ar V 13130 ryrighted Price 25 Cents THE RED BOOK The Tribute We Pay fer Uwg i* this Streanetis Age of Iitostrulism * 'i.% THE ERA OF GreedandGraft BRAWN vs. BRAIN A Book for the American People By L. G. MEUSHAW MANHATTAN BOROUGH, (Greater New Ink) 1904 Peruse, reflect, a.r\d be wise Jp.la Cornell University MB Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031339181 The Plea of the Toiler FACTORS OF INTEREST COINCIDENT WITH THIS .EON OF BRAWN vs. CUNNING 11TJLTUM IN PARVO DEDICATED TO THE TBUE TOILEBS OF THE WORLD Wbitten bt LEVI GRIFFIN MEUSHAW Of Baltimore, Md? 3- 1904 " Behold the truth as it is revealed to thee." " What fools these mortals be." Entered* according to Act of Congress, in the year 19W, By Levi Getffim Meushaw, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. ▲11 rights reserred. PREFACE "No hay cerradura si es de oro la ganzua." Truth is mighty, and ■will prevail. Prosperity, under the present system of society, is not equitably divided, and the wage-earner's contracted remedy, at pres- ent, is the indecisive strike. Aided by cohesive union he demands readjustment of reward, for service performed, all along his line. The Federal and State governments appear to be semi-neutral fac- tors in the industrial disputes, with here and there a vacillating tendency in their official disposition to so remain. The forces in op- position are titanic in power, and are lined up in echelon for a war to the knife, and to the hilt, if necessary. Manual labor is floored repeatedly in the struggle, through a lack of ammunition, only to rise again to the combat more pertinacious than ever. The means at the service of the wage-earner, so far, are but palliative in their remedial effects, the conditions remaining, very often after each collision, in "status quo." The sinuous changes of evolution are at work, demanding of all a higher degree of mental and moral culture to share equitably in the rewards of human endeavor. Knowledge is power "per se," and power commands success, limited only by the confines of the world. Educated intelligence decides battles, creates and sustains industries, and guides the ship of state in its perilous course clear of the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. The wage-earner's true road to reach the goal of his earnest essay is along the narrow one of education in the vital questions of the hour — financial, industrial, political, and moral; to deposit his ballot for pure principles; and a 90 per cent, reduction in the use and abuse of alcoholic and malt beverages. Physical strength Is bested in this era by an educated intellectual cunning. Today, mankind may witness the dominion of the few over that of the many, the masses yielding implicit obedience to the guidance of the intellec- tual minority. It is the century when mind expansion reigns tri- umphant and dominant over material matter. Matter is mortal; whilst mind exists "in aeternum." Rulers and sages, from times far remote in the rear history of this celestial sphere, have sought the open sesame of the "lapis philosophorum" to aid them equitably conciliate the warring factions surrounding them. What they sought for in vain, the modern has found — in universal education and political suffrage. Philanthropy and charity are but soothing balms fallibly applied to a constitutional distemper in society. Consuming greed, the basest passion integrated and inherent in the human mold, is never totally eradicated. College education but in- tensifies it; whilst the theological training of the morals is a check- rein only to its violent rampage, to which it is beholden today. Greed of acquisition is the supreme test by which Providence av- erages the calibre of the individual, and it is a sore trial for frail humanity to wrestle with. It bends the knee and salaams to one terrestrial power only — legislative law, which must be impartially, swiftly and surely executed. All men are of an animal origin and nature; therefore, their different status in life are then due but to circumstance, environment, and education. There is no special inspiration by Divine decree. All talent, and that which is called genius, are purely physical and material in their phre- nological composition and character. In fact, genius is not any- thing more nor less than common sense, seconded with a healthy and vigorous bodily constitution. Greed has become rampant in consonant with the juggling of the monetary affairs of the people by the financial wizard. It is the immoral influenza in the serious economic conditions of the people of this country today, as it has been for that of others who have long since dis- appeared from the drama of this stage. Financial speculation is a profession both flexible and mobile in the hands of the keen and invisible money manipulator of the times. Modern financial in- tricacies should be a lecture course frequently in the public schools, and well-discussed and diagnosed by the masses until all monetary technicalities and subtleties are as clear to them as the light from a summer's sun at its zenith. This is the bogy "which influences so mightily the casting ballot of the day; and it must understandingly be comprehended to combat it in the poll room. Publicity is a handi- capped panacea with this dangerous all-'round and political meddler unmuzzled. The pleasure-loving and indifferent masses are never serious enough to keep pace with the demands of innovation. Greed is a gormand that gorges to a saturnalian satiety upon the ignorant. It is this class only, which is a proletariat in knowledge, who so willfully mistakes liberty for license, and often disputes the rights which belong to others. The great inherent moral traits of the masses, indigenous to "natale solum," inculcated from the cradlo through generations, now running the gantlet of such a crucial test in resisting contamination from political degeneracy, class legisla- tion, monopolistic corruption, and satanic competition, in support of the prevailing order of greed and graft, are the buttressed ram- parts which retard the rapid decay of free institutions synony- mously with the decline of ancient Hellas and Rome. This book, abridged by financial pressure, is the experience and observation of the writer — a mechanic. Its main purport aims to show the tribute these competitive times demand of the toiler before he may drop the crumbs which he is now gathering upon his knees from the bare floor to take a comfortable seat at the table with the delicatesse. At the same time it will uncover a few other grewsome unpleas- antries which invariably follow in the wake of unrestrained Greed and Graft. INTRODUCTORY This appellation, "The Red Book," is a sympathetic title in Its adoption, conforming with the scarlet hue and conditions of the period now existing in the republic as the masses every day observe and experience them in contending with greed for their right to ex- ist. This book is of an impromptu character and origin, and its olive- branch mission will be propounded without fear or favor; although its brevity admits of its contents being but superficially treated. Greed — covetousness — selfishness — desire — wish — is a comparison in grading this octopus downward from its maximum to a minnow size in its degree of definition. Greed constitutes a dominant part of the human personality, more or less dangerous according to the soil in which it is propagated, and the conditions surrounding it. It is the main factor in selfish ambition, and has been the prime instigator in mammoth events in the affairs of human destiny. All commercial and financial exchange of the modern world is based, artificially and immorally, upon greed, and cultivated into a science. But it is built upon a foundation of queachy sand. All barter is, more or less, dishonest in its modern transactions, respectably con- ducted visibly, but with the latent and innate intention of deceiving in the end. On the reverse, every design in nature is moral, prac- tical, real, generous, free of magic and greed, and based upon in- exorable and immutable laws of permanancy, good will, and purity. Greed, in this simile, dwarfs man even below the unreasonable crea- tures. All material matter of the whole universe is but an echo of Deity, and a vehicle in which the spirit of life is only temporarily confined. The bulwark of the land today is that of the great inter- mediate class, composed of the manual and intellectual workers, a dual formation of the second estate. They stand as a shield to the first estate, and hold in check the estate of poverty. But the com- ponent parts of the second estate, however, impelled by conditions the result of predominant greed, have arrived at about the parting of the ways. All ages have had their particular shrine before which humanity has crooked the knee in homage. Whilom, in the far dis- tant past, pastoral, commercial, and military pursuits engaged the attention of the masses to an emulous rivalry with their tramon- tane neighbors, which developed greed in all its rapacity; later on, religious sects were propagated, fanatically, to the point of exter- minating their opponents; and, at this date, it is the strenuous in- dustrial and commercial activities, so selfish and hot, as to threaten a serious change in the order of society as it is now constituted. Why this callous confusion and scramble in the division of the boun- tiful gifts of Providence? There are many incompetent people in all walks and conditions of life; but at no time, within the memory of mankind, were such out of place so much as in the industrial Wrangles of today. The mad straggle has waxed so bitter as to retire the participant as an obsolescent at the meridian of life; while the youth, only, is now sought to feed the voracious fire under the industrial crucible. Why this perspirative haste in the land today? Nature, on the other hand, complacent and dilatory in her designs and in evolution, points the gait and method for man to adopt. But microcosmic man ever gropes in the dark, searching vainly and wrongly for a solution of his infinite task, blinded to the true lumi- nous path under the guidance of consuming greed. Greed is but the spirit of Mephistopheles romping incog, in the republic today. A partial cause is given in this concise review for the incompetent workman. Attention is directed to the archaic financial and indus- trial systems; also to the commercial, political, and moral prob- lems in their bearings upon the equitable settlement of industrial disputes. The present conditions of modern society — industrial, social, and political — will be treated in three distinct parts in this book. With this, the reader is left to its perusal, in which he may find, whether he is a native of one section of the country or of the other, truisms every day encountered in his experience with mod- ern conditions. PART I A Brief Review of the Present Industrial Conditions Note. — At the close of the book see addenda for the paraphrase and metaphrase of alien quotations and colloquial phrases used in this volume. INDUSTRIAL Consecutive order of subjects treated in Part I PAGE. MANUAL LABOR 1 Opportunity 1 Success 2 Apprentice 2 The Parent 3 Journeyman 3 Farm and Ranch 4 Sea and Underground 5 Child and Female Labor 6 Hours per Diem 6 KNOWLEDGE 8 Omniprevalent Design and Moral Law 10 THE LABOR UNION 14 The Call-Out 16 Some Modern American Wonders 18 Decadency of England 18 INTELLECTUAL LABOR 21 Opportunity and Success 21 THE BIG FOUR 22 Financial 22 Commercial 22 Gens de Lois (Legal Jurisprudence) , and 23 Journalism 24 The Miscellaneous Intellectual Callings 24 The Aristocratic Club 26 THE MUNICIPAL ADVISORY AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 26 THE MONEY POWER 29 Wealth Inherited, and Its Idle Possessor 29 FEDERAL DEPOSITARIES 31 Wealth Organized, and Dominant in Politics 33 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP 35 Federal 35 State 36 Municipal 36 PUBLIC CONTROL 36 Federal 36 State 36 Municipal 37 THE GREED OF GENIUS 38 Capital Organized 42 Finance and the High Financier 43 THE CARDINAL QUATERNION 46 Credit 46 Interest 47 Competition, and 47 Supply and Demand 48 Celestial Spheres for Exploitation 50 INDUSTRIAL MANUAL LABOR- Opportunity. "Dum vivimus vivamus." Just a few years ago opportunity for advancement in every human enterprise was always in reach of healthy ambition, and exacted no unusual precocity to walk its royal road to success. It has receded now beyond the reach of the wage-earner probably forever. Arising, sphinx-like, from the smoke and slaughter of the deadly internecine and fratricidal conflict of the early sixties new factors have arisen to act in the drama of the republic's manifold destiny. Emulous men, armed with re- cently-acquired wealth and "nouveaux riches," born of the necessi- ties of a free nation battling for its very existence, originated the germs of the conditions which confront its peace and security today. Their offspring, instructed in the university with all the theories of the sciences pertaining to the times, have laid hold of the practical part where their sires have left off. Fostered by a government pa- ternity, nursed with subsidies, land grants, high protection, the free franchise, exemptions, rebates, and a like variety of official pap, by a sympathetic class legislation, pampered by an obliging public treasury, their paths unconstitutionally cleared by the court3, in many instances, at the expense of the people's rights, and in vio- lation of public policy, with their wits polished up by university training, these publicans have pushed production through the mid- circle of the globe. But at what cost? Cast an eye over the indus- trial, social, and political fields. Opportunities waning; monopoly increasing; legitimate competition dead; crime, vice, and idleness increasing in enormous volume; race deterioration threatened; diffu- sion of wealth swept unto one end of society; free institutions "in extremis"; the people plundered of their natural material posses- sions; the political system adrift; and the native race crowded to the wall by the tidal wave of inferior blood now rushing pell-mell upon her shores. All this to humor enthroned greed and fatten the few. With this stand-and-deliver method of piling up colossal for- tunes, at the expense of the wondering many, came a thirst for po- litical power. Denied by the people a way by their suffrage fran- chise to sit in their council chambers the plutocrat found his way up and in by the spout. Thuswise was the vice of graft sown through the political system — the Federal, State, and municipal. Men, given temporary power as public legislators by the ballot of a toiling people prostituted their trust, and stand in relation to free institu- tions as "vendidit hie auro patriam." Here, they receive honor for misrepresenting their constituencies; but in heathen lands such are rewarded with the bastinado, the hara-kiri, the bowstring, the im- palement, and the golden cup. The last and only disputing hench- men of liberty which stand in the path of this monopolistic power, 8 The tied Booh Illuminating the challenging Its right to demolish this free respublica and reduce its people to an industrial serfage, are the labor union and the benevo- lent lodge of the day. No condition of society can be of abiding stability until manual labor is freed of these werewolves. The eter- nal and moral law of nature, in its infinite wisdom, always requires equilibrium, as water seeks its level, to maintain durability, ana when all the wealth and power approximate to one end of free so- ciety, and all the toil and poverty lie athwart of the other, the needle on the register is violently agitated in seeking its normal readjustment. Civilization is a misnomer when a large fraction of humanity is denied the benefits of its constantly increasing bless- ings by enforced idleness. They see the new order of things only as their portion of the general legacy. Any unredressed political wrong, even to a single unit in a state, inaugurates a precedent which will lead eventually to the overthrow of popular government. Success. This is the pinnacle which, to reach, inspires the youth in his soliloquies and reveries. It is a lasting or transitive fancy that is decided by his parents when they sagely or unwisely place him at what is destined to be his life's work. It is a prize which seduces and conjures its aspirant from the crowded centres of contracted opportunities to the arctic wastes of the Alaskan soli- tudes, or to perish in the fever-stricken countries of the pestilential tropics. Any condition or cause which blasts the hopes, dims the vision, or narrows the field of the toiler to reach this "ne plus ultra," should be speedily removed for the safety of the state. Apprentice. "Quails vita, finis ita." Two roads will lead the inquiring youth unto the industrial field — one by the way of man- ual labor, the other by the route of the intellectual callings. The youth should slip into the traces of a congenial and healthy occupa- tion suited to his temperament, habits, and physique, whether it be that of a trade or a profession. After looking over the whole field of modern industry, with the aid of wise parents and interested friends, he should select that which will match his every part with affinity, and strive to get into it. Where there is a will a way is to be found. He, only, will have to live his life. Some judgment should be formed as to how such a calling would befit him in his maturer life which looks so promising now. It is a fact, for re- membrance, that no one ever was able to master an uncongenial calling; and that one had better be without any skilled occupation than to be an incompetent workman in this age of the survival of the fittest. Make haste slowly in deciding. On it depends the fu- ture journeyman's status in a fickle society. Often a few months in some industrial school should advance a youth to such knowledge in the vocation he seeks that an apprenticeship may be his just for its seeking. Agricultural and a seafaring life are peculiarly suited to some natures which would be a failure in the irksome and sed- entary pursuits. After pronouncing upon a congenial selection he should study its principles and precepts from good books of past masters in some industrial, night school, as well as Its practical side System of Modern Greed and draft 8 through the day. He should also learn his calling from Alpha to Omega, with as much diligence as a Dayman applies in the hospital ward on a battleship, and, in his duties, be a votary to its require- ments, and a maestro in proficiency. This will differ him from an au- tomatic workman. Very few men ever succeed in divorcing them- selves from uncongenial callings in after life. They become set in their ways, and take on narrow traits of their avocation which rivet them to their first attempt unto their final exit. From the bungler to the cumulative ranks of the straggler is but a step, and once there his chances are nil. To be concise in his work is to keep his place in the ever-changing line. The Parent. The error of parents in placing their "fils" to unsuitable vocations is one which seems to be nigh unto universal. Drifters, from incompetency and physical incapacity, are constantly floating, in an endless flotsam, from the industrial sea to pick up at new moorings, all astanding, in the ditch of the derelicts. The man in the wrong business very soon feels it, and, through his trav- ail, becomes a dissolute idler, a chronic bench-lounger in the urban small parks, a doper, or a habitue of the stale beer dive. He is a tool of the grafting politician, and an enemy of organized labor and society in general. He barters his perfunctory service for a pauper wage. Seventy-five per centum of these debased wrecks were avoidable, with congenial handicraft, and would have been a source of strength to the state instead of one of perpetual menace. Parents should go slow and sure and investigate before launching their boy out on his voyage of life. Advanced adultness is aversed to retrac- ing his steps to repair the error of his past days of non-age, in allying himself with a calling dissident to his ability and its agree- ableness. Journeyman. Standing upon the threshold of manhood, and armed with the invincible weapon of a congenial and felicitous occupation, well-mastered, he sallies forth to the battle of serious conditions. Naturally, he unites with his kind to secure an equi- table remuneration, as far as is possible, for his ability and energy. His union aids him to a generous limit, which he must complete by his own exertions. All along his career, in the drama of life, he has intermittent battles with the warlocks of greed to get a part of the universal blessings of bountiful Providence. The strike, the lockout, the speculator's shut-down, and the like, divide with his prosperous time in his struggle for existence. The life of a man- ual toiler is one often "au desespolr," and of stoical obscurity. His mind is soon molded for a serious horoscope. Often the query haunts him, and will not down, "For what and whom is govern- ment?" Gradually, it will dawn upon him, with reflection, that in his ballot lies the specific to redress his grievances. But the remedy is coupled with a rider, which demands that it be depos- ited with a moral aim, a cunning hand, and guided by an educated and a sober top. This only can stamp out graft, and hold greed In subjection. This is a moral creation, and only by simon pure 4 The Bed Booh Illuminating fh« means can permanent and legitimate results be achieved. Jeal- ousy and envy betwixt the toilers of one and the others ability only redounds finally to their mutual disadvantage. To aDoi- lsh the piece system, the inconvenience of which all workmen have knowledge of, and enable men, advancing well along in years to OD- tain work, two grades of a working card may be issued. The maxi- mum scale for superior talent, with the inferior wage for the under- rate and aged workman. It probably would add extra strength to organized labor, if hedged anent with a stringent law to prevent the abuse of such innovation. All productive labor is aggregated as an integer in fulfilling the ordainment of Deity, and comprise the continuous links of a composite chain of man's universal du- ties. A crippling of one impairs the rest. Unnatural competition, suppressing the good will heretofore existing among the people, is accredited with the degenerate custom of commercialism in the placing of positions. The skilled workman in private, as well as the place hunter in public, life, from the policeman and fireman up to the vicinity of the man higher up, alias John Doe, purchase with simoleans from the foreman in the one, and the grafting profes- sional politician and official in the other, their right to labor or to hold office. The manual skilled laborer is compelled, in many instances, to initiate in the social and convivial club to obtain a prestige in holding his laborious situation. Others come up the spout in securing employment through political pulls, friendly tips, patrons' aid, and many other ways and means unfair to the ordi- nary toiler. This is probably more despicable than the methods of the ratter. Enormous immigration, and long "per diems," are Immeasurably answerable for this debasement in the industrial spheres. On many occasions, the workman vends his late sit to another in jumping over to something more remunerative. There is much commercial speculation in situations in these strenuous times. All this teaches the temper of the age. In the political world conspiracies are brooded in placing an applicant into posi- tion over the civil service rules and superior talent. Records have been purloined, and examination averages criminally erased and raised, in landing the favored nondescript into his dearly purchased sinecure. But then, however, when the moral and independent toiler has reformed all this political and industrial perfidy, and per- formed his own manual duties satisfactorily, his niche in this scene of mystery, for "fait accompli" will have been creditably encompassed. The conjugal state, and early, is necessary to moral rectitude through life, unless the solitaire in celibacy is supernatur- ally gifted with an absolute will. Farm and Ranch. The yokelet farmer, the farmhand, and the toiler on the ranch, together with the guide and the trapper, and the worker in the mountain, forest, village, hamlet, and coast, should see the advantage of combination, politically and indus- trially, to combat organized slavocracy successfully. By forming local unions in their respective vicinities, and uniting with the urban toiler under one grand national federation, they may per- 'System of Modem Greed and Graft 5 form miracles in clearing the industrial and political horizons and routing the tobyman from his trocha. Organized man is a power; individually he is simply "non ens." Their association should be a mighty unit for knowledge in the great and vital questions which are now up to the people to solve — financial, political, and indus- trial. Morality and benevolence should be emblazoned to helium brilliancy on their banners in guiding them to the era of peace and good will to all men. They should diffuse and disseminate all acquired wisdom broadcast, and with dispatch. Free institutions are now in the balance. This is the proper mode to banish visions of the railroad brownie, the nightmare of the stock and produce exchanges, and the bogy speculator from the debtor farmer's slum- ber. Purified official power, and not bourbon prejudice, should be the slogan considered. The predial toiler must not be deceived by the artificial stimulants of the "agiotage" filibuster, and the like, in directing temporarily toward him abnormal figures for his products at the expense of his brother toiler in the incorporated communi- ties. This is not prosperity. The son of the glebe toils, more or less, as he is well aware of, in an independent occupation, whilst the municipal wage-earner is, more or less, dependent upon his wage. The speculator, in scheming for easy money, is compelled to rob Peter to pay Paul, and seize a heavy tribute in its transit. He is the Sindbad upon the shoulders of Atlas; and the miseries of society lie credited to him. All toilers fight in the same cause. The farmer, the mechanic, and the fisherman are the true factotum in productive industry. Elsewhere is noted some relief the grower and planter may obtain. With the farmers politically and indus- trially organized, the city toiler can then extend the hand and say, "Hey, Rube, give us a shake!" Sea and Underground — The sailor, the miner, the fisher- man and waterman, and the wage-earner in their vicinage, might adopt the suggestions as chronicled under the caption Farm and Ranch. It may prove a strong hand in winning, successfully, fair treatment for work performed. All men who toil have inter- ests in common. The wage-earner in the miscellaneous callings, manual and intellectual, as the salesman, the clerk, the shopkeeper, the agent, the drummer, and the janitor, watchman, porter, and the like, either on land or sea, would profit by marching under the banner of organized industry. The official and civil employee — in the Federal, State or municipal service — with but few excep- tions of the mandatory incumbents, may induce existing condi- tions to become more congenial by allying with the people's in- dustrial associations. The state must not be an alien to the in- terests of those who created it. All intelligent men know that the more prosperous the masses the better it is for society and the community at large. Extremely hazardous manual occupations, such as the steelworker on the great suspension bridges of modern times, the steeplejack, the deadly damp of the mines, and the perils of the sea, as encountered by the deep-water man, in his contracted quarters, upon his loxodromic voyages, with the host of minor, yet 6 The Bed Booh Illuminating the dangerous, pursuits filling up the list, deserve the highest enconi- ums and compensation, instead of the commonplace attention and pittance doled out to them, for so gallantly performmg their du- ties in nature's omniscient design. Whilst on the other hand, the drones and parasites of the rich maidmarian class, and the schemes of speculative spiders, denude these toilers of just dues, and exist a butterfly life at the expense of their toil and privation. "Come, Jack, take a hitch in your pajamas, and join us in the rofundelay and song." Child and Female Labor. This defenseless class of toil- ers lie prone at the feet of pedestaled greed. Children, of tender years, robbed of their patrimony of a public school education, and desiccating and insiccating in premature decay, to fill the great sacks, "ad nauseam," of the mill owner and the factory lord. Women, in the rdle of- the bread-winner, and compelled to toil in uncongenial surroundings and influences, lose their ties of the do- mestic hearth, while the proper toiler is relegated to an innocuous state of desuetude to become the housekeeper of the home. The state is silent. The native born dwindling in quantity and degen- erating in quality. A pittance, for a long day's toil, is the reward of these unnatural conditions which are so widely suffused through- out this stricken land. The white worker in the factory and the mill in the Southland has been yoked to the conditions which the manumitted negro discarded in the early sixties, while the toiler of the Bast is but a freeman in name. The healthy mother, as the experience of past ages proclaim, more so than the sire, is the main factor in the virility of the future race. Nature will not be violated with impunity in her eternal laws without exacting a com- pensatory retribution. This is a vital issue, concerning national perpetuity, not so much as a collateral thought with these captains and monopolizers of so many other chattels. Hours per Diem. Crime and vice, under the present system of society, keep pace with the success of the inventor and the wizard in the sciences. Their sowing and reaping are continually aligning up additional manual workmen loiteringly on the outside. Paromol- ogy is not a necessary factor in this question to omnify one's po- sition as to the fact that such is the case. Theory is left to the student. Enforced idleness can be alleviated, only, by a shorter work-day from the travail of labor. Keeping abreast, or to the fore, of the constant augmentation to the legions of the compulsorily idle, and the vicious, and of the alien pauper, by increasing, intermittingly, the army of the municipal constabu- lary, and other parasitical supernumeraries, is discouraging to the toiling masses, who are compelled to shoulder the appropriation cross. Vested rights, and community of interest, owe a duty to society as much so as the man with the shovel. Public polity demands concession. "Droit au travail." It is man's obligation by predestined ordination. Man, blinded by greed, invariably spurns a blessing until it reverts into a curse. Education, and a pure bal- System of Modern Qrtei and Graft T lot, are potent factors in hurrying greed to its valedictory exit. Legislation is temporizing, and tardy in its decision, and, at pres- ent, it is up to the call-out to enforce the reform. No man is neces- sary; yet the niggardly are conceited with a morbid fancy that the world will pass away with their annihilation. Work and life are integrated, and inseparable. Observation imparts to the serious the fact that the whole universe is at work on things practical — and this is IHVH, the spirit of life that pervades the abyss of space. The playful "sottise" of children is their kindergarten. In- animate creation, it may be observed with propriety, is allotted a task to fulfill. The earth is constantly at work, in conjunction with the rest of nature; vegetation and zoological life are ever busy; life in the sea is an integer in its unremitting labor. Even the in- visible infusoria, in an insignificant drop of water, may be seen in energetic and tireless activity; the same with the coral reef builder. Out in the cosmos void lie the solar and the astral sys- tems, performing a sympathetic part for the benignant welfare of its whole. They influence this planet and its material life by mag- netism, heat, tidal changes, and the like, besides holding this sphere to its duty and its orbital course. The great turbulent ocean rolls docile to the moon and to the sun. All the universe is akin, as it is, in its individual units, but the parts of an omnipresent whole — the First Cause. Enforced idleness stands for naught else but the lethal echo of a misgoverned state. The despair of its victim arouses Nemesis to award retributive justive. In savage life, from the barbarous giant of the frigid Patagonian wilds to the uncouth Esquimeau pigmy of the dreary northland wastes, man is never idle. Civilized man is the only idle creature upon the planet. This verily stamps it as a vice, the result of monopoly and enthroned greed, and a specific should be hastily unearthed for its removal. There has never, in all eternity, existed a condition in which noth- ing, "per se," was a factor. In inert forces impending thunder- bolts, ever ready, are held in leash, a passive captive. All fair labor should be encouraged. Upon it depends the state and the contour of society. All true toilers merit fair reward, with the extra hazardous ones in the lead, as the producer is the true "fac- totum" in this practical and material world. Greed and cunning are as old as the geological periods of the earth, with the fact that the present world has to combat the same in their well-nigh impregnable intellectual garb. The Oriental and Greek philoso- pher of ye olden dates, of the days of Zoroaster, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and the like, and those of the mediaeval period, together with the present day savant, have tried to force the rear of Cause, by conjecture and science. Infinitely down the tortuous and intricate channel of evolution is the lead running to its source — Majestic Silence — and there it stops, and the whole line is one of a synony- mous strenuity in constant repetition. A day's work, for a day's pay, should concur in length equally as well in official sinecurism as doth the manual toiler give in private life. There should be np difference. "Vox populi, vox Dei," 8 The Bed Booh Illuminating th* KNOWLEDGE Universal education is the leveler of mankind, and an insur- mountable barrier to the progress of the despoiler of free institu- tions and popular government. The public school is an inspiration from beyond the great divide. No age, as known, has ever pos- sessed the ken so prevalent in this bi-decade century of the Chris- tian supremacy. Ignorance has been led to the slaughter by strong personalities all through the ebon ages of the receding past. But the eclipse, at last, has given way to the peep of dawn. Liberty can not be preserved without the universal intellectual and moral expansion of the people. The human pack of the congested centres, alien in its physiognomy, is brutal ignorant in its hue and cry, as it pursues through the thoroughfare some fancied miscreant. Mind is omnivagant in its annihilation of space, and can transplant one instanter from his terrestrial position to any imaginary one in the most distant part of the speculative beyond. Right about, as one looks down the centuries, he may perceive that it was the few, and not the many, who possessed even a quantum of knowledge. To- day, it exists gratuitously for all. Intertwined with morality felici- tation of society may be made permanent. Educated intellect, ex- panding with fleeting time, may enable man, in metaphor, to im- plant his feet in the middle of a hemisphere and alternate at pleas- ure the position of its continents; or, even to turn this old veteran ball inside out, as a hand inserted can invert a purse, and expose its treasures to ever-active humankind. Yea, even to the altering of its orbital track, and its angle to the sun, and bring with the change a reversion of the seasons. It is thus ordained from the "ab initio" of things. The more man expands, intellectually and mor- ally, the nearer he approaches the solution of Why? Archangels and the cherubim obey with awe where humanity, groping in sable nescience, but stops to interrogate and dispute. Omniscient knowl- edge is Deity; an infinitesimal part of it has been willed to creation. Man's part is procurable with a short self-denial. Education, the ballot, and morality, are the winning triad; ignorance, indiffer- ence, and intemperance, constitute the ternary which are a satanic handicap to independence. The monera age — the remains of whose organic life extend to the very axis of this rolling globe — 100.