ago,
the relative position of the rich man and the poor man has not greatly
changed. It is true, especially in the United States, that the poor have
become rich and the rich poor, but inequality of condition is about as
marked as it was before the invention of labor-saving machinery, and
though workingmen are better off in many ways, the accumulation of vast
fortunes, acquired often in brutal disregard of humanity, marks the
contrast of conditions perhaps more emphatically than it ever appeared
before. That this inequality should continue in an era of universal
education, universal suffrage, universal locomotion, universal
emancipation from nearly all tradition, is a surprise, and a perfectly
comprehensible cause of discontent. It is axiomatic that all men are
created equal. But, somehow, the problem does not work out in the desired
actual equality of conditions. Perhaps it can be forced to the right
conclusion by violence.

It ought to be said, as to the United States, that a very considerable
part of the discontent is imported, it is not native, nor based on any
actual state of things existing here. Agitation has become a business. A
great many men and some women, to whom work of any sort is distasteful,
live by it. Some of them are refugees from military or political
despotism, some are refugees from justice, some from the lowest
conditions of industrial slavery. When they come here, they assume that
the hardships they have come away to escape exist here, and they begin
agitating against them. Their business is to so mix the real wrongs of
our social life with imaginary hardships, and to heighten the whole with
illusory and often debasing theories, that discontent will be engendered.
For it is by means of that only that they live. It requires usually a
great deal of labor, of organization, of oratory to work up this
discontent so that it is profitable. The solid workingmen of America who
know the value of industry and thrift, and have confidence in the relief
to be obtained from all relievable wrongs by legitimate political or
other sedate action, have no time to give to the leadership of agitations
which require them to quit work, and destroy industries, and attack the
social order upon which they depend. The whole case, you may remember,
was embodied thousands of years ago in a parable, which Jotham, standing
on the top of Mount Gerizim, spoke to the men of Shechem:

"The trees went forth on a time to anoint a kin