-to leave the soil and become
vagrants, in brief, to starve. And even there they were frustrated, for
stringent vagrancy laws were passed and rigidly enforced.

Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole communities of
farmers, escaped expropriation by virtue of exceptional conditions. But
they were merely strays and did not count, and they were gathered in
anyway during the following year.*

* The destruction of the Roman yeomanry proceeded far less
rapidly than the destruction of the American farmers and
small capitalists. There was momentum in the twentieth
century, while there was practically none in ancient Rome.

Numbers of the farmers, impelled by an insane lust for the
soil, and willing to show what beasts they could become,
tried to escape expropriation by withdrawing from any and
all market-dealing. They sold nothing. They bought
nothing. Among themselves a primitive barter began to
spring up. Their privation and hardships were terrible, but
they persisted. It became quite a movement, in fact. The
manner in which they were beaten was unique and logical and
simple. The Plutocracy, by virtue of its possession of the
government, raised their taxes. It was the weak joint in
their armor. Neither buying nor selling, they had no money,
and in the end their land was sold to pay the taxes.

Thus it was that in the fall of 1912 the socialist leaders, with the
exception of Ernest, decided that the end of capitalism had come. What
of the hard times and the consequent vast army of the unemployed; what
of the destruction of the farmers and the middle class; and what of the
decisive defeat administered all along the line to the labor unions; the
socialists were really justified in believing that the end of capitalism
had come and in themselves throwing down the gauntlet to the Plutocracy.

Alas, how we underestimated the strength of the enemy! Everywhere the
socialists proclaimed their coming victory at the ballot-box, while, in
unmistakable terms, they stated the situation. The Plutocracy accepted
the challenge. It was the Plutocracy, weighing and balancing, that
defeated us by dividing our strength. It was the Plutocracy, through its
secret agents, that raised the cry that socialism was sacrilegious
and atheistic; it was the Plutocracy that whipped the churches, and
especially the Catholic Church, into line, and robbed us o