obbly little lamb
between a lion and a tiger. If one doesn't get you, the other will. And
if the Plutocracy gets you first, why it's only a matter of time when
the Proletariat gets the Plutocracy.

"Even your present wealth is not a true measure of your power. The
strength of your wealth at this moment is only an empty shell. That is
why you are crying out your feeble little battle-cry, 'Return to the
ways of our fathers.' You are aware of your impotency. You know that
your strength is an empty shell. And I'll show you the emptiness of it.

"What power have the farmers? Over fifty per cent are thralls by virtue
of the fact that they are merely tenants or are mortgaged. And all of
them are thralls by virtue of the fact that the trusts already own or
control (which is the same thing only better)--own and control all
the means of marketing the crops, such as cold storage, railroads,
elevators, and steamship lines. And, furthermore, the trusts control
the markets. In all this the farmers are without power. As regards their
political and governmental power, I'll take that up later, along with
the political and governmental power of the whole middle class.

"Day by day the trusts squeeze out the farmers as they squeezed out Mr.
Calvin and the rest of the dairymen. And day by day are the merchants
squeezed out in the same way. Do you remember how, in six months, the
Tobacco Trust squeezed out over four hundred cigar stores in New York
City alone? Where are the old-time owners of the coal fields? You know
today, without my telling you, that the Railroad Trust owns or controls
the entire anthracite and bituminous coal fields. Doesn't the Standard
Oil Trust* own a score of the ocean lines? And does it not also control
copper, to say nothing of running a smelter trust as a little side
enterprise? There are ten thousand cities in the United States to-night
lighted by the companies owned or controlled by Standard Oil, and in
as many cities all the electric transportation,--urban, suburban, and
interurban,--is in the hands of Standard Oil. The small capitalists who
were in these thousands of enterprises are gone. You know that. It's the
same way that you are going.

* Standard Oil and Rockefeller--see upcoming footnote:
"Rockefeller began as a member . . ."

"The small manufacturer is like the farmer; and small manufacturers
and farmers to-day are reduced, to all intents and purposes, to feudal
tenure. For that matter,