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30 known as the array of one portion of the community—the preponderating, voting portion—against another—the more ostentatious property-holding portion. It is the natural result, I may say the necessary as well as logical outcome, of a period of too rapid growth,—production apportioned by no rule or system other or higher than greed and individual aptitude for acquisition. I will put the resulting case in the most brutal, and consequently the clearest, shape of which I am capable. Working on the combined theories of individualism controlled and regulated by competition, it has been one grand game of grab,—a process in which the whole tendency of our legislation, national or state, has during the last twenty years been, first, to create monopolies of capital and, later, to bring into existence a counter, but no less privileged, class, known as the "wage-earner."

Of the first class it is needless to speak, for, as a class, it is sufficiently pilloried by the press and from the hustings. Much in evidence, those prominent in it are known as the possessors of "predatory wealth"; "unjailed malefactors," they are subjects of continuous "grilling" in the congressional and legislative committee rooms. The effort to make them "disgorge" is as continual as it is noisy, and, as a rule, futile. It constitutes a curious and in some respects instructive exhibition of misdirected popular feeling and legislative incompetence. None the less, the existence of a monopolist class calls for no proof at the bar of public opinion. Not so the other and even