To-day we have labor unions, organizations that in the old West would have called forth indignant contempt in the mere suggestion. We have associations of managers to fight the unions; we have monopolies, combinations, masses, upon the one side and the other, contending, not working together harmoniously. We have become par excellence the people of castes and grades and classes. The whole theory of America was that here there was hope for the individual; that here he might grow, might prevail. It is degradation to abandon that theory. It is degradation for the American man to say of his own volition: “I am but one cog of a wheel, and my neighbor another. I can not change; I can not rise; I can not progress; I can not grow; I dare not hope.” The degradation of the industry shares the degradation of the individual. The joint degradation, if it be accepted as final, spells a national deterioration and a national ruin which may be gradual and slow, or may, in these swift-moving days, be rapid and cataclysmic in its nature. We have departed from the careful intent of that government which originally abolished for us even the law of primogeniture, a clause adopted in the state constitutions nearly throughout the Union. Our general public is more absolutely ruled by a few than is the case in any portion of the earth. Offsetting this, we boast of our “prosperity”! Let those that like call this a national prosperity. It is national fate, but there may be those that do not care to call it by the name of prosperity. Times are good when all the people are busy. Most of the people in the South were busy before the war; we called that slavery. It was as nothing compared to the industrial slavery impending over the American people to-day. It was simple by comparison as a problem. Tremendous indeed is the problem this implies, and grave and serious indeed should he be who attempts to solve it. We need statesmen, not politicians, to-day. We need men willing to do their duty in office, without regard to the question of their re-election to office. We have promised that our study of American transportation should bring us close to the heart of things in our national life. The promise may be made good in the review of the work of the iron trails in the Age of Transportation. It would be but raving to hold the captains of transportation alone responsible for the deplorable changes that are taking place in America and the American character; yet only an equal folly could deny that too little fearless statesmanship, combined with too much politics and too much ungoverned transportation, has been responsible for many of these changes. Any candid student of American transportation and of American politics will find himself irresistibly arriving at the great question of the unrestricted American immigration.