does not give you twenty-five cents’ worth of governmental power.  It is an empty shell, and soon even the empty shell will be taken away from you.  The Plutocracy has all power in its hands to-day.  It to-day makes the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures.  And not only that.  Behind law must be force to execute the law.  To-day the Plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the law it has at its beck and call the, police, the army, the navy, and, lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of us.”

* Rockefeller began as a member of the proletariat, and through thrift and cunning succeeded in developing the first perfect trust, namely that known as Standard Oil.  We cannot forbear giving the following remarkable page from the history of the times, to show how the need for reinvestment of the Standard Oil surplus crushed out small capitalists and hastened the breakdown of the capitalist system.  David Graham Phillips was a radical writer of the period, and the quotation, by him, is taken from a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, dated October 4, 1902 A.D.  This is the only copy of this publication that has come down to us, and yet, from its appearance and content, we cannot but conclude that it was one of the popular periodicals with a large circulation.  The quotation here follows: 

“About ten years ago Rockefeller’s income was given as thirty millions by an excellent authority.  He had reached the limit of profitable investment of profits in the oil industry.  Here, then, were these enormous sums in cash pouring in—­more than $2,000,000 a month for John Davison Rockefeller alone.  The problem of reinvestment became more serious.  It became a nightmare.  The oil income was swelling, swelling, and the number of sound investments limited, even more limited than it is now.  It was through no special eagerness for more gains that the Rockefellers began to branch out from oil into other things.  They were forced, swept on by this inrolling tide of wealth which their monopoly magnet irresistibly attracted.  They developed a staff of investment seekers and investigators.  It is said that the chief of this staff has a salary of $125,000 a year.

“The first conspicuous excursion and incursion of the Rockefellers was into the railway field.  By 1895 they controlled one-fifth of the railway mileage of the country.  What do they own or, through dominant ownership, control to-day?  They are powerful in all the great railways of New York, north, east, and west, except one, where their share is only a few millions.  They are in most of the great railways radiating from Chicago.  They dominate in several of the systems that extend to the Pacific.  It is their votes that make Mr. Morgan so potent, though, it may be added, they need his brains more than he needs their votes—­ at present, and the combination of the two constitutes