In every quarter of the globe the cry of depressed and defrauded labor is heard.  The enormous drain upon the producing agents necessary to maintain in idleness and luxury the great capitalists of the world who accumulated their ill-gotten wealth by fraud, perjury and “conquest,” so called, grinds the producing agent down to the lowest possible point at which he can live and still produce.  The millionaires of the world, so called “aristocracies,” and the taxes imposed by sovereign states to liquidate obligations more frequently contracted to enslave than to ameliorate the conditions of mankind, are a constant drain which comes ultimately out of the laboring classes in every case.

What are millionaires, any way, but the most dangerous enemies of society, always eating away its entrails, like the cultures that preyed upon the chained Prometheus?  Take our own breed of these parasites; note how they grind down the stipend they are compelled to bestow upon the human tools they must use to still further swell their ungodly gains!  Note how they take advantage of the public; how they extort, with Shylock avarice, every penny they possibly can from those who are compelled to use the appliances which wealth enables them to contrive for the public convenience and comfort; how they corrupt legislatures and dictate to the unscrupulous minions of the law.  The Athenians were wise who enacted into law the principle that when a citizen became too powerful or rich to be controlled within proper bounds, the safety of society demanded that he should be exiled—­sent where his power or riches could not be used to the detriment of his fellow-citizens.  Should such a rule be applied to-day, society in every land could disgorge with much advantage the men who ride the people as the Old Man of the Sea rode Sindbad the luckless sailor.  But our civilization is built upon a higher conception of individual right and immunity; there is now no limit to the right of one man to rob another of the produce of his labor or his natural and conferred rights.  Not only may individuals rob and plunder their fellows with absolute impunity, but our laws have put breath into that soulless thing which has become notoriously infamous as a “corporation.”  Around this thing, this engine of extortion and oppression, our laws have placed bulwarks which the defrauded laborer, the widow and orphan, and even the sovereign public, cannot overleap.  Here is where Monopoly first shows its cormorant head.

If millionaires are enemies of society, and I assume that they are—­not because they have property, but because, as a rule, they have acquired it by unjust processes and use it tyrannically—­what excuse have we for aristocracies, an idle class, a privileged class, who toil not, nor spin?  What is a recognized aristocracy, such as England maintains?  From what perennial fountain did it draw its nobility and wealth?  Came they not through Norman conquest and robbery?  Who pay the heavy taxes levied upon the people to support the privileged classes of England?  The royal revenues and princely preserves, are they not supported out of the sweat of the poorer classes, upon whom all the burdens of society fall at last?  And why should there be royal revenues and princely preserves?  Do they add anything to the wealth of a nation or the happiness of a people?  Let us see.