- 000,000 years rearward in the varied history of this juvenile planet, is a long stretch of time hewn out of eternity; yet, it has receded, at last, as a fleeting panorama, to yield its vacuity for the advent and domination of man. And must man then be so suicidal and paretic as to yield his birthright for a mess of pottage unto a few of his kind? From the darkness of the glacial pack, 500,000 years back in early times, on up to the beginning of light in Asia, all is oblivion. Indeed, the history of the early dynasties of Oriental countries is as obscure as the life of the savage on the Amazon and the Kongo. The seismic wave of intellectual culture is in a tidal sweep over the greater portion of mankind in this Christian era The whole of humanity is uplifted and accelerated by every ad- System of Modem Greed and Graft 9 vancement of its sectional part. The savage and the cannibal of the emeralds of the sea, so generously sprinkled in the serene Pa- cific, have ever been the darkest in true knowledge of all the races of mankind. Utopia, the sport of the prosaic, is a reality possible with the new conditions so close at hand. There may be a higher organization than man, in its turn, to people the earth before this old veteran becomes wobbly in his groove, and finally a moribund wanderer in the void of space, regarding this event with a per- ceptive view of ratiocination in consonant with the multitudinous stages of evolution. Man, himself, has the historical and scien- tific lessons from "in ssecula sseculorum" as a monitor to steer his passing career through life. Eternity, and infinite space, are be- yond the comprehension of finite beings, as they are the attri- butes of Deity. Time is only the revolutions of the earth in eter- nity. All material creation is tardy in maturing, and sums the process of evolution in the eons of eternity. Nothing is wrought to order. Nature designs her plans, and the various stages in eter- nity perform the rest. In his early evolution man roosted high in the tree top, and from this perch he descended to the cave; thence, in the order of his development, and for safety, his habi- tation he built upon piles which arose above the surface of the tranquil inland waters, and to the inaccessible side of the precipi- tous mountain. Advancing, by experience, and developing in strength, he struck normal "terra firma," and began his progress as a nomad shepherd, a hunter, and a tent dweller. Soon, he raised the mound for his home, and learned to till the soil. Many stages, from those primitive times, through carnage, fanatical pas- sion, and greed, have developed him into the cis-Atlantic plutocrat and imperator of today. Since ancient times, when he became a land grabber, and cried "meum," by a squatter sovereignty, latent greed became a master passion. The Gargantuan of this period is an exotic plant of this primitive seed; but has gone the savage one better, by claiming his grabs, and everything in sight, by a sacrosanct right. "Sic semper tyrannis." From Terra del Fuego to Pt. Barrow and Greenland's icy mountains, in the western hemisphere, and from Nova Zembla to New Zealand, the hermit isle of the southern seas, in the eastern hemisphere, the land betwixt, on isle and main, have been the scenes of perpetual strife where man has ever been a wolf to his kind. Man is the creature of an occult force, which is constantly urging him onward and upward. Eter- nal and inflexible law has decreed the white races as the chosen chorological instrument of Deity to fulfill the ordination of cre- ation. Variety is one of the main laws in the order of nature. Races of various hues, through all the eras, acquired enlightenment of a kind; but they have been always secondary to the Caucasian in the perfection of mundane intelligence. Expand morally, and the race is won. And when the sapient, "sui generis," has handed to man the aerial chariot to soar with the eagle in the region) where the electric flame is held in leash, his supremacy of his finite latitudes will, at last, he complete, and bis ever-unsatis- % 10 The Bed Booh IUuminaUng H* fied yeanlings may then turn his energies to newer fields *?**** celestial space encompassing the conquests of his past. Fana * lcls "T ignorance, and greed block the road to a people's progress. Knowl- edge and morality are the true religion, and the wedges to split the knotty problems of life. "Vestigia nulla retrorsum." The masses, the world over, ancient and modern, have ever been flexible to the wand of the intellectual schemer. The hiatus between a brainy financial career and one of unselfish rectitude is as broad as the periphery of the globe. The estrapade of the masses to slip the coils of the monopoly-laocoon, to obtain even a scant modicum of the bounty devised by Jehovah, overflowing in their abundancy, and boundless, will cease only with morality and political-industrial unity at the ballot box. Educated cunning has grabbed a surfeit of the universal inheritance, and only by education and united ef- forts at the polls can they be made to disgorge, so that all may live. Superabundant blessings are here, and the toiler can get them. There will be no political relief until manual labor forces such. The people are growing hourly more callous and inhuman in their social and industrial amenities with one another, superinduced by the prevailing conditions of base competition and greed driving them to penury and consequent selfishness. Politics and sinecurism are the bane upon the toilers of the world. From proem to con- cluding review morality will be advocated in this abridged volume as the measure to right all conditions. Omniprevalent Design and floral Law. The fool saith in his heart there is no God. No suspicion should be impinged upon the assertions proclaimed by the savant regarding the atomic, molecular, and germ theory of material creation. It is unques- tionably true. But an unvanishing farrago of doubt remains that these agencies could produce system. They may possibly be the "a priori" and "a posteriori" aids divined by the Master Intelli- gence, and seem abstruse to the ordinary mortal. Periods of evolu- tion, running from the archasan youth of the earth up to modern dates, are recondite, and ever may be, to the investigator. The globe, torn by upheavals, eruptions, and explosions in the azoic and eozoic eons, remained, for untold ages, devoid of conscious life. As it became apropos, in the subsidence of the effects from such for organized life, the Silurian invertebrate made its formal bow, prefacing the long panorama leading up to the modern civilization. All thinking men, ancient and modern, of all races, have advo- cated morality for a perpetuity of race existence. It may be inter- preted from the ancient classics, and was promulgated by their philosophers and teachers. In Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Confucius Zoroaster, Brahma, Gautama, Mahomet, and in Homer Horace Livy, Virgil, Praxiteles, and others, whom modern thought gen- eralizes as the heathen and the agnostic, scholars note them all adorn- ing their tale in pointing a moral. And morality is a salient an- tagonist to the selfish and the greedy. Design is manifested in the orderly movements of the celestial worlds, and in the lunisolar precession of the equinoxes. It is discernible in the races &n4 System of Modern Greed and draft 11 variegated hues of humanity, and the varieties of conscious and botanical life. Uniformity of unchangeable laws, and evolution, divulge a controlling power. "Veritas vincit." The prismatic crys- talline lens reveals to man the microscopic world in all its orderly and invisible wonders. Simplicity and beauty is the constructive rule throughout creation. There is no exception, not even in the hippopotamus or in the pug; for beauty lurks even in hideousness of natural design. Creations of the inventor become commonplace to the masses in a very brief period. Intricate in unraveling, they excite the sage's amazement, on revealment, by the simplicity of the law governing their problems. The procreation of continuous life, identical with self species, is the greatest transcendent predica- tion, "ipso facto," which can be advanced to confute the dullard, and render design less abstruse to the thinking mind. In many instances have men traveled for months, through incredible priva- tions and sufferings, bearing to civilization and to sapiens what they had all along been deluded with, by its lustre and tinsel bril- liancy, as a thing of fabulous wealth, only to be undeceived by the rude shock of its truth. Nature is jocose at times, and fond of a joke, and wraps all her intrinsic presents in a sheathing of un- attractive hide and seek. In the theories propounded by natural philosophy, chemistry, and physics, man develops the latent power concealed in inert matter. That which appears to the savage as the useless rock, or things supernatural, is divined to the scholar as a precious treasure, or a pent-up power, which can be captured for the use of society. They are blessings disguised. Knowledge unmasks them. In electricity, are hidden all the riddles of the uni- verse. It is the source of power, and is stored in boundless vol- umes in the abysses of space. Man, however, by decree, will never acquire a specific in anything, as all life corporeal is mortal. The elements, of frost and heat, snow and rain, and of the burrowing life, are supplemental aids to fhe tiller's toil in rendering the earth more friable and mellow for adaptation to the use of mankind. Copulative with the above are the impressive effects of the solar system, and of the diurnal and nocturnal successions of the planet. All this is design. The innermost recesses of mother earth are the universal digester and the workshop of nature in resolving dross, unceasingly, into worth, of one design or another, for the benefit of coming ages. Beyond the limits of creation, a magnitude which cannot be realized by human computation, lie endless abysses of eter- nal emptiness and silence. This certainly is hades, the abode of Pluto. The worlds in the sidereal heavens are linked consecutively, and everlastingly, by the imperishable power of magnetic attrac- tion, and all suspend from a centre of gravity, without which the heavens would collapse, and all be chaos. All animal life, with no exception, is endowed with a personality identifying each individual unit thereof one to the other, and apart, as much so as may be per- ceived in the "genus homo." There is no paradox in nature; all is probity. The zodiac of incandescent Sol, with his solar faculae or photosphere of caloric luminosity, nourished with actinium, radium, 12 The Red Booh Illuminating the and other royal metals of the gods, flaring up In his helium corona, and throwing oft the sources of nourishment and life to his system of inhabitable worlds and planets, read design, beyond compare. Arcturus, verily, and all the suns, are electrodynamic electrodes, and exist as the eyes of the universe. The sage sees concinnity in the rain- bow and the aurora borealis, and in nebula. In the observatory the optical lens brings to view the celestial iridescent and scintillating pearls and diadems pinioned in clusters to the gemmy vault of the seraphic canopy. Some dually entwined; others as triplets; and many in quadrupled fellowship. No earthly comparison can par- allel them in their isolated grandeur. In the composition of air, water, and food, design is revealed. From zenith to nadir, and on to zenith, continuously in its circling, are the terrestrial revolutions which tally in Hermse-like intervals the dots of time along the infinite path of eternity. The earth, in its unending and diversified motions, is ceaselessly whirling its impurities off and out into space, to be dealt with according to ordained laws. In a meteorological quest, for a concordance in the universal law of nature, such may be found in the syzygies of the moon, with its apogean and perigean positions toward the earth, and the solar system, which, together with the earth's own revolutions, influence the tides, weather, and general welfare of this planet. Evidence of design is displayed in the tem- per of the winds, as they rampage from a midsummer's zephyr, by degrees, into the terror of a howling whirlwind, typhoon, hurri- cane, tornado, cyclone, and the sirocco, harmatta, khamsin, leste, leveche, simoon, or a monsoon. It is manifested in the movements of celestial worlds; their statical connections in space; the ripplet and wavelet, until they transcend unto the cumulative and cresty mountain wall In destructive fury; in oxygen and in hydrogen; in heat and in the cold. Design may be read in the iceberg and the glacier, and in the rush of the frigid undercurrent of the non- saline waters, from their arctic latitudes to tour the seas of the globe, in their purifying, cooling and rejuvenating mission, both to the piscatorial denizens of the deep, as well as to life and vegeta- tion terrestrially; and, in their salubrious return, to lave the west- ern littoral of the dark continent a homogeneous current of tepid- ity, until, by design, this life current channels its way through the ireful Atlantic, to break, in a swish and a swirl, upon the coasts of the western hemisphere, where it is rendered in twain in the part- ing of the ways. Divided here, the Gulf Stream, meandering among the Antilles, through the Mexic gulf, and onward by the broad Atlantic, a gigantic stream of humid warmth, giving a genial glow and inflorescence throughout its journey, until, at last, it breaks upon the sands at the northern pole, a roaring surf. The remain- ing divide, billowing its way southward into the southern sea, with a branching offshoot scouting the southern pole, and rounding the southern promontory, in its swelling up the placid Pacific, to carry perennial summer in its undulating and flexuous current amidst innumerable isles, until, at last, it joins its Atlantic twain in a cresty dash upon the beaches of the Arctic pole. This is perpetual System of Modern Greed and Graft 13 in its continuity. Design is here apparent. The reflective mind may observe the low, fleeting boreal winds, laden with frigid chill, scurrying from their arctic sources, sweeping the glebe with their freezing presence, until, at last, they turn, rounded up at the doldrums, in their rejuvenescent mission, and softened into a balmy breeze by a vertical sun, giving renewed vigor to an enervated region, and hastily returning, in their endless circuit, the warm south wind, to rejuvenesce the northern zones into re- generated life and vegetation. The student, posted in the lore of meteorology, is well acquainted with the fact that there exists marked varieties of weather in tropical climes in equatorial lands situated in opposite longitudes. That of the West Indies is of a different quality to that which hovers over the East Indian Archi- pelago, and produces different races and animal genus; also, ichthy- ological, entomological, and vegetable life. The same rule governs conditions in the Arctic and Antarctic, and in the Cancer and Capri- corn circles. There is many a slip in degree of clime betwixt a Quito and a Hammerfest locality. Observe the momentum and energy given to the overflow of the placid lake as it glides to the brink of a Niagara crevasse; or, in its dash down the valley of the mountain. In the waterspout and in the cumulative wave latent power is aroused. A rule, coincident with the above, governs conscious life with the same unchangeable laws as it does that of inert matter. The volcano, in its wrestle with constitutional impuri- ties, brought on by solar attraction upon the one side, and spon- taneous gas explosions and gravitation on the opposite, may be seen the terrestrial ulcer. While the earthdln Is but a seismal shock of a rheumatic condition in the diversified stratas seeking new positions to reach their centre of gravity. The same may be observed in the carbuncled homo and In the spavined equine. Be- hold the giant and tranquil Pacific, a behemoth of placid waters, a marked contrast to the ireful, but smaller, Atlantic. The same may be noted among men. The smaller a man sizes up in stature and avoirdupois the more he desires to expose the chip on his shoulder, and to knock some one's block off. On every hand design is re- vealed. This is enough for the material world to know. All phys- ical substance, without exception, perishes. By astronomical divin- ation all material matter and worlds are born, and they die, through fire, to be returned unto fathomless nebula. They are reborn, for a new drama, and so on, ceaselessly, forever. Brevity of space for- bids further moralizing. Every blessing is handed to man mixed with a certain amount of evil. It is up to him to shake the evil and hold on to the good. It may be said, they are loaded. Design is manifested to the student of physiology in the neuron, the circu- latory, and the digestive systems of the animal organization, by their complexity and unison, and in the eye that can see, and the ear that doth hear. Because the hand is not divulged to impure humanity isn't any reason that it is not there. Machinery may Whirl with an invisible engineer, but he is near. 14 fhe Red Book Itluminating tht THE LABOR UNION "Chapeau bas!" The local union Is a factor In the national federation, and this, then, is an ally of the international parlia- ment of industrial trades. The Federation of Labor stands today with its back hard up against the Federal Constitution, facing and defying its monopolistic, greedy, and vulpine foe in its violent as- saults upon its integrity and perpetuity, and upon the universal leveling and consanguinity of mankind. United we stand; divided we fall. These centripetal and centrifugal forces are the symbols of antagonistic power represented by organized industry and organ- ized money, which are in alignment as emulous opponents for the acceleration or subversion of the rights of the people and of civili- zation in evolution's advance. Unionism should be a "vade me- cum" with all toilers. A state of opposition is a fact and a force in nature. Without evil, one would not know the virtue of good. But good and virtue stand indestructible, whilst evil and vanity are but transitory. The industrial organization expands with prac- tical experience, and becomes wise. With accumulating power it assumes responsibility. It is verily common sense which induces the isolated unit to unite in unison to form a whole in demanding attention from the obdurate, and, by so doing, he enlarges his con- ceptions of matters in general. The industrfcl union assumes va- rious functions in advancing the welfare of the wage-earner. It sustains him in enforced idleness and ill-health; it pensions him when senescent; and puts his remains away decently when his spirit has fled its clay. This seems to partake of insurance. By waging war, after arbitration, or even compromise, is refused a con- sideration, on his despoiler, it plays the part of a guardian. In its trials trades-unionism should receive the sympathy and assistance of every liberty-loving and class-despising factor of this land of popular government, which is for, and by, the whole people, as, in its industrial tribulations, the fight is really one which is directed against a debased and unholy competition, and for a perpetuation of the free institutions as guaranteed by the Continental Constitu- tion of 1789. The benefit the union hands to the masses seems to be but dimly understood, as yet. Its victories even elate and ele- vate labor's obstructionist, in his contracted ambit — the non- union quiz. His inferior wage ascends proportionately with the general uplifting of compensation all along the line of manual labor. This is the capital reason why he is so dubbed a rosorial rat, and he urgently desires the ferret. The battle ground for a decisive de- cision, whether the masses are forever to remain in indifference to their fate, and allow selfish privilege to frustrate any and all at- tempts for the amelioration of insufferable conditions, or, on the other hand, whether morality and truth shall be the pole star to lead them in fraternal harmony with the nations in social equality, along the ages, in the completion of the design of Deity, 1b fated for the soil of the Great Republic. Here Ormuzd and' Ahximan may have a colossal arena for a bare-knuckled mill to a System of Modern Greed and Graft 15 finish, for the leveling of mankind. The union, it may be observed, is the tactical and strategical talent, and the combiner of unique alignments, in its campaigns and battles against the hoplites of plutocracy, for the triumph of right over wrong. No other nation, as yet, has the universal ballot and a rock-ribbed constitution, and so, of necessity, they must be only a short second in the coming upheaval. The strike "en masse," internationally, is the coming feature, which may induce political regeneration, resulting in uni- versal comity and harmony among the nations of the earth. Ger- many, the leading exponent of intellectual thought in research and philosophy among the European states, may be a close second on the industrial firing line in the coming contest. Simplicity of rou- tine is the leading feature in the everyday life of these courts of industry. Graft, at times, as heralded by its opponents, pervades its councils, and gets its foxy claws upon spoils in the name of the toiler; but the morale of the labor host attacks it with "cour- age sans peur, et sans reproche" to its utter rout and dissolution. Masterly inactivity is often a virtue employed which brings dis- sembling greed to toss the sponge. Questions of the hour, as poli- tics, legislation, and the minatory attitude of the judiciary, are being reviewed by all serious-minded men, with the result of align- ing masses of men, as a unit for reform, at the polls in an indus- trial-political organization. The professional politician and public place hunter will, in due time, realize that he is not the whole of the show, and that there are others who help to make a nation. The Federal Constitution should be widely conned by the masses. Never should organized labor take a rearward movement in times of lax production or of business, nor in those of monetary panics, and the like. The wage-scale advances, but never fluctuates to the rear. Hours "per diem" may be contracted, but never the pay "per diem." The labor union is not concerned, technically, in the dire results materialized by legalized and unrestrained impolitic corner speculation, and the financial battles in the stock exchange, as to affect its wage. This is a distemper for the legislator and the judiciary whom the people elect and support to attend to the pub- lic business. The en masse call-out, and a rigid boycott and social cutting, seem to be the most judicious and effective per- suaders, at present, to bring monopolistic greed to an "amende hon- orable." The captains are engaged at present in an imbroglio, with ambitious politicians seeking for some economic policy to ride into power on the popular wave, to fetter labor leaders with an arbi- trable and incorporative frame of mind. Finance, the tariff, the slavery system, Chauvinism, and the like, have captured the masses, at times, so as to land the successful sophist in the highest posi- tion. Old chicanery is only laid away, not discarded, and things industrial is the rage now in political spheres. The mad money hunter and hoarder is as full of turgid tricks as an unbroken broncho. Monopoly is only sparring to get a jitsu hold, in the in- dustrial wrestle, to floor the manual laborer, and with him popular government. Labor should be as sure of its footing, in dealing 16 The Bed Boole Illuminating tht with this vulpine antagonist, as a chamois feels for its position on an Alpine crag. To be a respondent in a suit with capital be- fore a prejudicial judiciary is equivalent to destruction. Coopera- tion among workers, in a mutual business, or profit-sharing with employers, are two good innovations. They pan out more profitable than the weekly wage. But the maximum number of people prefer the tangible weekly wage to a system which asks them to be a little more serious and circumspect in life. They prefer pleasure, indiffer- ence, and a due share of misery to some care and self-denial for bettering their condition. The wage-earner has always taken hold of cooperation in a half-hearted manner. Education can remedy this in the industrial schools springing up. Until people do their own thinking, and not depend on others to do it for them, they may never better their industrial conditions, or get any more than a fractional part of what is due them. The masses, universally, for- sake their gladiatorial champion nigh the martyr's gate, and in his subversion leave him to his fate. Not so with moneyocracy. Proverbially, it befriends an insidious server to the bitter end, through thick and thin. Even when the grafting political sinecur- ist gets his throw-down, by an outraged constituency, these money bugs never desert him. For his past services, in aiding privilege to forage the nation for public plunder, he always commands fruit- ful consideration. This is the reason why the trust power is so strong, and the people's cause so nerveless. Sublime public indiffer- ence! With an innovation in this habit of inconsiderateness mani- fested by the wage-earner may come added strength to the cause of labor. Yet, with similar patience and persistence in achieving defi- nite aims as the mariner displays in combating the doldrums, or in forcing his white-winged freighter to double the Horn, in its topping of the majestic Pacific, or the Arctic viking, in his bouts with the wall of ice in his invasion of the pole, doth the labor union show, in its firm but moral stand, in the industrial arena of the present day, to war for the rights of the plain people against or- ganized money and greed. "Labor omnia vincit," The Call-Out. When an irrepressible force collides with an immovable body in a labor argument, the logical sequence of such an occurrence starts a head-on strike, or a lockout. If the wage- earner were more frugal, and less the lover of symposiums, to a more reasonable extent in his career, he would win his independ- ence, hands down. No call-out is the usual thing, as the uninitiated so think, by a random "viva voce" acclamation. A local squabble is managed, advisably, by a delegate, or an organizer, while the general strike must be declared through the consensus and delib- erations of the entire membership, in conclave assembled, by a ref- erendum vote. Arbitration, or compromise, for an equitable adjust- ment in a labor dispute, always commands the attention of the membership. The outside public may rest assured that the strike is always a "dernier ressort" in case of a flat refusal on the part of the employer to play fair in the game. The strike and the lockout, Otherwise, are often the conspiracy of the debentured and first pre^ System of Modern Greed and Graft 17 f erred magnate, the sky-high financier, and the ambiguous speculator, with organized capital rounding up the rear, and a few other mon- etary terrors, for profit, passion, or political prospectus. The strike is a miniature battle mainly waged without the lead and steel; yet, in its train follow all the after horrors of real war. The result of this mimic deploy can be seen in the increasing poverty, intem- perance, crime, immorality and suicide, the family tie rent asunder, patriotism chilled, apostasy, and ambition sunk into trampdom. Even thus, habits of independence and industry survive his enforced debasement so strong that the true toiler would rather force a hold- up than panhandle; but would, if righted, prefer honest industry to either. Boycotting, a trans-Atlantic custom, adopted here and re- habilitated with true American sagacity, social cutting, picketing, and the like, are potent agents employed by organized labor to shame recusant greed to its corner. The organizer is a proctor ap- pointed to originate new labor branches and chapels, and to adjust minor difficulties. His office is but an advisory one, with little or no mandatory authority. He has his finite limit. The non-union man floats as a derelict upon the industrial sea. He stands ready to cut off his proboscis to cancel a grudge against his face when he acts as a strike-breaker to aid monopoly and incarnate greed, the human representative of which detests, as much as upright labor despises, him. Riots occur, as