For thirty years, since 1880, we have been piling up wealth in the hands of men who do not work. In almost every year there has been pouring from our mills a steady grist of idlers. It has gone so far that to-day, in every city of the Union, the class of the idle rich has reached proportions that to the thoughtful student of events are alarming. The millionaire habit has spread until to-day men of millions are far more numerous in our great cities than were men of one tenth the wealth twenty years ago. I do not desire to criticize wealth; for I am not a Socialist, and I entertain no Utopian dreams concerning the equal distribution of wealth among the people or the public control of all sources of wealth. I agree thoroughly with Mr. Carnegie, and with much older economists, in the opinion that any arbitrary distribution of wealth, or any arbitrary assignment of the sources of wealth, would be but temporary, and would be followed by another period of adjustment which would end with the reappropriation of wealth and the reassignment of the sources of wealth into the hands best qualified by nature to hold them. I take it to be proven by the experience of the world that individual exploitation of the sources of wealth remains as the established basis of the industrial, commercial, and social development of the world. Yet, I confess, the terrific sweep of industrialism across this land throughout the past century appalls me as I study it from records written and unwritten. I cannot go down through the crowded tenement sections of our great cities without having it borne in upon me that we as a nation pay a fearful price in human blood and tears for our industrial triumphs. I cannot see the poverty, even the degradation, of the wives and children of the wage-working class in many cities, and even in many rural districts, without being visited by the devastating thought that surely, if the principle of the thing be necessary and right, there must be fearful errors somewhere in the application of the principle. For the grim fact stands out beyond denial that the men who are the workers of the nation, and the women and the children dependent upon them, are not to-day given the opportunities that are their proper birthright in free America; and that, struggle as they will, save as they may, lift their voices in protest as they dare, they cannot obtain from our industrial hierarchy much more than a mere living wage. And, on the other hand, it is equally true that the wage of capital is high, that the class of idle rich has grown out of all proportion, and that it has taken upon itself a power and an arrogance unsurpassed in the industrial history of the world.