l wealth. It was the
high aim of the _New Dawn_--said the associate editor, Merle Dalton
Whipple--to dethrone the dollar, to hasten and to celebrate the passing
of American greed.

Not until the second number was it revealed that the arch criminals were
to be found in the exploiting class, a sinister combination,
all-powerful, working to the detriment of the common people; an
industrial oligarchy under whose rule the cowed wage slave toiled for
his crust of bread. This number unflinchingly indicted the capitalistic
ruling class; fearlessly called upon the exploited masses to rise and
throw off the yoke put upon them by this nefarious plunderbund. The
worker's plight was depicted with no sparing of detail--"the slaves
groaning and wailing in the dark the song of mastered men, the sullen,
satanic music of lost and despairing humanity."

Succeeding numbers made it plain that the very republic itself had been
founded upon this infamy. Our Revolutionary War had marked the triumph
of the capitalistic state--the state that made property sovereign. The
Revolutionary fathers had first freed themselves from English creditors,
then bound down as their own debtors an increasing mass of the American
population. The document known as the Constitution of the United States
had been cunningly and knowingly contrived to that end, thus thrusting
upon us the commercial oligarchy which persisted to this day. It had
placed the moneyed classes securely in the saddle, though with fine
phrases that seemed not to mean this.

"A conscious minority of wealthy men and lawyers, guided by the genius
of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison," had worked their full
design upon the small farmer and the nascent proletariat; we had since
been "under the cult and control of wealth."

After this ringing indictment it surprised no Whipple to read that we
had become intolerant, materialistic, unaesthetic. Nor was it any wonder
that we were "in no mood to brook religious or social dissension." With
such a Constitution fraudulently foisted upon us by the money-loving
fathers of the Revolution, it was presumably not to be expected that we
should exhibit the religious tolerance of contemporary Spain or Italy or
France.

"Immersed in a life of crass material endeavour," small wonder that the
American had remained in spiritual poverty of the most debasing sort
until the _New Dawn_ should come to enrich him, to topple in ruins an
exploiting social system