naturally they may; but are very often engendered by the money bug at the throttle of industry, and accredited to the wage-earner so as to influence fickle public opinion. All is fair in war, as in love, is emblazoned on the banner which greed unfurls to the passing breeze. The inventor is the carpen- ter ant, now busily tunneling under the foundation of modern so- ' ciety. Sampson-like, his continuous efforts will be rewarded by bringing this old ramshackled system down in ruins to be replaced by one which probably will be satisfactory to the hastening genera- tions that await in line. The length of the work-day will get an equitable paring, and then all men, who so desire, may have a chance to labor. Pay and hours "per diem" are the principal griev- ances; yet, many minor ones may precipitate a sententious resist- ance, viz., abolishing long-enjoyed customs, "ex usu," the sympa- thetic strike, and the like. Non-union labor is known, by the wise and experienced employer, as a dear and costly perfunctory to sub- stitute for true talent. United labor should be a pyramid, in its hindrance, to the blighting progress of the professional public place hunter. The strike, and the lockout, are often compromised, for the time being, by the intercessor, with a metastasis tranquillizing both contestants. There should be no consarcination in the war upon greed even if a severe "frais" is demanded of the toiler, as the struggle will be a rough house in shaking the "ultimus regum" from their plutocratic throne. Tabular statistics on population, when they point to increase, are often favorably commented upon by pub- lic men as evidence of national wealth and greatness; yet, at the same time, moneyocracy clamors that there is not bounty enough to go around for the increasing volume, which will always yield only 18 The Red Booh Illuminating the a bare subsistence for the submerged, with but a moderate living to the many, and luxuries just for the select. This is a mislead- ing and mendacious assertion. As, at the last supper, there are more than enough of loaves and fishes — everything being infinite in nature — on the paschal plate of the Holy Grail to go around, if all were fair in the game of life. But a surfeit has been bagged to one end of society, at the expense of all, and legislation is mis- applied in surging it there. All who hunt with politics for a living, and live by serving the public from an official sinecure, care not whether rats or ratcatchers are predominant in the nation so long as they receive their bonus for routine work performed in very con- tracted "per diems." "Ic hsbbe mete ta etanne." Some Modern American Wonders. Antiquity boasted of but seven wonders. They were great in their way. Modern civili- zation possesses many. A few are mentioned below accredited to the North American Republic. They stand as the apotheoses of the national intelligence and industry. Seven times seven may be pro- claimed without an arduous quest for their resurrection. Steel suspension bridge building, and general engineering. Modern architecture, and presto rise of populous cities. Electricity, in its applications, and Chemistry. Agriculture, its implements, and mechanical industry. The Panama canal. Greed, monopoly, and moneyocracy. The Billionaire. The New Masculine Woman, academy cultured and imitated The American Republic. Surgery. Decadency of England. Nowhere, and in no age of the world's history, has such a hardy and robust race deteriorated so conclusively, in its virility, as this one of Albion, where domestio peace has prevailed so long a time, free of universal immorality and of pestilence. Pharaohic greed rests recumbently enthroned in the British Isles, where all realty, and visible possessions, and titles patent, descend by entail, with callous exactness; opportunity ex- tinct; sympathy submerged by a state of hypocrisy; poverty as common as the conditions which are answerable for it; life auto- matic; with a patriarchal parliament, which follows the faithful subject and wage-earner e'en to his couch with its paternal legislative and wage-consuming laws. All may perceive here conditions which simply are born through lack of education and an indifference to public affairs upon the part of the masses, with a contrary zeal of greed pursued by the privileged classes. It would, indeed, agitate the shades of Neville of Warwick, were he to wander earthward, to see the degeneracy of his race that once was. Children, soiled and gaunt, and the barefooted tatterdemalion, even in the throes of winter, haunt the doors of cocoa and tea cookshops, ready, on the rising of the diner, to rush in and smack his platter clean. They ran by the pedestrian's side, an economic study, and solicit only System of Modern Greed and Graft 19 for a lucifer or a pin. This is an -insinuative evasion of a parlia- mentary law which prohibits alms seeking. The matches and pins, when the requisite number is aggregated, are traded for the farthing or ha'penny, to buy a small loaf or a kippered herring. With no universal ballot to obtain redress, and at the feet of the titled pop- injays, all may perceive what to expect of class usurpation which is not firmly and securely adjured by a stalwart constitution and the ever sleepless vigilance of the masses. Lombard street, as the clear- ing house of the world's business, and in a country so rich as a creditor that all nations seek its pecuniary aid, may be traced as the source of these soulless conditions. The helping hand is in a state of paresis in the whole of Britain, with the one exception of London, and yet the charity which is doled to the subject there represents the manifold gifts of the stranger within England's por- tal. The "malade" of this moribund kin«>lom is class legislation, and the privileged parasite, as a vampire, grafting upon the grime of the many. They have as slyly slipped the headstall over the manes of the masses as the stealthy farmer doth upon his browsing steed. The people, domiciled in the Transvaal, and other conquered but valiant enclavements, detest and loathe the emasculatory yoke of this saturnalian vandal. Britain has been a veritable Roman upon the territory of the defenseless with her mission (?) of evan- gelization and civilization. Conceited with the easy cinch they have had in times past this aristocratic and insipid nobility can scarcely perceive that England is now but a has-been. The great English yeomanry, which Warwick, and Richard III., and the Edwards and Henrys led with delectation to the onslaught, and to emblazonment and undying glory, in times of yore, is slowly succumbing to the lethal repulses it received in its attempts to enslave the free people of America in the XVIIIth and XlXth centuries. At Saratoga, Yorktown, Trenton, and at North Point in 1812, where the mechan- ics, Wells and McComas, sent Gen. Ross, their fustian leader, to dine with Pluto in hades, as this fanfaron vaunted he would, if not in captured Baltimore, monarchical greed received its mortal quietus and started Britain upon the road to premature senility. No late economic policies of the short-sighted and greedy jingo and spellbinder can now stave off her doom. Her plight has reached the gods, and Nemesis is sure to appear. Babylon is fallen, and Nine- veh is naught else but a subsoil for scientific research. Samson- like, class has suicided, in the general catastrophe, with the masses, by their loosening of the pillars of state. Intemperance was en- couraged by class legislation, in the interest of the brewer and distiller, who were often knighted, and, also, as a political measure, to assuage the toiler with his paupered wage and a servile indus- trial policy. No ways are lasting but the true way. With bibulous habits and constrained to a meagre and non-nourishing sustenance consuming his pittance wage, he has degenerated and deteriorated to such an alarming degree that, without the aid of her foreign tributaries and provinces, home material would be insufficient to recruit her armies tor domestic defense. Her next contest with 9, 20 The Red Book Illuminating the redoubtable and worthy antagonist will develop her bluff and seal her doom. Nature is not remiss in her method, nor does she stop at a relay house. All her laws ring clear as a whistle and pure as the tumbling snowflake. The monocled nobility, an immoral, pretentious, profligate, and arrogant class of degenerates, the venous blood and deseendent jackanapes of a once sturdy ancestry, the able counterpart of a Villiers, the Buckingham courtier of sensu- ality, and with the harlequins, manikins, buffoons, and the like, a toy and pastime for Rex, have yoked the submissive people, with the aid of Lex, and their claims by divine right, to the policy which has drifted them to the brink of the yawning crevasse. Reform of the pub., at the eleventh hour, is exercising the wits of the solons down in London. Servile to a law of entailment for so long a time he is now but an automatic factor in his own land. These are the recrudescent scenes which organized monopoly, and highly-pro- tected captains of industry, and the peregrinators hobnobbing with royalty, endeavor to transplant hitherward. A smattering of chem- istry, with even less knowledge of natural philosophy and physics, may aid them in perceiving a dissimilarity in the ozone which the great Atlantic swerves to the right and to the left. Experience af- firms that it is the air which makes the character of a race. The England of roast beef and plum pudding, as a general thing, is a matutinal dream of a midnight reveler. In a realistic verity, it is more often the penny loaf, a bowl of tea, the periwinkle, and a bloater. We see the navvy, and his class, in his well-worn raiment of a tenner-cap, hobnailed shoes or clogs, and his tri-ennial suit of cheap and spurious corduroy. And yet he is vociferous for roy- alty. The land is overrun with the constabulary, on a paupered pay, the egotistical and needy militant, and a multitude of treadmill and oakum reformatories which a fatherly parliament provides for those who lag by the wayside, in succumbing to the prevailing soulless conditions. That which is known as a financial panic in the U. S. is the usual routine of life in this merry old wayback; but when Lombard street speculation, with the help of Pall Mall, doth start a panic ball rolling, the grim Spectre, with his overworked scythe, invades the haunts of the ever-impecunious submerged frac- tion, in the slums and muck of its hidden quarters, and removes a multitude beyond the further rapacity of legalized greed. A manu- facturing country, unsupported by a great domestic agricultural section, proves a dangerous and precarious ground for permanent and successful class legislation and exploitation in these strenu- ous times of world-wide competition. England, Ireland, and India have had their holocaust from famine, and may have the same again when outraged moral laws consider the time propitious to sickle the weak from the comminutions of avarice. The struggle for existence waxes so tight in this dear little isle that everything claims a mar- ketable value, from an old battered plug hat, up or down, to a last year's newspaper. It is a stereotyped cry, familiar to nonchalance in Liverpool, "All ahead; to the devil with the hindmost!" And this is proud old England, and, as they say in Lancashire, this is System of Modern Greed and Graft 21 proud old Preston. The writer of this epitomized essay sojourned several months investigating conditions in England, Scotland, Ire- land, Wales, and France, and in the first three of the above named lands witnessed most of the conditions and realities depicted and narrated in this concised version. Their unwritten law, England for the English, and to the dogs with the alien, impresses the stranger in its reality. And an American, or any foreigner, receives a callous greeting in that island of patriarchal ways when he starts out to hustle for employment. Ask your road, or any civil question, and one will often get a curt answer on the thoroughfare. Even common information has a salable value. But in America the grafting politician, at the bid of the plutocratic money power, has bowed her gates ajar to the social and industrial vomit from the ghettos and submersions of Europe, Asia, and the entire world, to the dismay and degradation of the native element. A substitution of the dross for the gold. It is sedition in England to criticise the institutions of royalty aDd the titular classes, or even to pule disparagingly of the reigning rex. INTELLECTUAL LABOR ("University Cultured,) Opportunity and Success. The word toiler, wherever and whenever used in this book, stands for, and embraces, this class of labor as much so as that of manual. Opportunity is always in reach of the professional toiler who is big enough to dig up an idea, and the road becomes narrowed only in a degree commen- surating with the capacity of the individual. Knowledge is a celes- tial power, which gets its share of the common pile in spite of the enslaver. The university and the college are a growing factor in the daily expanse of the land. Legions of matriculated cadets are constantly swelling the industrial army. Their educated tal- ent may be daily seen in the improvements and betterments en- compassing society. Many of them, who have chosen finance, juris- prudence, commerce, and politics, as a special course, seem, by in- tellectual cunning, to have devised ways and means to get the meat of the melon, and leave manual labor in a scramble for the rind. That the university sharpens the nous of the modern captain of industry, and the public man, and neglects their moral training, is an ethical truism which is palpable even to the sojourning celes- tial chinkies. The monopolistic idea represents a creed in his nar- row set. A vested right in everything in sight, and out of sight, he considers as his by a paramount preference above all the com- mon herd for his recherche talent. Easy money, with the masses in the ditch, sums the efforts of his schemes and misapplied ener- gies. Man proposes; but God disposes. In most peculiar ways doth complacent nature devise her periodical trial balance. The honorar- ium of the professions is conclusively disproportionate to the com- pensation vouchsafed to manual labor, as much so as the emoluments ** The Bed Booh Illuminating 1h« received by officialdom. The masses get the sleeve laugh in all the amenities of life. THE BIG FOUR. (QuadriviumJ Financial. Of obscure origin, but taught a few tricks by the modern Jew. It is a "profesh" pursued -without compunction in its callous exactions, and holds the most powerful nation, as well as the impecunious patron of the avuncular Jew of the pledge shop, in its talons of steel. In its various gilded temples — of the exchange, trust company, bank, clearing house, and the like — schemes, and at times they approach treason, are concocted which, more than once, have perturbed the civilized world. Its menial — interest — is ever a proficient fertilizer, raising the primordial principal up to a colos- sus before it vanishes in a terminal liquidation. Credit, the gay deceiver, is skurrying sheep to its shambles every hour. These two factors are the main refunding tools in this calling, and their activ- ity is further accelerated by the studding-sail of wilily concocted ru- mor. Finance represents a calling which gets a glossy technique in the university; and a little practical experience, with the aid of the ticker and the tape and some knowledge of sheep, sends it forth upon a varied career in its contact with the affairs of men. Gold can build or destroy; break the peace or forbid war. There lives no power so ubiquitous to parallel money's sway on this floating financial disk. It generates class and creates conditions of pov- erty, and makes or unmakes the standard of value as is the specu- lator's wont. It is Himalayan in stature among all other pursuits, and its devices are infinite to enslave the needy and the ignorant. Political corruption is a stimulant to its viceregal grip upon the masses. The money merchant sits with a stethoscope to the public aorta unceasingly. Finance is an old mountebank and charlatan parading under the "nom-de-plume" of a licit science. It has bluffed the wild and woolly West as completely as it has ensnared the back- ward Southland. This speculative bogy, engineering the people's money, can will them a monetary panic, hard times, the lockout, or prosperity, as loss and gain move its cupidity. The wage-earner is as intellectually languid as the average toiler in the intellectual callings is physically lazy. The money bug claims the right, "per se," to manage a people's finance. When the public school, and the lecture hall, impart to the people, and to the coming generations, more wisdom and less latescence, on this vital business, money may then, and then only, find a legitimate sphere and be robbed of its elfish terrors. Modern financial and commercial circles have mapped a prearranged quiescent concordat to fleece the industrial masses universally. Commercial. Ingrained in this intercalary vocation in its every transaction between the vendor and vendee are the potent factors of supply and demand, competition, calamitous events, and ttl* like, Financial juggling and political legerdemain, together System of Modern Oreed and Graft 28 ■with the differential collusions of the "chemin de fer" director, agi- tate its shifting vane constantly. The commercial student in the university is drilled thoroughly in the lore of barter. With added practical experience he descends to a state of quiddity approaching "homo homini lupus," in contravention to the weal of the toiling wage-earner, who, in his purchasing necessity, becomes enthralled in a mobile tribute to him as an intermediary evil in his exchange. This calling is pursued with the same callous Indifference as the demonstrator in a clinic handles the gratuitous patient. Barter goes back earlier than Phoenicia, and is hoary in its ancestry. It is engaged in importing and exporting, domestic trading and adul- teration. Job lots is a familiar term with the profession. Condition of crops, here and elsewhere, corners, war, rumor, industrial troubles, the monetary panic, high tariff, politics, monopoly, and a whole host of trade trumps have their weight at the Exchange pit, for weal or woe, both to the unprotected and defenseless producer and con- sumer in toeing the mark. From antipode to antipode this mid- dleman is constantly pushing commercial exchange and looking for alluring marts. When the husbandman cultivates his cerebrum as dexterously as he handles his digits in his manual work, and public ownership and control is just around the corner, with the public depositary, and the continuous changing of the official sinecurist, with the short and fixed time tenure as a verity, then the com- mercial corner and jugglery will be a spook which has had its inn- ing. The manufacturer has an impolitic remedy in the restriction of output and a shutdown. The middleman is a necessary evil; but should be legitimized within constrained limits. Prices ruling on exchange should be based on the prevailing average rate of wage compensating manual labor, and not fluctuate to suit a visionary cry of supply and demand. New Zealand and Australia, the isle of the Southern Cross, just about at present seem to be the only two countries legislating for the masses, and giving privilege only what is coming to it equitably, and, at frequent Intervals, comminuting it of public plunder. Qens de lois (legal jurisprudence). Law and order constitute the first omnicorporeal flat in creation. Impartially executed, as in omniscient nature, law leads to stability of society. But archaic legislation and law, becoming overburdened and topheavy by the passing of time with musty precedents and opinions which were a paragon of wisdom in times of an ancient date, show signs of turn- ing turtle in their solution of modern problems. Law, at present, tardy in its work as the flight of the ages, unreliable as the weather on a winter's day, its rules and principles at variance with the every-day occurrences of established fact, justice often but second- ary in its deliberations and determinations, it is swiftly dawning upon the most indifferent that it needs a thorough recodifying and pruning, both in its quality and compass. Lex is the progenitor of the modern technical terms which so plentifully stud the monopo- listic firmament. It is the community of interest, the injunction, and the vested right, and such, which so thoroughly weds the lobby- 24 The Bed Booh Illuminating the ist to his captures and the spoilsman to his graft. Politically created exigent law — law worked up to date in its Rip Van Winkle garb — is but a valet to the cunning monetary kings. A star boarder at the political round table, its usurpation of power has attracted the attention of all serious thinking men. The pettifogging practitioner is more of a dangerous Figaro in parisology with his litigious clien- tele than the fanatical Mohammedan effendi with the supplicatory giaour. Judicial law, on a parity with monopolistic privilege and custom, occasionally needs a thorough pruning to keep it in a nor- mal and robust condition. Journalism. Every other industry in the world's labor ranks second to this quartette of intellectual professions in the shaping and molding of society. The hand that urges a pen, or engineers a crayon pencil, in scribing or cartooning the thoughts and fancies which well up in the head, usually belongs to one who is even with his era, and often somewhat ahead of his time. Its duties are mani- fold and onerous, and its power, which subjects it to many responsi- bilities, is measured in force with its variable success in keeping in touch with advanced ideas and public demands. It has its evil, as well as its moral, side. Often suspected of spreading misleading industrial, financial, commercial, and political news, all vital ques- tions, in its public print to entice the gullible and the unwary to enter the meshes of the unproductive spiders, hosts of wage-earners view its depictions with incredulity and apprehension. Looking over this field of news exploitation reflection may reveal to the con- siderate and complacent mind that manual labor has its champion, as well as it is supposed to have its detractor, in the man who pushes the pen. All labor should be as one vast whole in a sym- pathetic tie. Debasement of one factor means a deterioration of all. The press is hourly expanding with the times,, and is, at this moment, demanding a seat of learning for the training of its staff. It will then become the great mentor and educator of the masses in the perplexing questions which are troubling this period. It is noted that imperially-inclined officialdom is endeavoring to muzzle free speech and free print in this free land, which is for, and by, a free people. "Virtute et labore" is the true religion. The niscellaneous Intellectual Callings. Toil- ing, potently and noiselessly, in the universal hive of in- dustry multifarious and varied intellectual callings add their quota to the general results. In the array of talented en- ergies, busy for the weal of the world, and the glory of God, a few may be noted. With architecture one may pass on to astronomy, navigation, dynamics, engineering, surveying, in- vention, exploration, agriculture, the sciences, anthropology, archae- ology, biology, botany, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, philosophy, seismology, surgery, zoology, history, the conservatoire, the model room, belles-lettres, the Thespian art, the pulpit, the teacher, fine arts, and the host of similar callings. The manual worker has his counterpart and coadjutor ia the thinker. To be an adept in the System of Modern Greed and Graft 25 fine arts the possessor must have phrenological gifts of talent; it cannot be acquired with proficiency. One cannot capture the muses — Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomeme, Polyhymnia, Terpsi- chore, Thalia, and Urania — as these are fickle goddesses who yield only to those phrenologically gifted. Every man has a talent for some part in nature's workshop. If he lose his way in his appren- ticeship days and gets in the wrong business, his lottery chance for a successful life will yield him but a blank in his draw. Intellect always keeps open a runlet to opportunity, and when success is bagged the game is high. Education and morality will recompense the manual laborer the same favorable way, and free him from the crouch of the bunco cougar. All toilers are necessary in the work of the world. The more, the merrier. Each and every individual business forming the general sum of human thrift is agglutinated to a vocabulary of trade expressions peculiar to its own work. The physician enshrouds his calling in Latin, and music affects a glam- our of French and Italian. The scientific man, in all the various branches and callings of science and art, uses a jargon. Even the outcast and the criminal have a lexicon of their slang. This cus- tom of using an idiom to ensconce the arcana of their callings, is an impressive barrier to the prying lampooner. In volapuk may be noted an international commercial wink. MATHEMATICS, the sponsor of man in defining, measuring, de- termining, and calculating his work and knowledge, from the ob- scure vales and valleys which bottom the restless sea to the dim and misty regions of the Pleiades, is the keystone of all knowledge in the workshops of the world. Advancing from algebra to calculus bodies in the nethermost regions of eternal and infinite space, out beyond the hazy storm-cloud nimbus and the fleecy cirrus, and from the Pole Star to the Dipper, and in the constellations betwixt the Great Bear and Orion, may be distanced and truly weighed. By the syllogism and the axiom are wrought out equations deducible from the angles and perspectives given by the prismatic lens in the theo- dolite, hypsometer, telescope, and the like. Mathematics is more useful in its applied state than ornamental in the abstract. It has its limits in conjunction with all things mortal. It has failed in squaring the circle, as well as in bounding the universe. From hy- draulics to tunnelling it is infallible. The mathematical brain has given to mankind the architecture displayed in the temples of Solo- mon, all of the wonders of antiquity, the grand temples of Lamaism, at Lhassa, the Escurial, the Moorish Alhambra of Cordova, in the land of Castile and Aragon.the sublime castle of Pierref onds, and the abodes of royalty and wealth the world over. The formulas of geometry have won all the great battles of the nations, built their fortifications and mines, and performed their engineering. In peace it has divulged forces which man has adapted to annihilate spatial wastes on the land, in the air, underground, and on the sea. Geo- desy, with some knowledge of geogony and geognosy, enables the scientist to get the angle by which mathematics elucidates the alti- tude of the mountain, and the distance from apex to apex of oppo- 8 26 The Bed Boob Illuminating the site ranges. The navigator qualifies his course with the quadrant, sextant, and his mathematical logarithms. It is observed to be a constant companion with the spirit level, the prism, the square, the plumb line, the compasses, the linear rule, the surveyor's chain, the log, and the like, in the useful arts. Where'er the eye doth per- ceive the railroad curve and embankment, the tunnel and the sus- pension bridge, mathematical science has been there. It measures the resisting ohm, to obtain a volt to give the arc an ampere of light. It serves mineralogy in the mines, and aids geology in un- folding the history and the age of the earth. It aids the soldier to get the true aim on his mark, and the battleship to point its guns. It will bring the aerial ship as surely as it has the steam engine. It works with meteorology in space, as well as with the transmissible cable that underlies the sea. Its principles have solved the riddles for artificial light, and the heat and water for modern comfort. It is indispensable in all the arts, sciences, and profes- sions, and for the welfare of mankind. It planned the city and its homes. In fact, it is a world beater, this science of mathematics. In all things it is "a posse ad esse." Life is short to the virtuoso, and art is long. Mathematics is an attribute of the gods. The Aristocratic Club. Fraternizing in these social meets are the intellectual workers, which are synonymous in aims with the purposed functions of the manual labor union. With their gath- erings there ushers in the exchange of ideas between art, science, and the professions, resulting in mutual benefit and expansion to all concerned. Fortified by their association with kindred spirits they sally forth to conquest and to fame. THE MUNICIPAL ADVISORY AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Liberty is not license; and this is a government of, for, and by, the whole people. The primary booth, as much so as the jury bench, is gradually dragging its anchor and slipping its moorings of public esteem; yet a momentary reflection may show that it is its abuse, and not its inadequacy, which is separating it from a cus- tom of inchoative integrity. In this limited space and summarized work just a superficial conspectus can be sketched of a counter- poised innovation which is imperatively demanded in the republic's political system, and which will have to come, sooner or later, by slow attrition or in haste. The above caption to constitute a basic entity, in which the whole Federal and State governments should seed from. To eliminate the chesty and chronic official place hun- ter and professional political grafter from the public crib a few suggestions will be distributed throughout this book, which might, if propitiously prevailing, be as effective in the removal of this graft- ing usufruct as burning sulphur is a sequel to the demise and the epitaph of a rodent. The ballot of today is cast as a stranger to its free selection. It is compelled to kowtow to a party idol, picked from a bunch of mossbacks, which the political manipulators en- throne for its homage, or become an iconoclast and apostate in its System of Modern Qreed and (haft %t fealty to popular government. If the people, generally, do not Issue from their intellectual lethargy and get more wise on leading and vital questions, and attend to them as religiously as they do to their private affinities, and morally, they may, in the hastening future, have to inaugurate a still-hunt to find any business at all for their delectation and profit. A standing committee of, at the least, one hundred capable and worthy citizens, of various shades of political opinion on questions at issue, with one hundred alternates, ditto, for large cities, and smaller communities in proportion, should be drawn, individually, by name, from some up-to-date rotary me- chanical device, being the first to issue of a greater number placed therein. In the central labor union, comprising branches of all manual trades, in each large urban centre, one hundred of these names should be allotted, fifty the choice, and fifty the alternates. The remaining one hundred, of fifty alternates, and fifty the choice, should come from an organization composed of business men and those in the intellectual callings. The one hundred chosen regu- lar ones to form, conjointly, and each and every unit of it the same in standing as its fellow, the above committee. Their term tenure of office to be of six years, and until their successors are inducted in position. Their pay a "per diem" whilst attending to their chosen official duties. The proposition is advanced that the worker, only, should govern the State, when found fit. The duties of this centenary committee should run in the groove of receiving candi- dates from the source in which they derived their existence, of men of all shades of opinion on public questions at issue, and of worthy and capable attainments, and also of any one or more from the outside, who can show a considerable and definite following, of worthy citizens of like qualities as the foregoing, to form tickets, pro and con, to stand before the people at the primary. The suc- cessful ones, representing methods at odds in palliating or remov- ing conditions of public disadvantage, to have a final sanction for preference on the regular election day. This centenary committee of the whole to have the power to create unlimited minor or sub- committees within its primary body, to facilitate public business. They shall also receive