Of course, the newspapers that you read will tell you there are other ways of beating the robber Coal Trust than by voting against it. They will tell you that the Coal Trust can be “regulated” or indicted and convicted into decency. Ask your newspapers what makes them think so. We have many great trusts in this country—has a single one of them ever been regulated into decency? Have they been so ruthlessly pursued in court that they were willing to be decent? You know the answer. You know there is not a decent great trust in the country. You know that every attempt to drive them into decency has failed. Yet your newspapers have the impudence to tell you that it is not necessary that the government should own the anthracite mines and the railroads. It would be difficult to imagine a more amazing situation. Here we have in this country two sharply contrasted classes of opinion. One opinion is that institutions like the Coal Trust should be regulated or destroyed—compelled to go back to competition. The other opinion is that institutions like the Coal Trust can neither be regulated nor compelled to break up into small parts and compete. The men who hold the first opinion can not point to a single instance wherein their belief has been justified by events. The men who hold the second opinion have only common sense with which to back up their assertion that, if the government owned the coal mines and the railroads, Coal Trust magnates and railway multi-millionaires could not rob us. But in this instance, as in all others where the robbery of the many by the few is concerned, truth is put upon the defensive. The grafters, as they might naturally be expected to do, not only shower upon the truth-tellers their scorn and derision, but even the people who are being robbed are doubtful or suspicious. They are not so certain that if robbers be stopped robbery will be stopped. They suspect the statement that, if nothing be taken from something, something will remain untouched. They want us to prove, not only that two and two make four, but that nothing from four leaves four. But they don’t ask the “regulation” send-them-to-jail gentlemen to prove anything. When these grafters say two from four leave four nobody expresses a doubt. Everybody is ready to believe that that which has never been done can be easily done. Few are ready to believe that that which might easily be done can be done at all.