Having ground down the price of factory labor to such a low point that they can undersell foreigners in the foreign market, our Privileged and Protected Capitalists can nevertheless convince American laborers that the motive for high tariffs is to enable the Capitalist to pay big wages! And they swallowed it—the wage-earners swallow it, meekly, blindly, trustfully. The record of a Century teaches them nothing. The evidences of their own senses are ignored. The very factory hands who at Fall River lived off the soup of the Salvation Army devoutly believed that if it hadn’t been for the Protective system they wouldn’t even have got the soup. The factory girl who is paid five dollars per week, and who, when she complains that she cannot live on the wage, is sardonically advised to get a gentleman friend, actually believes that were it not for Privilege and Protection she would not get the five dollars. God in heaven! No wonder that George McDuffie expressed his doubt as to whether the masses could ever be enlightened. No wonder his prophetic speech vibrated with an undertone of despair. Less than one-tenth of the laborers of this country own their homes; yet _they_ have been Protected for a hundred years. Less than a quarter million men own practically the entire wealth of the whole United States; yet Privilege and Protection are _not_ for their benefit. You go to the millions of Unprivileged and Unprotected citizens and you point out to them how they are plundered by being made to pay twice as much as they should on every article which they buy. They understand it; they admit the fact; but the corrupt politician has taught them what to say. This is the lesson: “Yes; we pay twice as much as the goods are worth, but it is patriotic and humane, because we thereby enable millions of American wage-earners to get big wages.” Fine, isn’t it? If the man who repeats that little lesson, and believes it, would go into the districts where Protection is and where the system has been at work longest he will find himself in precisely the places where wages are lowest, where Capitalists are harshest, where squalor and vice are rankest, and where the maddened victims of our soulless wage-system are nursing in their hearts the passions of hell. _The Highest Office_ Let seasons come and go, let the sunlight and shadows fall where God’s pleasure puts them—do your duty as conscience and reason reveal it to you. Let no other man measure your work or your responsibilities; let no artful sophistry, in favor of the expedient, veil from your steadfast eyes the summits of Right. Let parties rise and fall; let time-servers flop and flounder, let the heedless praise of the hour lay its withering garlands at the feet of him who will purchase them by bending to every passing breeze, every popular whim, every local prejudice.