"Certainly; by the latter part of the nineteenth century manhood suffrage had become practically universal in America." "That is to say, the people through their chosen agents made all the laws. Is that what you mean?" "Certainly." "But I remember you had Constitutions of the nation and of the States. Perhaps they prevented the people from doing quite what they wished." "No; the Constitutions were only a little more fundamental sort of laws. The majority made and altered them at will. The people were the sole and supreme final power, and their will was absolute." "If, then, the majority did not like any existing arrangement, or think it to their advantage, they could change it as radically as they wished?" "Certainly; the popular majority could do anything if it was large and determined enough." "And the majority, I understand, were the poor, not the rich--the ones who had the wrong side of the inequalities that prevailed?" "Emphatically so; the rich were but a handful comparatively." "Then there was nothing whatever to prevent the people at any time, if they just willed it, from making an end of their sufferings and organizing a system like ours which would guarantee their equality and prosperity?" "Nothing whatever." "Then once more I ask you to kindly tell me why, in the name of common sense, they didn't do it at once and be happy instead of making a spectacle of themselves so woeful that even a hundred years after it makes us cry?" "Because," I replied, "they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government." "But, dear me, Julian, life itself and everything that meanwhile makes life worth living, from the satisfaction of the most primary physical needs to the gratification of the most refined tastes, all that belongs to the development of mind as well as body, depend first, last, and always on the manner in which the production and distribution of wealth is regulated. Surely that must have been as true in your day as ours." "Of course." "And yet you tell me, Julian, that the people, after having abolished the rule of kings and taken the supreme power of regulating their affairs into their own hands, deliberately consented to exclude from their jurisdiction the control of the most important, and indeed the only really important, class of their interests." "Do not the histories say so?" "They do say so, and that is precisely why I could never believe them. The thing seemed so incomprehensible I thought there must be some way of explaining it. But tell me, Julian, seeing the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?" "To the capitalists." "And did the people elect the capitalists?" "Nobody elected them." "By whom, then, were they appointed?" "Nobody appointed them."