There was a reliance on nature--an idea that men had interfered with the harmonious action of great principles which if left to themselves would work out universal wellbeing for the human race. Others imagined that the inequalities between men were necessary--that they were part of a divine plan, and that all would be adjusted in some other world--that the poor here would be the rich there, and the rich here might be in torture there. Heaven became the reward of the poor, of the slave, and hell their revenge. When our Government was established it was declared that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It was then believed that if all men had an equal opportunity, if they were allowed to make and execute their own laws, to levy their own taxes, the frightful inequalities seen in the despotisms and monarchies of the old world would entirely disappear. This was the dream of 1776. The founders of the Government knew how kings and princes and dukes and lords and barons had lived upon the labor of the peasants. They knew the history of those ages of want and crime, of luxury and suffering. But in spite of our Declaration, in spite of our Constitution, in spite of universal suffrage, the inequalities still exist. We have the kings and princes, the lords and peasants, in fact, if not in name. Monopolists, corporations, capitalists, workers for wages, have taken their places, and we are forced to admit that even universal suffrage cannot clothe and feed the world. For thousands of years men have been talking and writing about the great law of supply and demand--and insisting that in some way this mysterious law has governed and will continue to govern the activities of the human race. It is admitted that this law is merciless--that when the demand fails, the producer, the laborer, must suffer, must perish--that the law feels neither pity nor malice--it simply acts, regardless of consequences. Under this law capital will employ the cheapest. The single man can work for less than the married. Wife and children are luxuries not to be enjoyed under this law. The ignorant have fewer wants than the educated, and for this reason can afford to work for less. The great law will give employment to the single and to the ignorant in preference to the married and intelligent. The great law has nothing to do with food or clothes, with filth or crime. It cares nothing for homes, for penitentiaries, or asylums. It simply acts--and some men triumph, some succeed, some fail, and some perish. Others insist that the curse of the world is monopoly. And yet, as long as some men are stronger than others, as long as some are more intelligent than others, they must be, to the extent of such advantage, monopolists. Every man of genius is a monopolist.