day it is pounded into the
heads of the people through a hundred agencies that it is the greatest
and most flourishing of peoples and that the laws and customs which
regulate its lives and rights are the best in all the world. How shall
the people know that these glowing rumors, these propitious tidings, are
but the siren songs of the "System" under the spell of which it is
despoiled of its savings?

Ask yourselves, my friends, how much you know about those familiar
things which are part of your lives as are the sunshine, the grass, and
the flowers--your Bible, your money, your playing-cards. Each is an
institution so consecrated by custom that you accept it exactly for what
it meant to your father just as he took it from his own father a
generation before. That the Holy Book is God's message to His children,
the human race, we know because we have the words of our ancestors
therefor; the stamped silver and gold we take for granted as we do shoes
and clothes, because money is an essential factor in the social fabric
and the form in which it comes to us seems as inevitable as the moon or
our ten fingers; humanity has gone on for hundreds of years considering
the knave of greater value than the ten-spot and the ace of higher worth
than all the rest of the pack, because it is content to believe that the
rules that have been handed down apportioning these values are the best
that could be devised. With a hundred other elements and details of our
daily life, it is the same--we accept unreasoningly what we are told or
what is given us, with no look forward or back, and, engaged with the
thousand new toys and problems which Fate, the conjurer, shakes out of
his hat, we become bound by habit and blinded by precedent.

The love men have for the formulas and conventions of their daily lives
is the "System's" opportunity for plunder, and it is this fundamental
principle of humanity that makes my work so difficult. It would be as
easy to convince the masses that their playing-cards are all wrong and
that the ace is really of lower value than the two-spot as it is to
awaken them to the terrors of the conditions that are confronting them;
to compel them to realize that a despotism of dollars is being organized
among them; that the cherished institutions of generations are the
instruments by which a few daring schemers are concentrating into their
own hands the money of the nation, and that this concentration can have
no other result