It is difficult for people here in Texas to understand the industrial condition of the American nation today; to appreciate the dangers upon which it is drifting. We are too apt to imagine everybody as prosperous and conservative as ourselves; or if not so, it's because they do not vote the Democratic ticket--that panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. Here in Texas we have hung our second providence on the Democratic party--it has become a religion with us. If a man is orthodox in his political faith all things are forgiven him; but if there's any doubt about his Democracy we are inclined to regard him as an alien, if not an anarchist. Most of us enjoy the shadow of our own vine and fig tree--which it is impossible to mortgage. We feed three times a day, have a cocktail every morning, a clean shirt occasionally and even when cotton goes so low it doesn't pay for the paris-green to poison the worms, we blame it on the Lord instead of on our political leaders. But it's different in other sections of the Union. America contains more than a million as desperate men as ever danced the Carmagnole or shrieked with brutal joy when the blood of French aristocrats reddened the guillotine. The dark alleys and unclean dives of our great cities are crowded with dangerous sans-culotte, and our highways with hungry men eager for bread--though the world blaze for it. Pauperism is rampant, the criminal classes increasing and everywhere the serpent of Socialism is leaving it's empoisoned slime. Suppose that these desperate elements find a determined leader--a modern Marat, who will make the most of his opportunities for evil: how many of that vast contingent now clinging with feeble grasp to the rotten skirts of a doubtful respectability, would be swept into the seething vortex of unbridled villainy? Note the failure of public officials to protect corporate property; the necessity of calling for federal bayonets and batteries to suppress labor riots; the dangerous unrest of the common people; the sympathy of the farmer--that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders rests our political and industrial world--with every quasi-military organization that throws down the gage of battle to the powers that be, then tell me, if you can, where Dives may look for defenders should the rabble rise in its wrath, the bullet supplant the ballot in the irrepressible conflict between the Cormorant and the Commune! And what are we doing to avert the danger? Distributing a little dole and preaching patience to starving people; quarreling about the advisability of "counting a quorum" or coining a little silver seigniorage; wrangling over the "rights" of a mid-Pacific prostitute to rule Celts and Saxons, and trying to so "reform" the tariff that it will yield more revenue with less taxation! We are bowing down before various pie-hunting political gods and electing men to Congress who couldn't tell the Federal Constitution from Calvin's Confession of Faith.