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  CHAPTER XXXIV.

  WHAT STARTED THE REVOLUTION.

  What did I say to the theater for that evening? was the question withwhich Edith met me when we reached home. It seemed that a celebratedhistorical drama of the great Revolution was to be given in Honolulu thatafternoon, and she had thought I might like to see it.

  "Really you ought to attend," she said, "for the presentation of the playis a sort of compliment to you, seeing that it is revived in response tothe popular interest in revolutionary history which your presence hasaroused."

  No way of spending the evening could have been more agreeable to me, andit was agreed that we should make up a family theater party.

  "The only trouble," I said, as we sat around the tea table, "is that Idon't know enough yet about the Revolution to follow the play veryintelligently. Of course, I have heard revolutionary events referred tofrequently, but I have no connected idea of the Revolution as a whole."

  "That will not matter," said Edith. "There is plenty of time before theplay for father to tell you what is necessary. The matinee does not begintill three in the afternoon at Honolulu, and as it is only six now thedifference in time will give us a good hour before the curtain rises."

  "That's rather a short time, as well as a short notice, for so big a taskas explaining the great Revolution," the doctor mildly protested, "butunder the circumstances I suppose I shall have to do the best I can."

  "Beginnings are always misty," he said, when I straightway opened at himwith the question when the great Revolution began. "Perhaps St. Johndisposed of that point in the simplest way when he said that 'in thebeginning was God.' To come down nearer, it might be said that JesusChrist stated the doctrinal basis and practical purpose of the greatRevolution when he declared that the golden rule of equal and the besttreatment for all was the only right principle on which people could livetogether. To speak, however, in the language of historians, the greatRevolution, like all important events, had two sets of causes--first, thegeneral, necessary, and fundamental cause which must have brought itabout in the end, whatever the minor circumstances had been; and, second,the proximate or provoking causes which, within certain limits,determined when it actually did take place, together with the incidentalfeatures. These immediate or provoking causes were, of course, differentin different countries, but the general, necessary, and fundamental causewas the same in all countries, the great Revolution being, as you know,world-wide and nearly simultaneous, as regards the more advanced nations.

  "That cause, as I have often intimated in our talks, was the growth ofintelligence and diffusion of knowledge among the masses, which,beginning with the introduction of printing, spread slowly through thesixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and much more rapidlyduring the nineteenth, when, in the more favored countries, it began, tobe something like general. Previous to the beginning of this process ofenlightenment the condition of the mass of mankind as to intelligence,from the most ancient times, had been practically stationary at a pointlittle above the level of the brutes. With no more thought or will oftheir own than clay in the hands of the potter, they were unresistinglymolded to the uses of the more intelligent and powerful individuals andgroups of their kind. So it went on for innumerable ages, and nobodydreamed of anything else until at last the conditions were ripe for theinbreathing of an intellectual life into these inert and senseless clods.The process by which this awakening took place was silent, gradual,imperceptible, but no previous event or series of events in the historyof the race had been comparable to it in the effect it was to have uponhuman destiny. It meant that the interest of the many instead of the few,the welfare of the whole instead of that of a part, were henceforth to bethe paramount purpose of the social order and the goal of its evolution.

  "Dimly your nineteenth-century philosophers seem to have perceived thatthe general diffusion of intelligence was a new and large fact, and thatit introduced a very important force into the social evolution, but theywere wall-eyed in their failure to see the certainty with which itforeshadowed a complete revolution of the economic basis of society inthe interest of the whole body of the people as opposed to class interestor partial interest of every sort. Its first effect was the democraticmovement by which personal and class rule in political matters wasoverthrown in the name of the supreme interest and authority of thepeople. It is astonishing that there should have been any intelligentpersons among you who did not perceive that political democracy was butthe pioneer corps and advance guard of economic democracy, clearing theway and providing the instrumentality for the substantial part of theprogramme--namely, the equalization of the distribution of work andwealth. So much for the main, general, and necessary cause andexplanation of the great Revolution--namely, the progressive diffusion ofintelligence among the masses from the sixteenth to the end of thenineteenth centuries. Given this force in operation, and the revolutionof the economic basis of society must sooner or later have been itsoutcome everywhere: whether a little sooner or later and in just what wayand with just what circumstances, the differing conditions of differentcountries determined.

  "In the case of America, the period of revolutionary agitation whichresulted in the establishment of the present order began almost at onceupon the close of the civil war. Some historians date the beginning ofthe Revolution from 1873."

