“What power have the farmers?  Over fifty per cent are thralls by virtue of the fact that they are merely tenants or are mortgaged.  And all of them are thralls by virtue of the fact that the trusts already own or control (which is the same thing only better)—­own and control all the means of marketing the crops, such as cold storage, railroads, elevators, and steamship lines.  And, furthermore, the trusts control the markets.  In all this the farmers are without power.  As regards their political and governmental power, I’ll take that up later, along with the political and governmental power of the whole middle class.

“Day by day the trusts squeeze out the farmers as they squeezed out Mr. Calvin and the rest of the dairymen.  And day by day are the merchants squeezed out in the same way.  Do you remember how, in six months, the Tobacco Trust squeezed out over four hundred cigar stores in New York City alone?  Where are the old-time owners of the coal fields?  You know today, without my telling you, that the Railroad Trust owns or controls the entire anthracite and bituminous coal fields.  Doesn’t the Standard Oil Trust* own a score of the ocean lines?  And does it not also control copper, to say nothing of running a smelter trust as a little side enterprise?  There are ten thousand cities in the United States to-night lighted by the companies owned or controlled by Standard Oil, and in as many cities all the electric transportation,—­urban, suburban, and interurban,—­is in the hands of Standard Oil.  The small capitalists who were in these thousands of enterprises are gone.  You know that.  It’s the same way that you are going.

     * Standard Oil and Rockefeller—­see upcoming footnote: 
     “Rockefeller began as a member . . .”

“The small manufacturer is like the farmer; and small manufacturers and farmers to-day are reduced, to all intents and purposes, to feudal tenure.  For that matter, the professional men and the artists are at this present moment villeins in everything but name, while the politicians are henchmen.  Why do you, Mr. Calvin, work all your nights and days to organize the farmers, along with the rest of the middle class, into a new political party?  Because the politicians of the old parties will have nothing to do with your atavistic ideas; and with your atavistic ideas, they will have nothing to do because they are what I said they are, henchmen, retainers of the Plutocracy.

“I spoke of the professional men and the artists as villeins.  What else are they?  One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy.  Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and either perish or become working-class agitators.  And don’t forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation.  As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy.