“I have made you the victim of a mean little trick. Each of those passages starts out as ‘The Metropolis’; but then it slides into Juvenal--the sixth satire, dealing with the ladies of ancient Rome. The point of my joke is that you will have to consult the books in order to be sure which is Juvenal and which is me. Of course I’ve had to change names and phrases, replacing Roman things with New York things. And I’ve had to tone Juvenal down, because there are some of his phrases I couldn’t reproduce--” “There are some you have tried to reproduce, and that you’re going to cut out,” says Mrs. Ogi. And as always, she has her way, and so it is a Bowdlerized Juvenal you have been reading! CHAPTER XXV THE AMERICAN EMPIRE “You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s all nonsense.” “Those who know about Rome,” says Ogi, “don’t always know about capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole book of mystifications--quoting American poets and statesmen and journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn’t tell which was which.” “We still have our republic, have we not?” “In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now we are at the critical moment--the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend--” Mrs. Ogi’s hand tightens upon her husband’s arm. She never has this thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new uniform of white night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the “Better Roman Federation,” and collects lists of the proscribed, and issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered them. “What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi. “There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which was denied the slaves of Rome.” “And the other factor?”