from the same source candidates and alter- nates for Federal and State conventions, to come before the people at the primary. There should be but two estates in the public serv- ice, of either the Federal, State, or municipal. One of which should be escorted to office by the suffrage power, the other through the sieve of the civil service mill. The legal profession is, at present, too manifest in legislative councils. Such should be marked by its absence; and the lawyer should have only an equitable quota iu the remaining public offices. This is a country for a whole peo- ple, not for any particular class or calling. This aforesaid muni- cipal committee to press the serious charges and complaints made against any public official or officials which may arise, before the proper tribunals, for malfeasance and subservience in the conduct of their chosen office; to supervise the government depositaries in their Jurisdiction; to guard the -public franchises against corrup- 88 The Bed Booh Illuminating the tion; to arbitrate any dispute between capital and labor; to keep the political channels undefiled; and other similar duties. Prin- ciples, and not men or party, should be their slogan. All States should be a unit in uniformity of like laws. The general election of the entire State, for State officials and measures, and the muni- cipal general elections, should be all held at the same date, and in all the States, conjointly, and in unison of time, in the second week of the second month in Autumn, for climatic reasons, of every six years; and the Federal or National election a like date, in the Au- tumn, every six years, alternating the State election day by three years. This election period may suit the husbandman better than that of the third month in Autumn, as now. For the same meteoro- logical reason Inauguration day should be a feature for the sec- ond week in the second month of Spring. A duplicated counterpart of all ballots to be voted should be exposed to public view in the news press, and posted in prominent places, a sennight or ten days before all primary and general elections. Any stultification or graft- ing by any member or members of the said municipal committee, in the discharge of their chosen duties, on conviction by the legis- lature or the court, should be condoned only after a severe penance through imprisonment. No elective office, within the gift of the people, to enjoy a tenure over six years, to be followed by an interim of six years, before further eligibility of the departing sinecurist. Before the adjournment of a State convention, it should, after get- ting its ticket in shape, appoint a committee of five persons, by balloting in referendum mode. This committee, with a term tenure of six years, and enjoying a yearly salary, to devote its entire time to an espionage of the conduct of all officials, elective and appointive, accredited to its particular State, in the employ of the Federal and its own State government. Those in Washington should receive par- ticular attention. All bribe transactions, recipient and tender, graft- ing of any sort, vending state secrets to speculators, and the one and many defaults in integrity of office, should be immediately ha led by them to stand trial before the proper tribunal, and, on conviction, suffer impeachment and imprisonment. Legitimate election expenses should be publicly borne, so that any and all worthy though impecunious citizens may not be debarred from standing before the people for office. A municipal building should be set apart for the municipal executive committee, and other branches of officialdom appertaining to the conduct of elections, the trial of officials, inquisitorial officials of incorporations, public ac- countants, civil service examinations, a labor union and business men's outfit for the drawing of candidates. A court room should be in these buildings in every municipality, with specially elected judges and attorneys, for the trial of officials in either the Federal or State employ, with power to imprison on conviction. With this a close is brought to this subject to take up the money power. System of Modem Greed and Graft 29 THE MONEY POWER Money, up to date, is a metal, used as a full medium of ex- change. It is a precious metal, of an intrinsic and inherent value. Gold and silver have received the consent of the nations to circulate as money, to facilitate exchange and barter. These metals have re- ceived government stamp, for weight and fineness, as a unit and standard of value. Other circulative mediums, flat and otherwise, pass current to expedite business, but are buoyed by government promise, and a redemption-fund of sterling specie. Therefore, ac- cumulated medium of exchange is wealth, and is an enlightened improvement upon the wampum. Wealth Inherited, and its Idle Possessor. This is a government for, and by, the people. In "ante-bellum" days, an exploded idea of today passed current as the right thing among the masses, that wealth brought anxiety and insomnia to the be- witched one who was accursed with its possession. This delusion was cultivated through the press and the forum, intentionally, to still envy, and for security. Today, greed is in an anarchistic foot- ball rush for its elusive chase. A vast number of the "inespSrto riches," who toil not, neither do they weave nor spin, univers- ally dubbed the leisure class, and constantly drifting over the country and peregrinating across the seas, having hibernal domi- ciles here and beyond the Atlantic ferry, known in Leicester square as the American Johnnies and chappies, with speech "bizarre," and mien of kangaroo locomotion aping of the court "naissance," suck their pap from the toil of the wage-earners of this republic. Per- centum and increase of value, due to the energy of toil, keep their gilt-edged, first preferred investments and registered government bonds rising constantly above high water level. Contrary to estab- lished custom, and with a contempt for democratic institutipns, "odi profanum vulgus," they have, by class legislation, devised an un- written system of entail and primogeniture, having its counterpart in royal lands. By this mode a precedent is instituted, and a wedge inserted, that arrogates to the aspirant, this novus homo, privileges which are a menace to the Federal Constitution. They have en- snared this power from the ever-indifferent people, which will en- able them, and their future progeny, to indulge in idle luxurious- ness, at the expense of grinding toil, to perpetuity. The labor they perform for the welfare of society is defined and reflected by the tennis court and lawn, the golf links, the anise bag and kennel, the tally-ho, automobile, the boudoir, the opera, the lollipop banquet, and other fantasies. In their automobile whizzes, on the highways and byways, they rival the juggernaut in their indifference to hu- man obstacles dotting their path. They have cut loose from all obligations to popular government, and lose no sleep fretting over economic conditions seriously confronting this repuMie. "Tney are with us, for gain only, but not of us." They are always first ill at the cutting of the melon, and follow strictly the advice of the 30 The Red Book Illuminating the Kentucky mountaineer and itinerant parson, who preached that, "while you're gittin', git a-plenty." With them it is "Findins, keep- ina." These sciolists expend their effete energies in the game of pushpin, oiled, perfumed, and lapelled with the verbena and the nasturtium. In their foibles, illumined to the world by their gene- alogical quest in the Almanach de Gotha, the Blue Book, and au- thorities on Heraldry, and the like, for the lineage of legendary progenitors, nee soap boilers, pack peddlers, and such, to emblazon their escutcheons, these quidnuncs develop a nature as barren as the waterless Sahara, where Sol only scorches, but is futile to arouse to verdant life. The dew falls upon their virtues with the same effect as upon a flagstone sidewalk; the violet wastes its fragrance upon their scentless senses. Their selfishness is as the mold of the Egyptian catacombs, which is lethal even to a rat; and it is as at- tractive as the face of a limestone rock, where even the briars will not thrive, and the vulture will not nest. They have a homeless spirit, and a sightless brain. They perceive but a part of nature's idea of things pulchritude, and nothing of the underworld of pov- erty. Doubtless they possess a selfish solace, comforting them with the fallacy that there exists no connective link joining them with the rest of creation. Their pastimes of flippancy are the buoyancy of their fleeting youth; and the balm of their dotage is their rev- eries of the blissful past, strewn with its paths of continual feasts on nectared sweets. He who makes a shovel, or fashions with a tool, or invents some useful device, is of more use to mankind than all these drones, who are an incubus upon the producer. Chaos would speedily ensue if order and system of society depended upon these butterflies of fashion and the salon. Personified selfishness! Their domestic duties never extend beyond their commands deigned to the concierge, the soubrette, and to the mews, with some attention to their caddie and the tout. It is doubtful if they could repeat the Decalogue of Mt. Sinai, Ex. XX., verbatim, and the miserere of 50th Psalm, Latin version. The exhortations of Christ, in His logos to the greedy nations of the earth, passages occur in which it is com- manded for the wealthy to forsake worldliness, discard their wealth, and follow the Master to obtain salvation. This is too much for greed. Literally, the divine command meant for the selfish hold- ers of superabundant riches to disgorge superfluous treasures hoarded, so that all may live. It did not mean for a man to beg- gar himself, and become a charge upon the State. There is plain, common sense in all of the tenets of Christ, and the teachings of the apostles. This is the hiatus between the antipodes of greed and virtue. Defeating legitimate legislation, inimical to their greed, by supreme court rulings, they manage to evade their quota in the expense of government, to the woe of the overtaxed producers. Cou- pon cutting and dividends, with an eye askant on trust earnings, are the severest mental and manual industrial labor their cere- Trum ana manicured digits perform. Percentage and dividend comprise the only rule their abridged arithmetic contains. Seques- tered in communities of their kind, in favored localities, and sur- System of Modern Greed and Graft 31 rounding such with a duplicated counterpart of the wall of China, and in large preserves, measured in extent by many posts of the ancient Hermse, to the deterioration of the rural folk, all of wfcich importations are hostile to popular liberty and to the spirit of the age, they rival even the Oriental despot, and the grand Lama of Thibet, in arrogating to themselves rights not common to the ordi- nary clay. It is "laesa majestas" for the plain citizen to enter the portals of their well-guarded fastnesses. All over this groaning land exclusive wealth is rounding ihe people up into the limited cotswolds. It is plain, to the observing one, that high culture, with- out morality, is no bar to conceit and greed. The diaphanous and dficollete habilimented "nouvelle riche" is assisted by the millions of paterfamilias in her excited chase of a coronet. This frail aig- rette, a dependent upon the sterner sex, seeks an escape from ob- scurity which only her sire's wealth can temporarily obtain. "M8re de famille" is as much of an intrigante as the loud soubrette at- tendant, with her ogling pince nez adorning her phiz, in chaperon- ing her debutante bud to purchase and capture a patent of nobility, notwithstanding the hue of the knight, as miscegenation is no bar- rier to her ambition for title and notoriety. The Salic law is a dead letter to the ambitious American heiress. The toilers of a free country are thus made to pay tribute to bolster up the monarchical system of a degenerate and impoverished nobility. There are many tofters, frankly admitted, idle by choice, in the middle classes; but their period of indolence is dependent upon contingent events. In the next article is a method to level the different abnormal con- tusions upon society to their natural and equitable plane. Money is not a toy; but a great necessity and the life of a nation. Re- laxed vigilance, due to indifference, decadence, and laziness, shifts wealth in subsequent generations from its antecedent sources. Na- ture's eternal laws overtake the erstwhile prudhomme in a contre- temps, and his riches take to wing and soar away. Genealogically, all humanity is a literal descendant, and collaterally, from the same primeval source. When misfortune overtakes the exalted and the parvenu, "noblesse oblige" from his kind instantly ceases. He becomes ostracized, and is simply relegated to the state of obliv- ion. FEDERAL DEPOSITARIES Pro Bono Publico. The government, by legislation, to form the initiative, and organize in every community, throughout this republic, the depositary savings bank for the people at large, to be proportioned in number to every individual community in a ratio with its population. Here deposits may be received up to $10,000. The rate of interest to be one per cent on one dollar per annum, on the amount deposited, with safety from accident or monetary panics. A deposit may be drawn against instantly, in its integer or part, on presentation of its credit book and check, if it is apropos to government interest to allow such withdrawal at 38 The Red Booh Illuminating the that particular period. Each and every bant book to he associated with a metal embossed check, which should invariably accompany such book in depositing and withdrawing credits, and neither should be accommodated without the same. The mandatory offices asso- ciated with each of these banks should be elective through the people of their respective districts, for six years, with the usual in- terim of ineligibility. All other employees to acquire their positions, and a desk, by the civil service procedure, and be permanent in their "sits" if faithful and capable. The central power, in the management of these banks, to reside in the House of Representatives, through the Treasury Department as an advisory intermediary. The run- ning gear would soon become automatic in its functions, and the system may command public respect and patronage with the pass- ing of time. The government to loan on valid security, for legiti- mate purposes, from a minimum to a definite maximum amount, as set by law. A term of imprisonment should inexorably follow any evasion, circumvention, or subterfuge of its laws and regula- tions, upon conviction by the proper constituted tribunal. The rate of Interest on loans to be fixed at a maximum of not over three per cent, on a dollar, per annum, for any amount loaned. No loan to be extended over three years; and loans only to constitute its investments. The whole system of its fundamental business should be fettered by impartial and vigilant laws, and be free of the poli- tician. The municipal committee, with sworn public accountants elected by the people, to have power and authority to examine its every detail in their respective communities, at any and all times, with the purpose of advising the legislative authorities at the Fed- eral capital, through the Treasury department as an advisory agent, of the condition of its affairs. This institution may stimulate busi- ness and industry with the small promoter, as well as with the legit- imate larger one; divorce the Jew from his grip on the nation's financial helm; and the government from its revenue to lower the internal rate of excise and taxation; prevent financial panics, or lessen their severity if they must inflict humanity, deal a blow at speculation, usury, and monopoly; place the management of the money of the people where it properly belongs — in the con- trol of the government, which is for, and by, the whole people. Public policy demands a penalty for miserly hoarding of gold and currency, in its permanent withdrawal from circulation, by selfish and unscrupulous persons and miserly anchorets, for various rea- sons. This bank is their remedy for its security. There should be a periodical change of color, and a withdrawal of former color, in paper currency, to get these selfish harpies and hoarders. A dis- count, after one year's withdrawal of same, should be decreed against the former color, and the tenders of large amounts investi- gated. No man, or number of men, should be entrusted with power which is not handicapped by constitutional law. This bank may be a great boon to the impecunious small farmer, and assist him to fight base competition to a standstill, and best it at any stage of the game. Gold should be made a standard, and with silver, under System of Modern Greed and Graft 33 any and every condition, at a fixed and irrevocable and reasonable ratio with it, to suit the conditions of the whole people, and an international concordat invited. Production may fluctuate; but money — the standard of value — never I This institution would come in at the demise of greed and the lawless speculator and promoter, with their dummy directors, and the like, who, at the present time, are making a farce of the present system and laws of society and civilization, and are bandying, in a mutually arranged under- standing among themselves, incredulous volumes of inflated value with perfect abandon, to the utter amazement of the uninitiated and the safety of the state. Wealth Organized, and Dominant in Politics. Lib- erty, but not license, is what the Constitution offers to all men. O, omniscient monopoly and polycracy, baptized in the font "auri sacra fames," and fanned by the zephyrs of the midsummer's night, whom the masses are commanded to salaam to as IT! Under the above caption is easily recognized the sky-high promoter, the dif- ferential transportation king, the pool-merging speculator, the bun- co-scheming lupus of high finance, the lobby and caucus wirepuller, the franchise grafter, the land grabber, the peregrinator, hibernator, and hobnobber of tinsel royalty, bribers in political contests, and the whole circle of the initiated and exclusive trust interests, in mining, transportation, hot mills and furnaces, exchanges, and such. This is the highroller and the marplot and "sans-culotte" who is looking askant at the people's constitution at this hour, and for the reduction of manual labor to a servile chattel. They are "imperium in imperio." Is monopoly a menace? Put this query up to the hoary Sphinx, as it complacently rests draped in the sombre mantle of the pall of eternal silence, in the Egyptian vale by the historic Nile. The desultory echo, if 'twere possible, would bid the seeker after truth to divert his glances to the cardinal winds, and see the blight which greed has left. The fellah of Egypt, the idolater of Mongolia, the nomad of Arabia, the jejuneness of India, the emas- culated Persian, aye, of all the ancient Oriental glories of magnifi- cent antiquity, these, their direct descendents, are the degenerate scions of a glorious past, which stands as a universal witness of their ancestor's former greatness, and the vulturine qualities and consequent effects of a privileged class when unrestrained by the intelligent organization of a vigilant people. The lobby and the caucus are the diamond for these players with the destinies of men, in these modern times. Enthroned and domiciled in the legis- lative and administrative councils of the nation, or by proxy, it governs the throttle which sets in a whirl the official machinery of government. Organized money has the fate, destiny, and future of the country in its keep. The ermine nods and bends to its every passing breeze. It creates value out of a fictitious exchange, and has a fiat currency of its own. It has grabbed everything in sight. Bribe and graft are analogous with the judge and colonel of the Seller's persuasive brand in speculating and skirmishing for public forage. High protection they hallelujah in a joyous inter- 34 The Bed Booh Illuminating the jectlon, with cymbals and dance, the whole day long. Any party Is their Idol which is in dominant sinecurism. All together, in ob- streperous glee, they affirm, "The king is dead, long live the king!" The coal baron, railway magnate, finance king, factory lord, and such, are the democratic nobility, abiding their time for the oppor- tunity to hedge their "entourage" with the shield of heraldry. Plu- tocracy degrades a free commonwealth and its people, industrially, morally, and politically, and kites the appropriation budget of the State and nation. It is an automatic adjunct of privileged greed, without conscience or remorse. No education or training the uni- versity may impart to these captains can circumvent the inexorable law that, if you raise a mound you must somewhere leave a void. Monopoly, "ipso facto," is greed in allegory, and devilishly aggres- sive, and the strike is the logical outcome of its pernicious nosing and encroachment. Effect always points a cause in the eternal economics of nature. The modern dollar performs more gyrations in moving the masses than ever did either Iskander Beg or Bona- parte on their most momentous occasions of activity. The lungs of the republic are the transportation lines and the circulative me- dium of exchange. The monopolist baits the people with financial delusions before the general election on industrials and fiscalltls in general, and angles them, at the polls, to a clean land of the grafter into power. Combined with the lawyer and the professional politician a trinity is created that the organization of the manual worker will ever be a desideratum in the attainment of some sort of an allotment at the general pile. Education and morality, and a politico-industrial party, will prove the above triple-headed dragon a Frankenstein in reforming the toiler to their methods of despoli- ation. The retail merchant and his, at one time, envied independ- ence, by the pressure of monopoly, have reached the forks of their common journey, and adulteration now has become an adopted venality in his calling, in compensation for their disturbed rela- tions, to the garroting of the hapless consumer. The short skirmish with the Hispanic kingdom in '98 gave publicity sufficient of the power and callous indifference and unpatriotism of organized wealth and monopoly. All betterments on their chattels and plants are made good for the assessment on their shares by unloading newly- created unpreferred common stock, without representative power, on the lambs of the speculative brand, until their incipient capital, and the value of their holdings, are sunk out of sight in the over- capitalization by these serviceable securities. Abiding a propitious era, they inaugurate the rumor of insolvency, and, with their over- capitalization, stocks take a slump, which they cunningly refund at panic prices from the frenzied public in the general liquidation. The margin on these debentures virtually pays for their betterments, refunds them their assessments, and dons the road in a new dress. The next thing then in order is the bonfire to consume this hastily returned alary script, and await another such coup. Very seldom any of the select in these speculative rings ever get scorched. A giganic plundering of a hapless people, fond of the spider's web. System of Modern Oreed and Graft 35 Easy toll from multitudinous labor, and beyond the legal code. The cupidity of the masses should be restrained with legal enactments. Ultra wealth, it may be perceived, is retiring from its native heath to take up a permanent abode in foreign lands, and use America as a raiding and foraging proposition. This is serious food for reflec- tive minds. These rotund and intumescent filibusters may be brought to the stool of repentance, in a sartorial posture, in the near future, by an awakening public seeking a vent for their un- natural conditions. Even the power they have usurped by employ- ing a vast number of armed men, in periods of strikes, would not be tolerated in a country as backward as the Russian autocracy. It is felony, simon pure. Organized greed uses bureaucracy, the servant of the people, as caddy, bottle holder, and tenpin assist- ant, in enslaving its master, the plain people. The trust magnate is the mahout jabbing the political elephant. He is as sightless as a subterranean fish in reading the handwriting upon the wall. Money now is in an international pool of kindred spirits to en- hance their power and opulence, control governments, enslave the masses, and reign universally as king of kings. A greater power than the papal pontiff ever wielded. New Zealand, and others, are fighting greed to a successful close. Here, it is more merciless, in its requirements from the masses, than that exacted of his slavish subjects by a mid-African monarch. Avarice is a hard vice to best in its mastery. The railroad magnate has become a mesne lord of public land, willed to him by grafting laws of Congress. He is a lessor of land he never owned by a valid purchasing right. This is an anomaly nowhere else existing on top of this crust. There should never exist a condition in society when money has the power to subvert labor in a moot court. Existing by living on rents and on interest is the worst kind of grafting on the travail of the masses. The next article is a way analogous to that of beneficent Sol, in breaking through the ominous and heavy cloud cumulus to light the way for the masses to voyage to circumvent the machinations of Machiavelian greed, with its tufthunters. "Let us have peace." "Regnant Populi." PUBLIC OWNERSHIP Pro Bono Publico Federal. This is a government by the plain people. There- fore, it is to have and to hold all interstate steam and electrical transportation lines; all utilities for the universal transmitting of intelligence, electrically and mechanically, under the sea, on or in the earth, and spatial; all territorial natural wealth of raw material, in and on the earth; the sea fisheries, within "mare clausum," the lakes of definite dimensions, and the Gulf, the sole management of the fiscal and financial systems; public lands in unorganized and unincorporated territories, recently acquired, or inherited; its own industrial plants; a system of irrigation for backward regions to anticipate drought. In the regions of British Columbia, and the 36 The Red Booh Illuminating the Northwestern country of the Canadian Dominion, unlimited water- sheds, of a clear and crystal draught, are stored in the innumerable deep and large Arctic lakes and rivers. The whole of these, by the aid of science and the engineer may, in the future, be conjoined consecutively, to be led through the Mackenzie, Saskatchewan, and Athabasca streams, by different channels of tunnels, canals, dams, locks, reservoirs, and such, as to be a grateful boon to the thirst of man and the soil for the whole of North America. And so on, with other public necessities, which should be acquired by the peo- ple, to forestall greed and avarice. State. Each individual State to be the sole owner of its natural wealth in its soil, as the mines, oil wells, quarries, and the like; and in its waters, of the bay, river, and lakes of definite dimensions; and on its land surface, in its forest, and the mountain. To have and to hold the brewery, the distillery, the canal and the highways; its own industrial plants; and the like, as are in its respective ter- ritory. Municipal. To have and to hold its lighting and also ice plants, waterworks, street railways, docks, street-cleaning plants; its own industrial plants; public franchises, only for its own use for the peo- ple's benefit; mechanically propelled public ferryboats; municipal lodging houses; telephone plants; public pledge shops, to aid the im- pecunious and lessen crime, with interest on securities pawned of one per cent, on one dollar loaned, per annum, or fraction thereof; and such, as are in its limits. PUBLIC CONTROL Federal. Coastwise and outward-bound steamers; and all pub- lic utilities of great necessity and corporations doing interstate business and manufacturing, which are exempted of state control; all imports and exports; the public school system, and the like. State- All incorporated and vested industrial plants, free of municipal and Federal control, which are domiciled on its terri- tory: to compel them to maintain hygienic and sanitary conditions about the workroom and its vicinity; to hold them liable for mis- haps to the employee in any hazardous work, and the like. Public policy urgently demands a check on extortionate prices charged con- sumers. Supply and demand is no excuse for trust piracy. If it is a fact, as contended, that the middleman and the transportation expenses rule the cost to the consumer, then all the more public ownership is a public necessity. Here is where elusive opportunity halts for the loquacious jingoist and spellbinder, and comes close, to give him a chance to coddle his hemispheres and fertilize a germ which will develop a panacea to cure these ills. Certified pub- lic accountants, elected by the people, should have inquisitorial pow- ers to pay them a periodical visit and give publicity to their capital and their loss and gain column of the ledger and their trial bal- System of Modern Oreed and Graft 37 ance. No man is necessary. Any opposition to the will of the people by any objector, he should be handled without gloves; and greed will find many ready to take down its put-up shutters, and just as good in business, to do manufacturing under a coming sys- tem of moral conditions. Also, to control its water front and shores, inland and seawise; to banish tolls on bridges and turnpikes; to regulate all water transportation carriers intermunicipal in char- acter, and such. A per capita tax, on a pro rata basis, on all toil- ers, manual and intellectual, deducted from wages and salaries, and a direct tax on incomes, commercial paper, real estate, visible and personal property, should be annually appraised and collected, as a subventitious fund for aged natives who have given thirty years of service to some occupation, are now needy, and of fair character. This is a duty owed to them by society. Municipal. All monopoly and trust combinations, Incorpo- rated manufacturing and financial institutions and public utilities, coming in direct contact universally with the masses, should be visited by elected public accountants, periodically, and verified state- ments of their capital and profits given full and explicit publicity in the public press by the municipal executive committee. Storage warehouses should be especially looked after on all 'round grounds. All public lodging houses, and all tenements, the food in all cheap eating houses, and the drink in all cheap saloons, shops, and the Eoda fountain; and the goods of the pushcart peddler, and of the wandering arab, and the like, should be rigidly viseed under a vigi- lant system. All unnecessary noise made by transportation car- riers on rail, and otherwise, abated; tonsorial shops under super- vision of Board of Health; cremation made imperative. Menials and attendants in places instituted for public convenience, and sup- ported from the fiscal budget, usurp their best features and func- tions, leaving the residue a scramble to the public recipient. A halt should be ordered on these vulgar monopolists, who are a debtor to public bounty for their living. All canines should be ex- cluded the public thoroughfare. One human life is worth all the dogs upon the planet. Drivers of trucks, and those working for express companies, and otherwise, chauffeurs, motormen, conductors, grub-chasers In cheap eating houses, the concert hall, the saloon, and the dive beerslingers, porters handling merchandise on the side- walk, all should be licensed, and compelled to wear a conspicuous and burnished faced metallic embossed shield, symbolized, with an easily Identifiable Inscription, and worn openly on the front of the body, with a number on the hat front. Ignorant and vicious men, in these several callings just mentioned, are accredited with a large amount of bodily Injury done heedlessly to patrons and the public In general. People are, and have been, doped and maltreated by the wait- ers, and also have suffered bodily injury from the porters, motormen, and the drivers. Sidewalks should be kept passable. Pavement sweep- ings should be deposited by householders in receptacles to await the rounds of the S. C. D., and not promiscuously pushed into the street, creating expense and unsanitary conditions. Corporations who use 88 The Red Booh Illuminating the the streets with tracks, and the like, should be compelled to remove all accumulations of snow and refuse between and on their tracks, and such. A holocaust of a few hundreds by some public accident, in a lump sum, will create rabid consternation among the masses and excite the jacks in sinecurism to a panoramic display of offi- cial activity; but one thousand victims in a year by the juggernaut of street traffic is too slow and spread-out a method to excite even the puerile law and legislation to a "mutatis mutandis." Not one con- viction for this street murder; nor even does it worry the non- chalant public guardian. Leather medals should be voted the motor- man or driver who has the most kills to his credit. There is a lot of crooked work performed in the intelligence office, of both the male and female variety, such as vice, crime, immorality, and the like. The jacks in office are cognizant of this. Adulteration of all or any article or articles for sale, and for consumption, should be atoned for by imprisonment, on detection and conviction, and its stages pursued from the importer, manufacturer, rectifier, and the like, to the retailer. All hospitals and eleemosynary institutions visited to guard the welfare of the charity patient against sectarian prejudice, wherever it may exist, attendants' brutalities, and the criminal carelessness and inattention of the internes, and the pre- vention of euthanasia, and a whole host of things good government owes to its creators and sustainers. A penalty first, and on a repeti- tion of the offense imprisonment, should be unmitigatingly meted out to those who defy legal inquisitorial information and inspec- tion, to bring them to the stool of repentance. With higher eco- nomic intelligence there is not a particle of doubt that an uniform price, or one which will vary but a fraction, may be made a stand- ard, on an averaged per cent, basis of the capital and profit of man- ufactured products. Irrigation will insure steady production of staples for the manufacturer, barring temperature changes. The standard should be made so that the small manufacturer may ex- ist, and will not be unjust to prevailing rates of manual wage. When one ascends, the other follows suit. All innovations for the equi- table arrangement of human activities depend upon the intelligence and ambition of the masses. They, only, can help themselves. It's a case of, "if you don't like what you get, come get what you like." Education and morality and politico-industrial unity are the only leveler, and a bane to the arch-fiend — greed. "Rira bien qui rira le dernier." THE GREED OF GENIUS Legendary Facts. Whilom, in the days of yore, yea, ten thousand years rearward in the annals of time, amidst the scenes of spectacular life in the early seclusive dynasties of the dragon worshipers of pagan China, and in the land of the oppressive Phar- aoh and its submissive fellahin, and of the historic Nile, and on to the Hindostanee country, with its varied castes and degraded masses, and from one to the other, in their order of decadency, of System of Modern Greed and Graft 39 all the ancient Asiatic absolutisms, reaching in sphere from the banks of the great Yang-tze-kiang, the Golden Stream, and "fruc- tifler" for ages of the Celestial and Middle kingdoms, on again to the Egyptian Nile, in the plain which is a catacomb for the great and powerful of a bygone age, who played their selfish part all along their varied dynasties; and further onward, to the Euphrates, the Tigris, and on to the Ganges, the home of the saurian deity, whose familiar banquet was the Hindoo babe; and from the Cas- pian Sea to the Persian Gulf, on to the Red Sea; and from the Euxine to the ^Egean Sea, the gulf where the Cyclades are enisled in sacred waters; and, in point of time, the link from the begin- ning of reason to Abraham, and continuing on down the ages, in the order of the prophets, to Moses and Elijah, thence to Paul, with the vortex of interval between the moralists, Zoroaster and the Brahma, unto Confucius and Gautama, leading up to Mahomet of Media, each, and every, race have lost their primeval lustre through consuming greed and avarice, and very many of them have assimi- lated with oblivion, whose resurrected mold, a mute witness of such, is a reminder to the modern of a like fate which awaits upon selfish vanity and greed. Even in the mediaeval ages many have suc- cumbed, and now are but a history. And yet many are going their way among the modern monopolistic Christian (?) nations. With the rise of Mahomet at Mecca came a spirit of aggrandizable greed, seconded by invasion and the sword. The epitaph of these ancient nations of greed and tyranny is burnt in the soil to a depth that, by the aid of science only doth the sage learn that they ever had being. Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Merodach, Nebuchadnezzar, Sardanapalus, Sennacherib, Seti, Rameses, Thothmes, on up to Xerxes, Darius, Cyrus, with the barbaric splendors of Nineveh, Baby- lon, Damascus, Tyre, Susa, the palaces and temples of Karnak and Luxor, the colossal sculptures of Memphis and Edfou, to the pyra- mids and tombs of Gizeh and Sakkara, and lastly Jerusalem, all have offered up their panegyrics to Mammon, and gone the way of lust. From the captivity of the Israelite, and their exodus and he- gira over the Red Sea, from the land of Osiris and Isis, unto the enslavement of the African within the North American republic, and the crossing of the Potomac by his liberator, unholy and de- vouring greed has ever been a curse and bane upon the nations of the earth, and the vengeful heralds of the gods have pressed the scourge of retribution upon them with a chastening exactness. The history of mankind in the past is a chronicle of rapine and plunder with fire and sword; that of modernity a ditto, with a more blood- less way of accomplishing the same by intellectual cunning. Politi- cal finesse and invasion are the pursuit of kings; monopoly and greed the hobby of plutocracy. But man is mortal, and his selfish machinations end him with annihilation, with the same dispatch as the moth meets in its attacks upon the electric arc. The heroes and conquerors, as are historically known, from Hercules, Theseus, Achilles, Hector of ancient Ilium, AJax and Ulysses, to Romulus, the progenitor of universal Rome, and the ages of strife of the states of 40 The Bed Book Illuminating the the ancient Hellenes, with its Spartan and Athenian heroes and cap- tains, of the days of Alcihiades and Pericles, among themselves, and ■with the Persian avalanches of human chaff, and from the greatest soldier of all times, Alexander, to the murderous expeditions of the Roman legions and centurions, of Coriolanus, the Scipios wrangling with the avenger Hannibal, on to the usurper Caesar, and the demon- iac Nero, and later, the caliphs of Arabia; yet, later, to the swarming hordes of nomadic tribesmen, barbarous and fanatic, at successive intervals, from Alaric and Attila, the despoilers of ancient Rome, to Tarik and Musa, with their Arabian hordes, throttling the do- minions of Espafia, seconded by the Moors; then Genghiz Khan, the Mongol horror, and the coup of William of Normandy, leading up to the crusade fever against the Saracens and Saladin; yet, still onward to the bigoted papist and fanatical zealot, Philip, the Span- ish autocrat, he of the Invincible Armada, up to Napoleon, all these strong personalities led myriads of men to a foreign sepulchre, to humor their passion for selfishness and vanity, fanaticism and greed. They are gone forever. Greed and fanaticism are paralleled in sim- ilitude with infinite heat and liquid air. They are different routes which lead up to the same results. The Afghans, the Abyssinians, Nubians, and other Oriental states, have had their era of trial, and failed to achieve any moral results. The hosts of Arabia met their Nemesis when they crossed the Pyrenees and fell upon the sword of Charles the Hammer. They went up a bounding rocket, and terminated similar to the hasty descent of the burning stick. Thi- bet, ever a more despotic and seclusive land to the alien than the Zambesi country in the heart of mid-Africa, is today wrapped in forbidding reserve. The Incas and the Montezumas were as tyran- nical as they were immoral. They are as completely extinct as the bird compsognathus of the Jurassic period. Miltiades, at Marathon, Leonidas at Thermopylae, and Pausanias and Themistocles at Pla- taea, gave the arch-demon — aggressive greed — an effectual chasten- ing, which has been repeated in many minor events since their re- mote times. Agamemnon, at Troy, passing hastily on up to Ver- cingetorix, Charles Martel, the grandsire of Charlemagne; Alfred of Albion, Drake, Peter of Muscovy, William of Orange, Cromwell, and our own immortal Washington, and others, have hammered greed many lethal blows. In the proa of the Malay corsair, the Turkish xebec, the praam of the Viking, and such, the fanaticism of a Ghazi is in correlation with their murderous greed. The great Caesar. he of the commentaries, was a roving scourger of nations, from the German Ocean to the African Sea. When Yermak, the Cossack bandit, crossed the Ural to invade the tundras and the unknown frozen wilds, where nature takes her nap and siesta, all Muscovy followed Mm to the Pacific. It was the seizure of a continent, and a path of despoliation through the native races. Muscovy has al- ways been the most subtle nation in the realms of diplomatic finesse. The Afric Sea, from the Balearic Isles to the eventful Cyprus, with all its embayments and islets, from times so far remote that history is not in touch with the same, has ebbed and risen in concert with System of Modern Qreed and Graft 41 the innumerable tragedies which periodically placed greed in tem- porary dominion over the natural laws of morality. But all was vain. The Pyrenees, which turned the tide of the Arabian and Moorish invasions, the Balkans, which defied the Moslem fanatic, the Caucuses and the Ural, which bade defiance to the mongrel Asiatic deluges, and the Alps, which made Rome great, have, at intermittent times, been surmounted by the talented invader. Prom the first Parthian and Scythian arrow flight, aimed at ancient Greece and Rome, to the destruction of Novgorod and Moscow, Slavdom has been, for ages, the contentious ground for the sur- vival of the fittest, and greed has scored its many innings. The misanthropical ravishers of the nations of Europe, in bygone days, the French Louis, the English Henry, the Spanish Philip, the Swe- dish Gustavus, the Russian Ivan, the Austrian Leopold, the Ger- man Fritz, with their captains, the Condes, Turennes, Sax6s, Eu- genes, and their marplots, the Richelieus, Mazarins, Wolseys, and the like, compelled the torch and the Bible to harness together. France, with Spain a close second, has had more salt- petre arguments with her neighbors on the map of Europe than any of the other nations in that sphere. Although Spain has ventured farther in her quest of greed, and with fanaticism in her hand of Cain, has dispatched her freebooting captains and viceroys, Cortez, the Pizarros, Ponce de Leons, De Sotos, and such, to ravish a hem- isphere in her, at one time, monopoly of slaughter. Under their mode of colonization, melted away the sway and existence of the Yncas, Aztecs, Montezumas, Toltecs, and the like. In Vasco de Gama, the Portuguese were a good analogy. It has always been a struggle of the manikin with a Magog. Contemporaneously with the age of French chivalry and political finesse, Spain, Italy, and Portugual developed a passion for navigation, exploration, and dis- covery. With the close of the Vlth, unto the advent of the XIHth, century, intellectual progress was in durance vile, and slumbered in abeyance throughout the world, the result of dominant vandalism and greed. Louis XIV., the French monarch, with his hussars and the "fleur-de-lis" on his waving banners, spread consternation and despair among the masses of mankind. Many centuries earlier than Charlemagne this contentious nation had scoured Europe with her legions, a veritable Persian for invasion. But she is now shackled, and a Delilah has shorn her mane. The races of mankind, in all ages, through ignorance and superstition, have been but pliable puppets to the will of the artful, the powerful, and the select. Big- otry and greed, from the early Christian era to the hegira of the Arabian prophet, and from Mahomet to Saladin and the Crusading propaganda, and the English and German reformations, covering the events of the Huguenot and the Puritan, clear up to this era, were the evil and immoral forces arrayed against the peace and welfare of the plain people, and to prevent harmony among the na- tions. Mankind has been chastened by ages of ordeal, wiiich has been as crucial as a continuous passage of the fiery furnace, until, at present, it is getting well on toward its destined finale, by the 4, 42 The Bed Book Illuminating th» rise of knowledge and other modern forces. The Mt. Sinai tablet, with education, if conformed to, is a more effective panacea than the sword, spear, yataghan, or machete, in conducing to the equi- table settlement of industrial and political contentions and the im- molation of King Greed. America will never be "offlcina gentium." Blood atonement has yielded to morality and enlightment. Taoism of the Chinese, and the Shintoism of Japan, with all other phases of moral teaching and direction adopted by nations, modern and ancient, have vastly assisted the versatile swarms of mankind to closer approach the matutinal truth. Greed and monopoly are naught else but Mammon, diaphanously veiled by duplicity, which presupposes that the masses were created for exploitation by the vauntful select. All through history minor lights, in the interim of the multifarious scenes enacted in this continuous earthly drama as played by the stars, have had their brief meteoric career in their onslaughts upon the rights and possessions of the less strenuous races, only to flicker, after a time, and finally to die out forever. The archaeologist delves in the rear of history and turns up with his spade innocuous mold, which bears mute witness to a past voli- tion of greed and immorality. The glory of the hero and the con- queror is but momentary. His selfish exultation is a joy short lived. A few annual circuits of this revolving globe remove him from its passing scenes forever. The astronomer directs his aids to the sid- ereal vault of the firmament and brings to light veritable evidence of things ordained in the virility of purity and of truth. The clash of arms follows as a corollary to the casuistry of mandatory greed, and the vanquished are despoiled of liberty, title, and possessions. Might is never an index to the right, although the whole world may applaud the victor. It is more worthy to be a Davy Crockett, or a Kit Carson, as a pioneer and a frontiersman, than to pass a career as an industrial enslaver and a money sharp. Capital Organized. Capital is money, or its value, invested in valid manufacturing, in all ways of production, commerce, and in general business, for profit and gain. Of late years economical conditions, in a hectic flush of decadence, hastened by a homogene- ous sympathy superinduced by heterogeneous distempers in the body politic, such as the unrestricted tide of the base competitive immi- grant, high protection, addled political conditions, blighting mo- nopoly, rapid labor saving inventions of mechanical device, volatile financing, demoralizing, unrestrained, and complexed speculation, and other causes thus veneered, have led the captains of industry, or forced them, to get together in organization to avoid, and com- bat, competition among themselves, and to defeat manual labor in its just demands. It has at times tactically about-faced, and en- deavored to use the labor union to destroy its rival in competition. Legitimate native labor, lying between the antipodes of the stream- ing alien and that ot domestic greed, when pressed too uncomfort- ably close by either degraded factor, which parades under an alias of the term supply and demand, runs amuck, by throwing aside its badge of servitude, and the strike is then on. Capital is a wary "avis," System of Modern Oreed and Graft 43 and strives to surmount, or threatens a ruin. It is opposed to a gallant but handicapped opponent in the industrial arena. If the raising of the wage scale by successful labor organizations, in vic- torious industrial troubles, tends to eliminate small employers and concentrate capital into mergers and pool combinations to swell monopolistic conditions, then public ownership and control, and a politico-industrial party, are demanded all the more. Both counter opponents may soon give heed to admonition that they are mutually dependent one upon the other. Somewhere, it is written that he who hath to him much will be given. This is a true assertion, and literally proved by capital in wresting from the affrighted wage- earner a part of the pittance due him as compensation for his hand- icraft and industry. Grafting has knocked the political props from under the assiduous toiler so completely that it is up to the strike to see him through. Mother Earth rolls through the resistless ethereal void a seething caldron of pent-up injustice and remorse- less greed. Legislation and law, when the people ever close up and get more wise on their remedy, will do much for the equity of in- dustrial squabbles. Organized capital is a foxy quiller in sway- ing the judiciary, which is now using a tory inquisition to Hes- sianize labor with the unconstitutional court injunction, and with the intention of smashing the industrial organizations and jug- ging their leaders. Labor awaits the outcome. A word to the wise is sufficient, of corporations either in the sole or the monopo- listic aggregative (aggravative) forms. The "Zeitgeist" in regard to passing events is shown in the selfish disregard of the welfare and rights of fraternal toilers manifested by the employees, male and female, from the salesman down on through to the porter on the sidewalk working for monopoly and wealthy incorporations, in badgering and mulcting people in selfish despoliation, to increase the gains of such at the expense of the comfort of the wage-earner. Of course, it is due to ignorance, and simon pure at that, and re- dounds to the bane of society all around. Like master, like serv- ant. Mankind is weak, and a little brief authority necessitates most people to enlarge their headgear. Vitriolic vituperation never helped any cause, neither does it frighten the intrepid. Finance and the High Financier. This is a government for, and by, the whole people, and liberty is not license. This brob- dingnagian is the "passe-partout" to the modern system of society. The exchange, the broker, the banker, the underwriter, the build- ing and loan society, the speculator, the investor, the insurance and the trust company, the clearing house, the promoter, and the like in the above sub-caption, collectively, are the Richelieu finesse which sways the affairs of men. Gold's inner kingdom lies in Lombard street, in the country where this metal is held more sacred than the rights and liberty of humankind. This swinestone brings lorth from its temporary retreat, and polishes up to a reflective lustre, tbo corner, the bank and plant wrecker, the trust underwriter, speculating -with the depositors' credits in windy enterprises, the time-and-call mone> magician, the interna- 44 The Red Booh Illuminating the tional speculator in prime public necessities, the promoter and bushwhacker with the dummy director, fake trust combines and incorporations, mine salters, base rumor, the speculator on the future, and the hypothecator on the margin, the inflator, the air and water bubble, the watered script magnate, and other and in- numerable hobgobblins, which make legitimate values recklessly dance up or down as the bull or bear scores at the bat. That which they fail to list on 'Change they barter on the curb or in the bucket shop. The' mental maieutics of the high financial robber are as fertile as the tricks of the brownies. These lupines in petto are scheming for lambs all the while. Unrepresentative shares of com- mon stock and air and watered bubbles for the margin speculator to gamble with, and gilt-edged, first preferred for the select. The high financial freebooter is as fertile in scheming as a mellow field of well-fallowed land is overflowing with possibilities for producing diversified crops, and is as ready to spring a coup to overthrow a republic, as well as to tumble a kingdom, in their speculative fren- zies of gambling whenever or wherever a show of gain looms up in sight. They are dogmatic on the subject of finance, and their lives are one of innuendo. The wheels of industry cease directly as the piston rod of precarious speculation stands pat over its centre. It promotes more wildcat schemes, flimsy, watery, and airy enter- prises on inflated, depreciated, and worthless paper, and more pyro- technic antics than Aladdin himself ever conjured up in his solilo- quizing reveries. It can shock the ship of state even when sailing in deep water, and under full sail, with a stiff beam-wind. The ticker is the spellbinder and the tape his angling line which fill his safe deposit boxes. The small compensation vouchsafed to dolorous toil compares pitifully with this juggling of immense values by the unproductive and unscrupulous tricksters, who manipulate money as a pastime with as much gusto as a woodcorder handles his wood- pile, and the wage-earner is dumbfounded at the political degen- eracy which winks at such contumacious contrivances. In this monetary fiasco is where the panic is formulated with as much un- concern as the professional shouts fire in a crowded assembly, the better to apply his art. Only the timely aid and vigilance of the Federal treasury, which it unceasingly attempts to raid, and with a good crop success, prevents the country from drifting into a wel- ter of decay. By a concatenation of consecutive events a panic may be likened to a hub, which is as a fixed point, where is focused, from long indiscretions, all the innumerable financial and industrial irregularities of the Exchange and its auxiliaries, in speculation, overcapitalization, weak bank reserves, rubber ball enterprises, and such, which have trickled down by the spokes as runlets, from the great circumferential field of financial riot in the fellows, caus- ing a slump and ruinous liquidation. The indifference of the masses in purifying politics, caging the grafter, and jugging the financial robber, is hurrying events to a crisis. The stock reports, commer- cial market figures, the bank ami financial statements, railroad divi- dends, the manufacturing output, mine development, realty values. System of Modern Greed and Graft 45 and such, are all alluringly displayed in cold type in the daily press. But between the lines, and up and down the initial letters, he who runs may read and interpret the caution, "Beware of the dog." These Spanish main buccaneerish ventures in buncoing a confiding public, under the cloak of commercial and financial enterprises, and in bringing the system of popular government into derision universally, bid defiance to legislative interference, by vague com- minations of disrupting the industrial activities. They are doing the land more harm than the assaults of a mighty alien foe could effect. The masses, morally in earnest, and minding faithfully, for a pittance, to their end of the world's work, while unchecked cunning is roaming around and plundering everything In sight, to expend in bolstering up effete monarchy and in profligacy. This esoteric circle of money jugglers now indulge in international pour- parlers, of frequent occurrence, comprising the banker and the high financier, the diplomatic chancellery, and those of the commercial classes, and the importer and the exporter, and the like, for the "reapprochement" in a consonant unity to the furtherance of the project for the enslavement of the wage-earner, world wide. This to be followed by an united aulic council of the rulers of state to second their aims. The equation will then lie under a complete axiom toward its determination. It will be less objectionable than the arcana in the methods as now in vogue, and will give publicity in its exposition which will lead to an organized plebiscite of the people for the overthrow of a rising and arrogant power which, for "lucri causa," would blot out the life of a free nation. In the civil war it had free institutions by the throat, and the constitu- tion in a close corner, and in the affair of '98 this garroter dis- played its teeth. Balance of trade, and the travels of the gold in- got, are calculative factors in the size of the toiler's dinner pail. Having in their depositaries the money on keep of the masses they can produce a neurotic tremens, with an encyclical embrace, by baseless and panicky rumors of financial ruin, or depreciation, the ceasing of prosperity, and the like, on the eve of a general election, to divert its tide their way and so land their grafting prox- ies into power and make permanent the present deteriorative condi- tions of society, with its ceaseless flood tide of the slough of the world. Only a certain per cent, of any nation compose its entire patriotic, volunteering, and physical and moral brave element. This constituent part, only, is the defiant force which the bluff of the financial hydra is lost upon. They know, with an inly intuition, that the money-bugs fear anarchy more than the impoverished masses. Education, morality, and industrial-political unity will get things right. The zealous Jew is a debasing element in the Gentile monetary centres, and the "nigger in the woodpile." In the large cities freedom and the rights of the individual are made a mockery of by the moneyed interests and incorporated monopolies, and further — by the courts. Every unredressed injury, politically, to even the humblest citizen, is a precedent for an accumulated fu- 46 The Bed Booh Illuminating the ture attack upon the constitution for its permanency. The many hideous forms of financial bunco, continually sprouting and fleecing the solecists in fortune hunting, devised by these mollahs of finance, are subject to no definable law, but are elastic in scope of susceptible deviltry. They are impromptu of birth, and die with their mission, to be rehabilitated in a new garb for fresh and further exploitation. It is the labor leaders only who are bringing the people up to see the whole show. When they do see it clearly the refrain will then start with, "Oh! there will be rejoicing, etc." The public press is a conservator of much to educate the people. Moneyocracy plays with the nation's money as if it was a chip on the 'Change green cloth, and is riotous in its excesses. The work people are pawns on the chessboard for these financial adepts. Jurisprudence is ever the chaperon of these swells of -the wise circles, enabling them, with costly lore from its legal stores to despoil the masses and evade the code. The curates and prelates are remiss in their duties, and the politician is "non est." The only way to draw the claws of this Shylock is for the government to take the management of the na- tion's money out of private hands and exchequer as enlightenment, attained by observation of ages of past experience of unfortunate nations, has shown would be the best method, and form depositary banks as elsewhere outlined in order to prevent the money power, as now roystering, from scuttling the ship of state. The speculator should get his bounce with his own petard. World wide money is in for world wide bondage of the illiterate. THE CAR.DINAL QUATERNION Credit. Is dual-sided in its nature. It seems to be a friend, yet, at the same moment, it is only a base deceiver. Nations, and the individual, find its exactions and tribute a heavy cross to bear for the benefit reciprocated by its use. On the slightest rumor it becomes capricious with its patron. It is a weather-vane, very vari- able, and pervades the entire circuit of thirty-two rhumb points of uncertainty in a diurnal of time. It is ever ready, with affability, to socket a ball and chain to the leg. Patriotism and sympathy are alien attributes in its composite make-up. Where credit has been worsted by repudiation on various occasions, and insurance losses, and by demise, insolvency, and such, it has, on the average, a thou- sand-fold avenged itself. It is not averse to usury. It is as a gnome in alchemy, with schemes legion as the wants of man. It is as hot and cold to the digits of the needy, the imprudent, and the legitimate promoter, as the touch of liquid air. A volume of money kept in circulation, for a nation's daily exchange, should be so bal- anced by Federal government, per government depositaries, with penalty on hoarding and withdrawal from permanent circulation, that it will neither induce kite speculation by a high, nor pro- duce a monetary panic by a low, tide. Credit will enslave its patron as long as he dallies with it. Its evil preponderancy, in the down- ward balance, will throw its moral virtues up clear out of sight; System of Modern Greed and Graft 47 and, moreover, all of Its extortionate gain is wormed out of the masses and labor. It is a siren with Orphean strains, which in- veigles only to bereft of independence. Interest. This is the servant which adds increment to credit. It makes its congener a duplicate of itself before it gets its cancel- lation. It works in a simple and in a compound harness. Over three per cent, it should be dubbed a Shylock. From the avuncular tri- ball to the exchange centres is a Via Appia which is full of usury. Ceaseless in its arithmetical computations, it is known of all men as the best paid non-producer upon the globe. Only those who have felt its frigid chill can best give expression to its predatory em- brace. The wage-earner is Its especial prey, for, it is here, whence it gets new money, and where all the burdens of society, at pres- ent, screen down to in reaching their centre of gravity and bed rock. Competition. This is a condition which is the most para- mount and momentous in society, for its weal or woe. Healthy com- petition prevents extortion by the producer and the middleman. But man is not capable of overcoming the greed in his moral make-up, and must be constrained by organized opposition of his fellow- man. Unhealthy competition is "what's the matter" with this coun- try today. Eliminate spuriousness and adulteration, and put com- petition in its proper and legitimate channels, and it may be ac- complished, and the immigration of the scum of the planet to these shores would instantly cease. The Jew, the Italian, the Greek, and all the rest of this tail end of humanity would not be able to exist here in a square stand up joust with legitimate conditions. All the work they do is perfunctory, and all the wares they vend is of an inferior merit. All of their patrons are recruited from the sources of ignorance, selfishness, and impecuniosity. In employment their employers are, for the most part, grossly selfish, and hold gold sacred above the welfare of their country and posterity. As carried on now, in this republic, it drags the tinsel pell-mell over intrinsic merit. Greed is performing its work well with this land, permeat- ing the masses as thoroughly as yeast leavens dough. Dating from negro slavery is traced the inception of its wonderful gyrations, to finally culminate with landing the republic in the octopus em- brace of monopoly. Unnatural competition results finally in the mere exchange of dross, either in industry or commerce, and will engulf a nation in the muck of the world. The greedy cormorants of this free land are pennywise and pound foolish. A square, straight, and manly business, all 'round, will return the steerage pen of the ocean hounds back to its original state. With the re- moval of the bulkhead it becomes the hold. The rabble of the Eastern hemisphere are in a carnival of ecstasy in this land of popu- lar government, while the native element are on the tramp. To be honest in business is as easy, and more profitable and moral in the final reach, than being a rogue. Take, for instance, the truculent competition handed to retail dealers by the mammoth department 48 The Red Book Illuminating the stores. They vend and barter in wares which, by "ex usu" custom, have long been enjoyed by varied retail dealers. Their