And people who are not only permitted to run at large, but actually elected to office, prattle of "overproduction" --while people are starving in nakedness; proposes to eliminate pauperism and inaugurate the industrial millennium by placing fiddle-strings on the free-list or increasing the tariff-tax on toothpicks--to relieve the country of the commercial jim-jams by means of the gold cure. And the fool-killer still procrastinates! . . . The American citizen is called a sovereign--by those patriots who are preparing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of a nice fat office. And perhaps he is; but I'm free. We are frequently told that the condition of labor is better to-day than a century ago. That is half a truth, yet wholly a falsehood. A century ago the workman knew naught of many comforts and conveniences he now enjoys --when he happens to have a job; but that was one age, this quite another. Progress gives no man new wants, and the luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next. To deny this--to limit the laborer to actual necessaries as measured by a former age--were to relegate him back to barbarism, to nomadism and nakedness. If we should be content with what our fathers had, then they should have been satisfied with the comforts enjoyed by THEIR progenitors, and so on back until man digs roots with his finger nails, attires himself in a streak of red paint for winter overcoat and a few freckles for summer ulster. It is by comparison with his fellows and not with his fathers that man determines whether he's fortunate or unfortunate--whether he's receiving his proper proportion of the world's increase of wealth. A century ago there was no such glaring inequality as now exists. There were no fifty million dollar fortunes and no free-soup joints. If the workman's piano was a jews-harp and his Pullman car a spavined cayuse, his employer was not erecting palaces in which to stable his blood stock, nor purchasing dissolute princes for his daughters to play at marriage and divorce with. If the farmer's wife wore linsey-woolsey and went barefoot to save her shoes, her neighbor did not import $5,000 gowns from "Paree" and put jeweled collars on her pet cur. The difference in the condition of Dives and Lazarus is more sharply defined than ever before. It is not so much the pitiful poverty of the many as the enormous wealth of the few that is fostering discontent. Pride dallying with Sin begot Death; willful waste is breeding Anarchy in the Womb of Want. The lords and ladies of the house of Have revel in luxury such as Lucullus never knew, while within sound of their feasting gaunt children fight like famished beasts for that which the breakfast garbage barrels afford. Private fortunes make the famed wealth of Lydia's ancient kings appear but a beggar's patrimony, while brawny giants must beg or steal and starving mothers give the withered breast to dying babes.