“The ancients were never so free or so powerful as when their citizens exercised the right to proscribe unworthy citizens.

“Let us constitute this meeting into a forum and issue our list of the proscribed.  When the list is read I shall be glad to substitute others for the names I have selected.

“The people are too subservient to aid us in carrying out the edict; so I propose that we each select a man from this list of forty, and that we then see that the edict is enforced. We shall thus rid the earth of its chief transgressors.

“When the French revolution was brought on, the world knew nothing of the possibilities of combined wealth as an agency for the improvement of the condition of the human race.  Now we are familiar with all of the wonders that can be accomplished by the combining of money into corporate form.

“We also know that at the present time all of the combined capital of the world is held in the hands of a mighty ring of magnates.  The civilized world’s billion of people slave for the benefit of a few thousands, who have usurped the prerogatives and the rights of the whole.  Nowhere is this condition more aggravated than in this country.  We were all born freemen and we find ourselves to-day at the mercy of a few thousand plutocrats.  The advantage of improved production is being kept from the people.  We are denied our heritage.

“We cannot fight the magnates in the open, for they have attained control of the army and the judicial forces of the government.  We face the alternative of submission or revolution.

“What does it avail if we send Representatives to Congress who are tools of the magnates?  What does it avail if Congress enacts laws which the executive refuses to enforce?

“The ballot has become a weapon to destroy those it should protect.  Elections ruled by coercion are a mockery.

“I am in favor of inaugurating a scientific revolution.  There is no need to raise a guillotine in the city’s square and drag to their death those who are living upon the life’s blood of the many.  This is the crude way to reach a desired end.

“The world is never lastingly horrified and deterred from evil by the mere letting of blood.  Crime can be obliterated only by reformation of the criminal element of society.  Condemnation of individuals who are caught is productive of little good.

“The destruction even of an army momentarily shocks; but in the one breath the people will cry, ’war is hell; let us have war, for peace sake.’  And when war comes it never affects the cowards, the usurers, the rogues; they stay at a safe distance from the scenes of action, and, with the instinct of the hyena, they profit on the nation’s calamity.  Our trusts are the result of the jobbing that was started during the Civil War, and which has never lagged since.

“The fight that I would have you make is against forty cowards and scoundrels who are sucking the very life out of the country—­the forty who represent the high council of the magnates.  Let it be a personal fight, a tourney; you the Knights Errant who ride against the dragons.