d
income, leisure and culture.

The members of the dominant economic class hold a key--property
ownership--which opens the structure of social wealth. Those who have
access to this key are the blessed ones. Theirs are the things of this
world.

The property owners enjoy the fleshpots. They hold the vantage points.
The vital forces are in their hands. Economically, politically,
socially, they are supreme.

If the control of material things can make a group secure, the wealth
owners in the United States are secure. They hold property, prestige,
power.

The phrase "our United States" as used by the great majority of the
people is a misnomer. With the exception of a theoretically valuable but
practically unimportant right called "freedom of contract," the majority
of the wage earners in the United States have no more excuse for using
the phrase "our United States" than the slaves in the South, before the
war, for saying "our Southland."

The franchise is a potential power, making it theoretically possible for
the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the
franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of
American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise
and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of
which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their
retainers. The people, deluded by the press, and ignorant of their real
interests, go to the polls year after year and vote for representatives
that represent, in all of their interests, the special privileged
classes.

The economic and social reorganization of the United States during the
past fifty years has gone fast and far. The system of perpetual (fee
simple) private ownership of the resources has concentrated the control
over the natural resources in a small group, not of individuals,
but of corporations; has created a new form of social master, in
the form of a land-tool-job owner; has thus made possible a type of
absentee-landlordism more effective and less human than were any of its
predecessors and has decreased the responsibility at the same time that
it has augmented the power of the owning group. These changes have been
an integral part of a general economic transformation that has occupied
the chief energies of the ablest men of the community for the past two
generations.

The country of many farms, villages and towns, and of a few cities, with
opportunity