numerous floors contain everything that is manufactured and soil produced which is found listed on the exchange, and in addition they receive deposits and do a banking business, cater with the restaurant, en- tertain with alluring musical entertainments, adulate patrons with a correspondence room, which has become a resort for begging letter writers, blackmailers, grafters, and the like, sustain branch post offices, and other things too numerous to narrate. This is the incar- nation of monopoly personified. It is said by many unthinking citizens that, so far, it has proved a benefit to its patrons. But at the expense of the varied small tradesmen. A full paid license ex- acted for every individual business it has vested in its gigantic pool, which are paid outside by the individual whom it has frozen out of trade, would be the more consentient idea with justice and the future welfare of the nation. They work off mostly, on a too confid- ing bargain-hunting femininity, shop worn and smartly appearing inferior wares. Moribund England, hoary with ages of experience, deals wisely on the subject of competition. Although business in that country descends from father to son, yet miscellaneous vend- ing of multifarious products is unknown. In instances, nine out of ten, the price of wares is attached to each individual article; one price only, and the purchaser knows the price before purchasing. There are no degraded hordes desecrating her soil. She is slow, and slowly expiring, but yet still foxy in her public economics. She knows these are vital concomitants toward a nation's weal or woe. Education and industrial-political unity can cure nearly all this re- public's ailments. The wage-earner, at present, is in a condition to fly the coop, and come down off the moldy perch, of his former po- litical attachments. In metaphor, Manhattan Island lies like a lanky lean tongue out of the head of the great State of New York, which yearns to lap the waters of its inland sea. In its tip humanity swarms as in no other part of the globe of like area. At early morn and. eventide a vast ocean of alien faces, and a Babel of polyglot dialects, carry the native beholder, in mind's flight, into the Eastern lands of Europe and Oriental Asia. The native born is a "rara avis" in Gotham during these matutinal and evening hours. His sun has arisen, and is slowly sinking down the West. And this congested appendage aims to be a president maker. The patriotic official who ferrets out the adulterator, and the vendor of spurious articles for the genuine, may materially lessen the human stream which flows this way. Cheap and pauper labor is more costly in the end than the native talent, and at the same time it is demoral- izing to free institutions and menacing to future posterity. A pau- pered wage, and fewer employees, are false economies, as natural law compensates such avarice by a retribution of curtailed business and profit. Supply and Demand. This bugaboo and spook may be ana- lyzed without diffidence by the most obfuscate intellect. In System of Modern Oreed and Graft 49 industry, If the demand is more than the supply it raises the wage and makes the workman careless in his duties. But, with experience, it seems that such is not the case, simply because the labor union has a standard scale which is only raised universally, by urgency, to remain permanent, and workmen do their best through pride of ability and emulous each of the other. If the supply is more than the demand competition makes the labor union necessary, and excites it to activity. But it has not brought out any superior talent, as far as knowing ones can see; it merely elimi- nates a host of stragglers to drift into the ranks of the idle and into poverty. A shorter work day, and a maximum and minimum scale, would rob over-supply of its disquieting effects. In com- merce, if the demand is more than the supply the middle man plun- ders the consumer with but slight temporary advantage, if any, to the producer. If the supply is more than the demand the middle- man unloads upon the consumer at the expense of the producer. In finance, if the supply of money waiting for exercise is greater than the demand prodigality in speculation and wild cat enter- prises are spontaneously generated. If the supply is contrariwise, a panic looms in view, shut-downs considered, money invisible, and productions go begging for a purchaser. If in politics — well, this will end right here in its definition. The extreme in any of these phases arrive at the same goal, as all extremes must meet at the same termination — dissolution of society and anarchy, the pesti- lence which scourges all wayward and greedy nations. The hus- bandman may mitigate his troubles by a cold storage entrepdt in his vicinity, State owned, if necessary, and by financial aid at a government depositary located in his district, with an organized bureau of universal intelligence to keep him posted on the selec- tions of seed which are going into the ground in considerable acre- age in his competitive province. The tardy farmer, who is finan- cially able to float, and enters the market when the deluge is spent, possesses a wise top as well as a cunning arm. The increase of the cannery is a blow to the middleman, and weakens the cry of supply and demand, if morally managed. Irrigation is a great fac- tor in this alimental question. The whole redress of the debtor farmers grievances lies directly with him and in education. Cur- tailment of hours "per diem" renders unnecessary shut downs and restriction of outputs the manufacturer has recourse to in tiding over dull periods and surplus products. Constituted authority, in many communities, the civilized world over, have in times of scar- city, protected their bone and sinew from famine, and against the acrimony of monopoly, by vending to the people, at the normal rates, and also by a largess of frumentation, the alimental necessities of life and comfort, which they have sagely laid in before the whirl- wind broke over their vicinity. A person, frugal in habits, and of a self-denial control of will, may confute supply and demand, in the line of the consumption of necessities, to a standstill, and send the greedy monopolist begging for charity. But a penurious dispo- 60 The Red Book Illuminating the Bltion should not be cultivated or encouraged by state inaction, or by a condition of political paralysis agitans, in lieu of reasonable and generous traits, to overwhelm monopoly, or right society. Lib- erality is an attribute of the gods, although, under present condi- tions of society, it keeps a wage-earner a corollary dependent throughout his career. Moral law outraged will, sooner or later, rebel at monopoly and base competition. This clandestine system of supply and demand, distraughted, will find an ulcerated vent at some one point or the other. Labor cannot exist in its purity where any one or more callings live at the throat of the other. Legiti- mate supply and demand Js always normal. It is conditions de- based, through and through, which turns it otherwise. Society, as at present constituted, is a house built upon a foundation of shift- ing sand. A glut, in many instances, echos the ignorance of the man with the hoe and the plow; a famine is the chastening scourge of the visiting heralds. One is avoidable; the other Is not, in many cases. Celestial Spheres for Exploitation. Astronomical science informs us that space is "immensum quiddam et infini- tum," and that the stars perceived on a clear night, which are as closely strewn in the dark vault of sempiternal cosmos as raisins and currants in a good housewife's Christmas loaf, are naught else but worlds themselves. Some of the brightest, and the more dis- tant ones, dwarf the earth to an insignificant size and weight in comparison, and their distance from this planet, and from each other, is so inconceivably great as to be computed by light-years only. Nearly 200,000 miles per second is the speed of Celestial light, star reflective, through ethereal space, and this aggregated arithmeti- cally for a year's continuity, yields a majestic total for the sage to wield as a yardstick in measuring the heavens, which are without bounds. If the observer were empowered to use any one of the least of these brilliants as a basis to scan the heavens, as he may from the earth, this planet would not be visible to his gaze, which proves how infinitesimal in size this mite really is in the make-up of cre- ation. What an immense sum a light-year computes in the total the interested one may easily verify by a little judicious exercise in arithmetic. The light from some of the more distant constella- tions, made known to astronomy by the aid of the photomicrograph, has been for more than 100,000 years in bursting upon this scene, in its flashes and resilience from its primeval basis, on its eternal flight in a never-ending void. It is not certain whether reason- able beings dominate them or not. This is a field which even as- tounds the buccaneer in finance, the stock waterer, and the trust underwriter, who are blessed with opulence and rural preserves, with plenty of inflation in their lakes. The astronomer will be closely accompanied in his tour of exploration and discovery by the ever irrepressible high financier. As the star finder grows more wise with his familiar thesis speculation will yield its place to veri- fication, with the truism that the tenth has not as yet been revealed System of Modern Greed and Graft 51 to man of the contents of the welkin in universal space. All sound, light, air, and water, travel in an undulating movement, and on for- ever. The voice, and even the thoughts, of the immoral and of the moral, are recorded in nature's depository. It is even conjectured that from the beginning of this particular planet's existence, for each and every race of people during the ages of their existence, are recorded in successive, never-ending waves of infinite travel, their individual and national actions and thoughts. As Scripture reveals, in substance, Providence can instantly place each individual, as well as each nation, in true judgment. As sapiens grows more pro- found he may unfold the events of the world's whole career, by reading the recorded ethereal wavelets in the abysses of space through improved means of capturing such. All parts of the whole universe is sympathetic, more so than the arm is to the body, in its integer. It is but Deity. An active volcano will shower its ash in the upper currents to the antipodes, and a seismological disturb- ance will raise a tidal wall of water which will do the circumfer- ence of the globe. There is no resistance to matter in the eternal seas of luminiferons ether, where the worlds float and bob as ser- enely as the lightest cork upon a placid stream. The halo in the Galaxy, when astronomically photographed, becomes isolated into star units, millions, and even billions, of miles each from the other; yet, so distant from this planet in the octillions of leagues, as to appear together in a hazy mist. After leaving the earth's atmos- phere higher mathematics, as an aid to man, finally reaches its terminal. The void is too profound with omniscience for finite abil- ity and reason. This, "per se," is as insurmountable to the exploit of greed, and more so, than the Arctic wall of ice offers to the advance of the explorer. Spectrum analysis proves that each and every one of these consorts in creation have their proper share of natural wealth in raw material bedded in their soil. Water and air, and, therefore, organic life, are entwined with the most of them. The promoter of monopoly may take a greedy view of this austere grandeur; but, in the same bout with the fox, he will find the grapes high, but yet they're sweet. Some of these worlds are so large that this planet, as big as mother earth is rated, would not size up in comparison to them than a poor man's potato patch would match the globe itself. Think of this: Arcturus, the pearl ef the heavens, the diamond of the sky, the ruby of the firmament, is a grand field for exploitation. This glorious sun, which nourishes a sympathetic but different system of worlds from that of King Sol, and the oth- ers, is so far from this amphibious natured planet that even the glori- ous sun of this constellation, accredited as it is with 92,000,000 miles from its proximity to the earth, pales in the computation. In meas- ure and bulk, the sun of this system, of nearly 1,000,000 miles in its diameter, is but a molehill to a mountain. Yonder, in the dark and eternal dome, it yet shines as bright to the vision of the be- holder as the arc of an electric lamp. The spectroheliograph reveals to man the worlds in their gala attire, variegated, and separated. 52 The System of Modern Qreed and Graft The sun in its calcium dress reflects the splendors of omnipotent na- ture. Time and distance, variety and number, are omniscient fac- tors in eternity. The periodical comet is naught else but a silent governor of this system of worlds, which lie out in that silent, cold, deep, and glittering speculative beyond! Life and death, in a tragic drama, in their blazing entrance and exit, ceaseless in decree as cause and effect, constantly are occurring among the diamonds in the azure blue; and in nebula, whose magnitude is beyond the power of human reasoning, and the source of all worlds, they return unto in their decadence, as the eternal necropolis, to be resurrected, in an endless circuit, into new forms in the aeons to come. The astronomer, up to date, records 500,060,000 worlds, planets, and suns, with infinite more waiting upon an improved lens to search out. And every unit of this revealment requires millions of miles for its orbital circuit. Mars is in close vicinity, and sapience is endeavor- ing to get in touch with him. When he is heard from means will be developed gradually to communicate with all. Not anything is lost in annihilation in the order of creation. It may change its form, yet the atoms of its first cause are ever existing. Close to twenty centuries rearward a moral altruist taught rare truths and aphorisms to men, who were blinded to the light by Ignorance and greed. Quoth he: "In my Father's house are many mansions." The whole universe is an apotheosis to the house in its allegory. The astronomer may be from now on busily occupied in recording their interminable findings. And this is Deity. Morality survives for all eternity; but greed is allocated to perish. The earth is but a grain of sand, and even less, in comparison with the immensity of creation, and yet, this molecule of attention is apportioned 300,- 000,000, miles for an orbital area in an annual and necessary circuit around its sun. This is somewhat of a 1,060,000 mile spin in 24 hours, which is performed so silently as to be imperceivable to the sensa- tions of organized life. But hold, two additional motions, and prob- ably more, are going on at the same time, conjointly. One of these motions is a complete revolution, from perigee around to perigeum diurnally. This is a 1,000 mile whirl, hourly, in an angular direc- tion to that in which the planet takes in an • annual circuit about its sun. Another motion is one which is performed in unison with entire creation, in a ceaseless and orderly precession, around some hub or central point. With what speed this planet is trav- eling in this last movement is merely conjectural. Speculation in this third movement surmises it to be an eternal circuit about the abiding place of the First Cause. This system of worlds, of which the earth is a factor, in the lapse of centuries, has been swiftly mov- ing toward the northern heavens, as, at present, can be observed from the earth. There is no monopoly and competition in nature's bounty. Her price is — effort! And this is "Ewigkeit" PART II A Short Summary of the Present Social Conditions SOCIAL Consecutive order of subjects treated in Part II PAGE. CRIMINOLOGY 1 Crime 1 Adulteration 2 Gambling 3 Punishment for Crime 4 VICE 5 Trampdom B Nescience 8 Immorality and Terpsichorean Music 9 Intemperance 10 Faex Populi (Poverty ) 11 Evolution 11 CONSCIENCE 12 Philanthropy 12 Charity IS Religion and the Evangelistic Grafter 14 SOCIAL CRIMINOLOGY Crime is a barometer -which gauges the political and industrial conditions of a people. Up or down its mercury flits to suit the in- termittent stages of society. Crime of a modern and nascent va- riety, "industri» floremus," is of a grand canyon grandeur in its panoramic tragedies. Innumerable degrees of crime, but a whisper in the era of Kent and Blackstone, are now of microphonous volume in strenuousness, and as common as the asphyxial conditions which create it. It leads at present the legislator and the judiciary in a safe stern chase. The professional thief is the most wide awake unit using the public thoroughfares in looking after other people's business and their possessions. The large centres are a flaring Ve- suvius of sinister crime and smouldering vice. The impostor, of all varieties and hue, and the murderer, blackmailer, firebug, kid- napper, dirigible bunco helmsman, the bankrupt swindler, the forger, the thug of ye ancient times of ye olden Rome, who hire to murder, kidnap, and blackmail, the urban highwayman and gar- roter, the feudist, rapist, divorce perjurer, burglar, bunco under- writers, fagins, urchin artful dodgers, grafters, and the common custom of "felo de se," are but a dole of the varieties of Satanic creations devised and germinated by the criminal gray matter. which have their incipiency in the mephitic olfactories of skul- duddery and greed and graft. Indeed, along with the above com- pendium, may be installed the horse drivers of all street vehicles, the chauffeur, and the motorman fronting the street car. To occupy one of these wage-earning occupations is a cinch to an erratic de- generate. A glance at the mortality column of the yearly kill these misanthropists have to their credit, and the punishment due which all have evaded, is enough to make the felon awaiting the chair for an ordinary murder an apostate to all that is earthly, in reflecting how he may have appeased his cravings for gore in a safer way than he followed. Soon it will require an especial prothonotary to chron- icle the new phases of crime and vice. Man has become so per- verse to honesty, that every accused brought to the bar in these times of prevailing greed, is instantly prejudicated guilty and it is up te him to prove his innocence. In the days of yore he was the in- nocent lamb, and it was up to the state to prove him a wolf. In na- ture's eternal law of retribution are many paradoxes. Once a crim- inal, in these competitive times, always a criminal, and the dead line of reform is a chaparral he receives no encouragement to pene- trate. Lack of public attention and sympathy, and the zeal of the sleuth, are obstacles in his return to society; and, taking on traits of his' nefarious calling, he becomes more and more less unable to 8 The Red Book Illuminating the appear again among upright men. The glad hand is withdrawn from him, and society only gives him the glassy stare and the mar- ble heart of adamantine solidity, and the frigid shrug, and it is only too willing to hand him a throw down than to assist him to arise to a vertical position. In the maximum of instances a penniless and idle condition is compulsory in the matter, and yet, living without visible means is tabooed by the code and under the ban of vigilant lex. The spirit of greed is on a parity with a grist mill, which has comminuted its victim pretty fine, and performed its devastation with consummate skill. The tie of consanguinity is no longer a but- tress to the plundering foray of greed and graft. Judas Iscariot is a back number with these hired mourners who wolve the public of today. The eye and the mien of the individual are the true in- dex of character, as is well known to the biologist and physiologist, and mathematical corporeal measurement the best thief catcher. It will require a stathmograph, in this epoch, to keep tabs on the gait of fertile rascality. The criminal neology, the vocabulary of the evil doer, is a lexicon of respectable bulk and volume. It is of paramount utility in aiding the sleuth to jug these rodents and overhaul them with the self evidence, "caught with the goods on 'em." The welcher is the grandest rogue of them all. It is not uni- versally known that a man can steal with his eyes and ears. The hands are not always a necessary factor. Adulteration. This tops the list in crime, along with the political briber and bribe partaker, as it is the greatest in volume, blackest in hue, liberty crushing, a high protection creation, an immigrant persuader, and more; and is adjudged to the brute cre- ation, as well as it is universally mulcted upon a long-suffering public, dipnetting the dishonest as well as the upright of the com- munity. It is a knife up the sleeve, and the assassin doubly for- tified, in his lurking attack upon the unsuspectful victim, by the convenient screen. It is a happy thought of the criminal gray mat- ter to make easy money. It is to the new arrivals, the ones of trad- ing proclivities, like finding money. The manufacturer, the pro- ducer, the importer, the wholesaler, the retailer, each, and all, get in their likin of alloy at their various toll gates, with lastly a lam- basting by the small tradesman, in finally disposing of the spurious article, at a decimated avoirdupois, to the hapless consumer, who has been compelled to run this gantlet of mercenary thieves without even a verdant gambler's chance for his hard-earned exchange. Is business on the level? Diogenes, he of Athens, the sage of 2500 years ago, had a farrago of doubts concerning this irony. Chem- istry is prostituted and debased in its decorum when enforced as an accessory cozening in the commission of this universal crime. The eleemosynary institutions and charitable dispensaries are deluged with chronic sufferers, and the valetudinarian, from the effects of adulterated and spurious alimentations, both solid and in the liquid form, imposed upon the Impecunious, more so than on the pros- perous, in the cookshop, the saloon, and the market. The shoddy System of Modern Qreed and Graft 8 which is extensively worn, and the luxuries civilization demands, absorb the talent of this uncial in measure of morality in his en- deavors to give the least he can, and inferior as he can, for the most he can get out of the purchaser. The hypostasis of his alloy is not strictly religious in its Innocuousness. If rehibition of impositions were enforced by the purchaser, the vendor would be compelled to institute a reform in his mode of bartering. Persuaders, in the form of gratuities, as the trading stamp, the cou- pon, and multifarious tinsel articles, are wary traps placed judiciously to ensnare the unthinking. They are an imposition upon the intel- ligence of the community, and are manipulated by the commercial schemer who always keeps safe to the windward. A word to the wise, etc. Gambling. "Homo homini lupus." Unrestrained, illegitimate, and demoralizing stock gambling, in all its varied phases unto the criminal line on the marches of ordinary speculation, bank and in- dustrial wrecking, inflated values, underwriting valueless incorpora- tions, and such of like ilk, which are too numerous for a complete glossary here, are so reflective in their immoral mirror as to cast their silhouetted shadows clear down to the bottom of society. The urchin crap-shooter of the sidewalk, the saloon card player, and the Juvenile artful dodger, are the apt pupils of this speculating fagin and padrone. The game of chance is unresisting In its allure- ments to many, enticing children from their homes and play, and routs old age from the chimney corner to stake their last In a game of bridge and whist. On again, with a high bound, It lands In the circle of the smart set, the glided palaces of the tiger, radiant with the red light, and finally rounding up in the poolroom and at the race track. Thus unconsciously doth the very escapades and mode of life of the select and the privileged have their Influence clear down to the dregs of society. Gambling is greed run riot and amuck. It is a bhang which feeds the river anarchy. Women at the race course, in the club drawing room, in the private booth at the gaming palaces and pool parlors, are completely absorbed In the consuming passion of casting unearned money to the winds, for notoriety, a fad, or sentimental furore. While men, at every centre of gambling and speculation, are contending and scheming to blast the hopes and lives of others. Gambling is all risk, and made more so by the art of the blackleg, from tumbling the dice unto the roulette wheel, and the hypothecation on a margin, or trading in mythical futures which have no existence. The sporty and clever set, who swim inside the circle, may be found In their life's termi- nus over their stature in the slough succumbing to the compensa- tive law of nature's trial balance. The lottery schemers have hoo- dooed a state, and the grab-bag, the sight-unseen swap, and such, have left their stain upon the church fair. Gambling is a Satanic bubble, and destroys its victims, more or less, sooner or later. It can be curtailed in volume by sound legislation, but, with Satanic obstinacy it refuses annihilation. "Foolish boy, what you are." * The Bed Booh Illuminating the Punishment lor Crime. Imprisonment ia more persuasive to the wayward to abjure his style than other modern forms of cor- rection, such as pecuniary penance, placing under bail, and such. After the second offense, for crime petit and misdemeanor, the pe- cuniary fine should be superseded by corporeal imprisonment only. Every succeeding conviction of a person should be atoned for by an increased term, in point of time, in proportion to his criminal waywardness, to be fixed by the legislative enactment. There should be no amercements affeered by the judiciary. There should be pris- ons of divers classes, to keep separate the non-professional violator of the law from the professional thief and criminal. Every pro- fessional criminal, not serving the maximum sentence, should re- ceive from ten to thirty taws or lashes upon his back, "en cueros," and ten once every month during his sojourn under its reforming shelter. All crimes of theft should invariably come under the moral restraint enjoined by the beneficial cat. All prisons should be out- side the corporation limit, and isolated, with the exception of one to hold those awaiting and undergoing immediate trial. Capital pun- ishment should be abolished, to be replaced by imprisonment for a stated term, at the most, of thirty years. Thirty lashes on con- viction, and thirty more twice a year, with solitary confinement at intervals, and reduced diet, to accompany him to the close of his penitential penitence. Thirty years should be the maximum and minimum penalty for the star actor in the drama of crime, in the category of the following variety: The political briber and par- taker and grafter, railway ditchers and the hold-up robber of trains, the firebug, burglar, murderer, highwayman and thug, rapist, coun- terfeiter, forger, perjurer, black drop canfidante, kidnapper, the in- dustrial wrecker, and such. Capital punishment is "de trop," and not sufficiently drastic in this age. The professional criminal, not under duress, sundown should be his curfew notice to quit the public thoroughfares. One trial should suffice for a professional, charged with commission of crime. Large municipalities, becoming infested by juvenile delinquents, should institute the reformatory, with castigatery features. Life imprisonment is as barbarous as capital punishment. No man, where it is avoidable, should die in prison a convicted felon. Every man should have a chance to sur- render his mortal coil morally clean, and near his demise have his liberty of person. Every corpus, on dissolution, frees a spirit which is instantly immerged in the First Principle. The Federal or State convict should, at regular seasons, if his term, individually, lengthens over a year, be alternated at stated intervals around among the va- rious state prisons belong to the state, within whose bounds he is confined. The guard and prison official should also have such a change likewise, but not in a manner to subvert their usefulness. This change is a represser of rust and familiarity. Every person, a convicted transgressor by the court, influential or otherwise, should be compelled to toe the line in fulfilling the requirements which the prison rules demand, without recession. The mandatory System of Modern Greed and Graft 5 officer, of each and every prison, not of a military character, should fill his position by the way of the ballot, and his time tenure should be for six years. All positions to be held in civil prisons, for the chars© of convicts, not mandatory, should be filled per civil cervice inquisition, and be of a good moral and humane character. Public nuisances awaiting abatement by an efficient political regime are many. A few will be annotated in closing this article: Homeless people, suffering with vermin, should be introduced to the fumlga- tory, or immersed in a bath of staphisagria; badgering urchin bootblacks suppressed; the Jew clothing barker squelched in his as- saults upon the passerby; the receptacle can, awaiting the S. C. D. cart, to be sprinkled with water before going over its side; com- pulsory retirement of filthy and disgusting mendicants, with the gig make-up, from their grafting mission fields — the public streets; freak anatomical museums of monstrosities and disease repressed, and closed to public patronage; the usurious sharp, who haunts the workshop to fleece the impecunious borrowing wage-earner, given his quietus, and such. Yet, another. The vendor and vendee in bal- lot bartering receive a long term, with its disqualification. VICE Trampdom. "Otia dant vitia." Far from the scenes of their childhood these nomads wander. In many of these flux characters their "modus Vivendi" is the result of perverse advice and train- ing they received in their younger days, while the residue are born degenerates. It is simply a case of what might have been. Lest we forget, a reminder may be suggested that these gents of ennui and leisure, who roam far from the madding crowd of greed adorers, and the fragrance from whose presence would Inoculate a stone figure with a twitch of rhinitis, are a codicil to the general testa- ment which has passed down to society with other dire effects, as a devise of the fratricidal strife of the early sixties, when this nation turned its sword upon itself. Trampdom has been added to, and expanded hugely, by the withering spirit of greed now so grimly and sententiously stalking in the country's midst. Thus the evils which men do ever follow after them, and there is no escape from eternal laws, even unto many generations, until the trespass is partly atoned for and Nemesis subsides, by degrees, in her tensity of retribution. Its army comprises brigades of failures from industrial competi- tion, the immigrant pauper proletary, bestial negroes, degenerate youths, petty thieves and murderous yeggs, with a sprinkling of the half-way honest hobo, who does work, occasionally, when the spirit moves him. They are the vexation of the suburban and the rural citizen, a terror to the isolated denizen, and a bogy to constituted authority. The impossibility of keeping up a presentable front on the road has biased the incipient wayward from hitting the pike and becoming a permanent Sadducee to society in adorning the hobo camp. Jn the city the tra^np is the insistent and persistent 6 The Red Booh Illuminating the panhandler on its public thoroughfares, often recumbently monopo- lizing the sidewalk in a stale beer or mixed ale stupor, the lodging house doorway lounger and thug, the star-gazing benc-ier in the city small park, and, in the city barrel houses and distilleries he finds his banquet, caucus, and dormitory shelter, although a steno- sis in limit. They are in bunches in cold weather on every corner in the slums of any large city. They migrate with the bluebird from the liquid air and the congealed rural pike of the country in the desolate season, to the hospitable warmth and welcome of a more congenial temperature the city offers this "rus in urb6" in the cheap lodging house and the all-night vertical drowse in the rear room of the barrel house. Often he may be seen performing irksome toil for his daily proteinmystiflcus in his exploring forays on the refuse receptable cans dotting the city curbs for offal to pacify