We have allowed private persons to put their thumb where
they can constrict the life blood of the nation at will. The
common people have financed the industry of the country
with their savings, but the control of industry has passed
out of their hands almost completely. The profits of our
common work are absorbed by a limited group; the mass
of the people are permanently reduced to wage-earning
positions. The cost of living has been raised by unseen
hands until several millions of our nation are unable to
earn even the bare minimum which social science declares
necessary for health and decency, and all families living on
a fixed income have felt a mysterious and- suffocating
pressure.

All this was the necessary outcome of our economic
system, but it was a sore surprise to most of us when the
process began to culminate and we saw the end of our own
doings.

When the people in anger turned to the means of self-
defense provided by our political democracy, they found
the weapons on which they relied in the hands of their
opponents and leveled against themselves. The will of the
people expressed through the ballot was often directly frus-
trated by election frauds and bribery. Even when the
votes were properly registered and counted, they were as
ineffectual as a blow on the surface of a pond. They
merely served to give legal sanction to the manipulations
of a political oligarchy whose will was the real force in
shaping our affairs. When the popular will did succeed in
framing a party platform, the men ejected to carry it out
balked like Balaam's ass, because some mysterious presence
(not angelic) blocked the way, and the people had no means
of compelling their servants to obey them, or even of
punishing the guilty with any precision. The most august
and powerful body in the nation, the Senate of the United
States, had become a fortification of predatory interests,

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