It is a knowledge of these things which has organized a great rebellion in the United States, especially among those who live outside the great cities and homes of monopoly--a rebellion which has begun to control political parties, and which, in the last general election, mustered nearly six and a half million voters--voters who were hurled, for once, against the great international brotherhood of plunderers by legislation. Some, however, who were in it are not of it; these, when they comprehend it, will become offended and walk no more with it. A new declaration of independence is being formulated to voice its spirit, and it awaits its Jefferson, if, indeed, as some believe, he has not already come in the person of Bryan, a Western man descended from Southern ancestors, and seeming to have at heart the interests of all sections. It is a significant fact, in this connection, that from two-thirds to three-fourths of the foreign voters in the Union marched under the allied leadership of foreign and domestic monopoly and ill-gotten wealth. Two-thirds, at least, of the native-born white voters were in this great rebellion, and the life and soul of it. The negro voted almost solidly with the foreigners and with his new masters, for he will have masters of some kind yet for many years. I note the status and attitude of the negro seriously (and let him that readeth understand), for if this ever-deepening conflict comes to bullets, those who now tell the old Federal soldier to vote as he shot, will tell the negro to shoot as he voted; and he will so shoot. The negro vote, under the easy control of a sectional faction of political manipulators, is as dangerous a menace to our institutions as our foreign population indoctrinated with European medievalism--kingcraft and priestcraft. Much, if not most, of our foreign immigration now comes from cities, and pours itself into the already corrupted life of our own great cities. ("Syrian Orontes pours its filth into The Tiber."--_Juv._) It does not buy land, it sells votes; it specifically performs the political contracts of its priests; it buys and sells political jobs; it officers ward politics. It is one of the arms--and the negro is the other--by which greed and monopoly, the twin devils which dance attendance upon national decline, are consolidating our government. No great city has ever been fit for self-government and civil liberty. From Babylon to Nineveh, from Nineveh to Carthage, from Carthage to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice to New York and Chicago (neither of which can elect an honest board of aldermen), it is the same old story of avarice which finally overreaches itself. This is the sin which, when finished, brings forth the death of nations. In vain did Virgil and Horace sing their deathless melodies of country homes to a people whose blood was already poisoned with the lust for gain and fevered with the excitement of artificial life.