At any rate, this is true of all civilized countries except the United States. This is the only modern State wherein coercive military powers are still wielded by individuals. In the United States it is still possible for rich and powerful individuals or for corporations to employ their own bands of armed men. If any legislator were to propose a law allowing any man or group of men to have their own private battleships and to organize their own private navies and armies, or if anyone suggested the turning over of the coercive powers of the State to private enterprise, the masses would rise in rebellion against the project. No congressman would, of course, venture to suggest such a law, and few individuals would undertake to defend such a plan. Yet the fact is that now, without legal authority, private armies may be employed and are indeed actually employed in the United States. In the most stealthy and insidious manner there has grown up within the last fifty years an extensive and profitable commerce for supplying to the lords of finance their own private police. And the strange fact appears that the newest, and supposedly the least feudal, country is to-day the only country that allows the oldest anarchists to keep in their hands the power to arm their own mercenaries and, in the words of an eminent Justice, to expose "the lives of citizens to the murderous assaults of hireling assassins."[2] It is with these "hireling assassins," who, for the convenience of the wealthy, are now supplied by a great network of agencies, that we shall chiefly concern ourselves in this chapter. We must here leave Europe, since it is in the United States alone that the workings of this barbarous commerce in anarchy can be observed.