  "Eighteen seventy-three!" I exclaimed; "why, that was more than a dozenyears before I fell asleep! It seems, then, that I was a contemporary andwitness of at least a part of the Revolution, and yet I saw noRevolution. It is true that we recognized the highly serious condition ofindustrial confusion and popular discontent, but we did not realize thata Revolution was on."

  "It was to have been expected that you would not," replied the doctor."It is very rarely that the contemporaries of great revolutionarymovements have understood their nature until they have nearly run theircourse. Following generations always think that they would have beenwiser in reading the signs of the times, but that is not likely."

  "But what was there," I said, "about 1873 which has led historians totake it as the date from which to reckon the beginning of theRevolution?"

  "Simply the fact that it marked in a rather distinct way the beginning ofa period of economic distress among the American people, which continued,with temporary and partial alleviations, until the overthrow of privatecapitalism. The popular discontent resulting from this experience was theprovoking cause of the Revolution. It awoke Americans from theirself-complacent dream that the social problem had been solved or could besolved by a system of democracy limited to merely political forms, andset them to seeking the true solution.

  "The economic distress beginning at the last third of the century, whichwas the direct provocation of the Revolution, was very slight comparedwith that which had been the constant lot and ancient heritage of othernations. It represented merely the first turn or two of the screw bywhich capitalism in due time squeezed dry the masses always andeverywhere. The unexampled space and richness of their new land had givenAmericans a century's respite from the universal fate. Those advantageshad passed, the respite was ended, and the time had come when the peoplemust adapt their necks to the yoke all peoples before had worn. Buthaving grown high-spirited from so long an experience of comparativewelfare, the Americans resisted the imposition, and, finding mereresistance vain, ended by making a revolution. That in brief is the wholestory of the way the great Revolution came on in America. But while thismight satisfy a languid twentieth-century curiosity as to a matter soremote in time, you will naturally want a little more detail. There is aparticular chapter in Storiot's History of the Revolution explaining justhow and why the growth of the power of capital provoked the greatuprising, which deeply impressed me in my school days, and I don't thinkI can make a better use of a part of our short time than by reading a fewparagraphs from it."

  And Edith having brought the book from the library--for we still sat atthe tea table--the doctor read:

  "'With reference to the evolut
ion of the system of private capitalism tothe point where it provoked the Revolution by threatening the lives andliberties of the people, historians divide the history of the AmericanRepublic, from its foundation in 1787 to the great Revolution which madeit a true republic, into three periods.

  "'The first comprises the decades from the foundation of the republic toabout the end of the first third of the nineteenth century--say, up tothe thirties or forties. This was the period during which the power ofcapital in private hands had not as yet shown itself seriouslyaggressive. The moneyed class was small and the accumulations of capitalpetty. The vastness of the natural resources of the virgin country defiedas yet the lust of greed. The ample lands to be had for the takingguaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resourceno man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllicperiod of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it,though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed ofdeath was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and wassure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were notfavorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is notstrange that the American people indulged in the hope that their republichad indeed solved the social question.

  "'From about 1830 or 1840, speaking of course in a general way asto date, we consider the republic to have entered on its secondphase--namely, that in which the growth and concentration of capitalbegan to be rapid. The moneyed class now grew powerful, and began toreach out and absorb the natural resources of the country and to organizefor its profit the labor of the people. In a word, the growth of theplutocracy became vigorous. The event which gave the great impulse tothis movement, and fixed the time of the transition from the first to thesecond period in the history of the nation, was of course the generalapplication of steam to commerce and industry. The transition may indeedbe said to have begun somewhat earlier, with the introduction of thefactory system. Of course, if neither steam nor the inventions which madethe factory system possible had ever been introduced, it would have beenmerely a question of a longer time before the capitalist class,proceeding in this case by landlordism and usury, would have reduced themasses to vassalage, and overthrown democracy even as in the ancientrepublics, but the great inventions amazingly accelerated the plutocraticconquest. For the first time in history the capitalist in the subjugationof his fellows had machinery for his ally, and a most potent one it was.This was the mighty factor which, by multiplying the power of capital andrelatively dwarfing the importance of the workingman, accounts for theextraordinary rapidity with which, during the second and third periodsthe conquest of the republic by the plutocracy was carried out.

