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 tion and starvation, while hundreds of thousands of those belonging to the middle class became proletarians? Is it not a fact that our factories are filling up with female and child workers at a shockingly rapid rate? Are not these all facts that can, at any time, be proven by figures not to be denied by anybody who would blush to tell an untruth? And all this in spite of our boasted republican institutions; in spite of the uncounted millions of alleged free and fertile acres of land; and in spite of the fact that our country is not by any means inhabited by idiots but by a conglomeration of energetic and intelligent races!

This picture of yours seems

(interrupting): Look at the facts, young man! If you think my picture is overdrawn you forget that I have cited nothing but hard, cold facts. But, what am I to say? Words are too mild, indeed, to describe the real state of affairs. We have been speaking of people working in factories almost exclusively. But how about the miners and others who are in a much worse condition than the factory hands; and how about the agricultural laborers who are employed but part of the year, and must be contented with the most miserable of living. And here we have the laborers employed at the building trades, the bricklayers, carpenters, all of whom on an average are in no way situated better than the factory workers; also the small farmers who are in debt up to their very teeth, and engaged in a hopeless struggle against the gigantic farms of capitalists and stock-raising monopolists, besides being almost strangled by railroad corporations — — —


 * But are not those employed in stores and offices to be counted among the working people?

Of course, everyone who is engaged at some useful labor of any kind is a worker, and he who receives wages for his work is a wage worker. And among these you find the same misery; there are tens of thousands of miserably paid, hard working telegraphers and railroad employees, car-drivers and conductors, hundreds of thousands of male and female clerks and salespeople who, if that be possible, are situated almost worse than common laborers,—not to speak of the