He tells them, for example, that wages and the expense of living have not kept equable pace with each other--that the smaller rate of wage which the worker received fifteen or twenty years ago may really have been a higher rate of wage because the man who got it was able to buy more with it. He tells us that it is a bad thing that children should be compelled to work for a living at an age when they ought to be in school or playing the games which nature intends children shall play. He points to the employer as he rides by in his $4,000 touring car, and he asks how long it has been since you have had a ride in an automobile. He reads to you the newspaper report of an elaborate dinner given by “society women” to their poodle dogs, and supplements it with another item, from the same paper, telling the number of people who have died of starvation during the past six months. With eloquent words, vibrant with sympathy, he paints a picture that makes your blood boil with indignation, and the worst of it is that the things he describes are true. Every man, if his heart is in the proper place, knows that things are not right. He knows that there are plenty of workers to-day who do not earn money enough to enable them to live decently. He knows that workingmen do not make their wives and children toil in the factories for the mere joy of knowing that they are not idle. The worker is not so blind to the advantages of education, that he does not want to see his children well-educated. If he insists upon their going to work instead of to school, it is because he needs the few dollars which they can earn to supplement somewhat his own too meagre wage. The worker is justified in not being satisfied with his lot. If a man is treated unjustly, he has a moral right to protest; and I am the last person who would wish to deny him that right. At the same time, I am going to take exception to one statement that the soap-box orator makes. He tells us that Socialism is the one and only solution of all the industrial and social evils of the world. He asserts that, if enough of us will vote the Socialist ticket, we can get the industries away from their present owners and own them ourselves, paying ourselves for our labor by taking all the profits that now go to the men who furnish the capital to carry on the business. If this were true--and that were all there was to it--I might be a Socialist. It is because it is impossible for it to be true that I am writing these letters; and, before I have finished, I think you will admit that I shall have proved that the soap-box orator is talking “through his hat.”