e of servitude.
They believe that wealth is a power which can raise the wealthy few to
the dominancy of a privileged class. They believe that as members of
this class, they can treat all other classes as servitors and
dependents, who may be hired to do anything for money. They view with
complacency, the crowded populations of our great cities. The greater
and more dense the mass of people, the larger, more dependent and more
obsequious the class of servitors. They are naturally, more or less in
sympathy with monarchial and despotic institutions. They believe that
the rulers, judges and law-makers, should come from the ranks of the
privileged class. They are out of harmony with the republic, because it
is the true form of a co-operative government. Co-operation, they hate,
it smacks of equality! They are devoted to the competitive system. They
recognize its power to maintain a perpetual warfare among competitors,
which shall forever keep the main host in such abject poverty, that they
willingly become slaves to the wealthy. Having lost their independence,
the votes of these competitors are at the command of their financial
masters. Than this, nothing could be more harmful to the welfare of a
true republic.

"This form of urban society, is the flower of the competitive system.
The tendency of this society is to so engender selfishness, and to so
destroy patriotism, that a multi-millionaire of the William Waldorf
Astor type, deliberately achieves the acme of shame, by renouncing his
allegiance to a country to which he owes everything. He expatriates
himself, and flies to the refuge of a monarchy, to escape the honest
burden of a just taxation. A taxation based on an assessment of less
than one-third the rate, which is applied to the average farmer of the
republic. One example of such ignominy, ought to teach every patriot,
that the true republic must be built on the solid foundation of a
society and industrial system, which represents justice and equality.

"Let us now question the co-operative movement, with the purpose of
ascertaining its fitness to become the base of a new society, and also
the proper foundation for a true republic. In a society growing out of
the co-operative system, as our rural and agricultural societies may now
do. We find the conditions are reversed. Labor, is the badge of
respectability. It is the title to an honorable independence. In such a
society, both men and women are free. All are co-opera