“Organized discontent” in the laboring population is no new thing under the sun, but in this century and country it has a new opportunity, and Omniscience alone can forecast the outcome. Of one thing we may be very sure, and the sooner the “capitalist” can persuade himself to discern it the sooner will his eyes guard his neck: the relations between those who are able to live without physical toil and those who are not are a long way from final adjustment, but are about to undergo a profound and essential alteration. That this is to come by peaceful evolution is a hope which has nothing in history to sustain it. There are to be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and the good persons who suffer themselves to be shocked by such things in others will have a chance to try them for themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those who do not work with their hands, he will not consider too curiously any one’s claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his sense of the fitness of things if the disadvantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the share of his benefactors; but almost any distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the meantime it is to be wished that the moralizers and homilizers who prate of “principles” may have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be notably advantaged by removal. IV It is the immigration of “the oppressed of all nations” that has made this country one of the most lawless on the face of the earth. The change from good to bad took place within a generation—so quickly that few of us have had the nimbleness of apprehension to “get it through our heads.” We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we were taught at our father’s knees before the eagle became a buzzard. America is still “an asylum for the oppressed;” and still, as always and everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything but to be oppressed—makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his head above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.