picking of the galley-slave, then they will appreciate how much deeper and more damnable are the crimes of the "System," such crimes as Amalgamated and its like, than even such national tragedies as the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, at each of which all the people held aloft their hands in horror.
Why is it that the millions of intelligent, able-bodied Americans, who could crush the tribe of Rockefeller as elephants crush snakes, rise with each sun and dig and delve and suffer that a Rogers may wallow in wealth and an Armour gain a greater income than the Rothschilds? Why are they so easily hoodwinked into imagining that the elaborate reports detailing the immense and growing wealth of the country represent their own well-being and affluence? Because the wise men of the "System" know human nature, know that most men and women accept unquestioningly the conditions they find surrounding them. Each day it is pounded into the heads of the people through a hundred agencies that it is the greatest and most flourishing of peoples and that the laws and customs which regulate its lives and rights are the best in all the world. How shall the people know that these glowing rumors, these propitious tidings, are but the siren songs of the "System" under the spell of which it is despoiled of its savings?
Ask yourselves, my friends, how much you know about those familiar things which are part of your lives as are the sunshine, the grass, and the flowers—your Bible, your money, your playing-cards. Each is an institution so consecrated by custom that you accept it exactly for what it meant to your father just as he took it from his own father a generation before. That the Holy Book is God's message to His children, the human race, we know because we have the words of our ancestors therefor; the stamped silver and gold we take for granted as we do shoes and clothes, because money is an essential factor in the social fabric and the form in which it comes to us seems as inevitable as the moon or our ten fingers; humanity has gone on for hundreds of years considering the knave of