Mr. Doctrinaire can see the process going on around us. He can see how great estates absorb small estates. Our legislation for one hundred years has been in the interest of capital against labor. A plutocracy which enjoys the principal benefits of government, and contributes almost nothing to the support of the government, has been built up: charters have been granted by which large corporations exploit the public; and in this way great estates, whether in stocks or bonds, or gold, or land, have been created. The same principles, the same favoritism, the same privilege, working in different ways, brought about the same results in France before the Revolution, in Rome before its downfall, in Egypt, in Persia, in the Babylonian Empire. If there is any one word which can be appropriately used as an epitaph for all the dead nations of antiquity, that word is “_privilege_.” The government was operated by a ruling class for the benefit of that class, and the result was national decay, national death. Mr. Doctrinaire asks me: “How did the ruling class at Rome come to control the money?” I might answer by asking him: “How did the controlling class in the United States come into control of the money?” He would certainly admit that they have got control of it. How did they get it? They took into their own hands, in the days of Alexander Hamilton, the control of governmental machinery. They erected a tariff system to give special privileges to manufacturers. Out of this has come the monopoly which the manufacturers enjoy of the American market, and the natural evolution of the tariff act which Alexander Hamilton put upon our statute book more than one hundred years ago, produced The Trusts. Again, the power to create a circulating medium to be used as money and to expand and contract this circulating medium, thereby controlling the rise and fall of markets, was a vicious principle embedded into our system by, Alexander Hamilton, more than one hundred years ago. Again, the granting of charters to private companies to exploit public utilities is another means by which our patrician class has secured the control of money. Now at Rome there was a similar process. Instrumentalities were different, the names of things were different, but the ruling class at Rome had the power of fixing the taxes, and they appropriated to themselves the proceeds of these taxes. They had the power of legislation in their hands and exploited the public for their own benefit. In this way they secured, of course, the control of money. The one advantage of paying no tax themselves and of appropriating to themselves the taxes which they levied upon the plebeians was sufficient to give them not only the control of money, but the control of the land and of the man. In fact that tremendous power, to fix the taxes and to appropriate the public revenue, is all that the ruling class of any country need have in order to establish an intolerable despotism over the unfavored classes.