The rapid progress towards this stage of industrial autocracy was already marked, and not a few years ago at that, by the historical Vanderbilt exclamation, “The public be damned!”—the modern version of Louis XIV’s “The government, it is I!” Still more light on the progress made in that direction under the very eyes of the present generation is thrown by the figures which recently made the rounds of the daily press. They deal with the growth of the volume of business and power wielded by one single capitalist concern, the J. Pierpont Morgan banking firm in Wall Street, New York. The figures show that the business capital of that concern alone, the stocks and bonds of all the innumerable enterprises, commercial, industrial, etc., controlled by it represented the amount of $527,282,564. But that was 21 years ago, in 1892. Gigantic as this mass of capital was it was insignificant compared with the proportions it reached in subsequent years. In 1897 it was $1,396,506,231; in 1902, $3,852,940,908, and in 1912 it was estimated to be $26,854,254,628. In other words, nearly TWENTY-SEVEN THOUSAND MILLION dollars of business capital are controlled by the one man at the head of this single concern, whose mere stroke of pen would suffice, if he saw fit, to turn the key in the lock of the door of thousands of factories and other business concerns where millions of workers must earn their daily bread. The lives of millions of workers and of many more millions of members of their families actually depending upon the will and the whim of a single individual! How much more is needed to complete the evolution towards industrial autocracy, the gate to Industrial Democracy? The power of political autocrats, of Czar Nicholas of Russia, of Louis XIV of France, etc., is like that of children, compared with the economic power wielded by this colossus of Twentieth Century capitalism. It will not require, it cannot require, centuries or generations for the thirty-three and a half millions of wage-slaves to realize that they can have the power and must,—to save their own lives—throw off from their necks the Iron Heel of modern Industrial Autocracy! In point of development of all these material conditions, as prerequisites for a successful Social Revolution, America leads the procession of all modern nations. In one important respect, however, America lags far behind the procession. It is with regard to the economic organization of labor, with regard to the labor union movement. As yet this strategically vital and determining field is in the possession of the reactionary forces of the American Federation of Labor, the organization that is doing all in its power to check the growth of Socialism in this country, to perpetuate the capitalist system of wage labor.