tient. Invention increases the power of wealth instead
of increasing the resources of manhood, for wealth absorbs and uses
machinery and diminishes the relative value of the man by making him a
machine attendant. In leather work he sinks from the independent
shoemaker, safe in the patronage of his neighbors, to the mere tenth of
a shoemaker who if dislodged from the factory is helpless. The
independence of the hunter and the farmer is fast disappearing.
Population is gathering in cities, and the country becoming the home of
tenant farmers or day laborers on large estates. The middle class is
declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and
employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and
conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. At this moment a
strike of 150,000 is threatened. But it is not merely the laboring
classes, for all classes are threatened by our present dangerous system
which is running on to sure destruction, like a locomotive let loose and
flying wildly over the railroad. If there were no other formidable
danger, the trust or syndicate is in itself a fatality. When a thousand
millions enter the field they enter as master, in the Standard Oil
fashion. They can buy out or crush out, as they may choose, every
competitor in the field they may seize. There is _not a single form of
industry_ which they cannot monopolize, and where the monopoly is
established, demand what prices they please for that which they alone
can supply. Can we imagine the conventional brother Jonathan held down
by the throat with iron grip, and his pockets open to the holder, or
will he rebel before the grip is fastened? He does not seem aware how
well it is fastened upon him already; but something decisive will be
done long before a syndicate senate can rule the entire country. Ten
years more will introduce the struggle. The struggle must come, for
plutocracy is advancing to universal absorption, and labor is becoming
defiant, and well it may, for the COMMONWEALTH represents _not money but
man_, and when plutocracy, absorbing ninety-five per cent. of the
nation's wealth, assumes the practical government, the commonwealth with
a firm hand will thrust it aside; but will it be a peaceful change, will
the conquerors yield to the conquered? As the vampire bat fans its
sleeping victims while absorbing their life blood, the advocates of
capital deny that there is any such thing as plutocracy,