And that, you understand, means a loss of a _market_—of a market of five million people—a population equal to that of the Dominion of Canada. And of course, therefore, those whose work it has been to supply these people, will be out of work, and likewise those who supply the suppliers. And even this is by far the least of the consequences; for another part of our domestic market depends upon the fact that our workingmen too have been able to form trusts. And when this period of depression comes, their trusts will fall to pieces, and competition will begin again—a process which they will find all the brickbats and dynamite in the country cannot check. The employers will, of course, be straining every nerve to make ends meet; and so wages will go down, and when strikes are declared, the starving workingman will “scab” and the strikes will fail. We shall have riots, and perhaps gatling guns in our streets, but the wages will go down; and step by step as the wages go down, consumption goes down, with the loss of another Dominion of Canada. When the thing is once started, it will be an avalanche that no power upon earth can stop; and it will be the beginning of the Revolution. The word has an ominous sound. The reader thinks of street battles and barricades. By a Revolution I mean the complete transfer of the economic and political power of the country from the hands of the present exploiting class to the hands of the whole people; and in the accomplishment of this purpose the people will proceed, as in everything else they do, along the line of least resistance. It is very much less trouble to cast a ballot than it is to go out in the streets and shoot: and our people are used to the ballot method. However, the staid and respectable _Harper’s Weekly_, which calls itself a “Journal of Civilisation,” suggested in 1896 that if Mr. Bryan were elected, it might be necessary for the propertied classes to keep him out of office. If anything of that sort is attempted in this coming crisis, why then there will be violence—just as there will be in such countries as Germany and Russia, which have yet to learn to let the people have their own way. The worst feature of the situation with us is that we have gotten into the habit of letting our elections be carried by bribery; and that is likely to play us some ugly tricks in this new emergency. The reader perhaps objects to my theory that this change must come with suddenness. It is such a tremendous change—and would it not be better if it were brought about little by little? Undoubtedly it would have been a great deal better; but the time to begin was ten or twenty years ago. Now the horse is stolen, and we are venting all our energies, and cannot even succeed in getting the stable-door locked afterward.