nkind. Their very poverty was a crime,
for after they were plundered and expropriated, either by the ruling
classes of their own country or of the United States, the laws regarded
them as semi-criminals, or, at best, as excrescences to whom short
shrift was to be given. They made the clothes, the shoes, hats, shirts,
underwear, tools, and all the other necessities that mankind required;
they tilled the ground and produced its food. Curiously enough, those
who did these indispensable things were condemned by the encompassing
system to live in the poorest and meanest habitations and in the most
precarious uncertainty. When sick, disabled or superannuated they were
cast aside by the capitalist class as so much discarded material to eke
out a prolonged misery of existence, to be thrown in penal institutions
or to starve. Substantially everywhere in the United States, vagrancy
laws were in force which decreed that an able-bodied man out of work and
homeless must be adjudged a vagrant and imprisoned in the workhouse or
penetentiary. The very law-making institutions that gave to a privileged
few the right to expropriate the property of the many, drastically
plunged the many down still further after this process of spoliation,
like a man who is waylaid and robbed and then arrested and imprisoned
because he has been robbed.

On the other hand, the class which had the money, no matter how that
money was gotten, irrespective of how much fraud or sacrifice of life
attended its amassing, stood out with a luminous distinctness. It
arrogated to itself all that was superior, and it exacted, and was
invested with, a lordly deference. It lived in the finest mansions and
laved in luxuries. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of
importance, it radiated tone, command and prestige.

But, such was the destructive, intestinal character of competitive
warfare, that even this class was continually in the throes of
convulsive struggles. Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of
others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate
the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he
preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon
him. If he were less able, less cunning, or more scrupulous than they,
his ruination was certain. It was a system in which all methods were
gauged not by the best but by the worst. Thus it was that many
capitalists, at heart good men, k