of riches, was as the Mississippi to the slender stream of
Pactolus. The men whose energy had created this wealth, and the
men who managed and increased it, lost the sense of their proper
relations with the rest of the community and the Nation.
According to the current opinion progress consisted in doubling
wealth in the shortest time possible; this meant the employment
of larger and larger masses of labor; therefore laborers should
be satisfied, nay, should be grateful to the capitalists who
provided them with the means of a livelihood; and those
capitalists assumed that what they regarded as necessary to
progress, defined by them, should be accepted as necessary to the
prosperity of the Nation.

Such an alignment of the two elements, which composed the Nation,
indicated how far the so-called Civilization, which modern
industrialism has created, was from achieving that social
harmony, which is the ideal and must be the base of every
wholesome and enduring State. The condition of the working
classes in this country was undoubtedly better than that in
Europe. And the discontent and occasional violence here were
fomented by foreign agitators who tried to make our workers
believe that they were as much oppressed as their foreign
brothers. Wise observers saw that a collision, it might be a
catastrophe, was bound to come unless some means could be found
to bring concord to the antagonists. Here was surely an amazing
paradox. The United States, already possessed of fabulous wealth
and daily amassing more, was heading straight for a social and
economic revolution, because a part of the inhabitants claimed to
be the slaves of industrialism and of poverty.