The franchise is a potential power, making it theoretically possible for the electorate to take possession of the country. In practice, the franchise has had no such result. Quite the contrary, the masters of American life by a policy of chicanery and misrepresentation, advertise and support first one and then the other of the "Old Parties," both of which are led by the members of the propertied class or by their retainers. The people, deluded by the press, and ignorant of their real interests, go to the polls year after year and vote for representatives that represent, in all of their interests, the special privileged classes. The economic and social reorganization of the United States during the past fifty years has gone fast and far. The system of perpetual (fee simple) private ownership of the resources has concentrated the control over the natural resources in a small group, not of individuals, but of corporations; has created a new form of social master, in the form of a land-tool-job owner; has thus made possible a type of absentee-landlordism more effective and less human than were any of its predecessors and has decreased the responsibility at the same time that it has augmented the power of the owning group. These changes have been an integral part of a general economic transformation that has occupied the chief energies of the ablest men of the community for the past two generations. The country of many farms, villages and towns, and of a few cities, with opportunity free and easy of access, has become a country of highly organized concentrated wealth power, owned by a small fraction of the people and controlled by a tiny minority of the owners for their benefit and profit. The country which was rightfully called "our United States" in 1840, by 1920 was "their United States" in every important sense of the word. FOOTNOTES: [39] "Estimated Valuation of National Wealth, 1850-1912," Bureau of the Census, 1915, p. 15. [40] "Addresses of President Wilson," House Doc. 803. Sixty-fourth Congress, 1st Session (1916), p. 13. IX. THE DIVINE RIGHT OF PROPERTY 1. _Land Ownership and Liberty_ The owners of American wealth have been molded gradually into a ruling class. Years of brutal, competitive, economic struggle solidified their ranks,--distinguishing friend from enemy; clarifying economic laws, and demonstrating the importance of coördination in economic affairs. Economic control, once firmly established, opened before the wealth owning class an opportunity to dominate the entire field of public life. Before the property owners could feel secure in their possessions, steps must be taken to transmute the popular ideas regarding "property rights" into a public opinion that would permit the concentration of important property in the hands of a small owning class, at the same time that it held to the conviction that society, without privately owned land and machinery, was unthinkable.