I can imagine the voice of the million which says to the millionaire, we do not ask you to be a hero and leap in to save the drowning; we do not even require you to be a manly man and bestir yourself before a life is lost; but we do say that the drowning man shall not be doomed to drown by your indifference? but if there is a rope which may be thrown to him, or a plank to uphold him, that rope or that plank shall be used, even if you forbid and claim them as your vested rights. You have no vested rights paramount to the rights of the commonwealth. It can order you in times of danger to all to place your body for the protection of the city in the path of the cannon ball, and if the commonwealth can demand your life for the benefit of all, do you think it will allow its members to be slaughtered in order to sustain your revelry, and leave your piles of hoarded gold and silver to accumulate as a magazine of corruption and danger to society? No, Mr. Millionaire, poverty, pestilence, and crime, are making war upon society and tumbling their slaughtered thousands into Potter's Fields. And if the commonwealth does not demand your personal service, but simply demands that you shall not make perpetual for the sake of ostentation all of the present unnatural inequality, you are surely treated justly and kindly. When the planter objected to General Jackson's using his cotton bales as a rampart for the defence of New Orleans, tradition says the General ordered him to take a musket and stand behind them as a common soldier. At present we ask only your _superfluous_ cotton bales, and it would not be wise for you to oppose our demand. The people remember the unholy distinction of classes thirty years ago, which enabled a favored few patricians to flourish as vampires on the commonwealth, while the plebeians were giving it their sufferings, their blood, and their lives, and hence they seek justice through our enormous system of pensions. Patricians would retain commanding superiority of wealth for power and ostentation, but the people object to this power and scorn the ostentation. The immense concentration of wealth by syndicates, corporations, and trusts alarms us all, because we see in it a formidable danger to the republic.[15] Colonel Higginson admits the evil, but denies that any method of counteracting it is known, yet it may easily be shown that we have several effective methods. [15] It is not only in the strong language of many political meetings, conventions, and the independent press, that this danger is recognized, but in that wealthy and conservative body, the United States Senate, it is distinctly recognized and frequently expressed; the language of Senators Ingalls, Stewart, Call, Gorman, Vest, Berry, and others, shows that they are alarmed and would warn their colleagues.