heir robes, and you will doubtless be the nobles.
Poverty and riches only discriminate betwixt
you.--_Machiavelli._

Thou shalt not steal. _Thou shalt not be stolen from._--_Thomas
Carlyle._

I want you to consider, friend Jonathan, the fact that in this and
every other civilized country there are two classes. There are, as it
were, two nations in every nation, two cities in every city. There is
a class that lives in luxury and a class that lives in poverty. A
class constantly engaged in producing wealth but owning little or none
of the wealth produced and a class that enjoys most of the wealth
without the trouble and pain of producing it.

If I go into any city in America I can find beautiful and costly
mansions in one part of the city, and miserable, squalid tenement
hovels in another part. And I never have to ask where the workers
live. I know that the people who live in the mansions don't produce
anything; that the wealth producers alone are poor and miserably
housed.

Republican and Democratic politicians never ask you to consider such
things. They expect you to let _them_ do all the thinking, and to
content yourself with shouting and voting for them. As a Socialist, I
want you to do some thinking for yourself. Not being a politician, but
a simple fellow-citizen, I am not interested in having you vote for
anything you do not understand. If you should offer to vote for
Socialism without understanding it, I should beg you not to do it. I
want you to vote for Socialism, of course, but not unless you know
what it means, why you want it and how you expect to get it. You see,
friend Jonathan, I am perfectly frank with you, as I promised to be.

You will remember, I hope, that in your letter to me you made the
objection that the Socialists are constantly stirring up class hatred,
setting class against class. I want to show you now that this is _not
true_, though you doubtless believed that it was true when you wrote
it. I propose to show you that in this great land of ours there are
two great classes, the "shearers and the shorn," to adopt Talleyrand's
phrase. And I want you to side with the _shorn_ instead of with the
_shearers_, because, if I am not sadly mistaken, my friend, _you are
one of the shorn_. Your natural interests are with the workers, and
all the workers are shorn and robbed, as I shall try to show you.

You work in one of the great steel foundries of Pittsburg, I
understand. You a