Somewhere there is something wrong. I speak as a rich man. I speak as a representative of the class of which I write, and to which in particular I address myself. We can no longer blind ourselves with idle phrases or drug our consciences with the outworn boast that the workingman of America is to-day the highest paid artisan in the world. We know those lying figures well. Many a time I myself, in personal argument, have shown that the American workman receives from one and a half to three times as much as his English cousin at the same trade; but we know now that it means nothing. We are learning, instead of envying the American workingman his lot, to pity more deeply that English cousin. We are learning, too, that what we give our workers in wages we take back from them in the higher cost of necessities, in food, in clothing, in medicine, in insurance--in a hundred devious ways all with one tendency--to keep the living margin down. Many centuries ago two great Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, predicted that the time would come when the tools of wealth production--machinery--would have reached such an advanced stage of development that it would become unnecessary to enslave anybody for the sake of allowing any one class to devote itself to the pursuit of culture. These great philosophers believed in slavery during that period of the world’s development in which they lived, on the ground that only by the exploitation of forced labour could any class be left free to develop the higher attributes of mankind. Yet both looked forward to the time when, in the progress of humanity toward the ideal, the perfection of methods would permit the emancipation of all mankind. Aristotle and Plato were no visionaries. Their dreams, so far as the methods are concerned, are to-day realities; but, alas, how different the result! Instead of emancipation we have welded about the necks of the people the chains of industrial slavery. It is true that the form of slavery, the direct exploitation of the bodies of men, has been wiped out in every civilized nation; but is it not equally true that since our own great struggle for freedom from the pollution of chattel slavery we have but stepped out of a process of direct exploitation of a few enchained slaves into a process far more expansive and embracing far more people, namely, the indirect exploitation of wage workers for the benefit of capital? The fruit of the genius of the inventors of the world is plucked not by the hands of the workers, but by the hands of the comparatively small and personally insignificant class who, by virtue of the genius of their fathers, or by virtue of mere chance, administer the tremendous power of capital.