  "'It is a fact creditable to Americans that they appear to have begun torealize as early as the forties that new and dangerous tendencies wereaffecting the republic and threatening to falsify its promise of a widediffusion of welfare. That decade is notable in American history for thepopular interest taken in the discussion of the possibility of a bettersocial order, and for the numerous experiments undertaken to test thefeasibility of dispensing with the private capitalist by co-operativeindustry. Already the more intelligent and public-spirited citizens werebeginning to observe that their so-called popular government did not seemto interfere in the slightest degree with the rule of the rich and thesubjection of the masses to economic masters, and to wonder, if that wereto continue to be so, of exactly how much value the so-called republicaninstitutions were on which they had so prided themselves.

  "'This nascent agitation of the social question on radical lines was,however, for the time destined to prove abortive by force of a conditionpeculiar to America--namely, the existence on a vast scale of Africanchattel slavery in the country. It was fitting in the evolution ofcomplete human liberty that this form of bondage, cruder and more brutal,if not on the whole more cruel, than wage slavery, should first be putout of the way. But for this necessity and the conditions that producedit, we may believe that the great Revolution would have occurred inAmerica twenty-five years earlier. From the period of 1840 to 1870 theslavery issue, involving as it did a conflict of stupendous forces,absorbed all the moral and mental as well as physical energies of thenation.

  "'During the thirty or forty years from the serious beginning of theantislavery movement till the war was ended and its issues disposed of,the nation had no thought to spare for any other interests. During thisperiod the concentration of capital in few hands, already alarming to thefar-sighted in the forties, had time, almost unobserved and quiteunresisted, to push its conquest of the country and the people. Undercover of the civil war, with its preceding and succeeding periods ofagitation over the issues of the war, the capitalists may be said to havestolen a march upon the nation and intrenched themselves in a commandingposition.

  "'Eighteen seventy-three is the point, as near as any date, at which thecountry, delivered at last from the distracting ethical, and sectionalissues of slavery, first began to open its eyes to the irrepressibleconflict which the growth of capitalism had forced--a conflict betweenthe power of wealth and the democratic idea of the equal right of all tolife, liberty, and happiness. From about this time we date, therefore,the beginning of the final or revolutionary period of the pseudo-AmericanRepublic which resulted in the establishment of the present system.

  "'History had furnished abundant previous illustrations of the overthrowof republican societies by the growth and concentration of privatewealth, but never before had it recorded a revolution in the economicbasis of a great nation at once so complete and so swiftly effected. InAmerica before the war, as we have seen, wealth had been distributed witha general effect of evenness never previously known in a large community.There had been few rich men and very few considerable fortunes. It hadbeen in the power neither of individuals nor a class, through thepossession of overwhelming capital, to exercise oppression upon the restof the community. In the short space of twenty-five to thirty years theseeconomic conditions had been so completely reversed as to give America inthe seventies and eighties the name of the land of millionaires, and makeit famous to the ends of the earth as the country of all others where thevastest private accumulations of wealth existed. The consequences of thisamazing concentration of wealth formerly so equally diffused, as it hadaffected the industrial, the social, and the political interests of thepeople, could not have been other than revolutionary.

  "'Free competition in business had ceased to exist. Personal initiativein industrial enterprises, which formerly had been open to all, wasrestricted to the capitalists, and to the larger capitalists at that.Formerly known all over the world as the land of opportunities, Americahad in the time of a generation become equally celebrated as the land ofmonopolies. A man no longer counted chiefly for what he was, but for whathe had. Brains and industry, if coupled with civility, might indeed winan upper servant's place in the employ of capital, but no longer couldcommand a career.

  "'The concentration of the economic administration of the country in thehands of a comparatively small body of great capitalists had necessarilyconsolidated and centralized in a corresponding manner all the functionsof production and distribution. Single great concerns, backed by enormousaggregations of capital, had appropriated tracts of the business fieldformerly occupied by innumerable smaller concerns. In this process, as amatter of course, swarms of small businesses were crushed like flies, andtheir former independent proprietors were fortunate to find places asunderlings in the great establishments which had supplanted them.Straight through the seventies and eighties, every month, every week,every day saw some fresh province of the economic state, some new branchof industry or commerce formerly open to the enterprise of all, capturedby a combination of capitalists and turned into an intrenched camp ofmonopoly. The words _syndicate_ and _trust_ were coined todescribe these monstrous growths, for which the former language of thebusiness world had no name.

