What do I mean by an Industrial Republic? I mean an organisation for the production and distribution of wealth, whose members are established upon a basis of equality; who elect representatives to govern the organisation; and who receive the full value of what their labour produces. I mean an industrial government of the people, by the people, for the people; a community in which the means of production have been made the inalienable property of the State. My purpose in writing this book is to point out the forces which are now rapidly developing in America; and which, when they have attained to maturity, will usher in the Industrial Republic by a process as natural and as inevitable as that by which a chick breaks out of its shell or a child comes forth from the womb at the proper hour. I believe that the economic process is whirling us on with terrific momentum toward the crisis; and I look to see the most essential features of the great transformation accomplished in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912. If I had been a tactful person I should have kept that last statement until far on in my argument. For I find many people who are interested in the idea of an Industrial Republic, and some few who are willing to think of it as a possibility; but I find none who do not balk when I presume to set the day. Yet the setting of the day is a vital part of my conviction, and I should play the reader false if I failed to mention it in this preliminary statement of my argument. It is a conviction to which I have come with the diligent use of the best faculties I possess, and after a preparation of a sort that is certainly unusual, and possibly even quite unique. Perhaps I cannot do better by way of introduction than to explain just what I mean. Our country has passed through two great crises, when important political and social changes came with startling suddenness. I refer to the Revolution and the Civil War; and to the latter of these crises, or rather the period of its preparation—1847 to 1861—I once had occasion to give two years of an interesting kind of study. I read everything which I could find in the two largest special collections in the country; not merely histories and biographies, but the documents of the time, speeches and sermons and letters, newspapers and magazines and pamphlets. I literally lived in the period; I knew it more intimately than the world that was actually about me. My purpose was to write a novel which should make the crisis real to the people of the present; and so I had to read creatively, I had to get into the very soul of what I read. I had to struggle and to suffer with the people of that time, to forget my knowledge of the future, and to watch through their eyes the hourly unfolding of the mighty drama of events.