And if you grant this and begin to examine the millions in that light—what perplexities you come upon! Only take the tariff, for instance—is there a dollar invested in the business of this country to-day which has not profited by that, and which is therefore not made up out of the tiny contributions of thousands of persons who not only do not own that dollar, but do not own any other dollar? And then consider that the beginnings of most of our great fortunes were made in Civil War times, when the nation in its extremity paid two dollars for every dollar in value it received! And consider the chaos of political corruption that followed, the twenty years of plundering of every variety that American ingenuity could invent, from Black Friday to the Western land grabs and railroad steals! Try to figure how many crimes are represented by the Vanderbilt millions, how many by the Goulds’s; think of the commercial assassinations represented by the word Standard Oil—the secret rebates and discriminations, the wholesale buyings of legislatures and elections; think of the whole institution of corruption of the present day, of the “System,” intrenched in village and town, city, and state, and nation, owning both parties, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of the Government, the schools, the colleges, the pulpits, the press, literature, and art, and public opinion—making it, not figuratively and hyperbolically, but literally, simply, and indisputably the fact that there is not to-day in the land a place where a man can take a dollar and invest it, and get back a copper cent that is not tainted with corruption, polluted by violence, treason, and crime, and stained with the blood and tears of uncounted thousands of agonised women and children!