those who should be brothers.

It is impossible for even the most dispassionate or indifferent observer
to blink these facts. Proclaim as we may that there is no antagonism
between capital and labor,--that their interests are one, and that
conditions and opportunities for the worker are always better and
better,--practical thinkers and workers deny this conclusion. Wealth has
enormously increased, in a far greater ratio than population. Does the
laborer receive his due proportion of this increase? One must
unhesitatingly answer no. In a country whose life began in the search
for freedom, and which professes to give equal opportunity to all, more
startling inequality exists than in any other in the civilized world.
One of our ablest lawyers, Thomas G. Shearman, has lately written:--

"Our old equality is gone. So far from being the most equal people
on the face of the earth, as we once boasted that we were, ours is
now the most unequal of civilized nations. We talk about the wealth
of the British aristocracy and about the poverty of the British
poor. There is not in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland so
striking a contrast, so wide a chasm, between rich and poor as in
these United States of America. There is no man in the whole of
Great Britain and Ireland who is as wealthy as one of some
half-a-dozen men who could be named in this country; and there are
few there who could be poorer than some that could be found in this
country. It is true that there is a larger number of the extremely
poor in Great Britain and Ireland than there is in this country,
but it is not true that there is any more desperate poverty in any
civilized country than ours; and it is unquestionably not true that
there is any greater mass of riches concentrated in a few hands in
any country than this."