  "'Of the two great divisions of the working masses it would be hard tosay whether the wage-earn
er or the farmer had suffered most by thechanged order. The old personal relationship and kindly feeling betweenemployee and employer had passed away. The great aggregations of capitalwhich had taken the place of the former employers were impersonal forces,which knew the worker no longer as a man, but as a unit of force. He wasmerely a tool in the employ of a machine, the managers of which regardedhim as a necessary nuisance, who must unfortunately be retained at theleast possible expense, until he could be invented wholly out ofexistence by some new mechanical contrivance.

  "'The economic function and possibilities of the farmer had similarlybeen dwarfed or cut off as a result of the concentration of the businesssystem of the country in the hands of a few. The railroads and the grainmarket had, between them, absorbed the former profits of farming, andleft the farmer only the wages of a day laborer in case of a good crop,and a mortgage debt in case of a bad one; and all this, moreover, coupledwith the responsibilities of a capitalist whose money was invested in hisfarm. This latter responsibility, however, did not long continue totrouble the farmer, for, as naturally might be supposed, the only way hecould exist from year to year under such conditions was by contractingdebts without the slightest prospect of paying them, which presently ledto the foreclosure of his land, and his reduction from the once proudestate of an American farmer to that of a tenant on his way to become apeasant.

  "'From 1873 to 1896 the histories quote some six distinct businesscrises. The periods of rallying between them were, however, so brief thatwe may say a continuous crisis existed during a large part of thatperiod. Now, business crises had been numerous and disastrous in theearly and middle epoch of the republic, but the business system, restingat that time on a widely extended popular initiative, had shown itselfquickly and strongly elastic, and the rallies that promptly followed thecrashes had always led to a greater prosperity than that before enjoyed.But this elasticity, with the cause of it, was now gone. There was littleor slow reaction after the crises of the seventies, eighties, and earlynineties, but, on the contrary, a scarcely interrupted decline of prices,wages, and the general prosperity and content of the farming andwage-earning masses.

  "'There could not be a more striking proof of the downward tendency inthe welfare of the wage-earner and the farmer than the deterioratingquality and dwindling volume of foreign immigration which marked theperiod. The rush of European emigrants to the United States as the landof promise for the poor, since its beginning half a century before, hadcontinued with increasing volume, and drawn to us a great population fromthe best stocks of the Old World. Soon after the war the character of theimmigration began to change, and during the eighties and nineties came tobe almost entirely made up of the lowest, most wretched, and barbarousraces of Europe--the very scum of the continent. Even to secure thesewretched recruits the agents of the transatlantic steamers and theAmerican land syndicates had to send their agents all over the worstdistricts of Europe and flood the countries with lying circulars. Mattershad come to the point that no European peasant or workingman, who was yetabove the estate of a beggar or an exile, could any longer afford toshare the lot of the American workingman and farmer, so little timebefore the envy of the toiling world.

  "'While the politicians sought, especially about election time, to cheerthe workingman with the assurance of better times just ahead, the moreserious economic writers seem to have frankly admitted that thesuperiority formerly enjoyed by American workingmen over those of othercountries could not be expected to last longer, that the tendencyhenceforward was to be toward a world-wide level of prices andwages--namely, the level of the country where they were lowest. Inkeeping with this prediction we note that for the first time, about thebeginning of the nineties, the American employer began to find himself,through the reduced cost of production in which wages were the mainelement, in a position to undersell in foreign markets the products ofthe slave gangs of British, Belgian, French, and German capitalists.

  "'It was during this period, when the economic distress of the masses wascreating industrial war and making revolutionists of the most contentedand previously prosperous agricultural population in history, that thevastest private fortunes in the history of the world were beingaccumulated. The millionaire, who had been unknown before the war and wasstill an unusual and portentous figure in the early seventies, waspresently succeeded by the multimillionaire, and above themultimillionaires towered yet a new race of economic Titans, the hundredmillionaires, and already the coming of the billionaire was beingdiscussed. It is not difficult, nor did the people of the time find itso, to see, in view of this comparison, where the wealth went which themasses were losing. Tens of thousands of modest competencies disappeared,to reappear in colossal fortunes in single hands. Visibly as the body ofthe spider swells as he sucks the juices of his victims, had these vastaggregations grown in measure as the welfare of the once prosperouspeople had shrunk away.

