The bad gangs of the young are usually held together by a misdirected love of play and adventure. The dangerous combinations of adults are consolidated by “the cohesive power of plunder.” That makes them a far more difficult proposition. Any local attack on saloons and vice resorts furnishes a laboratory demonstration of socialized evil. The object of both kinds of institutions is to make big profit by catering to desires which induce men to spend freely. Music and sociability are used as a bait. The people who profit by this trade are held together by the fear of a common danger. Since the community uses political means of curbing or suppressing the vice business, the vice group goes into politics to prevent it. It seeks to control the police, the courts, the political machines by sharing part of its profits. Lawyers, officials, newspaper proprietors, and real estate men are linked up and summoned like a feudal levy in case of danger. Drugstores, doctors, chauffeurs, messenger boys, and all kinds of people are used to bring in trade and make it secure. The exploded fictions of alcoholism are kept circulating. Like a tape-worm in the intestines, these articulated and many-jointed parasitic organizations of vice make our communities sick, dirty, and decadent. We have learned to read the sordid trail of the drink and vice traffic in American communities. There is another kind of organized evil, even more ancient, pervasive, and deadly, which few understand, though it has left a trail sufficiently terrible. Wherever we look in the history of the older nations, we see an alignment of two fundamental classes. The one is born to toil, stunted by toil, and gets its class characteristics by toil. The other is characterized by the pleasures and arts of leisure, is physically and mentally developed by leisure, and proud and jealous of its leisure. This class is always class-conscious; its groups, however antagonistic, always stand together against the class of toil. Its combination of leisure and wealth is conditioned on the power of taking tribute from the labor of many. In order to do this with safety, it must control political power, the military outfit, the power of making, interpreting and executing the laws, and the forces forming public opinion. Before the advent of industrialism and political democracy, it secured its income by controlling the land and the government of nations; and the effects of its control can be read in the condition of the rural population of Russia, Austria, Eastern Germany, Italy, France before the Revolution, England, and especially Ireland. The development of industry has changed the problem of economic and political control; but the essentials remain, as we can see in the condition of industrial communities and the history of labor legislation.