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