More than this, as I have pointed out already in a phrase, the growing knowledge on the part of the people of the ways and means by which they have been exploited for the creation of wealth will surely prevent any further long-continued growth of this same process. Men are being sent up to congress year by year sworn to break up and destroy the coördinate political machine that has made possible the growth of the power of the trusts. Earnest fighters like La Follette may well be watched, for though no little of his work and his talk is based on fallacy, yet in this at least he represents the temper of the whole United States, that he is a bitter and an ardent enemy of the concentration of wealth. The agitation over the Guggenheim claims in Alaska, the bursts of popular acclaim over land-fraud prosecutions in the West, the sardonic joy of the people over the retrieving of enormous coal land areas stolen by railroads, the warm enthusiasm of the West for government reclamation, conservation, and preëmption--these are signs of the times all pointing in the one direction. They do not mark the end of the idle rich, to-day existent. They do point unmistakably toward the prevention of a new crop of great American fortunes won through exploitation of government property and popular rights. If you couple with them the ever-growing movement toward Socialism, and the hundred and one private propaganda along strange and often faulty economic lines, you cannot help but feel as I feel, that even if there were a revolution, in a hundred years, when the present great fortunes of America are subdivided, split up, and scattered among a thousand heirs, the wealth of America will certainly not be held ninety-five per cent. in the hands of five per cent. of the people and five per cent. in the hands of the rest of the people. And it is self-evident that since the gathering together of wealth in the hands of the few gave us the idle rich, the natural scattering of that wealth into more and more hands as the years go on must tend in the other direction. _The days of the idle rich in America are as a tale that is told. To-morrow in this land there will be one of two things, either an evolution or a revolution._ _... The class I represent will again be merged into and assimilated by the body of the nation.... We shall reënact in this land some of the most terrible tragedies of history._ _Chapter Eleven_ THE END OF THE STORY