“Your foreign friend--who is no wise leader for American workmen, and if you choose him, you will choose wrong--your foreign friend has told you to destroy. Suppose you tore up these railroads and wrecked these mills and furnaces and flooded all the mines and burned the oil--you know what farmers’ wages are; would you be better off? And if you all went out and wanted work in the fields, where would the wages go to? You say you would not want wages, but would take the land; very good, there is the land now: will any of you like to change your work and earnings for a freehold farmer’s life? ‘No, we want the mills and railroads, but we do not want the rich,’ you say. And if we wiped away the rich, who would build your railroads? Can you do it alone, and feed and pay yourselves? But if the rich must do it, what shall be their reward? They give you money--what will you pay them in? Money, or money’s worth, and human bodies, are the only values that the world has ever known. Will you pay them in your bodies, in your slavery? If no, why, then, object that they have money? “Because they have more than we, you say. Well, that may be mended. But if people are to use money to help you build your railroads, they must have the money to start with. “Because they have more money than we have, you say again. And now be honest. Will you promise me one thing: that you will try not to think the world all wrong until it has no justice? They say there is no justice in the country of our friend here, and that is why he had to fly to us. If you can say there is no justice here; when you can honestly say, ‘I have not got what I deserve’--then we will take it, though we wade through seas of blood, and I go with you. But tell me honestly, now--do you think you want money so much as some of the rich? Do you think it so needful to you? Do you think, each one of you, your know-how is so valuable? Do you think to-day, if you had a million apiece, you would use the money on the whole so well? You all know Coal-Oil Patsy--he got five millions, and he kept a bad circus, and a bad hotel, and a bad base-ball nine, and bad women, and took to drinking himself blind, and bribed himself a seat in Congress, and killed his wife or broke her heart, and at last he lost his money, and now he gets a dollar and a quarter a day, when he is sober enough--and he is worth no more--and what cent of his money ever did you any good? It is now all gone, and he built no single furnace, nor mill, nor railroad, nor worked a mine, nor gave any one of you a day’s work while his money lasted. And one thing more: do you think you are better, or as fit to spend this money that your railroad or your coal mine makes--I do not mean, whether you may be so in a short time--but fairly now, as you stand, to-day, are you kinder, wiser, nobler; have you higher tastes, more learning, better knowledge of all the things that take money to buy? For remember, beer and beef and clothes and