One cannot insist too strongly upon the futility of sentiment in connection with this process. We are dealing with facts, with grim and brutal and merciless reality. And it will not avail you to try to smooth it over—it will not do any good to turn your head and refuse to face it. Here is the monster machine of competition, grinding remorselessly on; the wealth of the world is rushing with cyclonic speed into one portion of the social body, and in the other portion whole classes of men and women and children are being swept out of existence, are being wiped off the economic slate. Exactly as capital piles up—at compounded and re-compounded interest—so also piles up the mass of human misery of every conceivable sort—luxury, debauchery and cynicism at the top, prostitution, suicide, insanity, and crime at the bottom. Political corruption spreads further and eats deeper, business practice becomes more impersonal and more ruthless; and all progress awaits the swing of the pendulum, the time when the cumulative pressure of all this mass of misery shall have driven the people to frenzy, and forced them to overturn the system of class exploitation and greed. I purpose to cite in detail the symptoms of disease and decay in our body politic; before I begin, I wish to put my interpretation of them into one sentence, which a man can carry away with him. I say that the evils of our time are due without exception to one single cause—_that our people are being driven, with constantly increasing rigour, to the ultimately hopeless task of paying interest upon a mass of capital which is increasing at compound interest_. Consider in the first place the broader aspect of the situation—the dollar-madness of the time which is the staple theme of the moralist. I have a friend who is in control of a great business concern, and who will read this little book with intense disapproval; and yet so fearfully has this man been driven by the lash of competition that when I saw him last he could scarcely digest a bit of dry bread, and his hand trembled so that he could hardly lift a glass of water to his lips. He talked of his business in his sleep, and he could not go for a walk and forget it for five minutes. And why? Was it money? He has so much that his family could not spend it if they lived a hundred years; but it was his business, it was his life. He was caught in the mill and he could not get out. His is one of those few industries which have not yet formed a trust, and he is in the last gasp of the competitive struggle—he has to plot and plan day and night to get new orders, and to cut down expenses, and to keep up the dividends upon which his _reputation_ rests.