  "'The social consequences of so complete an overthrow of the formereconomic equilibrium as had taken place could not have been less thanrevolutionary. In America, before the war, the accumulations of wealthwere usually the result of the personal efforts of the possessor and wereconsequently small and correspondingly precarious. It was a saying of thetime that there were usually but three generations from shirt-sleeves toshirt-sleeves--meaning that if a man accumulated a little wealth, his songenerally lost it, and the grandson was again a manual laborer. Underthese circumstances the economic disparities, slight at most andconstantly fluctuating, entirely failed to furnish a basis for classdistinctions. There were recognized no laboring class as such, no leisureclass, no fixed classes of rich and poor. Riches or poverty, thecondition of being at leisure or obliged to work were considered merelytemporary accidents of fortune and not permanent conditions. All this wasnow changed. The great fortunes of the new order of things by their verymagnitude were stable acquisitions, not easily liable to be lost, capableof being handed down from generation to generation with almost as muchsecurity as a title of nobility. On the other hand, the monopolization ofall the valuable economic opportunities in the country by the greatcapitalists made it correspondingly impossible for those not of thecapitalist class to attain wealth. The hope of becoming rich some day,which before the war every energetic American had cherished, was nowpractically beyond the horizon of the man born to poverty. Between richand poor the door was henceforth shut. The way up, hitherto the socialsafety valve, had been closed, and the bar weighted with money bags.

  "'A natural reflex of the changed social conditions of the country isseen in the new class terminology, borrowed from the Old World, whichsoon after the war crept into use in the United States. It had been theboast of the former American that everybody in this country was aworkingman; but now that term we find more and more frankly employed todistinguish the poor from the well-to-do. For the first time in Americanliterature we begin to read of the lower classes, the upper classes, andthe middle classes--terms which would have been meaningless in Americabefore the war, but now corresponded so closely with the real facts ofthe situation that those who detested them most could not avoid theiruse.

  "'A prodigious display of luxury such as Europe could not rival had begunto characterize the manner of life of the possessors of the new andunexampled fortunes. Spectacles of gilded splendor, of royal pomp andboundless prodigality mocked the popular discontent and brought out indazzling light the width and depth of the gulf that was being fixedbetween the masters and the masses.

  "'Meanwhile the money kings took no pains to disguise the fullness oftheir conviction that the day of democracy was passing and the dream ofequality nearly at an end. As the popular feeling in America had grownbitter against them they had responded with frank indications of theirdislike of the country and disgust with its democratic institutions. Theleading American millionaires had become international personages,spending the greater part of their time and their revenue in Europeancountries, sending their children there for education and in someinstances carrying their preference f
or the Old World to the extent ofbecoming subjects of foreign powers. The disposition on the part of thegreater American capitalists to turn their backs upon democracy and allythemselves with European and monarchical institutions was emphasized in astriking manner by the long list of marriages arranged during this periodbetween great American heiresses and foreign noblemen. It seemed to beconsidered that the fitting destiny for the daughter of an Americanmultimillionaire was such a union. These great capitalists were veryshrewd in money matters, and their investments of vast sums in thepurchase of titles for their posterity was the strongest evidence theycould give of a sincere conviction that the future of the world, like itspast, belonged not to the people but to class and privilege.

  "'The influence exercised over the political government by the moneyedclass under the convenient euphemism of "the business interests," whichmerely meant the interests of the rich, had always been considerable, andat times caused grave scandals. In measure as the wealth of the countryhad become concentrated and allied, its influence in the government hadnaturally increased, and during the seventies, eighties, and nineties itbecame a scarcely veiled dictatorship. Lest the nominal representativesof the people should go astray in doing the will of the capitalists, thelatter were represented by bodies of picked agents at all the places ofgovernment. These agents closely followed the conduct of all publicofficials, and wherever there was any wavering in their fidelity to thecapitalists, were able to bring to bear influences of intimidation orbribery which were rarely unsuccessful. These bodies of agents had arecognized semi-legal place in the political system of the day under thename of lobbyists.

