The firm gave way to the corporation. Industries that had been for generations family affairs were suddenly capitalized in the form of stocks and bonds, and the owners retired from the active business, hiring skilled men to carry on the work. They themselves sat down in comfort and ease and luxury to draw their sustenance from interest and dividends on the securities that represented the plants. Into the mighty cities of the East there moved an ever-growing army of those who had gathered, from the mines of California, from the forges of Pittsburg, from the forests of Michigan, from the metalled mountains of Montana, wealth beyond the dreams of Midas. They had capitalized the products of their own labour, and brought with them the tangible evidences of wealth in the shape of stocks and bonds. I remember very well the first great march of the suddenly rich upon the social capitals of the nation. Very distinctly it comes back to me with what a shock the fact came home to the sons and daughters of what was pleased to call itself the aristocracy of America that here marched an army better provisioned, better armed with wealth, than any other army that had ever assaulted the citadels of Society. The effect of these immigrations from the fields of labour to the cities of capital I shall sketch more fully in another chapter. I would now, instead, touch upon the conditions that they left behind them, the conditions that made possible their own retirement from actual labour to the ease and comfort of luxurious leisure. It is not too much to say that they left behind them a people reduced to industrial slavery. Gone forever was the free America our fathers knew. Faded into history was the ideal of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln. From the year 1890 onward the progress of the United States has been the fearful march of manufacturing industry. In that year the products of industry and agricultural wealth were about equal. Ten years later the products of industry were two to one against the wealth gathered from the fields. Side by side with this conquest of America went the growth of tenant farming, as against the old free tenure farming that had marched steadily into the farthest untilled corners of the land so long as land was free. To-day there is no free land within the borders of the nation, save for a few small tracts hardly worth mentioning. Here, as in the industries, capital did not hesitate to claim and capture all that it dared. Law after law was passed to prevent the centralization of the power of exploiters over great tracts of the West. Law after law was broken, evaded, or laughed at. Once the spirit of exploitation on a large scale was abroad in the land, nothing could stand against it.