In this country, under the eyes of a single generation,—the present generation—a veritable Social Revolution has taken place. When the gray-haired men of to-day were young the overwhelming majority of inhabitants in this country belonged to the property-holding class and were consequently self-sustaining. They had some farming, commercial, or industrial property. They did not have much but enough of it to be able to eke out a living without being compelled to hunt for and beg some employer for a job to save themselves from starvation. To-day what remains of the independent farmers and middle class are hanging by the skin of their teeth to their little property, the source of their “economic independence,” as they feel that property slipping through their hands. It begins to dawn on them that even those of them who still retain some business property are rapidly becoming mere dependents and hangers-on at the court of enthroned capital. But already a big percentage of formerly independent American citizens and the sons and daughters of a still bigger percentage of them, are found to be stripped of all income-bearing property, driven into and concentrated in the camp of the proletariat,—the propertyless wage-earning class—towards which, like iron filings towards a powerful magnet, are gravitating the rapidly increasing millions of ruined, formerly independent citizens, the modern proletariat. According to recently published figures to the camp of the wage-earning class belong now no less than thirty-three and a half millions of men, women, and children, not younger than fifteen years of age. This gigantic army, with the little children, the wives of some of the workmen and other dependents, whom the capitalists so far have not succeeded in hitching up to the machinery in their factories, constitutes already the overwhelming majority of the entire population of the country. The forces of social evolution have thus already created, as far at least as this country is concerned, that other indispensable factor for the success of the impending Social Revolution. They have created that class, the proletariat, whose mission it is and which is strong enough to free itself and the whole of mankind from exploitation and oppression by the capitalists, the master class of our time. While these forces of social evolution were thus decomposing the present social order, divorcing the wealth-producers from the sources of wealth-production, driving the millions of these wealth producers into the camp of the proletariat, there was at the same time another process of concentration going on, the concentration of the wealth of the formerly independent American citizens in the hands of a small number of gigantic capitalist concerns. Out of their ranks the industrial autocrat is to rise,—the “one head” that the disinherited millions are to “chop off” in order to come to their own by the institution of the Industrial Democratic Republic.