There can be no doubt but that the unlimited privileges of capital in these directions have greatly accelerated your material progress. The speedy utilization of the immense resources of your own republic has hidden and disguised the evil it was gradually producing. The new fields of labor opened by the many monopoly enterprises have satisfied and quieted it; and the open invitation, for the time being, of a partnership with capital in the occupancy of the soil for purposes of cultivation, leaves no apparent ground of complaint among the masses who toil. Thus have your demands for labor been so much greater than the supply, that large accessions have been drawn from the older countries of the Earth. These furnishing the bone and sinew for still more rapid development, your progress has become the wonder of the age. You will perceive, however, that the general prosperity among all classes of your society, and the absence of any great public grievance, is just that condition which render the incursions of capital and wealth easy, so that during all your enormous accumulations by the hands of your workers, out of which they have little to show of gain besides their living expenses, the most stupendous moneyed fortunes of history have fallen into the hands of the few. Unlike the older countries of the Earth, where the increasing poverty of the masses is a natural and unavoidable sequence of the large accumulations of wealth in few hands, your poor do not grow sensibly poorer during this unequal distribution. Your enormous resources hold up labor to a condition of comparative prosperity during all these inroads upon it. As a consequence, of the abundance which the bounties of nature have supplied to you, and the stimulated energies which your rewarded industries have induced, your labor unconsciously submits to the extraction of an unfair portion of the wealth it produces without individual suffering. The better condition of your workmen compared with those of other lands should not disguise the fact, however, that capital and wealth get new assurance, and encouraged to fresh demands upon the industries on this account. Although your poor do not yet grow sensibly poorer, your rich are getting immeasurably richer. The better opportunities for labor have brought millions of workers from abroad, who in their rapid development of the country have so immensely appreciated land values that the bosom of the Earth has been converted into a chattel for speculation, and the chief business of wealth has been to pocket the increase which it has not earned.