the gnawing refractory sensations vexing his cast-iron pit, or in gunning the streets for snipes or discarded butts. His pastime is his felicitous habit of scientifically introducing his tomato can to the bunghole of the empty beer keg to capture its imprisoned dregs. At the rear of the saloon his rounds are gone over before the ar- rival of the brewery collecting van. And his angles of the hypothe- nuse and the vertical are performed with true geometrical precision with the can and the keg. He is a nuisance to the cop on the block, and poisons the air he breathes. His bed often is hard, his slumber sound and sonorous, and his counterpoint the starry spread of the vaulted canopy. In hitting the pike for their warm weather ramblings, where the city bull and the fly cop are shy in number, the air balmer, a flll-up of ensilage and legumes more palatable and gratuitous, hospitality less callous, and standing room more ex- panding, they separate into grades which are congenial to their in- dividual and composite characters. Here, may be observed a bunch of 'cross-country jumpers, or turnpike stiffs; there the cross-tie calculator, driller, and mile-measurer, who are a permanent feature pounding the dirt road, and, like other grafters in more preten- tious callings, are the house-to-house visitant. But the more dar- ing members of the trampdom fraternity, holding the pedestrian brethren in scurrilous contempt, are the hobo, yegg, tourist, rod rider, box car swinger, blind baggage nabob, vestibule croucher, and the like. The lads in this latter class very seldom throw their feet out at any time, and only in a case of being ditched, and in making a water tank. They sprint, at times, when hastened by a vigi- lant railroad bull. They are the barnacles on the railroad monopoly. All may thus see that man, in any condition, is ever ingenious in his walks through life, and his mental maieutics are ever fertile in ingenuity. These wanton Willies are known, one to the other, by the sobriquet or the alias, in their incog, wanderings, their mem- ory being in a state of amnesia as to their original cognomen. Their facetious and prandial frumpery of tramp lore, around their diminutive nocturnal blaze, is on the lay of the province they are ■working, biographical sketches of the stars and minor glims in System of Modern Greed and Graft 1 their calling, good grounds, best railroads to hammer for a soft carry, slum gossip of past city felicities, surest railroad routes to all and any points, the history of fractious railroad bulls, and the like, and is invariably personal in substance. They despise a handout; but a sit-down, with their feet thrown under a table, is often re- hearsed and commented upon at these camp fires for months. Thus is shown the compensative retribution which nature decrees for the violation of her laws, in the worship of Mammon and greed. This sleepy pest, with the circulation of a salamander, occasionally, when not bumming, may deign to pick the berry, nip the hop, and pluck the peach, and condescend so far, at times, as to delve the soil to bar- rel the spud. All this combustion of energy is superinduced by his anxiety to obtain the spondulix and simoleans to enable him to keep upon familiar terms with the worry dissipator, the seductive nippitato, in his corroborees forgathered in the periodical round- up of his kind. In these convivial slops, in the purlieus of the town or city, their usual lynx-like caution and wariness steps aside for the sway of imprudence, which lands them, at the termination of their orgies, in the rural jug and cooler. All evil is accompanied by some good. So in this case, he has his opportunity apropos to the moment to shake his entomological friends, with the refrain, "Au revoir, 'twere well we had never met, as the parting gives me pain." By their ballot, and often, very often, as the repeater, they are the puissant tool of the political grafter, and a zany upholder of class government and woofy greed. They are, as a rule, capricious, and the backcapper, and discard each other with the utmost non- chalance, often and incessantly, for new associates. It's the Jack get up and John sit down condition which goes with them. They are a restless quantity, this fringe on human society, of the absent minded and wandering beggar. Once upon a time, after a rural fill-up, a wandering Willie was introduced to a woodpile, with a splendid saw. He was to reduce its length in reciprocal for the use of a meal. Immediately on the absence of his hostess, attend- ing to domestic duties, her guest chalked upon a convenient plank, in plain view, "Just tell them that you saw me with a saw, but you didn't saw me saw," and decamped as quickly as his weary limbs would propel him. Abuse of political power by the patrician, the usurper, the autocrat, and the oligarchy, and such, in ancient Asiatic despotisms, and in olden Rome and the Hellenic States, to- gether with the mediaeval period of Italian history, introduced and germinated vice and crime in such volume and variety, by class privilege, which this republic is following a close simile, and even rivaling, that the barbarian and invader easily enslaved them by conquest; and in mighty Rome they found, in this once redoubt- able people but only an emasculated grandeur, and a harmless paretic, in opposing their tactical promenade. "Mene, mene, tekel upharsin" was the wall chirography which closed the career of Assyria, Media, Persia, Egypt, and all other Asiatic greedocracies. Descending from the Olympian virtues and self-denials to the en- 8 The Bed Booh Illuminating the ervative and selfish Oriental revelries closed the career of Alex- ander, the victor of Arbela, and his country forever. To the vic- tor belongs the spoils, his dying bequest to his country. And this modern grand experiment of popular government, to make such a sure success, -will require the people to keep their mighty hand upon the throttle, and their vigil upon the rail. Nescience. Mephistophelian opposition to natural moral law is the apex of ignorance. The opposer of progress, the bigoted fanatic, the slanderer, the hypocrite, and the diminutive fice, may enjoy a college education, yet, withal, they are ignorant of the forces which all are subject to. Crassitude of physical and mental make-up is the fatuous "homo" who forms his opinions without judgment and mind exercise, and discards the elusive gold through its deceptive external appearance of dross. Yet, ignorance may be observed lingering, lethe-Iike, in the portal at the seat of learn- ing, where, at times, it points public attention to the hazer, the cane rush, the rooter, and the many student pranks of savagery. It is observed as plainly in the vain and conceited coxcomb and chappie as it is displayed in the horseplay of the cowman and the stableman. The ignorant man is always a bulldozer. Ignorance is as prevalent in the coterie of the drawing room and the circles of the parvenu as it is in the hut of the peasant, or in the slums of the proletary. The difference lies in degree, not in its character. Educated greed and monopoly, the same, is a sculptured allegory, surmounting monumental ignorance. It disregards the rights of others and the perpetuity of universal liberty, and is ignorant of the moral law of compensative retribution to be exacted of unborn generations of America's posterity. The abuse of temporary power by a, or any, megalomaniac in public office is ignorance enthroned, and is a sufferance to the public, as well as a standing menace to popular government. Political power, abused and degenerating in a free state, is contumacious in its indifference to the humiliating destiny unborn generations may encounter in the future as an after effect to its unpatriotic cause. By ratiocination this calamity must ensue, in due time, as surely as the nocturnal twilight succeeds diurnal daylight. Ignorance crooks the knee only to superior ma- terial force. It respects, but envies, intelligence. If it had a free hand the world would be as opaque as an Egyptian night. Guffaw, and show your teeth and your ignorance, is as apposite to the shallow parvenu of wealth and the "nouveau" preserve lord as it is in the home of its origin, the lowlands of Dixie, among the blacks, where the greatest anathema which can be hurled at an antagonist in a wordy argument is, "He's a great big nigger and got no sense!" Immorality and vioe are twins personified to a unity under Ignor- ance. It is this impure stain which overwhelms nations, smoth- ers their checkered career by an intellectual eclipse, and casts them down to perdition. Eons before even ancient history had an in- choative infancy nations generated and succumbed incessantly, and in succession, which were intertwined with a civilizatiQn and an System of Modem Greed and Graft 9 intelligence that equalled, if it did not dwarf, the present mode. Yet greed brought the night which, after an expiation decreed by eternal laws, was again succeeded by the photosphere of King Sol rising and illuminating other peoples. They, too, had the golden opportunity; but greed triumphed. And they met the fate of their antecessors. And thus it has been for myriads of ages during the trial of all races of men. With the downfall of imperial Rome in- tellectual insouciance reigned supreme, and on up to the XlVth century. Where moral ethics and justice are perpetually enthroned, and greed lies prostrate in spite of prosperity and the citternheads baiting the shrewd and intelligent to grasp, in that land such a people will endure forever. To hear a man reply to a query con- cerning his employment, "I ain't dun nuttin' in er munt," is to cogi- tate upon his moral right to suffrage. Immorality and Terpsichorean Music. Sweet music hath charms to soothe the savage ear. Music is a "particeps crimi- nis" in enshrouding vice with its alluring glamour and siren fascina- tion. The compulsory idle class has turned its attention and fertile faculties from beneficial production into the putrid channels of gilded vice and baneful crime, as a vent and outlet for its super- fluous and wasting energy. In vice alone it has resurrected more varieties of the evil than Beelzebub had ever dreamed he had listed In his gazette of the histrionic immortelles of immorality. The high and the sewer beard this wolf in its gilded den of bacchanalian rev- elry, to meet the fate of all who dare. Overflowing in the city, vice has crept, lava fashion, unto the hamlet. Encouraged by the graft- er in official authority, and emboldened by their consort, the ever- shadowing thug, degenerate and puerile slatterns have made the corner saloon a place of amatory retreat, and the concert hall, the sultan divan, the roof garden, the iridescent shadow dancing palace, the dewdrop inn, the gaudy variety theatre, and the like, their charnel houses to immolate the sensual ninnyhammer. Youth, and the glossy-pated and gray-bearded rouS alike, lie prostrated be- fore infucated Lulu's triumphant juggernaut, every hour the pendu- lum hammers the day to a close. These Leander geezers, the mo- nopolists at the bar of the drums, are the consorts of the frazzled Nautch rlvalesses at the fantasied mazes. The tintinnabulation of the concert orchestra, and the thrum of the spavined piano, with the "ivresse" and obfuscate condition of these impeccable exemplars and their malapert fizgigs, the clink of glasses, and the hall reson- ant with the lightness and gayety of Babylonian mirth and dulcet strains, the levity and chaff of the rainy daisies — all are the sirens which attend the obit of the reveler and the obsequies of society. In the lazaretto, and in the laboratory, the disciple of ^Bsculapius, and the wizard in chemistry, continuously, are experimenting and exploring botany for specific agents to fight to a standstill the retri- bution of an outraged moral law. Immorality, in an immense smoul- dering volume, is backgrounded by the flat, the apartment house, the furnished room, and the ochlesis of the tenement, in all large 10 The Red Book Illuminating the municipalities. It has a swagger set, with its smart doings and pithy sayings, as well as the hovels of squalor and lecherous misery, which the former, with the passing of time, invariably percolate down among in reaching vice level. This condition of connubial and nuptial abasement, born of greed and class legislation, is a menace to national existence, and its extent, partly seen in the police court and the divorce grill and the red light territory, is ruefully misunderstood. Moral and physical laws should be a course of consecutive lectures perpetually in the public schools, and the small but low cunning tricks of the meretricious madonnas com- bated by vigilant lex to a standstill. The realty owner should be prosecuted to repentance for aiding and abetting these cuckolds of society in furnishing the abodes which shelter this serpent of hades. The pirouette tomtit of the street, who follows the dago and his gurdy, is the embryo of the future street parader. It may be no- ticed, by the ordinary observer, that the average man discards his wits when a woman gets mixed up in an argument. The southern Europe and Asiatic endless cavalcade of the immigrant slide .has ushered upon this free land many new tricks in crime and vice, which was padroned and fagined deep into their ancestors, and entailed and inherited by these descendants, as. the result of en- throned greed and privilege in the land of their nativity. In the congested centres they are in preponderance numerically, and are fast turning personal liberty into license. They observe no rules of the road in using the highways and thoroughfares of the munici- pality, and to resist a jostling affront by a passerby is to envelop one quickly in a surging mob. The silliest thing will attract a mob, the most part of whom are aliens. The faithful guardian, com- prising an army corps in volume, is conspicuous by his absence, and when discovered, it will be at a saloon corner, at the rear end of his rounds, standing at attention, waiting for the relief squad. All these conditions await reform on the immolation of king greed. Intemperance and poverty go hand in hand congruously at some period in life. Alcohol has been a boon companion, and a con- vivial deceiver, to the nations of the earth, way down along the line, before the birth of history. It is the greatest ally which wrong has ever had to support a triumphant reign over right. The ordinary toiler pickles his head in rum and mixed ale upon the approach of all industrial storms. With the elimination of alcohol today from the affairs of men industrial emancipation would suc- ceed its vacuum tomorrow. Alcohol enchains nations, as well as the leery individual, to the steel staple of greed. The doper is a fiend in human shape, and a gastronomical and physiological freak. Invariably he is a prevaricator and servile as an Ethiopian. This vice and inebriety are ascending in volume. Maudlin men and women are so numerous in the large centres as to block the thor- oughfare for convenient use to the ordinary citizen. Intemperance is the resort of the morally weak and of nescience, and the cause is in "petitio prmeipii" when alcohol is enthroned as an arbiter. The Syatem of Modem Greed and Graft 11 slatterns observed reeling about the urban highways, "blase" with the vilest of half and half, are the scum of the slums, and a cogent rebuke to the entity of corrupt political and moral conditions. Greed inflates the baser passions of man as thoroughly as yeast doth dif- fuse itself through dough. Booze should be muzzled, unadulterated, limited, and made a government monopoly simon pure. A restric- tion should be placed upon the indiscriminate sale of narcotic drugs. It requires no spinthariscope to perceive the synthetic character of these conditions falling collectively under immorality. Uncon- taminated womanhood, devoid of selfishness, envy, and jealousy, is an alary mortal, and but little below the spiritual beings. But as an Inebriate and degenerate, she is viler than anything which earthly conditions can ever vaunt. Man is more generous, on the average; but he gets his fall in other ways. All suggestions on tem- perance reform, without the abolition of political and Industrial problems, are as silly as the Idle vaporings of the castaway In a cockleshell in the midst of the choppy seas of the Bay of Bis- cay. Paex Populi. Indigence and extreme destitution are condi- tions which rate these unfortunates a second to the brute creation in virtue. It is a contaminative moral depravity for which disso- lution alone is a specific. It is not very prevalent, as yet, in the republic as it is known in the British Isles and empire. There is a marked difference between the condition of being in straitened cir- cumstances temporarily and the one of squalid poverty. Philan- thropy may help the one by educational means and a helping hand, while the other requires the constant prop of charity to hold its oafish victim upon his feet. It is a degeneracy of the physical, men- tal, and moral make-up of the pauper which ramify his whole clay as thoroughly as does his circulatory or nervous system. Man's personality and will power He in his neuron system, from crown to foot. Mendicancy is the offspring of vice and crime, the opium fiend, the drunkard and the rou6. It is a legacy of greed and the lock- out. Its shiftlessness is rewarded, in sympathy with the concrete law of compensation, with a personal and domestic state which a jackal would not tolerate. Poverty is a high-protection creation. Swelling its ranks in later years, very perceptibly, is the trans- Atlantic pauper, a new factor the old world unloads upon the North American republic to increase its domestic troubles and endeavor to usher in its dissolution. Crime, poverty and intemperance are the effects from a cause whose true source springs from disease and degeneracy inherited from dissolute and immoral progenitors. It needs the physician more than the jailer. Evolution. The civilized vs. uncivilized society. The law of nature, in all of human inconsistencies, wills compensation and retribution, in its Bilent but fixed way, which never remains indefi- nitely an unknown quantity. Natural law may be temporarily cir- cumvented by the sinuous endeavors of greed, yet, it can never be evaded permanently any more than that water may be prevented 12 The Red Booh Illuminating the from seeking its level, or that damming a bountiful spring will pre- vent its breaking through In some distant ground. In abjuring the free and savage life of a remote past to assume the present one of rational society, man surrendered the independence and the social- istic conditions which the savage enjoyed, with all that went with it This was the animal state of rugged health and physical strength. Fetish was all the herbal decoctions he required. On the other hand, he acquired the benefit of visible conditions, and which are supposed to be in common equity, for what he had surrendered. Superior intellectual strength succeeds the reign of the past su- premacy of the physical. Man is denied perfection whilst upon the planet. That which he gains by his salience in one direction he loses to its resilience in the other. A man can not eat his cake and still visibly retain it intact for further consumption. He can not accept modern life and retain the many natural virtues of the barbarian. He has left the company of primitive creation to enter an unre- vealed state willed from the lncipiency of corporeal things. Man does not control his future. And even, despite him, his past and present are full of vicissitudes, and so may be his future, with the example of the mutations of the ages constantly mirrored to his vision. The moral law Is the chastening rod of the gods and the keystone of creation. Man is infinite in number, and of different personalities, which is one of the eternal attributes of Deity. No soul flitters earthward a second time. Once Is enough. In the cease- less triturations, transfusions, transitions and convolutions of phys- ical creation, dross today becoming worth tomorrow, it may be said, with propriety, that man literally devours himself over and over. And it may also be embossed on brass that physical suffering is nothing more nor less than an eternal law in nature, and no one can escape it. CONSCIENCE Philanthropy. "Quo vadis." Is a covenant and a burnt of- fering by many, conscience ailing, to appease NemesiB, while the exceptions are for motives unique and varied. Hoarded affluence is turned loose for exercise to alleviate depraved conditions pre- vailing in society, and also to advance it onward and upward. This ransom tribute in the posthumous devise to appease discontent and murmurings, is often bestowed by the "bonhomie" but quixotic donor or legator; whilst in the minimum of instances clear Judg- ment and good taste follow its devise and expenditure. Benignant men of means, dwelling far from the habitat of the common peo- ple, and ingrained with the traits of their narrow environment, naturally fire wild and wide of the mark In aiming to elevate con- ditions they are alien thereto. In some instances, by accident or intuition, the contrite heart lands his beatific beneficence "ad rem" to his intended beneficiary through his purveyor. Building a library for the masses In an aristocratic neighborhood, and shelved with System of Modern Greed and Graft 13 books of reference which only the scholar Is on terms with; the hos- pital whore It require* much tape to enter a ward; the college, and even the lodging house, which only the prosperous can patronize — all this is philanthropy traduced. These donations are above sus- picion when the string is detached and the grafter cut loose from his moorings. Bequests for the advancement of a science which is conducive to the welfare of humanity, such as chemistry, medicine, surgery, Industry, morality, and others of like tenor, are on the royal road to true philanthropy. A good use the philosophic philanthropist and moralist may employ his accumulations would be In the line of true endeavor in the erecting of schools of Indus- try. A structure, of considerable area, running up some four or five floors, and allotting to each, to suit convenience, may be the gymnasium, the bath space, the lecture hall, the library, a news- paper room, correspondence and conversation rooms, a moderate prices restaurant, study rooms, and manual workshops, to sustain theory with practice, and, lastly, artful pundits and pedants to im- part the principles and precepts of the industrial trades. All through the closed season, meteorologically, evening lectures, except on the Sabbath, stereopticon and otherwise, should be delivered upon topics which deal with concurrent conditions of modern civilization, ftnd on all educational subjects in general. Here, the syncrlses of pre- vailing conditions may be held up to public view, and the Inventor, the explorer, the archaeologist and astronomer, the industrial arts, politics, finance and commerce diagnosed, agriculture, the Federal Constitution, moral law, and the like, a discursus "ad Infinitum." Musical entertainments at intervals, Instructive and social, in the great hall, may be a feature of its general curriculum. The build- ing should be "In situ" in the vicinity of the section it is to bene- fit, and everything gratis, as far as is reasonable, to preserve its in- tegrity. The employee of all grades in its management should be carefully kept to his appointed duties, and conditioned in his tenure with administering his functions impartially and with cordiality. It is well known to all patrons of a philanthropic institution of what- ever nature, that the trust and intentions of the founder are prosti- tuted by those who manage its daily disposition, in their demeanor and deportment toward the public recipient. Everything for gratu- itous bounty to the masses is handed to them with such niggardli- ness, and doled so reservedly by the agents and servants hired, either politically, Industrially, or philanthropically, accompanied with the inevitable string and red tape, that it is a perplexing query why it was ever given at all. To the masses everything is in- debted. They pay the taxes and fight the country's battles. They labor for a pittance that the country may become great. And In return they are begrudged all the amenities of existence. Such Is the Irony of fate — all due to indifference to any remedy upon their part. Charity. What grafting Is conceived in thine errand, O holy virtue! This ethical side of modern greed receives more hard 14 fhe Bed Boole Illuminating the whacks on its charismatic mission from the ark by the dove baiter, than it would if attended by judicious sagacity. What the wage- earner demands is not alms — that is a virtue for the poverty- stricken and a graft for the sacerdotal hypocrite — but legitimate work, and an equitable share in prosperity. Charity runs a lengthy gauntlet in reaching the goal of its earnest endeavor and lands a ghost of its primitive self. The condors of society get various headmoney at their respective toll gates before the decimated resi- due is permitted to reach its destination. Men of superfluous means, for various reasons, experiment with the art of giving. Their mo- tives loom in a parallax as viewed by the alert observer of human economics. Some of their fads are ludicrous and arouse the risi- bilities, while others are just the right thing and deserve atten- tion. A certain man of propriety in the Quaker City condoles all seekers for alms with a dole meal ticket upon a swell restaurant. Here the starved beneficiary is as much out of place as a goat in a parlor. Besides, the fare is meagre for his price. Why not give famished rags this order on a cosmopolitan eating house. He surely would get a fill-up of esculent food even if the style and at- mosphere of the former place were lacking. This is an example of the way the mansion house greets the tenement and the sub- merged fraction. The free excursion and the short stay in the rural district, or by the seaside, for the invalid and the youngster of im- poverished families, are digressive ways of true charity. And an- other: The supply store, on which an order coupon may- obtain a certain amount of aliment, after strict investigation to suppress the grafter by proper and humane authority as to the condition of the applicant. Getting work for the loitering is good charity. Sifting out the grafter is good business. The donations of the necessaries of life and medicine, and even rent, is another merciful way to tender a lift to a stricken toiler in tiding over a storm he has tem- porarily encountered. Assistance may be rendered in all ways formulated by a benevolent mind. But it is very impolitic to give cash money indiscriminately. To the drunkard and the dope fiend charity should be doled out in posological portions, with supervisory and inquisitorial guardianship to prevent its presto-change into nippitato. Modern greed has educed and evolved in great numbers, and increasing, the malingering hospital fakir and the almshouse bummer. Every abnormal condition of society known, which spon- taneously generates through immorality, the demand is instantly met by a supply of the ever sleepless grafter. In the new condi- tions to come prosperity will bg more equitable, and poverty, ex- treme wealth, and the cunning grafter or sucker, may be a night- mare no longer extant. Charity in its best front is but a demoral- izer, and there must be no lasting business made of this virtue. Religion and the Evangelistic Grafter. All reason- able men believe there is more to come. Yet all is not serene in the spiritual world. All parts of creation are sympathetic. The strug- gle of the forces, good and evil, is waging beyond the world and System of Modern Breed and Graft 16 onto the heavens, of which the secular strife Is but a feeble counter- part. Every soul which soars from the earth is an added power to one or the other of the opposing forces. This is the condition which handicaps moral force, and it is to be removed before nature's con- templations for the glory of humanity can be realized. Mankind, in number, is as multifold as the sands on the seashore, and man's entrance, passage through life, and exit, are as commonplace as those of the ordinary forms of organized life. Yet, there is an in- nate counselor which persuades him that he is to live again. Sane, orthodox religion, our most cherished ideal, in which mankind has pinned its hope as the rock of salvation, is to a great extent ex- ploited by the grafting class in its raids upon the bounties of benev- olent charity, and in questionable commercial projects to entice the verdant and the unwary. The itinerant street corner "fraus pia," exciting apostasy, and enrolling dubious converts; the inebriate res- curers, with their horns and dancing women, mostly aliens, creating effervescive sensation incessantly along the thoroughfare the whole sennight through, on their exegetical slummings, the aged women drifters, of the Bostonian type, with their missionary tracts to re- generate the southern negro who cannot read; and the like. Their succulent broth is inspissated with philanthropical graft. Also, there are a number of swell female colporteurs, looking for fads, who perambulate divedom and slum the abysses of poverty for pur- poses of moral propagation or political persuasion. All in the true livery of reform, for temporal power and profit. In business, in full view, is the charity cheap dive and the cobwebbed helping hand and foul-smelling cookshop, plastered with Biblical epigrams, logos, and apothegms, where the age and quality of the incrassated soups and viands should cork the sacrilegious fakirs in the public jug; the sheltering-arms triple-jointed redeeming mission, lunch-serving, and lodging house effort to capture donations, where the apocryphal reformer gets the cream of benevolence and gives the skim to the vagabond seeking penitence. The straying tramp suffers the cant and claptrap of their various neologisms for its redemption in a little physical comfort, which they dole out to him, as a bluff for charity's money. All this, and more, are an imposition on charity, true religion, and a burden on productive labor. Mere honest was the mountaineer, a moonshiner and parson, who, on being taken to task for the paradox in his character and doctrines, replied, "Don't do as I do, but do as I say." Many of these interlocutors are not up to a knowledge of the Biblical tenets, which is a cure for all standing evils. From the Mormon to the Zionist and the Russian Doubuhar gyrator, with their various vagaries of the apocalypse, this mountain of suspicion is an object lesson for the iconoclast and the apostate. Organized greed has forced the wits of many an idle toiler from true industry into that of clever knavery, and, donning the cloth of the curt, to held up the benevolent, in the name of thou on the fringe of society. The prelate of the fashionable audience gallops his cut-and-drled homily in the minute-man duration of 16 The System of Modern Greed and Graft time. People leave the service of greed, where their compensa- tion is below mediocre, to graft upon the benevolent minded. This desecration of the temple by the sinecural grafter, engendered by the monstrosity of greed, would indeed dumbfound the prophets of old, even though they were used to the reign of Mammon in their time, were their shades to wander earthward once again. Fanati- cism is rampant in the sectarian hospital, where it adds additional suffering to the unbelieving charity patient. Dickens, if living, would meet with more suggestions in the congested centres to antici- pate any literary effort he should conceive here in one week than anywhere else in a month. Here is where the essayist Carlyle could criticise in a diatribe of his choicest sarcasm the grafting ways of exhorters more limpid than those of a Hindoo sadh. And many of these impeccable rescuers hardly know the eleventh commandment. AH this charlatanism is acted laconically and methodically before the perspective gaze of the indifferent masses, who observe it with composure; yet, the wage-earner being impressed unconsciously of the fake turns for sympathy and succor in his life's battles to the corner saloon and its compotations, seeking there the solace which the grafter in the temple denies him. From an orthodox believer he is now ycleped the agnostic and the skeptic in his terminal. Yet his tribulations may be ameliorated in the commendable embrace of morality and political unity, which is the true helping hand and sheltering-arms, and the true orthodox religion. All sordid people work cursorily and perfunctorily, urged by gain only, and not for the common weal. Mushroom prophets, of religious neologisms, are born of the desire to live an idle existence at others' expense and toil, and would indulge in the excesses of human immolation, as en- joyed by the African savage, if not held in check by organized law. All conditions of society at last meet on common ground with their final exit — the grave. "O temporal O mores!" PART III A Brief Review of the Present Political Conditions POLITICAL Consecutive order of subjects treated in Part III PAGE. GOVERNMENT 1 Federal Constitution 1 Political Suffrage 2 Official Prerogative 3 Military and Patriotism 4 LEGISLATION 6 Federal, State and Municipal 6 Modern Diplomacy and Politics 7 Protective Tariff 9 Fiscal Revenue 12 General Appropriations by Budget 13 A MORAL WAVE 14 Tenure and Prerogative of Officialdom 14 The Civil Service Crucible 16 The Public School 16 Citizen vs. the Subject and the Serf 17 The Judiciary 21 The Police 22 POPULATION 24 Immigration .' 