Fifteen years ago I pointed this out in a book. The argument was irrefutable, and the conclusion inescapable, but the few critics who noted it repeated their usual formula about "dreamers and theorists." Now, however, the business mills have ground on, and what was theory has become fact before our eyes. We have trusted the nations of Europe for some $10,000,000,000 worth of goods, and they are powerless to pay, and if they did pay, they would bankrupt American industry. France wishes to collect an enormous indemnity from Germany, but nobody can figure out how this indemnity can be paid without ruining French industry. The French have demanded coal from Germany, and have got more than they can use, and are "dumping" it in Belgium and Holland, with the result that the British coal industry is ruined. The French clamor that the Germans must pay for the destruction they wrought in Northern France, and the Germans offer to send German workmen to rebuild the ruined towns; but the French denounce this as an insult--it would deprive French workingmen of their jobs! So I might continue for pages, pointing out the manifold absurdities which result from a system of industry for the profit of a few, instead of for the use of all. Ever since I first began to read the newspapers, some twenty-five or thirty years ago, all our political life has been nothing but the convulsions of a social body tortured by the constricting ring of the profit system. Everywhere one group struggling for advantage over another group, and politicians engaged in playing one interest against another interest! My boyhood recollections of public life consist of campaign slogans having to do with the tariff: "production and prosperity," "reciprocity," "the full dinner pail," "the foreigner pays the tax," etc. The workingman, under the profit system, is like a man pounding away at a pump. He can get a thin trickle of water from the spout of the pump if he works hard enough, but in order to get it he has to supply ten times as much to some one who has tapped the pipe. But the tapping has been done underground, where the workingman cannot see it. All the workingman knows is that there is no job for him if the products of "cheap foreign labor" are allowed to be "dumped" on the American market. That is obvious, and so he votes for a tax on foreign imports, high enough to enable his own employer to market at a profit. He does not realize that he is thus raising the price of everything that he buys, and so leaving himself worse off than he was before.