Look, Mr. Steffens; you go from town to city, and from city to state, and everywhere you show us hordes of political parasites battening on corruption; and you tell us that the fortunes that they make represent but a small portion of what is made by the “big business men” who bribe them. Magee and Quay, you tell us, made thirty millions out of the street railroads of Pittsburg; and all over this land, year in and year out, such sums are being “made.” And soon afterward came Mr. Lawson’s story of how the Standard Oil group “made” forty-six million dollars in a single deal without turning over their hands. Mr. Lawson expatiates upon this way of “making” dollars—he makes reflections which I had often wondered if you were making. I have wondered if you realised entirely that these millions of dollars were _real_ dollars? Dollars that a man might spend, just the same as any other dollars—with which he might purchase food that men had toiled to raise, and houses that men had toiled to build! I am writing these words in October, and the windows of my room look out upon a cornfield. All the year long I have watched a farmer and his son at work in this field—first plowing it, then harrowing it back and forth and across, then planting the corn, patiently, row by row. The field is ten acres in size, and it seemed to me that not a week passed all summer that the farmer was not plowing and weeding it; and now that the fall has come he has cut it stalk by stalk, and stacked it; and now I can see him and his son sitting on the bare, bleak hillside this morning, husking it, ear by ear. That will take them all of two or three weeks, and when the whole thing has been done they will gather up the ears to cart them to town, and the farmer will have five hundred bushels of corn and will get for them two hundred and fifty dollars. And then I read Mr. Lawson’s account of how the Rockefellers “made” forty-six million dollars out of Amalgamated Copper—and strive to realise that what they made was the equivalent of the labour of the farmer and the farmer’s sons and the farmer’s horses in one hundred and eighty-six thousand ten-acre cornfields such as the one I look out upon!