from the middle class. It was the workers who excited and kept at its height the righteous indignation of the country that shamed the coal-trust into decency. It is the workers who are the most influential of all that strive to arm us with those plutocracy-destroying weapons, direct nomination and direct legislation; and of all who demand that the railroads pay just taxes; of all who would lay the axe at the root of public corruption by having government resume its powers and do every one of its duties without favor or prejudice to a single human being. It is clear that the laborers are gathering all the anti-monopoly interests and classes of society to their banner, and that from the steady and increasing impulsion of these laborers, in unions and political campaigns, industrial democracy will at last come in, to open the millennium by keeping every man, woman, and child, except the wilfully idle and criminal, permanently supplied with necessaries and comforts. Who are the laborers that are both to spur and lead us forward in this great course? Why, the white laborers, whose interests and whose qualifications to share in governments are the same as those of the rest of us; who are really part and parcel of the body politic and whose sons and daughters can be married by our sons and daughters without social degradation to themselves or degeneration of the proud Caucasian stock in their children. The negroes cannot do the great work we are contemplating. They are strangers in blood. They are as yet far too low in development. It is idle to think of making these aliens, whose highest interests are irreconcilably antagonistic to ours and our children's, allies of the white laborers--a point which will be treated at large in later chapters.