... “You ask me to give you suggestions for the expenditure of your wealth in benefiting humanity. This I must decline to do, my dear friend. If I had your wealth I know what _I_ should do, or, at least, what I ought to do, but _I_ am a socialist, and _you_ are not. I do not believe in _laissez-faire_ as you do, and as a socialist I should use my wealth and influence for a reorganization of society, not for a patching up of what is at bottom false and rotten. Things are getting worse and worse, and must continue to do so under the present social system. My hope is that they will get so bad, so unutterably vile, that the people will be compelled to throw aside their apathy and make a clean sweep. I take no part in any of the hundred little schemes for ‘improving’ the present system. I don’t want to improve the present system as you do. I want to destroy it. “We improve things that are already fairly good and can be made better, but we destroy whatever is thoroughly rotten; at least I think all rational people do so. So far as the present order is at all bearable, it is due to certain socialist innovations, such as interference with the capitalist, trade unions, movements like that of the Irish against the particular class of thieves called landlords, etc. “The people, the common people, who for centuries have silently suffered and abjectly kissed the foot that kicked them and trod upon them, the people, I say, are beginning to wake up. They are beginning to ask questions, and they are questions which will have to be solved erelong, even if it take another bloody French revolution to do it. I see no way in which bloodshed is to be avoided. I look forward confidently to what will seem to you very like a reign of terror ere this century closes. Things must grow worse before they can get better. The crisis has not come, but it is coming. Money has done much, but it cannot do everything; the press will not always be bribed and muzzled as it is to-day, nor Levi’s and Mulhall’s and Giffen’s statistics be doctored to suit the capitalists who pay for them. The time is coming, Miss Brewster, when the people _will be heard_; and _they will be heeded_, for their words will be as short and sharp as fire and dynamite can make them. “Do not think I am telling you of what I wish to see. I am telling you of what I know will come. “The rich are not voluntarily going to heed the bitter cry of the famishing, except in one way, the only way they have ever known, namely, almsgiving. They will give alms because it is noble to be a benefactor, because it appeases their consciences, because it might be made extremely inconvenient for them if they did not. But they will not give justice. Justice! they never learned the meaning of the word.