  "'The history of government contains few more shameful chapters than thatwhich records how during this period the Legislatures--municipal, State,and national--seconded by the Executives and the courts, vied with eachother by wholesale grants of land, privileges, franchises, and monopoliesof all kinds, in turning over the country, its resources, and its peopleto the domination of the capitalists, their heirs and assigns forever.The public lands, which a few decades before had promised a boundlessinheritance to future generations, were ceded in vast domains tosyndicates and individual capitalists, to be held against the people asthe basis of a future territorial aristocracy with tributary populationsof peasants. Not only had the material substance of the nationalpatrimony been thus surrendered to a handful of the people, but in thefields of commerce and of industry all the valuable economicopportunities had been secured by franchises to monopolies, precludingfuture generations from opportunity of livelihood or employment, save asthe dependents and liegemen of a hereditary capitalist class. In thechronicles of royal misdoings there have been many dark chaptersrecording how besotted or imbecile monarchs have sold their people intobondage and sapped the welfare of their realms to enrich licentiousfavorites, but the darkest of those chapters is bright beside that whichrecords the sale of the heritage and hopes of the American people to thehighest bidder by the so-called democratic State, national, and localgovernments during the period of which we are speaking.

  "'Especially necessary had it become for the plutocracy to be able to usethe powers of government at will, on account of the embittered anddesperate temper of the working masses.

  "'The labor strikes often resulted in disturbances too extensive to bedealt with by the police, and it became the common practice of thecapitalists, in case of serious strikes, to call on the State andnational governments to furnish troops to protect their propertyinterest. The principal function of the militia of the States had becomethe suppression of strikes with bullet or bayonet, or the standing guardover the plants of the capitalists, till hunger compelled the insurgentworkmen to surrender.

  "'During the eighties the State governments entered upon a general policyof preparing the militia for this new and ever-enlarging field ofusefulness. The National Guard was turned into a Capitalist Guard. Theforce was generally reorganized, increased in numbers, improved indiscipline, and trained with especial reference to the business ofshooting riotous workingmen. The drill in street firing--a quite newfeature in the training of the American militiaman, and a most ominousone--became the prominent test of efficiency. Stone and brick armories,fortified against attack, loopholed for musketry and mounted with guns tosweep the streets, were erected at the strategic points of the largecities. In some instances the militia, which, after all, was pretty nearthe people, had, however, shown such unwillingness to fire on strikersand such symptoms of sympathy for their grievances, that the capitalistsdid not trust them fully, but in serious cases preferred to depend on thepitiless professional soldiers of the General Government, the regulars.Consequently, the Government, upon request of the capitalists, adoptedthe policy of establishing fortified camps near the great cities, andposting heavy garrisons in them. The Indian wars were ceasing at aboutthis time, and the troops that had been stationed on the Western plainsto protect the white settlements from the Indians were brought East toprotect the capitalists from the white settlements. Such was theevolution of private capitalism.

  "'The extent and practical character of the use to which the capitalistsintended to put the military arm of the Government in their controversywith the workingmen may be judged from the fact that in single years ofthe early nineties armies of eight and ten thousand men were on themarch, in New York and Pennsylvania, to suppress strikes. In 1892 themilitia of five States, aided by the regulars, were under arms againststrikers simultaneously, the aggregate force of troops probably making alarger body than General Washington ever commanded. Here surely was civilwar already.

  "'Americans of the former days had laughed scornfully at thebayonet-propped monarchies of Europe, saying rightly that a governmentwhich needed to be defended by force from its own people was aself-confessed failure. To this pass, however, the industrial system ofthe United States was fast coming--it was becoming a government bybayonets.

  "'Thus briefly, and without attempt at detail, may be recapitulated someof the main aspects of the transformation in the condition of theAmerican people, resulting from the concentration of the wealth of thecountry, which first began to excite serious alarm at the close of thecivil war.

  "'It might almost be said that the citizen armies of the North hadreturned from saving the republic from open foes, to find that it hadbeen stolen from them by more stealthy but far more dangerous enemieswhom they had left at home. While they had been putting down caste rulebased on race at the South, class rule based on wealth had been set up atthe North, to be in time extended over South and North alike. While thearmies of the people had been shedding rivers of blood in the effort topreserve the political unity of the nation, its social unity, upon whichthe very life of a republic depends, had been attacked by the beginningsof class divisions, which could only end by splitting the once coherentnation into mutually suspicious and inimical bodies of citizens,requiring the iron bands of despotism to hold them together in apolitical organization. Four million negroes had indeed been freed fromchattel slavery, but meanwhile a nation of white men had passed under theyoke of an economic and social vassalage which, though the common fate ofEuropean peoples and of the ancient world, the founders of the republichad been proudly confident their posterity would never wear.'"

