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PRESIDENT: Christianity deranged the business of Paganism; the Reformation the occupation of the papacy; the Magna Charta that of the descendants of King John. The American Revolution considerably disturbed Great Britain's Indian tea trade; the Slavery-Rebellion King Cotton's reign; and thirty-three thousand millions out of sixty-five thousand millions of national wealth held by the 125,000 Power-holding Bosses of this country is a radical disturbance by concentrated capital, acting upon inequitable social adjustments under color only of lawful Republican authority.

SENATOR: The rapine of Trust, the most odious ever mentioned in the annals of history, is the riddle which the sphinx of Fate puts to America. Not to answer it is to destroy civilization.

PRESIDENT: The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality, political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.

Were I a Democrat, my answer to the sphinx would be as clear as the Sun at noonday. It is found in the economic importance of making more dear the industry of man.

The underconsumption of wealth by the Power-holding Class cannot furnish the habitual demands of the masses with wages necessary for the foundation of industrial prosperity. It is in the needs of the masses that the economics of the future must be studied and Democratic statesmanship determined.

If combination be substituted for competition, it is to be remembered the producer requires the finished product, and with labor as a consumer, consumption by distribution on a

large scale is the only way by which the finished product can produce a dividend on capital. I would answer the sphinx, if we give thirty-three thousand millions to 125,000 and twenty-three thousand millions to a million. and a half, it takes all the property, leaving but a bare minimum living wage, from industry. Capitalistic representatives cannot consume it. For consumption purposes it is worth no more than the stars or the oceans to the 125,000 uncrowned kings and the million and a half barons.

SENATOR: Our Power-holding Class jest at the expansion of American industry by home consumption.

PRESIDENT: Making light of so formidable a blossoming of evil as American underconsumption sounds like a jest issuing from an abyss. America, before she fell under the dominion of the Power-holding Class, had a loftier mission than to buy and sell. Tyre, Berytus, Sidon, Sarepta amassed wealth for the few. I saw the grass growing over their ruins. The question is whether Americans are by the Power-holding Class to be disinherited of America.

SENATOR: With the swiftness of a whirlwind, in the night when the hour comes, as come it surely must, eightyodd millions of people may yet say to our Power-holding Class as Diogenes said to Alexander, "Stand out of my sunlight."

PRESIDENT: Who can foretell? Another generation may shudder at the blasts of civil war. In another generation the mournful wail of constitutional liberty may be heard. Another generation may look from that dizzy height over the chasm of lost liberty, only the colossal lineaments of America left, and in time they will fade as has faded the tribune where Demosthenes spoke, Ceramicus or Cecrops the Parthenon, the Pynx. As American statesmen we can see the need of a revolution of ideas which

shall quicken the public conscience and strike off the fetters from Industry. Our representatives must be men who can say, "Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther."

SENATOR: If, as has been said, the Constitution is a miracle of God unleashed, why need the people fear her assassins overlapping God's boundaries?

PRESIDENT: Ovid said, Erectos ad sidera tollere. God created them to look to heaven, but men are always crouching on the ground. Each for all and all for each is the only law for the economy of production.

Unfortunately, there are so many ways of being wrongheaded. The greatest geniuses may have their minds warped upon a principle they have received without examination. It is not easy to oppose the restrictions of law to the resistless rage, the cupidity and arrogance of upstart Trust. It is only in seas of blood that the privileged classes of monopoly have been drowned.

SENATOR: Let us expressly particularize our views as statesmen, regardless of the business of politics.

PRESIDENT: Speaking as an American statesman, I should declare that as to vast fortunes stored up under the Republican fiscal policy, by an amendment to the Constitution, regulations by taxation and otherwise of incomes, bequests, inheritances, a progressive system, would distribute the enormous stored-up forces of production. If the Power-holding Class have almost the entire wealth of the Community, acting together as one man, they will quickly have complete control over all the people and could not well be other than despots. To concentrate in the hands of a few practically and as a matter of fact according to the known results of human action is the exclusion of all others. Unified tactics in government, price, and production is the essence of Trust; our legislatures are under their ban.

SENATOR: Next let us as statesmen take up those monopolies arising from properties inherent in our business, and this gives us the chief class of natural monopolies. 1 We have here the highways of all sorts, but especially railways with their terminal facilities, including the grain elevators and stock-yards, canals, the telegraph lines, the telephones, irrigation works, harbors, docks, lighthouses, ferries, bridges, local rapid-transit agencies, gas works, urban waterworks, electric-light plants, etc., some of them national, some of them local or municipal monopolies.

PRESIDENT: If we consider the resources of the Powerholding Class in raising and lowering prices and obtaining legislation, I repeat it is difficult immediately to form any scientific generalized code of laws to regulate Trust.

SENATOR: The people can well ask the statesmen of Democracy, "Where wert thou when the Republican party laid the foundation of Trust? Who hath taken the dimensions thereof? On what are its foundations fixed? Who hath laid the corner-stone thereof ?"

PRESIDENT: The answer is in seven words: "The people did not think at all." In a word, Americans are not philosophers.

We all know that physical and psychical laws favor production on a constantly and indefinitely increasing scale.

SENATOR: The difficulty is that when a monopoly is secured monopolistic prices are always advanced. Governmental interference with trade is always dangerous. Professor Ely, whose economic contributions have given him a world-wide repute, says:

In every great American city a three-cent street-car fare, increasing the traffic very largely, would yield ample returns upon all the capital actually invested, and would highly remunerate all the labor power and managing capacity employed. Yet the usual rate is higher by 66 2-3

per cent. This is an enormous surplus so far as the single fare is concerned, preventing many who most need the service from riding; and it is an enormous surplus also so far as the aggregate is concerned, yielding unearned wealth amounting to millions upon millions in the great cities of our country.

Mr. Willoughby states:

Combining the four branches of the textile trade, it is seen that while the number of establishments increased during the forty years considered but 36 per cent., the number of employees reached 248 per cent. and the value of the product 465 per cent. The average number of employees per establishment has thus steadily risen from 48.5 in 1850 to 64.1 in 1860, 57.4 in 1870, 95.1 in 1880, and 124.4 in 1890.

This shows the wage-earner has not lost in opportunities for employment and the growth of the business unit.

PRESIDENT: What is needed is a legislation sufficiently intelligent and strong enough to prevent present powerful monopolies from owning the entire wealth of the country. Whoever owns the wealth owns the country.

SENATOR: All civilization depends on the accumulation of speculative knowledge, and all progress in civilization depends on an increase in speculative knowledge.

PRESIDENT: The fundamental error in modern sociological study is its regard for the fittest survivor.

SENATOR: The progress of Trust is the result not of a struggle for the survival of the fittest, but for domination. of the least fit of the wealth contributed by the joint industry of the average man in coöperation.

PRESIDENT: If least fit, how did they secure thirtythree billions of national wealth?

SENATOR: By the fiscal indirect taxation of Funded.

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