It has been estimated by Bastiat, Karl Marx and Nordau, that laborers are unjustly deprived of the value of four days labor in each week. Terrible is the injustice to wage-earners, the world over, if the deductions of Carpenter and Godwin are to be accepted. “Behold the hire of the laborers which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” Proudhon and Spencer have revealed the “economic’s lies” of modern society. “The great game of the business world is the game of getting on,” wrote John Ruskin; “not of everybodies getting on, but of somebody getting on. What to one family is the game of getting on, to one thousand families is the game of not getting on. Nay, you say, they have all their chance. Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be the same number of blanks. Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence that take the lead, but blind chance. What then! do you think the old practice that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can, is less iniquitous when the power has become the power of brains instead of fist?” Is this a world of equivalents in labor? What is the ratio of riches awarded to those who toil? In 1860, the net average income was but three per cent. Yet, for that year the income of bare money (which needs no food, clothing or shelter), was all the way from five to thirty per cent. In England 30,000,000 people are taxed that interest may be paid to 300,000. In 1870, the interest on the national debts of the world amounted to $1,700,000,000. This rate in nine years would absorb a sum equal to the entire property of this country in 1870. We are informed that trade is annually taxed (interest on capital) about $200,000,000, for which not one dollar of actual service is rendered. Is interest on “watered” stock any better than theft? A world of equivalents, indeed! In our cities five per cent of the population own more property than ninety-five per cent; and twenty per cent of the nation own more than the remaining eighty per cent. At the present rate of increase, within thirty years, 100,000 persons will own four-fifths of all the property in the United States. In twenty-five years the number of our people who own their homes has decreased from five-eighths to three-eighths. In New York City more than 1,100,000 persons are dwelling in tenement houses. “In 1889, the farm mortgages in the western states amounted to _three billion four hundred and twenty-two million dollars_.” In England, to-day, there are less than 30,000 landed proprietors--one-half of the country is owned by 150 men. Twelve men own one-half of Scotland. The working classes of the United Kingdom own but a thirtieth part of the total real and personal property.