Here is your “revolution,” Mr. Steffens, in full swing. One of the questions which I have for some months found myself longing to ask you is, how clearly you recognised in the Colorado civil war the natural and inevitable consequences of a continuation of your “government of the people, by the rascals, for the rich?” Here is an unequivocal declaration, by a vote of two to one, by the people in one of the states of this free country, in favour of a constitutional amendment permitting an eight-hour law; and here are representatives of both the majority parties pledging themselves to enact it, and then openly and shamelessly selling themselves out to the predatory corporations of the state. The people then resort to a strike to secure their rights; and when they are seen to be winning, the militia is summoned, criminals are hired to commit a dynamite outrage and afford the necessary pretext, and then every tradition of American liberty and every safeguard of free institutions is overthrown, and the strike crushed and the striker’s organisation exterminated with a ruthlessness and a recklessness which no police official in Russia could have surpassed. And then the party of “law and order”—that is the “System”—sat enthroned in Colorado, and the guileless reader of newspaper despatches believed that an “election” took place in that state last November! The “System” suspended the _Habeas Corpus_ Act, censored newspapers and telegrams, opened mails, entered houses without warrant and drove women from their beds at dead of night, deported men, defied and threatened judges, shut down mines in spite of their owners’ will—and finally haled a score or two of elected officials before it and put ropes around their necks and compelled them to resign. And then the “rebellion,” that is, the agitation for an eight-hour law, attempted to reassert itself in the form of ballots; and by means of a threat of deposition it compelled the newly elected governor to accede in everything to its will—and in particular to retain in office the infamous militia official who was its agent in these crimes! But we, as I said before, are touched by these things only through our ideals. We are sorry to see American institutions overthrown in an American state; but we do not live in Colorado, and we are quite sure that there is no danger of our being turned out of our homes. And yet we know that the system exists in our own city and state, and sits just as surely intrenched there as in Colorado. And we know also that it exists for a purpose—that it exists to rule. And are we to imagine that it exists to rule the people of Patagonia, of Greenland and Afghanistan? Do we not know that it exists to rule _us_?