“There is only one class to dispute this proposition. They are the toilers, whose labor is the immediate cause of the production of our wealth. We may say that there must be intelligence to direct, and that to the intelligence which takes advantage should come the gains. But Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Frick are proofs that in the ranks of labor itself there is intelligence to direct. Many Carnegies and many Fricks would spring up to-morrow if opportunity permitted. If one would study the justice of a system of political economy, let him surrender his vested rights of property and take his place among those whom the system crushes, whose labor it devours, and whose reward for labor is a bare, joyless existence. We who have the money can reason speciously regarding the justice of our laws, the excellence of our system of government. The laboring man can only groan in spirit. He has not hitherto had the power of his vote, notwithstanding our boasted representative government, because his brothers, in the agony which poverty brings, in their effort to relieve the hand-to-mouth miseries of their existence, have sold at each election this birthright for the merest taste of pottage.” Fortunately, under the Australian system of voting, it was impracticable to buy Esau’s birthright with a delusive mess of pottage held out by the protected, wealth-accumulating, sham aristocrats. “Everyone knows that this has been true, that the labor vote has never been a unit, that its purchasability has been one of the well-understood factors in ward politics, that there has been no combination, no united effort, no intelligent direction, no willingness to submit to leadership, and that there is to-day no probability of the vote of these people being cast at an early election for the objects in which they are so deeply concerned. The issues that are before the public in either of the great political parties for whose candidates the votes will be cast, are very largely those which concern the people of means and influence. Platforms are dictated with reference to Wall street, and the great corporations and the rich men who supply the sinews of political war.”