greater value than the ten-spot and the ace of higher worth than all the rest of the pack, because it is content to believe that the rules that have been handed down apportioning these values are the best that could be devised. With a hundred other elements and details of our daily life, it is the same—we accept unreasoningly what we are told or what is given us, with no look forward or back, and, engaged with the thousand new toys and problems which Fate, the conjurer, shakes out of his hat, we become bound by habit and blinded by precedent.
The love men have for the formulas and conventions of their daily lives is the "System's" opportunity for plunder, and it is this fundamental principle of humanity that makes my work so difficult. It would be as easy to convince the masses that their playing-cards are all wrong and that the ace is really of lower value than the two-spot as it is to awaken them to the terrors of the conditions that are confronting them; to compel them to realize that a despotism of dollars is being organized among them; that the cherished institutions of generations are the instruments by which a few daring schemers are concentrating into their own hands the money of the nation, and that this concentration can have no other result than the abject slavery of the American people.
END OF VOLUME