wed to own the nation's industries, the toiling masses will be
struggling in the hell of poverty as they are today. To tell them that
juggling with the tariff will change this beastly and disgraceful
condition is to insult their intelligence. The professional politicians
who have been harping upon this string since infant industries have
become giant monopolies know better. Their stock in trade is the
credulity of the masses.

The exploited wage-slaves of free trade England and of the highly
protected United States are the victims of the same capitalism; in
England the politicians tell them they are suffering because they have
no protective tariff and in the United States they tell them that the
tariff is the cause of their poverty.

And this is the kind of a confidence game the professional politicians
have been playing with the workers of all nations all these years. To
keep them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance is the rule that
governs their campaigns for votes among the workers. The "issues" upon
which they keep the workers divided into hostile camps are of their own
making.

Since the foundation of the government one or the other of these
capitalist parties has been in power and under their administration the
working and producing millions have been reduced to poverty and slavery.
Professor Scott Nearing has shown in his work on the wages of American
workers that half of the adult males of the United States are earning
less than $500; that three-quarters of them are earning less than $600
a year; that nine-tenths of them are receiving less than $900 a year,
while 10 per cent only receive more than that figure.

Professor Nearing also shows the starvation wages for which women are
compelled to work in the present system. One-fifth of the whole number
of women workers receive less than $200 per year; three-fifths receive
less than $325; nine-tenths receive less than $500. Only one-twentieth
of the women employed are paid more than $600 per year.

These figures bear out the report of the Chicago vice commission to the
effect that the low wages of women and girls go hand in hand with
prostitution. Despite all attempts to control the white slave traffic,
which is now organized as one of the great profit-extorting trusts,
along with the rest of the trusts, prostitution, like a terrible cancer,
is eating out the very heart of our civilization.

And in the presence of this appalling condition the profess