Now, my neighbors and I, who together make up the government, suppress brigandage. Instead of three fourths of my crop being wasted by struggle for possession, it is all sold the very day it is carted to market. Instead of exchanging my hoe for a gun and chasing another man, I plant another crop of potatoes. Instead of helping me in the chase the policeman grows a crop of his own, and the bandit, knowing beforehand that it is impossible to live by robbery, ceases to watch for possible victims and raises his own potatoes instead of taking mine. Without proper governmental interference the three of us have only a portion of one crop of potatoes between us. AS THE RESULT OF GOVERNMENTAL ACTION, WE HAVE THREE FULL CROPS. THE GOVERNMENT, BY LEGISLATIVE "EDICT" OR "FIAT," if you please, CREATES TWO AND THREE-QUARTERS CROPS OF POTATOES. WE CAN VOTE OURSELVES RICH. And of each dollar voted into our pockets, not more than fifteen cents will be stolen property reclaimed. The other eighty-five cents will be a new product, rescued from waste or destruction. The saddest feature of our present industrial cannibalism is that where one dollar is stolen at least seven dollars are wasted. THE PREVENTABLE WASTES OF CIVILIZATION CAN MAKE EARTH A PARADISE. PROSPERITY, "THE McKINLEY" AND OTHER BRANDS. We can vote our country prosperous. But it is very essential that we understand clearly WHOM we mean when we say "country." We have been voting for one kind of prosperity for a long time, even before the "McKinley brand," was on the market. Our mistake has been in not asking the "Advance Agents" to tell us whose prosperity they represented. If a burglar is emptying your wife's jewelry box, and filling his trousers pockets with the contents of your safe, prosperity to him means ruin to you, and your success means the burglar's death. So, in the larger affairs of our nation, the kind of prosperity hoped for by the plunderers of the people means ruin to their millions of victims, while good times for the workers, the farmers, the merchants, mean hard times to our despoilers. We now have the best times the world has ever seen. Mr. Rockefeller, or Robafellow--one is his name, the other ought to be--has an income of forty thousand dollars a day, and it is increasing. No country in the world has ever produced so much; never were there barns so bursting with grain, or warehouses so filled with clothing, furniture and jewels; never before so many men making from five to forty thousand dollars a day. This great National Joint Stock Company of ours, with its seventy million stockholders, is doing a thriving business and making barrels of money. There is only one objectionable feature. It is that after the labor of these seventy millions of people, their genius, their suffering and their sweat, are converted into wealth, the dividends are given to a few hundred men, while the rest of us pay the assessments.