For a number of years the “money power” has been given a much needed rest in the West and South. Most of the pioneers there have substituted the term “plutocracy.” But in the East reformers are just now beginning to sit up and take notice. One hears the term frequently. “Roosevelt,” said Jacob Riis, in a recent interview in the _New York Herald_, “is fighting the greatest tyrant of them all. Slavery affected only the South, but the Money Power means the enslavement of all human beings and all homes.” Many an old, long-whiskered farmer said the same thing just as well fifteen years ago—and the _Herald_ called him an anarchist. “The Senate,” says Ernest Crosby in the March _Cosmopolitan_, “is now the agent of the Money Power—the representative of Wall Street.” Absolutely true; and no one can doubt the sincerity of either Mr. Crosby or the _Cosmopolitan_; but when the farmers of the West and South said the same thing fifteen years ago, they were greeted with hoots and jeers from the East. I don’t say that Messrs. Riis and Crosby joined in the hooting and jeering; I am quite sure they did not; but they are accorded a respectful hearing in making statements for the making of which thousands of respectable men fifteen years ago were branded as anarchists, wild-eyed fanatics, lunatics, and so forth. The world _do move_. L. H. B. [Illustration] _The Russian Apostle of Populism_ BY THOMAS C. HUTTON Fifty years ago a grayheaded prisoner, neglected, gaunt, unbefriended, died in the dungeons of Schlüsselburg, and today a thousand Russian cities are ringing with the name of Mikal Bakunin, the apostle of Populism, one of the many reformers who were stoned by a contemporary public and sainted by its descendants. Russia spurned the impassioned orator; Germany exiled him, after a few months of toleration, and now his projects are discussed by millions who seem determined to give them a fair trial. “A pack of knout-serving flunkeys,” Bakunin called the German officials who enforced the frontier-laws in the interest of the Czar, and soon after a messenger in uniform served him with a copy of the Prussian press-laws, and a hint at the expedience of making himself invisible. His virulent tongue hurt him a good deal, and his popularity was somewhat modified by his social radicalism; but the long neglect of his revenue plan is one of the strangest facts in the literature of political economy. One might as well reject Kepler’s solar hypothesis, because the great astronomer got a little cloudy on the question of witchcraft. And, after all, Bakunin only whispered his matrimonial theories, but shouted his tax-protests before multitudes who ought to have known better than to class them with his chimeras. Briefly stated, his main reform plan is this: That governments ought to earn their own revenues as they cast their own cannon and build their own battleships.