as enjoying unprecedented
prosperity, not because of her millionaires, but in spite of them.
The United States owed its high rank in the family of nations to
the country's vast natural resources, its inexhaustible vitality,
its great wheat fields, the industrial and mechanical genius of
its people. It was the plain American citizen who had made the
greatness of America, not the millionaires who, forming a class by
themselves of unscrupulous capitalists, had created an arrogant
oligarchy which sought to rule the country by corrupting the
legislature and the judiciary. The plutocrats--these were the
leeches, the sores in the body politic. An organized band of
robbers, they had succeeded in dominating legislation and in
securing control of every branch of the nation's industry,
crushing mercilessly and illegally all competition. They were the
Money Power, and such a menace were they to the welfare of the
people that, it had been estimated, twenty men in America had it
in their power, by reason of the vast wealth which they controlled,
to come together, and within twenty-four hours arrive at an
understanding by which every wheel of trade and commerce would be
stopped from revolving, every avenue of trade blocked and every
electric key struck dumb. Those twenty men could paralyze the
whole country, for they controlled the circulation of the currency
and could create a panic whenever they might choose. It was the
rapaciousness and insatiable greed of these plutocrats that had
forced the toilers to combine for self-protection, resulting in
the organization of the Labor Unions which, in time, became almost
as tyrannical and unreasonable as the bosses. And the breach
between capital on the one hand and labour on the other was
widening daily, masters and servants snarling over wages and
hours, the quarrel ever increasing in bitterness and acrimony
until one day the extreme limit of patience would be reached and
industrial strikes would give place to bloody violence.

Meantime the plutocrats, wholly careless of the significant signs
of the times and the growing irritation and resentment of the
people, continued their illegal practices, scoffing at public
opinion, snapping their fingers at the law, even going so far in
their insolence as to mock and jibe at the President of the United
States. Feeling secure in long immunity and actually protected in
their wrong doing by the courts--the legal machinery by its very
elaborateness d