  * * * * *

  The doctor closed the book from which he had been reading and laid itdown.

  "Julian," he said, "this story of the subversion of the American Republicby the plutocracy is an astounding one. You were a witness of thesituation it describes, and are able to judge whether the statements areexaggerated."

  "On the contrary," I replied, "I should think you had been reading aloudfrom a collection of newspapers of the period. All the political, social,and business facts and symptoms to which the writer has referred werematters of public discussion and common notoriety. If they did notimpress me as they do now, it is simply because I imagine I never heardthem grouped and marshaled with the purpose of bringing out theirsignificance."

  Once more t
he doctor asked Edith to bring him a book from the library.Turning the pages until he had found the desired place, he said:

  "Lest you should fancy that the force of Storiot's statement of theeconomic situation in the United States during the last third of thenineteenth century owes anything to the rhetorical arrangement, I want togive you just a few hard, cold statistics as to the actual distributionof property during that period, showing the extent to which its ownershiphad been concentrated. Here is a volume made up of information on thissubject based upon analyses of census reports, tax assessments, the filesof probate courts, and other official documents. I will give you threesets of calculations, each prepared by a separate authority and basedupon a distinct line of investigation, and all agreeing with a closenesswhich, considering the magnitude of the calculation, is astounding, andleaves no room to doubt the substantial accuracy of the conclusions.

  "From the first set of tables, which was prepared in 1893 by a censusofficial from the returns of the United States census, we find itestimated that out of sixty-two billions of wealth in the country a groupof millionaires and multimillionaires, representing three one-hundredthsof one per cent of the population, owned twelve billions, or one fifth.Thirty-three billions of the rest was owned by a little less than nineper cent of the American people, being the rich and well-to-do class lessthan millionaires. That is, the millionaires, rich, and well-to-do,making altogether but nine per cent of the whole nation, owned forty-fivebillions of the total national valuation of sixty-two billions. Theremaining ninety-one per cent of the whole nation, constituting the bulkof the people, were classed as the poor, and divided among themselves theremaining seventeen million dollars.

  "A second table, published in 1894 and based upon the surrogates' recordsof estates in the great State of New York, estimates that one per cent ofthe people, one one-hundredth of the nation, possessed over half, orfifty-five per cent, of its total wealth. It finds that a furtherfraction of the population, including the well-to-do, and amounting toeleven per cent, owned over thirty-two per cent of the total wealth, sothat twelve per cent of the whole nation, including the very rich and thewell-to-do, monopolized eighty-seven per cent of the total wealth of thecountry, leaving but thirteen per cent of that wealth to be shared amongthe remaining eighty-eight per cent of the nation. This eighty-eight percent of the nation was subdivided into the poor and the very poor. Thelast, constituting fifty per cent out of the eighty-eight, or half theentire nation, had too little wealth to be estimated at all, apparentlyliving a hand-to-mouth existence.

  "The estimates of a third computator whom I shall quote, although takenfrom quite different data, agree remarkably with the others, representingas they do about the same period. These last estimates, which werepublished in 1889 and 1891, and like the others produced a strongimpression, divide the nation into three classes--the rich, the middle,and the working class. The rich, being one and four tenths per cent ofthe population, are credited with seventy per cent of the total wealth.The middle class, representing nine and two tenths per cent of thepopulation, is credited with twelve per cent of the total wealth, therich and middle classes, together, representing ten and six tenths percent of the population, having therefore eighty-two per cent of the totalwealth, leaving to the working class, which constituted eighty-nine andfour tenths of the nation, but eighteen per cent of the wealth, to shareamong them."

  "Doctor," I exclaimed, "I knew things were pretty unequally divided in myday, but figures like these are overwhelming. You need not take thetrouble to tell me anything further by way of explaining why the peoplerevolted against private capitalism. These figures were enough to turnthe very stones into revolutionists."

  "I thought you would say so," replied the doctor. "And please rememberalso that these tremendous figures represent only the progress madetoward the concentration of wealth mainly within the period of a singlegeneration. Well might Americans say to themselves 'If such things aredone in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?' If privatecapitalism, dealing with a community in which had previously existed adegree of economic equality never before known, could within a period ofsome thirty years make such a prodigious stride toward the completeexpropriation of the rest of the nation for the enrichment of a class,what was likely to be left to the people at the end of a century? Whatwas to be left even to the next generation?"