“You either live in the country, almost cut off from trade and commerce, or you live in a crowded city or town where the smoke and offensive odor enters every crevice, door and window, and where you are more or less starving for want of wholesome air. Where scarcely a vegetation opens its mouth to exhale the life-giving oxygen and to inhale the excessive carbonic acid which impairs the health of animal life. Where a portion of mankind are living an idle, wasteful life in a palace built by the labor of the poor, and another large class of industrious persons are eking out a miserable existence in a poor, filthy hovel. Under your profit system each must grab all he can or he must starve. In order that a few may amass comparatively worthless fortunes, many are trampled in the mire who can never rise again under the burden of your social and industrial system. Perhaps from one-half to three-fourths of your commercial and mercantile work is unproductive and destructive labor. “Your railroad corporations not unfrequently receive large public donations of land, etc., to build the roads with, and after they are built they become the gambling stock on which large dividends are paid by the hand of labor. You have so many places of business where goods are spoiling for want of customers; and with your monopolistic profit system, every merchant is trying to freeze out his neighbor. We have no ‘middle-men’ who have to live from profit which must be taxed to the goods when sold to the consumer or producer; no army of mercantile schemers, the successful ones of whom live and grow rich from the labor and wrecked fortunes of others; no traveling salesmen; no countless warehouses and elevators, in which the rich speculator stores the grain and other commodities in order to create a fictitious market. Each one of our communities buys and preserves what it needs for its own consumption directly from some other community; and so each community also sells what it has to spare to some other purchasing community. Thus each purchase and sale is a wholesale, even if it amounts to only a nickle’s worth. With you a business man must live from the profits of his sales. He must sell or become impoverished. Under such a condition, in order to save himself from bankruptcy, he is tempted to lie, to misrepresent on the one hand and to suppress the truth on the other; he is tempted to persuade customers by deceptive means to purchase things they do not really want. He must strain every nerve and muscle to keep want from his door. His wife and children in many cases, where the business place is remote from the residence, scarcely ever see him. In the morning he leaves early and in the evening he returns late. Many of your business men have lost nearly all their social qualities and are little more than mere business worms with the shadow of death hovering on their countenances. Your business man is a mental slave also. In