all wanderers, looking for jobs without settled places, paying board as
I do, or living in rented places. One of them may own his house. Some
laborers do, not many. They are like the factory workers, the whole
breed of workers throughout the land. The Civil War did not make them
prosperous, or change their real status. It seems that the God of
nature still rules, and that Darwin is his best prophet. These men are
free to work or to starve. Some things have changed. It is no longer
against the law to send abolition literature through the mail. But it is
against the law to incite laborers to strike, whether they are white or
black, and it is against the law for laborers, white or black, to
organize themselves into unions. The slave owners were pretty well
organized once, both financially and politically, but now the
corporations are much better organized than the slave owners were. The
negro did not dare to rebel against his master. And now the law prevents
the laborer from organizing against the corporation. We have freedom
now, but of a different quality. It has changed its base, but is there
more of it?

A freight train goes by nearly a mile long. It is laden with coal, oil,
iron. I can't believe that the soil is free. Coal and oil and iron have
too much of it. I think of the banners borne in the campaign of 1860,
when Baron Renfrew stood that night on the balcony of his hotel. He will
soon be king of England and emperor of India. And some one--either the
men who carried those banners or their sons--some one now has a complete
overlordship of this United States.

Why did not these banners make free men and a free soil? I suspect that
the banner of protection to American industries was as influential at
least as the free soil banner. It was easy after the war to force the
XIV Amendment on the country, to give citizenship to the negro so far as
his color had kept him out of it. It remained for the courts to call the
corporations citizens and to fit to their backs the coat of equal
protection of the laws, which they told us was cut and sewed for the
negro. Hence this long freight train with coal, oil, and iron--all very
well, but where are the free men and the free soil that Reverdy's son
died for?

Cries are now being uttered of capitalistic America. Also they say the
Supreme Court is always the mouthpiece of the dominant influence. That
was what was said when Taney decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen.
"The cour