“How can they doubt that it is their interest to right them? It is they who suffer both in purse and pride for every unjust exaction and every dishonest evasion. The poorest do not escape the consequences; it all comes out of their toil in the end. It depletes their pockets in a hundred unobserved ways. They pay for it in enhanced taxation of their homes, in the fuel which cooks their food, in a greater cost of the necessaries of life, in a higher rent, in the nails which hold their houses together, and in the increased cost of the blows of the hammer which drives them. I do not need to tell you, doctor, that labor must bear the burdens of the State. Labor at last pays all and capital pays nothing—all burdens of government, all expenses of courts and juries, and prisons and police, all cost of armies and navies. The diamonds which glitter upon the shirt front of the purchased legislator, the wine which hisses down the throat of the lobbyist, the steel doors and locks which guard watered stock and stolen bonds, the very powder and bullets which shoot out the life of maddened and insurgent labor, are all paid for out of the toil of the laborer.” “While there is much truth in what you say, professor,” observed the doctor, “yet where is the immediate necessity for you to work yourself into such a state of mind about it?” “Your remark, doctor, is a representative one,” replied Professor Thornton, “and the general indifference which it expresses is the most discouraging feature of the existing situation. Like the villagers who cultivate their vineyards at the base of Vesuvius, we heed not the rumblings of the volcano. Like the citizens long resident in Cologne, we scent the tainted air without discomfort. We cry with the French king, ‘After us the deluge,’ and we seem to care very little what may happen so long as it shall not happen to us.” “There is the mate to your pickerel,” said the doctor, as he landed a fish upon the grass at his feet. “Two of the millionaires of Nine Mile Pond have succumbed to their own greed and the patience and cunning of intelligent labor.” “Many of our millionaires,” resumed the professor, not to be driven from his theme, “and some of the most active and powerful of them all, are as selfish, as rapacious, as arrogant, as ignorant, as corrupt, and as despotic as Russian Boyars or Turkish Bashans. At the same time they are unaware of their danger, are utterly obtuse to their social and moral responsibilities, and conceited with the invulnerable conceit of self-made men. They do not seem to recognize that they are unprotected by an army, or a strong government, or spies, or the machinery of despotism, or any traditions or practices of rule, and they appear to take no thought of the infinite possibilities of disaster which line the path of every to-morrow.” “You really fear, then, the fulfillment of Macauley’s prophecy, professor?”