d land beneath the bending skies, a land in which we have vast
areas of rich and fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible
abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, millions of
eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce an
abundance for every man, woman and child--and if there are still many
millions of our people who are the victims of poverty, whose life is a
ceaseless struggle all the way from youth to age, until at last death
comes to their rescue and stills the aching heart, and lulls the victim
to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty, it can't be
charged to nature; it is due entirely to an outgrown social system that
ought to be abolished, not only in the interest of the working class,
but in a higher interest of all humanity.

"I think of these little children--the girls that are in the textile
mills of all description in the East, in the cotton factories of the
South--I think of them at work in a vitiated atmosphere. I think of them
at work when they ought to be at play or at school; I think that when
they do grow up, if they live long enough to approach the marriage
state, they are unfit for it. Their nerves are worn out, their tissue is
exhausted, their vitality is spent. They have been fed to industry.
Their lives have been coined into gold. Their offspring are born tired.
That is why there are so many failures in our modern life.

"Your Honor, the five per cent. of the people that I have made reference
to, constitute that element that absolutely rules our country. They
privately own all our public necessities. They wear no crowns; they
wield no sceptres, they sit upon no thrones; and yet they are our
economic masters and our political rulers. They control this Government
and all of its institutions. They control the courts.

"The five per cent. of our people who own and control all of the sources
of wealth, all of the nation's industries, all of the means of our
common life--it is they who declare war; it is they who make peace; it
is they who control our industry. And so long as this is true, we can
make no just claim to being a democratic government--a self-governing
people.

"I believe, your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation
ought to own and control its industries. I believe, as all Socialists
do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly
owned--that industry, the basis of life, instead