legal and peaceable means. It is obvious that the beneficiaries of
special privilege can hope to retain their power only so long as the
working class is divided and too ignorant to recognize its own
interests. As soon as its eyes open, the privileged classes must lose
its political support and, with that political support, everything else.
That is absolutely inevitable. The interests of mass and class are too
fundamentally opposed to permit of permanent political harmony.

Nobody sees this more clearly than the intelligent capitalist. As the
workers become more and more conscious of their collective power and
more and more convinced that through solidarity they can quietly take
possession of the world, their opponents become increasingly conscious
of their growing weakness, and already in Europe there is developing a
kind of upper-class syndicalism, that despairs of Parliaments, deplores
the bungling work of politics, and ridicules the general incompetence of
democratic institutions. At the same time, however, they exercise
stupendous efforts, in the most devious and questionable ways, to retain
their political power. Facing the inevitable, and realizing that
potentially at least the suffrages of the immense majority stand over
them as a menace, they are beginning to seek other methods of action. Of
course, in all the more democratic countries the power of democracy has
already made itself felt, and in America, at any rate, the powerful have
long had resort to bribery, corruption, and all sorts of political
conspiracy in order to retain their power. Much as we may deplore the
debauchery of public servants, it nevertheless yields us a certain
degree of satisfaction, in that it is eloquent testimony of this
agreeable fact, that the oldest anarchists are losing their control over
the State. They hold their sway over it more and more feebly, and even
when the State is entirely obedient to their will, it is not
infrequently because they have temporarily purchased that power. When
the manufacturers, the trusts, and the beneficiaries of special
privilege generally are forced periodically to go out and purchase the
State from the Robin Hoods of politics, when they are compelled to
finance lavishly every political campaign, and then abjectly go to the
very men whom their money has put into power and buy them again, their
bleeding misery becomes an object of pity.

This really amounts to an almost absolute transposition of the c