ings, and overspreading our entire national
horizon, bursts with the fury of a cyclone.

The great masses of the people had for a long time watched with
ever-increasing rage the seeming conspiracy of the employing and
professional classes to bind to their chariot-wheels those who labored
with their hands. Gigantic trusts had "cornered" all the necessaries
of life, and a few lily-fingered plutocrats in their marble palaces
dictated to the horny-handed sons of toil the amount of their beggarly
wages, and the prices they must pay for every needed article, until
every job of work and every bone of charity was fought for by
multitudes who mercilessly stabbed each other in their mad fury to
assuage the pangs of hunger.

When the people rallied at the polls, and elected to the high offices
members of their own unions, the millionaires bribed these officials
to obey their every command, and these mercenary law-makers, as often
as chosen, joined the ever-growing ranks of the oppressors.

Even the almost innumerable colleges throughout the Republic, whose
treasuries had absorbed countless millions of dollars, had proved
a measureless curse, as they had become mere cramming machines and
nurseries of lawlessness and brutality. The great universities had
long idolized plug-ugly football kickers and baseball sluggers to
the utter ignoring of scholarship, until the hordes of eleemosinary
prize-fighters among the so-called students created a reign of terror
where they were located, and far surpassed in ferocity even the
gladiators of ancient Rome. The annual "athletic contest" between the
two greatest universities was fought out with almost inconceivable
fury on "Soldiers' Field."

Irresistible bodies met the immovable, cheered on by yelling legions,
each phalanx would conquer or die, and die they did by scores; they
kicked and slugged like maniacs until separated by the combined
police-forces of the surrounding cities, and more were killed and
wounded than in the entire Spanish War. When night fell, thousands of
collegians invaded the capitol of the State, and with savage yells and
wedge-rushes drove all citizens from the streets; they closed every
theatre, pelting the actors with whiskey bottles stolen from the
saloons in which they had smashed thousands of dollars' worth of
costly furniture; they stole every sign from stores, which caught
their fancy; no woman was respected, until their orgies were stopped
by the bayonets of th