"And here," Max added, "is the great work of Prof. Scheligan, in which he quotes from _The Forum_, of December, 1889, p. 464, a terrible story of the robberies practiced on the farmers by railroad companies and money-lenders. The railroads in 1882 took, he tells us, one-half of the entire wheat crop of Kansas to carry the other half to market! In the thirty-eight years following 1850 the railroad interest of the United States increased 1580 per cent.; the banking interest 918 per cent., and the farming interest only 252 per cent. A man named Thomas G. Shearman showed, in 1889, that 100,000 persons in the United States would, in thirty years, at the rate at which wealth was being concentrated in the hands of the few, own _three-fifths of all the property of the entire country_. The _American Economist_ asserted, in 1889, that in twenty-five years the number of people in the United States who owned their own homes had fallen from five-eighths to three-eighths. A paper called _The Progress_, of Boston, in 1889, gave the following significant and prophetic figures: The eloquent Patrick Henry said: "We can only judge the future by the past." Look at the past: When Egypt went down 2 per cent. of her population owned 97 per cent. of her wealth. The people were starved to death. When Babylon went down 2 per cent. of her population owned all the wealth. The people were starved to death. When Persia went down 1 per cent. of her population owned the land. When Rome went down 1,800 men owned all the known world. There are about 40,000,000 people in England, Ireland and Wales, and 100,000 people own all the land in the United Kingdom. For the past twenty years the United States has rapidly followed in the steps of these old nations. Here are the figures: In 1850 capitalists owned 37½ per cent. of the nation's wealth. In 1870 they owned 63 percent. "In 1889, out of 1,500,000 people living in New York City, 1,100,000 dwelt in tenement-houses. "At the same time farm-lands, east and west, had fallen, in twenty-five years, to one-third or one-half their cost. State Assessor Wood, of New York, declared, in 1889, that, in his opinion, 'in a few decades _there will be none but tenant farmers in this State_.' "In 1889 the farm mortgages in the Western States amounted to three billion four hundred and twenty-two million dollars." "Did these wonderful utterances and most significant statistics," I asked, "produce no effect on that age?" "None at all," he replied. "'Wisdom cries in the streets, and no man regards her.' The small voice of Philosophy was unheard amid the blare of the trumpets that heralded successful knavery; the rabble ran headlong to the devil after gauds and tinsel." "Have there been," I asked, "no later notes of warning of the coming catastrophe?"