The capital engaged in your industries adjusts itself to all these burdens, and is quiet under them, because it can readily reimburse itself by transferring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no such escape for labor, which not only pays these monopoly exactions directly, but as a consumer is obliged by an indirect method to foot a large share of these bills for capital. Capital remains contented under these extraordinary demands for another reason. All monopoly enterprises, and especially that one of land, furnish the safest and most profitable reservoirs of investment for its surplus earnings, and when it does not already participate it looks forward to a partnership in their profits. You can readily understand, then, why the toilers of your city, at this period of its history, should show signs of sinking back into that dependent condition which characterizes them elsewhere upon your planet. A few among them, with great fortitude of restraint and large acquisitiveness, manage to lay by some of their earnings, but the margin between income and expense is so narrow that such a practice is not general. So that from the disabling vicissitudes of life, and a carelessness of habit induced by lack of ambition, comes that distressful state of existence, unknown on our planet, but common enough on yours, where a human being, with abundant stores of food and raiment surrounding him, suffers for enough of them to supply his moderate wants. Poverty, which before had been only exceptional and sporadic, assumes now the proportions of a numerous class among you, and out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, crime as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected husbandry.