Looking upon your civilization, we find in its modern aspects a wonderful increase in all the appliances and conditions which accumulate wealth. Among these may be specified a better and more economical division of labor, the discoveries of science, labor saving inventions, and altogether as a result, greatly increased productiveness. Added to these contributions of knowledge and science in the interest of the working class, you have, during the last century, experienced the most remarkable acquisition in favor of labor that was ever known upon your planet. I allude to the accession of new and fertile lands, over which the boundaries of civilization have been extended, and out of which, by the new methods and contrivances both of husbandry and transportation, the food supplies of the Earth have been made to flow in a steady stream toward the districts of their consumption. These immense advantages could not fail to have, in some degree, a beneficent effect upon your labor class. Inasmuch as your workmen of to-day are enabled to obtain more of the comforts of life than formerly, real wages may be said to have considerably advanced. Their share, however, of the wealth produced is as small a portion as formerly. By the modern necessities which custom has rendered difficult to avoid, they have become larger consumers, which in itself has enabled your capital, with its undue advantages, to increase its store out of all proportion to a fair division of the wealth produced. But the greater and cheaper food supply, and the abundant capital of your recent times, while serving to neutralize the depressing effect of increase of population in the labor ranks, and to institute a condition of general prosperity in trade and mercantile pursuits, has at the same time offered to all your monopolists of land the opportunity to extort, under the pressure of competition, the whole surplus of the earnings of your workmen. Precisely the same happy conditions which have brought a modicum of prosperity to them have created a richer field for your monopolists, and especially for those of them who by their ownership of city land can exact from the extended demands of business, and a rapidly multiplying population, an unfair portion of the wealth produced. The unlimited privilege of appropriating to themselves the utmost share of the profits of industry, gives a speculative value to the holdings of your landlords, and serves in turn to furnish them the excuse of a parallel in their charges for rent to the current rate of interest on money. If industry can be forced to make over to them a third of its earnings now, the possibilities of the future shadow golden dreams, which promise no less to them than the power of your imaginary Midas--dreams which encourage an easier wealth-making than was possessed by your olden barons, who by force of arms were enabled to hold,--what your modern law and custom equally allows,--the privilege