talist to rise through slow increment from
small beginnings. The gateway of opportunity after opportunity has been
closed, and closed for all time. Rockefeller has shut the door on oil,
the American Tobacco Company on tobacco, and Carnegie on steel. After
Carnegie came Morgan, who triple-locked the door. These doors will not
open again, and before them pause thousands of ambitious young men to
read the placard: NO THOROUGH-FARE.

And day by day more doors are shut, while the ambitious young men
continue to be born. It is they, denied the opportunity to rise from the
working class, who preach revolt to the working class. Had he been born
fifty years later, Andrew Carnegie, the poor Scotch boy, might have risen
to be president of his union, or of a federation of unions; but that he
would never have become the builder of Homestead and the founder of
multitudinous libraries, is as certain as it is certain that some other
man would have developed the steel industry had Andrew Carnegie never
been born.

Theoretically, then, there exist in the United States all the factors
which go to make a class struggle. There are the capitalists and working
classes, the interests of which conflict, while the working class is no
longer being emasculated to the extent it was in the past by having drawn
off from it its best blood and brains. Its more capable members are no
longer able to rise out of it and leave the great mass leaderless and
helpless. They remain to be its leaders.

But the optimistic mouthpieces of the great American people, who are
themselves deft theoreticians, are not to be convinced by mere
theoretics. So it remains to demonstrate the existence of the class
struggle by a marshalling of the facts.

When nearly two millions of men, finding themselves knit together by
certain interests peculiarly their own, band together in a strong
organization for the aggressive pursuit of those interests, it is evident
that society has within it a hostile and warring class. But when the
interests which this class aggressively pursues conflict sharply and
vitally with the interests of another class, class antagonism arises and
a class struggle is the inevitable result. One great organization of
labor alone has a membership of 1,700,000 in the United States. This is
the American Federation of Labor, and outside of it are many other large
organizations. All these men are banded together for the frank purpose
of bettering t