Is it not obvious that if I were to have the power to call a piece of paper one dollar and to put it into circulation, exchanging it for two bushels of corn, I could only do it by diminishing the value of every other dollar in the country a certain small amount? Supposing that the total wealth of the country was one billion dollars, I should diminish every single dollar by one-billionth. Suppose that similarly I “made” one million dollars—by any sort of “making” whatever save by producing some useful thing and increasing the total wealth of the country—I should then tax the holder of every dollar one mill. A man who owned ten thousand dollars would be robbed by me of ten dollars—he would be robbed of it just as literally and as actually as if I had broken into his house and stolen his watch. He would not know that he was robbed, perhaps—all that he would know would be that when he spent his ten thousand dollars he would not get quite so much. In Dun’s and Bradstreet’s the event would be recorded in the statement that the cost of living had risen one-tenth of one per cent. since last week, and that interest rates had similarly declined. And now here is the young girl who works in the sweatshops of Chicago for a wage of forty cents a week, as thousands of them do. The great Amalgamated Copper deal is consummated, Mr. Rockefeller and his fellow-conspirators “make” forty-six million dollars—and the young girl’s wage becomes thirty-nine cents and a fraction. At forty cents she was hanging on for her life; at thirty-nine cents and a fraction she enters the nearest brothel. Here is the little child of eight years toiling from six at night till six in the morning in the midst of throbbing cotton-looms for nine cents. Magee and Quay of Pittsburg “make” thirty million dollars in street railroads—and the little child’s wage becomes eight cents and a fraction. At nine cents he was starving; at eight and a fraction he faints, and the machinery seizes him, and his arm has been torn out of him before anyone can answer his screams. So it is, Mr. Steffens, that there are people in this country to whom the difference between to-day and to-morrow is simply a difference between life and death.