without conflicting with the fundamental principles of our jurisprudence, to make a formidable Digest of Trust laws. The problems which some gentlemen deem so stupendous that they pause in terror before they have crossed the threshold of inquiry would be quickly disposed of by a Republican Congress not organized in favor of Trust. Our vast centralization of control cannot be a permanent condition; combinations of capital and combinations of labor are not the inevitable concomitants of social growth, nor are the forces which impel them stronger than the law which creates them.

This is only a popular delusion which the work of wellofficered Federal Bureaus of Trust under a conservative administration would quickly dissipate. The difficulty is the Power-holding Class is of the Republican party.

PRESIDENT: The progress of productive arts requiring that many sorts of industrial occupations should be carried on by larger and larger capitals, the productive power