But we promise you more. We promise you that, if you will give us power, we will give you not only the continuous opportunity to work, but we will give you continuous freedom from robbery. Again, nothing is simpler than to work without robbery. All that is necessary is to enable the worker to go to work without walking into anyone’s clutches. No one can now go to work without walking into many men’s clutches. When a man goes to work for the Steel Trust, he walks into the clutches of everybody who owns the stocks or the bonds of the trust. When a man goes to work for a railway company, he walks into the clutches of every person who owns the stocks or the bonds of the railway company. In other words, the stock and bondholders of these institutions, by virtue of their control of the machinery involved, have it in their power to say whether the worker shall work or not work. They say he shall not work unless they can make a profit upon his labor. The worker cannot haggle too long because he must labor or starve. Therefore, he comes to terms. He walks into the clutches of those who want to rob him of part of what he produces. He consents to work for a wage that represents only a part of what he has produced. That is robbery. You may call it business, but it is robbery. If robbery is anything, it is the taking of the property of another against his will. The worker knows his wage is not all he earns. He resents the fact that he must toil long and hard for a poor living, while his employer lives in luxury without doing any useful labor. But the worker has no alternative. He must consent. He does consent. Under Socialism, there would be no such robbery, because goods would not be produced for profit. Goods would be produced only because the people wanted them. Whatever the people wanted would be produced, not in niggardly volume, but in abundance. Decent homes, for instance, would be produced. Millions of people in the great cities now live in houses that are death-traps. They are not houses, in the sense that country dwellers understand the word, but dingy rooms, piled one upon another in great blocks. Light seldom enters some of them. Fresh air can hardly get into any of them. The germs of tuberculosis abound. The germs of other diseases swirl through the dust of the streets. The death-rate is abnormally high—particularly the death-rate of children. Yet, nothing would be simpler, if the profit-seeking capitalists were shorn of their power, than to give every human being in this country a decent home.