es between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted
by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal
among the profligate, idle rich?

I could get fifty thousand workingmen in Pittsburg to read long,
disgusting accounts of bestiality and vice more easily than I could
get five hundred to read a pamphlet on the Labor Problem, on the
wrongfulness of things as they are and how they might be made better.
The masters are wiser, Jonathan. They watch and guard their own
interests better than the workers do.

If you owned the tools with which you work, my friend, and whatever
you could produce belonged to you, either to use or to exchange for
the products of other workers, there would be some reason in your
Fourth of July boasting about this

Blest land of Liberty.

But you don't. You, and all other wage-earners, depend upon the
goodwill and the good judgment of the men who own the land, the mines,
the factories, the railways, and practically all other means of
producing wealth for the right to live. You don't own the raw
material, the machinery or the railways; you don't control your own
jobs. Most of you don't even own your own miserable homes. These
things are owned by a small class of, people when their number is
compared with the total population. The workers produce the wealth of
this and every other country, but they do not own it. They get just
enough to keep them alive and in a condition to go on producing
wealth--as long as the master class sees fit to have them do it.

Most of the capitalists do not, _as capitalists_, contribute in any
manner to the production of wealth. Some of them do render services of
one kind and another in the management of the industries they are
connected with. Some of them are directors, for example, _but they are
always paid for their services before there is any distribution of
profits_. Even when their "work" is quite perfunctory and useless,
mere make-believe, like the games of little children, they get paid
far more than the actual workers. But there are many people who own
stock in the company you work for, Jonathan, who never saw the
foundries, who were never in the city of Pittsburg in their lives,
whose knowledge of the affairs of the company is limited to the stock
quotations in the financial columns of the morning papers.

Think of it: when you work and produce a dollar's worth of wealth by
your labor, it is divided up. You get only a ve