Let us imagine a scale of income tax for the people of America: $5000 and under, untaxed; $5000 and over, to be taxed. If the chosen representatives of the people, selected by them last November and to be selected by the various State Legislatures elected by the people within the near future, refuse to make such an enactment as an income tax upon all incomes of more than $5000; suppose the people organize themselves, and call upon the country in a general election; gentlemen of aristocratic proclivities, where will you be? Of the mass of freeborn American citizens (quite as good as the sham aristocrats) not five per cent. enjoy an income as great as $5000. Would you resort to physical force? The Hon. J. Brisben Walker, in his article in the _Cosmopolitan_, indicates the true position that you would occupy. Consider the possibility. Yell “Unconstitutional.” Proclaim that it is illegal. The people would change the Constitution. By the voice of the majority, they would change the laws. What have you to offer to stem this tide of indignation that you have provoked? Do you say, “Capital would leave the country?” Well, you can’t carry the railroads, the factories, the soil, the buildings from America. You may have your castles in Scotland, but we have your plants of machinery, your buildings, and that upon which your security depends and is founded is in our power in America. Would you secede, as the Plebeians proposed to do from the Patricians at Rome, and found a city on the Sacred Hills of your sham aristocracy? The Plebeians, the Common People, would never seek you with the olive branch of peace and promise offers of compromise, as did the Patricians of old seek the Plebeians, but they would recall to your attention in forceful manner the lesson taught to the Southerners in 1861, when the “Common People,” the majority in America, by their might, overpowered and overturned the seceders who, when they found that the minority, even though blessed with an attempted social superiority, could not rule in the American Republic, sought to secede. The Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Astors, Fricks, and others, would be as helpless in such a struggle, and never as brave and earnest, as was Lee’s decimated army at Appomattox. What the people _should_ or _will_ do, it does not interest us to discuss. What they _can_ do is to require that the payment of the taxes for the support of the nation be derived from those sources which have become hateful and oppressive to the people; and, at a general election, the men who form the majority would be those whose incomes do not exceed $5000--no, not even $2000 per annum.