“The rich are better than we, he has the cheek to tell you. Yes, their dresses are better, and their food is finer, and they have learned how to lie and swindle with a soft tongue. They drink champagne instead of beer, and bet bigger money on their horses, and smoke cigars, and take their girls to ride in fine turnouts with a span of horses; but they don’t mean honestly by their girls, and they turn them out upon the streets at last. And they don’t have to work in the dirt, and they can take a hot bath every day, and their wives and daughters can keep their bodies clean and their faces fair, and so they go to the theatre and show themselves in dresses you’d be ashamed to see your wife in. “But in all the rest, he’s gassin’ you. I think my girls could wear their diamonds as well as them, and flirt and show their dresses; and I could drive my span, and take my fancy drinks, and bribe the judges and the lawyers. Do you suppose if they couldn’t steal from us, they could earn even so much as Coal-Oil Patsy? And as for books and pictures, they leave all that to the long-haired fellers at the colleges; they don’t care a damn for art an’ all that stuff any more’n we do. “Do you suppose if any boy o’ yourn studied to be a gentleman, and was as good, and as clever, and as gifted with the gab as our fine friend here, and went to him, he’d take him to his clubs and balls and parties? He’d say, ‘Your hands are coarse and rough, and you don’t talk enough like a dude’--and what he’d really mean all the time would be, ‘You ain’t got money enough.’ I tell you all this talk is guff, and it just comes down to the money. All we want is money, and they’ve got it. “Then he says we aren’t smart enough. Of course we aren’t smart enough. This world has been run for the smart fellers about long enough, and it’s about time it was run for the honest men. It’s the rich fellers on top that are the smart ones, and we are the fools who let ’em make all the money. It’s they who are the judges and make the laws and run the legislatures, and then they have the cheek to come to us and say, ‘Oh, lord, don’t break the law!’ And they bring you men over by the shipload, and give you seventy cents a day, and rent one room of their houses to your families at their own price, and herd your girls and boys together naked in the coal-mines, and then say, ‘See how much cleaner we are! how much more virtuous we are!’ And if you strike, you starve, and they know it; and if in your despair you give a kick or two to their damned machinery, they cry like cowards as they are, ‘Oh, lord, that’s my property--don’t break the law!’ And the law is theirs, too, not ours, nor God Almighty’s whom they talk so much about.