I believe that he was right. Without referring specifically to the tariff reform--for this is no political document that I am writing--I believe that the catalogue of legislative enactments by our administrative machine over the past twenty years reveals beyond the shadow of a doubt that the will of the people is subservient to the will of the plutocracy. How can we further blind ourselves to the truth? When such a fact is known as gospel to the people, from Maine to California, published in every section of the press, from the gutter-snipe class to the scholarly review, how may the best educated class in the United States go on upon its careless way ignoring the fact? The result is perfectly obvious in the light of history. The plutocracy, stripped of the artificial screens behind which it grew to power, stands exposed to-day in the full glare of the search-light of public knowledge. Under such circumstances, even in slave-holding nations, there has never lacked a tribune of the people. So sprung the Gracchi from the dust to lead the first great battle in Rome. So, even in the dawn of popular liberty, came a Tyler and a Cade, before their hour had struck, it is true, yet, even so, with power to call to their backs armies of men willing to die and conquerable only by accident or guile. So, in the fullness of time, came other greater men, a Marius, a Pitt, a Peel, who led the people onward and upward against the citadels of plutocracy. To-day we of the class that rules, that draws unearned profits from the toil of other men, know full well that the time is almost here when there must be a true accounting. The fortunes that have been made are made; and that is all of it. The fortunes that are in the making through misuse of political power, through extortionate exploitation of the people and the people’s heritage, through industrial oppression and industrial denial of the rights of man--these must be checked. To-morrow, in this land, the door of opportunity must be again unsealed. We cannot go back and create more free land to take the place of the millions upon millions of acres thrown away by a lavish, stupid, careless, traitorous government. We cannot fill again the plundered mines of Michigan or Montana or Pennsylvania. We cannot clothe the hills of Maine and Michigan again with pine, or the broad bottoms of Ohio with walnut. We cannot turn backward the hands of the clock, or re-create the economic factors that have been eliminated to make of their fragments the wealth and the social world to-day enjoyed by the exploiters and their descendants.