How does it rule us? How does it rule the people of Colorado? Whatever is it that is wanted of the people of Colorado? Why, simply that they should go into the mines and factories and work, not eight hours a day, as they wished to, but twelve hours a day, the time the “System” bade them to. And what is it that it wants everywhere else—in California, in Maine and in Texas? What, save that those who have labour to sell shall sell it at the price the “System” is paying, and that those who have goods to buy shall buy them at the price the “System” asks? If this be so, is not the only difference between us and the people of Colorado that they went on strike against the “System,” whereas we are not on strike—we _pay_? Let us deal with facts. Here is a corporation which runs a street-railroad in a city. It gives an abominable service, its cars are cold and filthy, its employees are underpaid wretches who work thirteen and fifteen hours a day—and the fare is just double that of the splendid government service of Berlin. And the public-spirited men of the city have for ten or twenty years been trying to do something with that corporation at the state capital; but the corporation has its lobby and continues to pay pig dividends upon its watered stock year after year. And then do the people of the city organise and go on strike against that corporation? No indeed—they pay. You know of the agitation for a parcels post; you know that under the parcels-post system an Englishman can send a package to California for one-third of what it costs us to send one from New York. In Germany a ten-pound package may be sent anywhere in the Empire for twelve cents; and our post office pays the railroads more for its service than all the rest of the civilised world combined, though the quantity of mail matter carried is less than that of Great Britain, France and Germany alone! Yet we know that it is a waste of ink setting these facts forth. Is not the president of the United States Express Company the United States senator from your own state? The railroad systems of this country have, of course, their lobby in every state capital, and in Washington as well; and every single year the railroad systems of this country slaughter and maim the equivalent of a Gettysburg campaign—there were as many people killed in the last three years as the British lost in the entire Boer war. Yet there is not the least reason for this; the railroads could, if they chose, build cars which will not crumble up like matchboxes—they have proven it by killing only six Pullman-car passengers in the same three years. But of course you have to pay a large sum extra to ride in a Pullman car. If you cannot pay with money, you pay with your bones—in either case, of course, you pay.