America, then, is a plutocracy. Always politically, the power of a plutocracy depends upon the maintenance of the _status quo_. It has come into being through the operation of certain industrial or commercial conditions. It lives by virtue of the continuance of those conditions, and by virtue of their freedom from attack by the one power strong enough to destroy them--namely, the people. To maintain this _status quo_ has been the gigantic task successfully carried out by the financial interests of the United States. It is not my intention--indeed, it is not within my power--to go into any complete details of the methods and machinery used for this end. It has not all been accomplished, by any means, through direct political corruption, though much of it has been accomplished in that way. The few scattered and unimportant instances of conviction are enough by themselves, without going into surmise at all, to establish the fact that in almost every state of the Union, and at the seat of the central government itself, there has been for thirty years past widespread corruption of political parties. Deeper than this, more sinister even than the most recent example of an administrative officer bound like a slave to the wheel of his master’s chariot, has been the indirect subornation of public opinion through a subsidized press, subsidized pulpits, and subsidized public speakers. We have heard a great deal of demagogues and wicked Socialistic leaders of the mob. We do not hear much of that other phenomenon, the oily sycophant who talks to the people with words of cheer and paragraphs of exhortation, having in his mind always the one single idea how best he may serve the moneyed interests that stand behind him. It is strange to me, and it has always been strange to other men who have studied these things, that the interests of a plutocracy can be so long maintained; for a plutocracy, of its very nature, is the weakest possible form of government. It lives either by force or by fraud. It lived in Rome before the days of Marius by force alone; and the lower orders of Rome were slaves. It lived in Paris before the Terror, by a combination of force and fraud; and the lower orders of France became fiendish brutes. It lives in America by fraud alone; and what may we say of the people of this nation who permit it to live?