For my own part, I must confess my fears that, unless some important change is made in the constitution of our voting population, _the breaking strain upon our political system will come within half a century_. Is it not evident that our present tendencies are in the wrong direction? The rapidly increasing use of money in elections, for the undisguised purchase of votes, and the growing disposition to tamper with the ballot and the tally-sheet, are some of the symptoms. . . . Do you think that you will convince the average election officer that it is a great crime to cheat in the return of votes, when he knows that a good share of those votes have been purchased with money? No; the machinery of the election will not be kept free from fraud while the atmosphere about the polls reeks with bribery. _The system will all go down together_. In a constituency which can be bribed all the forms of law tend swiftly to decay. "And here," he said, picking up another volume, "is a reprint of the choicest gems of _The North American Review_. In the number for March, 1889, Gen. L. S. Bryce, a member of Congress, said: We live in a commercial age--not in a military age; and the shadow that is stealing over the American landscape partakes of a commercial character. In short, _the shadow is of an unbridled plutocracy_, caused, created and cemented in no slight degree by legislative, aldermanic and congressional action; _a plutocracy that is far more wealthy than any aristocracy that has ever crossed the horizon of the world's history, and one that has been produced in a shorter consecutive period_; the names of whose members are emblazoned, not on the pages of their nation's glory, but of its peculations; who represent no struggle for their country's liberties, but for its boodle; no contests for Magna Charta,{sic} but railroad charters; and whose octopus-grip is extending over every branch of industry; a plutocracy which controls the price of the bread that we eat, the price of the sugar that sweetens our cup, the price of the oil that lights us on our way, the price of the very coffins in which we are finally buried; a plutocracy which encourages no kindly relation between landlord and tenant, which has so little sense of its political duties as even to abstain from voting, and which, in short, by its effrontery, is already causing the unthinking masses to seek relief in communism, in single-taxism, and in every other ism, which, if ever enforced, would infallibly make their second state worse than the first. "And here are hundreds of warnings of the same kind. Even the President of the United States, in that same year, 1889, uttered this significant language: