grees of radiance, is the fashionable one in the firmament of London Society. Not all the members of this species are men of letters, readers and writers of books, the masters of epigrammatic English or after-dinner speakers like Chauncey, but they are quiet-looking, always tranquil, with almost a seraphic expression of countenance in the presence of the most indisputably aristocratic ton. The Trust magnate has the hard practical sense of the long-headed Anglo-Saxon. Although he has not the art which only high station, birth, breeding, or extraordinary natural powers can develop, he never violates appearances nor offends decorum.

PRESIDENT: At times you appear to forget that majestic Trust and Imperialism are both regarded by Republicans and Democrats as gnarled Upas trees. A supreme public interest gathers around these sinister derangers of the Constitution and commerce.

SENATOR: I have masked the policy of the Republican party. There must be no anarchy of opinion respecting Trusts. By playing politics I have cornered the AntiTrust Platform of Democracy. Before our adjournment we proposed an amendment to the Constitution empowering Congress to define, control, and regulate, prohibit or dissolve Trusts, Monopolies, and Corporations, whether existing in the form of a corporation or otherwise. Other methods and measures simultaneously have been reported. for enforcing the law against Trusts. By these shifty expedients I have placed the Democrats in a hole.

PRESIDENT: Have care, Boatswain, this dexterous expedient is dangerous. The plain voter may ask, if the Republicans had the subject at heart when they had the executive and legislative control of the Government, why did they not amend the Constitution and enact a code of laws regulative of Trusts?

SENATOR: Assuming that such an amendment would provide an adequate remedy, which is far from probable, it would be years before the proposed remedy could be made effective. The Republicans had only a small majority in the House and could not, of course, give it the two-thirds vote necessary for the adoption of any amendment to the Constitution. The Democrats would, of course, oppose the amendment on the ground that it would give Congress more power than it should possess; that it might lead to a dangerous invasion of the rights of the States-in brief, that the remedy was worse than the disease.

By my stratagem Republican Trust appears as AntiTrust. Chairman Hanna, a millionaire, who is a consistent enemy of organized labor, and several months ago said trusts were a good thing; Vice-Chairman Payne, a millionaire; Secretary Dick, a faithful disciple of Hanna in Ohio; Joseph Manley, of Maine, who has been a consistent supporter of intrenched corporate interests in his State; Richard Kerens, of Missouri, who owns nearly half of his State and who sold the Government thousands of tons of coal during the war; Senator Kean, of New Jersey, who helped put through the law in New Jersey that makes the incorporation of trusts there such an easy matter, and Senator Scott, the affluent nabob of West Virginia, all agreed that trusts should be vehemently denounced.

No miracle in the Dark Ages worked so well. My Anti-Trust measure is a political chef-d'œuvre after the style but far surpassing Machiavelli. Besides, we cannot run the machinery by blusterous bags of empty wind; the campaign fund does not manage itself; it is a dead-lift effort. My bill puts Trust on tap; my Currency Measure tips the wink to the National Banks, and the antitrust platform at Philadelphia will renew the notice. We shall find the Power-holding Class extremely obliging.

PRESIDENT: Each of your steps in itself is inimitable. Party theorems and sociological problems do not organize the national intellect. The vast mass, like a cloud, drifts along to its destiny in an invisible wind shifted about by the artifices of infinite political dissimulation. The leaders of Public thought from this example of our Trust-statecraft may trace the course of the Republican party in doing whatever is possible to promote the omnipotence of Trust and its twin brother, Imperialism.

SENATOR: Mr. President, I, sitting in idleness on a cliff at Rhodes, eyed the Sun as he swung his golden censors athwart the heavens. I foresaw the fermenting sourness of the Chicago platform would turn vapid and the people would cast it out. The general condition of things looked ominous. We then had above 5,000,000 men out of employment, and another 1,000,000 homeless and on tramp, and a quarter of a million coming in annually to overstock our already overstocked labor market. The labor unions refused to be made the cat's-paw; they would not call out one class of labor to shoot down the other.

Militarism and Industrialism seemed two opposite poles, the one negative and the other positive.

But a few master minds successfully elected you and have ever since managed politics and business from a financial standpoint until now our Industrial Trusts propose to make the people pay tribute. We embrace every branch of industry, and the wealth that we hold in the United States equals in value four-fifths of the entire capital of the country. In spite of that burning theme of liberty, the Constitution, America, under the reign of Trust and Imperialism, has distanced the greatest of the six great powers of Europe (which combined hold ten millions of men for plunder and conquest)—the tottering hierarchy

of England struggling for the last prop in Africa. The annual produce of labor in Great Britain is estimated at thirteen hundred and fifty millions sterling. One million of Imperial English swells receive more than twice as much of this income as the twenty-six millions constituting the manual labor class. In America the inequality is still greater, there being 4,047 families of our nouveaux riches who own about five times as much property as 6,599,706 families of wealth producers. Our Trust System of Conquest far exceeds those of the European Molochs of war. Under the lash of the Trust the American serf enormously increases productive power and the amount of material products at least ten times faster than the growth of population, but the enormous increase goes to their Royal Highnesses, the Sovereign Trusts, while the industrial worker is little better off than before. The policy of our party has been to accumulate immense masses of property in single lines of families, which has divided America into two distinct orders: the Nouveaux Riches Royal and the Proletarian Classes. The spirit of the times has altered since the Declaration of Independence. We still proclaim that governments are constituted for the benefit of the people and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; but the Trust Leviathans of the East regard that doctrine as a heresy and a vagary. Popular right is not a known term in the nomenclature of Bonded Debt, National Bank, High Tariff, Gold Standard and Trust.

PRESIDENT: To attain the doctrine of our Declaration of Independence which Imperialists and Trusts deride, rivers of blood have flown; centuries of desolation have passed over. Have Imperialists ever paused to reflect that America may be crimsoned by the blood of the martyr? That America may be rebaptized in an ill-starred red

drama? The subject is too melancholy for reflection. Tell me, as a factor in the fight, what think you of the Nebraskan? He seems to bar the way to Republican preferment.

SENATOR: Assuredly this raw recruit, this novitiate in politics, has reushered these Constitutional, Anti-Trust, Anti-Imperialistic doctrines upon the attention of the common people, and with such restless éclat as to surmount the impediments which in the ordinary course of things centuries could but have dissipated. He presses his selfevident truths with industrious and theoretic precision. His theorem is the native equality of the human race. The cherishment of the plain people is the vital principle of his policy and the spring of his unprecedented success. In 1896 like an eagle he rode the rising blast. He has again raised the tempest! Who is better fitted to ride upon and direct its course? He has allied with him a motley constellation of counselors and generals, but he himself must. work the burdensome oar. Clearly he is a magician of Democracy; and, passing strange, Democracy has always been under the delusion that justice is an object of profound and universal concernment. The Imperial Republican revolution of Glory and Gold has powerful affinities which have coöperated in the production of the great transformations, ethical and political. But the transcendent influence of particular individuals in the fierce and angry collision of such a prolific era as this should not be overlooked. The Son of the West stands like a Colossus upon the floor of the nation. His personal influence is gigantic, his powers as a debater of a high order; for dexterity of address, fertility of resource and management, he is without a rival. His principles, though preposterous and deleterious remnants of the constitutional era, are a powerful auxiliary to him. He exhibits vast research, great consideration, and