it—we had this entire nation of eighty million people literally thinking about nothing else for months—nay, more, we had the attention of the whole civilised world riveted upon those filthy meat-factories. We uncovered crimes for which the condemnation of every dollar’s worth of property in Packingtown would have been a nominal punishment; and then we settled back with a sigh of contentment, because we had put a few more inspectors at work and forced the whitewashing of some slaughter-house walls. And we left the monster upas-tree of commercialism to flourish untouched—to go on year after year bearing its fruit of corruption and death! There is nothing whatever to be got from the capitalist. I used to think that the same thing was true of the politician. In common with most Socialists, I thought that the Revolution would have to wait until the people had come to full consciousness of their purpose, and had elected a Socialist president and a Socialist congress. But at the time of the coal-strike, when Dave Hill came out for government ownership of the coal mines, I realised that the politician is the jackal and not the lion. Of course we have amateur politicians—capitalists who play at the game—and they will not give way; but the professional politician is not a rich man—the competition has been too keen. He has served the capitalist because it paid; and when the people get ready to have their way, it will pay to serve the people. This is really a very important matter, for our political machinery is complicated, and the people have got used to it. It would be a frightful waste of energy to create new machinery—in fact, I do not think that our Constitution could stand the strain. We will now assume that the industrial crisis has come. What will be the political consequences? It takes two or three years for industrial conditions to get themselves translated into political acts in this country; it means an immense amount of agitating—tens of thousands of meetings have to be held and hundreds of thousands of speeches made; and then there is all the machinery of conventions and elections. The panic of 1893, for instance, resulted in the Bryan movement of 1896. That movement was a revolt of the debtor class; if it had succeeded it would have precipitated a panic, and that would have been a misfortune, for the reason that both the people and their leaders were ignorant, and instead of the Industrial Republic, we should have had a severe reaction. Mark Hanna was a cunning man; but if he had been still more cunning, he would never have raised six million dollars to buy the presidency for William McKinley—he would have let the people have free silver, and then he would have had the people.