It will be seen that the task which lies before the social democracy is a vast one. As yet even the political part of it is only to a small extent realised. At present the working class, though forming the vast majority of the people, has no corresponding representation in legislatures or influence in government. In England the ruling class has long been, and still is, an aristocracy, slowly changing in the course of generations into a plutocracy which has the wisdom to yield to the ever-growing pressure of democracy. France is now nearer to a real democracy than any other great European state. In Germany the executive depends on the Emperor; but his Chancellor has to find a majority for legislation and for the budgets in the Reichstag, which is elected by universal suffrage with an antiquated distribution of seats. The German executive is really a bureaucracy with the Emperor as chief. Government in Austria and Russia is also a bureaucracy of which the Emperor is the head. In Italy the democracy is slowly growing. It has very little real influence in Spain. If the American people do not exert themselves very effectively in the immediate future, the Republic seems destined to be a plutocracy. A power which appears to be incompatible with a real commonwealth has arisen in a marvellously short time. The oil industry in America goes back only to 1859. Mr. J. D. Rockefeller entered the trade in 1865. It was organised by him and his associates into the Standard Oil Company; and the Company has been the type of further organisation, has provided the men, the methods, and the capital, by which other great industries have been transformed. That is to say, Mr. J. D. Rockefeller and the men trained in his methods have gained control of railways, of finance and insurance, and even of the basic industries of steel and coal. The process has naturally gained enormously in momentum as it has gone on; the capital accumulated, and still more the capital controlled by the Trusts, the interests they have absorbed or brought within their orbit are gigantic, and continually increasing. Even the American Senate is declared to be in their pay. Most evil of all symptoms, when an eminent American senator, Mr. Tillman, lately undertook to speak for his order, a main point in his defence was, that the House of Representatives was worse than the Senate! Thus we see the industrial and economic power, which is also the money power, subordinating to itself the political, and, indeed, threatening all that is articulate and organic in the American people. In 1908, at the Chicago Convention, Senator Lodge went to the heart of the matter: ‘It is the huge size of private fortunes and the vast extent of the power of modern combinations of capital which have brought upon us in these later years problems portentous in their possibilities, and threatening not only our social and political welfare, but even our personal freedom if they are not boldly met and wisely solved.’