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44. Finance and markets are their throne. They, too, have their solemn draperies, their secrecies, and neighborly interchange of inside information. Here in our midst is the real heart of monopoly power. Here are the obvious sources of that ludicrous overloading of individuals with wealth. The Power of Kings has not been greater, but it is the unknown use of this vast power, its essentially arbitrary character, that the people again have come to challenge. It seems to them in very deadly conflict with every essential of real liberty. Multitudes, no longer to be silenced, are everywhere asking what respect or patience they should have with a system producing day by day the kind of inequality now visible in the United States. Especially are they asking about the measure and uses of this power which one or two per cent of the people now coin for themselves. They no longer ask, but know that democracy, or any real approach to it, is impossible until these privileged economic resources are themselves in some sense democratized. Multitudes now believe that the wage system is but an instrument in the hands of these powers. Of the dizzy heights of finance and credit labor knows nothing, and even special students war with each other over its most elemental explanation; but of the "wage system" the worker has his own opinion, founded on experience. Labor therefore begins its rebellion at this point. It is striking at the kind of power that appears through this wage system. Its very ignorance of the power behind, deepens its suspicions. But for us just now, it is a dangerous obliquity not to recognize that capitalists cannot