25 BOME OF OUR NEIGHBORS WHO ARE FILLING UP THE COUNTRY 28 The Jew 28 Italian 30 Chinaman, and 80 Negro 31 Vi et Armis (Force of Arms) 34 REVIEW AND CONCLUSION 37 ADDENDA. POLITICAL GOVERNMENT Federal Constitution. "Vivat respublica!" A written in- strument of inspiration, created through profound meditation, bap- tized by bloody sacrifices, and handed down, to be passed on, unto unborn generations of legatees, unsullied and untarnished as the flag itself, and is a sealed covenant of the elders, guaranteeing a government for, and by, the people, and sheltering all men under its folds in the free and full enjoyment of their rights and privi- leges, without fear or favor. It is so strongly, legally, and justly drawn that the wily lawyer respects it with neutrality, and is com- pelled to build his legal lore upon its fundamental principles. It is a challenge at the pretorian gate to mad ambition, and an intrepid disputer of the encroachments of organized monopoly and wealth. It resists, with immutable and unmistakable emphasis, their passage of the dead line of safety to assail the people's liberty. To openly assault it would free seas of human gore. In its main text it is never to be interpolated or dissected without the gravest danger. To suit changes in society amendments may be attached to or nul- lified from the terminal end of the main and original instrument. It is the hub of the political wheel, and its interpretation gives ori- gin to principles which divide the masses into opposing political parties. Liberty, and not vulgar license, is what it guarantees. Every and each patriotic citizen should study the republic's na- tional constitution, and it should be a prominent feature in the curriculum of the public school. Monopoly and moneyopolis seem to be afflicted with a monomania that, somewhere in its tenets, privi- lege is granted to the cunning exploiter of piratical financial ven- tures and buccaneerish commercial projects. Such is neither In plain sight nor between its lines. Inquisitorial legislation to secure income, inheritance, or any species of tax, or the supervision of any and all incorporated concerns, which are, or may become, antago- nistic to the welfare of the people, formulated by the Federal repre- sentatives or State assemblies, is as legitimate, and should be as final, as the assessor's right to value a poor man's home. This glorious inheritance is universal in its blessings to all upright men, and free of all subterfuge. It might be listed, as it appears at pres- ent, but it will right itself with energy when it dumps its incubus, and surely reach its centre of gravity. Only by a plebiscite of the people can constitutional changes be sealed. Political Suffrage. The ballot is a chastening birch, en- abling the people to redress all of their grievances, and it is a brusque caveat to the subtility of greed in blocking morality's en- deavor to usher in the era of universal felicity. But all of nature's 6 S The Bed Booh Illuminating the blessings require effort and self-denial in their eapture. So un- wisely or indifferently employed it proves a boomerang for un- mixed evil, as may be seen in the conditions enveloping society to- day. From the plebian of ancient Rome, on up to the wage-earner of today, failure to use this power sagely and vigilantly, and the Indifference to its use, have kept the masses dependent to the reign of greed and created privilege. "Quot homines, tot sententlsa." Here the alien proletary is handed this priceless gift by grafting poli- ticians the very instant he enters the open doors of the republic. The people inhabiting the Transvaal erstwhile republic were sa- gacious in their councils when they enacted the thirty-year clause, requiring such duration of continuous residence a fair exchange for the stranger's right to meddle in their political affairs. The alien should be denied political suffrage here, unless a resident of, at the least, ten years' continuity in the republic. He should also be required to speak and understand the prevailing language used in the republic, and enjoy a common education in his own tongue. Along with this his character should be fair and his manner indus- trious. The use of the ballot should be compulsory on all citizens, both at the primary and general elections. The third violation of the law, upon proof and conviction, should be followed by dis- enfranchisement and forfeiture of all civil rights — the House of Representatives only being able to lift the interdiction. Felons, political intimidators, political bribers and bribe partakers, vagabonds, ballot barterers, the mutely ignorant, the con- firmed drunkard, and dope fiend, and such, should be de- nied its power. At no time should a money qualification be requisite in acquiring the political franchise of the ballot. It is the wage-earner's true congener, as much so as his purse. It was willed to him by giant intellects, and will work wonders in rehabilitat- ing society, with education and morality ever its close allies. All people populating the soil of the republic should not be denied the ballot in their provinces, whether in the territories or the District of Columbia, and gerrymandering should be frowned upon. Only those who are "bona fide" citizens, with a common school education, of fair character and of industrial habits, should enjoy the power of the ballot. Women, of four children and over, if a citizeness, should be allowed partial suffrage. They should be privileged to cast a ballot on such questions as concerns their sex and children, in reference to schools, divorce,, vice correcting, and such, and be allowed a place, in mixed or in the whole impanelment, on the jury bench for the trial of such issues as above stated. Nowhere in omnipotent decree has nature ever insinuated that women were to rough it in the open with the men. On the contrary, she emphati- cally manifests her displeasure at such experiments by denying to them the requisite attributes and strength. Nuff sed. Official Prerogative, "ich dien." Government Is repre- sented in power through forces subsumable one to the other. Un- der its genus, we have in order the legislative, executive, administra- System of Modern Greed and Graft tive. Judicial and advisory. It should stand as a recognized power and dispensing agent, collectively, representing the will of the peo- ple, in joint assembly. It is not a master to exact tribute of its founders, in the form of revenue, to appropriate to partisan sine- curism and political corruption. It is a machine for the whole peo- ple, and it must be no discriminator of persons if it is to stand in- violate and command the support of its creators. The govern- ment is a corporation, de jure, which is automatic, and as perpetual as the people; its servants are as transitory as the variableness of contingent events. It should meet its every obligation with the same dispatch and exaction as it requires of its obligants. The people should discountenance its servants encroaching upon or usurping their constitutional rights. The government's duty is to travel parallel with and close up to the Constitution in its prog- ress through the ages. Governments only endure by the sufferance of a people, and are organized by the same power which is potent to dissolve them, as thoroughly as a snowbank will disappear before the mid-day sun in its summer solstice. Their main origin is traced through the desire of honest folks to combine for protection against the highwaymen and lawless of their kind. Mutual benefits other- wise came afterward. When the public servant becomes the willful master, virility in high revelry is in an automobile scorch for impo- tency. Slow encroachment, unchallenged, persistent and premedi- tate, is an insiduous creeper upon the indifferent, until, at last, gath- ering force with time, finally arouse an enslaved people to the lash. "Ex post facto" laws should always be tabooed by the ballot, and send their contrivers to the political necropolis. Officialdom has usurped power never intended by Jefferson and his colleagues, or exercised in his contemporaneous times. Bureaucracy stands now as high as the Colossus of Rhodes, a vast organized political ma- chine of intrigue for graft and perpetual power. Through public supinity the servant has become the master, and their welfare re- ceives but small consideration in payment for their laxity. All are joining now in the general scramble for gold, and virtue is bedding with the dogs. Modernity is but the administrator of free institu- tions for posterity. Shall the people prove recalcitrant to their trust? ililitary and Patriotism. With Old Glory and the line is as honorable a vocation as any in society. It is the abuse, and not its true use, which brings discredit upon the profession of arms. With the people enjoying moral politics and principles pure and above suspicion, and as clean as the driven snow, enthroned in their council chambers, the military may be no more of a menace than a kindergarten. The duty of a soldier is to obey. The trained and true of the profession are debonair in their exemplary rectitude, and a paragon of disinterestedness and unselfishness. The spirit of Mammon, romping in its attributes of envy, jealousy, malicious- ness and greed, now stalking so sententiously amidst the powerful of the earth, should be met by a show gf (mpressive force when 4 The Bed Booh Illuminating the it oversteps a normal latitude to encroach upon the preserves of this republic's eminent domain. With the whole of the past held up before the people, and until all peoples are confederated and con- glomerated under one banner and into a parliament of nations, and morally clean, the military and naval machine is a thing of neces- sity. And when this republic needs its aid it will need it stressfully. Physical force and brute ignorance are yet a rampant power in this world within the tire of the globe. Don't tread on the tail of the tiger, and let sleeping dogs lie, will heed the aggressor more effec- tively than effeminacy or sentimental babble. The militant, and not the money-bags, chant the paeans of victory. The military is not re- sponsible for its use in the industrial argument; it is the imperial political system. From the days of Theseus and Achilles, unto those of the heroes of '61, the glory of the hero has been but momentary and transitory. With a few annual circuits about its. sun old earth has rolled him from its drama forever. Patriotism is holy and a limb of the moral tree — purely military in its character. It is an infectious breeze which wafts its thrilling inspiration as to com- pletely enshroud the mature as well as youth. Without it an indi- vidual, or a nation, holds selfishness above their country, and are in the lethal throes of degeneracy in their inhuman worship of greed. An unpatriotic and indifferent people are at the feet of the first virile invader who shies his castor into the ring and dares its shores. Patriotism may be dampened by the wet blanket of greed, but it is an unquenchable fire whose reddening glare is never sub- dued by the short triumph of wrong. The "esprit de corps" of the regulars can never be equalled by the militia with its martinets. There is more effective and convincing logic in the gatling gun than in diplomatic hot air argument, to be handed the refractory liberty crusher. A stratocracy can never flourish permanently on any soil. None other but the American should be on guard beyond the pretorian gate. The conduct of campaigns in the field and in the camp, and all that which appertains to the military forces of the nation, should centre in a Federal military board permanently lo- cated in the U. S. capital. It should number, at the very least, 100 members, composed partly of retired and of active soldiers, with power of forming sub-committees from its entirety. It should have the Secretary of War, always a civilian, for chairman, and its power an advisory one only, to the House of Representatives. Partisan politics and its domination should be alien to its integrity. A naval board, with the Secretary of Navy for chairman, should be its dupli- cated counterpart. The flag is sullied when greed of gain compels it to wave its commercial ventures to the wondering gaze of the beholder; and, also, when the alien with it tops the spars of the reg- istered trans-Atlantic bottoms of presumed native-build and owner- ship. System of Modern (freed and Graft 6 LEGISLATION "TuQuoque Brute!" Federal, State and flunicipal. The several morbid con- ditions afflicting the republic, in which organized and unscrupulous greed has been the dominant factor in germinating, originated in, and is sustained by, the inferior material and immoral calibre which the people supinely, and by laches, elect to legislate laws for them and privileges for the few and select, in the various council chambers of the nation. The grafter jingoes his way in with flam- beaux and with music, keeping in cadence with true worth. These shallow and selfish professionals, with a "furor loquendi," which is all warm expiration, exhaled from distilled mash nestling below their esophagus, concoct the statutes which give loose rein to the speculative financial genius. With equal indifference they listlessly "manana" vital legislation which constituted the platform by which they were inducted into office. The bankrupt swindler, the divorce problem, financial reform, insurances statutes to cover the new phases of crime continually germinating under its complexities, as the modern firebug, the marine scuttler and wrecker, the grave- yard policy, and the like; then, there is imperatively demanded checks on usury, the present inadequate incorporate laws, tariff re- form, Immigration restriction, and a whole host of minatory ques- tions, which continually arise to vex nations, and must be met un- flinchingly, and also which are, at this moment, giving rise to great approaching danger, in spreading hoodlumism, crime, vice, discon- tent, riots, and the like, are all idly held in abeyance. Legislation is blocked in the gangway by lobby money. This, then, is not free institutions nor popular government. What then is it? Is the constitution a has-been? The council fires of the nation are in the hands of the wily political lawyer and the political boss, an item which is inimical to good and impartial legislation. The ju- diciary should be constrained from the usurpation of power in paraphrasing on the interpretations of legislative statutes; in the devising of the court injunction, injudicious terms of jurispru- dence to enable the hawks of monopoly to graft the franchises of the people, and industrially enslave the toilers. Legislation should be as lucid as language can engross it, and plain as to degree of crime, and absolute in a fixed penalty, with no degree of determinative sentence after the first conviction. And it should be an obtuse check to injustice. All public business should be given publicity the instant it becomes politic to do so, as inhibition of same is an interpolation of true autocratic customs. Pardoning of felons for obvious reasons should lie within the province of the legislative branches, whether of Federal or State. If the present legal machin- ery is but a one-horse seine to land the fry of all kinds and size, then to catch them effectively, and with up-to-date dispatch, the piratical kind which swim in financial, commercial, and political waters, legislation should increase its scope and calibre to the steam 6 The Bed Booh Illuminating the turbine limit. There seems to be more real public grievances abid- ing moral supremacy to get a hearing than Turkey and Persia com- bined could parallel. The low and the high are looking from early morn to dying eve for some victim they can "do," and a chance for easy money at some one else's expense. The kettle is coming to a boil. Every act of legislation abridging the liberties of the press, free speech, or of the individual, is unconstitutional, and an arbi- trary usurpation of despotic and imperialistic centralizing power not supported by the people or their constitution. It is the machin- ations of officialdom and political bosses, in their trysting lanes of the caravansaries and hostelries of large cities. This national wink at political corruption is a harbinger presaging the obsequies of popular government. Waving the white flag It seems to be a sur- render to plutocracy and money worship, and a pell-mell polo scramble to see who will get there first, and that none will be last and get a cold deal. In that case liberty is dead, and the epitaph at its obit will read — dreed. When officialdom gets the public on its knees, and money sits on a throne, public character and customs take a decided change for the worse. It Is then the old adage, like master, like servant. High and exorbitant salaries, perquisites, emoluments, commissions and mileages, and franking privileges, are mulcting labor tenderly to what the pension list and the retired- on-half-pay robber get away with. If corrupt legislation can con- taminate a people it stands for reason that judicious and moral legislation and laws may elevate them. There should never be a suspension of the habeas corpus and bill of rights either in war or in times of peace. Capital cases, and for long terms of imprison- ment, concerning the military and naval arms of the government, should always be decided by civil authorities, and not by courts- martial, either in times of peace or war. Life is held too cheap by the military — when it is some one else's in the balance. The secret service and the mint and assay sinecurisms need a healthy repression and supervision to prevent abuse of these most impor- tant positions as adjuncts to the ship of state. As the ermine and the toga have become scorched with the fire of greed and graft, now running amuck over the face of the land, the political system is, indeed, upon the rocks. The Senate is a balker, and the Supreme Court a violator, and the Cabinet a hedger, of Congressional legis- lation enacted by the lower house. This trio is aristocratic and tory in their tendencies, and perverse to the welfare of the plain peo- ple. The political atmosphere of Washington, and also, for that matter, of the State capitals, is that of the whited sepulchre. It is a stench in the nostrils of the industrial masses. Its immorality runs parallel and side by side with the road traveled by ancient Rome and antiquity in their passing from moral rectitude to po- litical decadency and oblivion. International collusion of pharaohic diplomacy, with the bludgeon, seems to portend a tacit forcing with- in a cul de sac to universally Inveigle and enslave the wage-earner, as concocted by organized wealth and the political talent the world System of Modern Greed and Graft 1 over. The coming power is the reign of Money, with its satellites, the male and female lobby supplementary, the most merciless since the times of Crcesus and the Assyrians. The people may prevent now, Just on the eve of its final advent, that which will take a myriad of martyred lives to recover. The woe of man may be ac- credited to the fact that he cares less for the bird in the hand than the two which are supposed to be in the bush. The law of nature's compensation is Just, but, oh, Jaky, it is severe. If the plain peo- ple will not make the effort, through self-denial, education, moral- ity, and political industrial unity, to keep the ship of state upon its true rhumb oourse, and off from the rocks, they will find, in their rude awakening, a greater ransom yet demanded for their supinity to regain their captivated liberties. Grafters must be ab- solutely driven from power and place. Modern legislation is a con- sarclnatlon only of public measures, and its energies may be summed up In its aggregate as consisting of enactments for appro- priations in all its extent, and granting class privileges. The wel- fare of the masses is hardly given consideration. Very few of these embryo and transitory statesmen are acquainted with modern par- liamentary laws and usages, and the gag laws and cloture of mod- ern assemblies, and their modes of procedure. So it is a mockery of free institutions to clothe them with such power to fall a prey to the wily political lawyer. A question is put, laid on the table, reconsidered, and carried, before they know what the excitement is about. And an act to amend an act entitled an act, etc., etc., is a severe strain on their brain exercise. Each and every city and town is entitled to good and substantial government structures rea- sonable to its Importance, and to such in alien lands, for the diplo- matic and consular service. All able bodied pensioners, and those having prosperous relatives of close consanguinity, should be turned loose from the eleemosynary Institutions of the government and state to get the opportunity to hustle for themselves. There are thousands of these grafters consuming the revenues. The practice of franking seed and political literature should be perceptibly modi- fled. The vending surreptitiously of state affairs, held in "arcana Imperii," to financial Jugglers, is contrary to "lex terra" and moral- ity, and deserves the highest opprobrium the people can offer these despoilers. In fact, the coup d' Stat should be by an exequatur from the legislature, and the coup de grace an investiture of the courts. There should never be any perquisites in officialdom, which are a burden upon the public at large. "Quis custodiet ipsos cus- todes"? "Quin sabe"? Hodern Diplomacy and Politics. Federal, State, and mu- nicipal. Modern financial and commercial diplomacy and politics, At home and abroad, seem to have formed an interaulic political understanding, amid the leading nations, to annihilate, displace, and assimilate smaller states, superinduced by "argumentum bacu- linum." They are to be "non persona grata" in influence among the nations. It is the cunning of universal intellect to enslave physl- 8 The Bed Book Illuminating th« cal labor the world over. The day of the brute has past, and ignor- ance is a crime. Nations, the same as the individual man, die, and when they are dead they're dead a long time. Greed allows no conditions of morality to remain aught else but Pharisaical. The obverse today is the reverse of tomorrow. This is a harbinger of woe which will bring implacable retribution upon the nation so adopting it. Can a man do or say two opposite things at the same time; or a rocket skurry up and its stick plunge to terra firma all at the same instant? Can the republic sustain a Monroe doctrine and pursue the course it has mapped out in regard to its dealing with other nations and peoples? Is it possible for it to interdict colonization from the eastern world with its subjects upon the west- tern continent, and, at the same time, conquer and colonize Eastern lands? Also, permit unrestricted and unlimited domiciling of its own territory by the alien? This seems to be a paradox in its am- biguity, and is only paralleled by upholding a republic here and hastening the demise of others struggling for life, or in a coup and fiasco of the Panama variety. The Boer republic may have been saved by a timely hiut. The natives of the Philippines are as well able to create and maintain a republic, and probably more so, as the experimenters in Cuba, Mexico, and South and Central Ameri- ca. And, moreover, the islands are not in this hemisphere, and the commercial field is in the hands of Eurasians and foreigners. The legation outpost of monopoly, serving their country abroad in the diplomatic and consular service of Uncle Samuel, are doing extra work, with overtime, in hunting court splendors, hobnobbing with the nobility and the select, brushing up their court costumes, holding pourparlers with foreign chancellors and others of high einecurisms, emigrant persuading, bourse speculating, with an occa- sional thought, of their fences in the home district. Unfortunate citizens abroad get a cold deal from these public sycophants. Inter- national political pulls have filled the republic's consular and diplo- matic service abroad replete with aliens in its minor positions, drawing their pap from the Washington treasury. The legation aids expansion by expanding themselves. Deferential, and with an obsequious bend to title, they are equivocable and seclusive toward the stranded citizen yearning for home. They are fair weather mariners, and abroad for their health at the expense of the Federal treasury. Space forbids further delineation of their shortcomings. The Federal, State, and municipal political bosses, domiciled in quarters and headquarters of barbaric splendor, here the fashion- able hotel and mansion, there the gilded and palatial club, meet in secret conclave, formulate an agreeable slate, start the music, fire- works, and the spellbinder, and the submissive people, lining up at the poll window, do the rest. At the banquet they meet to size each other up. It is a game of survival of the fittest. At these "pasty outgivings" of this mutual admiration party the post prandial orator is always in evidence. He is the jester of this bunch of moss- backs. If he can spring a coup by dropping the hint of some won- System of Modern Oreed and Graft 9 derful idea he has conceived, of reforming or vastly benefiting so- ciety, he is at once in the line for the presidency. All this state of affairs give the lie to popular government. Is liberty dead, and the people unaware of it? As long as the people are sequacious as the guileless lamb these things will be without an effective estop- pel. No official should, for one instant, be allowed such vital power as springing a serious coup upon an effete and ignorant nation as to sever them from their land and possessions. These questions should rest for Federal legislation to elucidate. In the nation's capital it is wirepulling from the Blue room to the august lady who scrubs the steps of public buildings. Bureaucracy is now running the machinery of government, from a ward heeler to the salaried ros- trum jollier and the irrepressible hired mourner, as if the people were a cut and dried transcript of decadency fitted to their order. This is what is commonly termed politics. It is the intellect and business sagacity which rate a country in the world's summing up and estimation and not its brawn. Purblind political wantonness is driving the people in a hegira over into the socialistic camp and fostering anarchy. Imperialism came in at the death of universal Rome and antiquity, and it is now the mortal sickness of decrepit Britain. Reform has never tarried long in the councils of the na- tion. The cause is not far away. Political reform similar to labor cooperation, is only practical when the people en masse accept it with a hearty cheer. And this is only possible with education and moral culture. All should be reformers, not a few such, to make regeneration possible. The masses are unconscious imitators and followers of the customs and habits of higher society. So it is a case where reform must commence at the top, and not at the bottom, of the ladder of progress. And if such a rare event ever occurs it will be the first recorded in history. The classes care nothing for the masses, and never have in the history of mankind, and so poverty and misery and war may ever reign. When they become correlative in concordance, then reform will agglutinate to a permanent incumbency, and have the right of way as conclusively as that enjoyed by the ambulance, the fire engine, or the mail wagon in street monopoly. The professional place hunt- er may be noted fixing his fences around the yuletide by throwing out swine feeds to the slums. This crafty political bow is imi- tated by the cunning evangelical grafter. These non-producers are fertile in their methods to evade legitimate labor, and to obtain prestige among the ignorant and debased for a hold on to political power and philanthropieal graft. In the next article the high pro- tection infant will receive some attention. Protective Tariff. Impost may be used as originally in- tended for government revenue, and it may be held as a convenient ehillelah to badger alien nations, commercially and politically. In the latter case it invites an international zollverein, 'lex talionis," to combat the greed of the republic's industrial captains. For public revenue, to meet the budget, normal tariff is permissible; yet taxa- Id The Bed Booh Illuminating the tion is a necessary evil, and should strictly be kept within healthy bounds. But with equivocal reciprocity attached, or an excluding olause and design, it is a barrier erected by the immoral, the pusil- lanimous, and by dire monopoly. It is a barricade impasse con- ceived in the brain of plutocracy, and of privilege and class power, and is an emanation from the bourse and the Exchange. It is a bludgeon mercilessly wielded in politico-economic wrangles. It is the extreme in the ad valorem, specific, and bulk gauge of fleecing the public. It will come down off its perch in 1904, and shake its characteristic falcade and comminations to the toiler's true welfare. It is as the wall of half-civilized Mongolia, in design, set up around the republic's entire marches, and is signally against moral law and an effort to thwart nature in her beneficent designs. It will prove a boomerang and a mixed evil to the hapless nation which allows its domination. It partitions the masses, by industrial servility, into class distinctions, which are born of hostility. It is a bone of con- tention which creates smouldering feelings of enmity among the nations and prevents their harmonizing in fraternity. It only enriches the privileged few at the expense of a whole people, and is sustained in its sway by ignorance. It is an artificial stimulant which is wholly unnecessary. It spreads domestic adulteration and dishonesty by denying healthy competition, and compelling the citi- zen to suffer that which is offered him, and also encourages the alien merchant to adulterate and ship hitherward spurious goods to esca- lade the protective fiasco. It squeezes the masses all around. It enhances smuggling to the degree of piracy with its drogher and the punt. It keeps the rate and the value in the monetary exchanges constantly in a desultory fizzle. It degrades labor, and is an indi- rect cause of the increase of vice and crime. Only with a club has the wage-earner had any share in what is termed prosperity. High protection Increases the expenditures and the prodigality of gov- ernment. It is a party shibboleth to bait the masses by ambitious pseudo statesmen to ride into power and graft. It gives monopoly, with no export tax, a free hand to unload adulterated and shoddy domestic production upon home consumption, at their own figure, while at the same time the captains freight their best to trans-At- lantic destinations, to reach the alien at a reduced rate in his pur- chasing capacity. This is what the spellbinder cries prosperity. The masses of this free land are made to pay tribute, indirectly, to help support the people of alien lands. It retires all the money of the nation to the speculative end of society. It plunders the masses, drains the channels of Industry of the circulating medium, and oscillates the spoils to and fro between the U. S. Treasury and the monopolist. This is no particular man's globe. It is a field of harmony wherein the nations are to work out their destiny and redemption. Gray bearded infant industries, which are the rival and dread of their alien competitors, standing at the portcullis of the Ft. Treasury bridge in their quest for government pap to aid them in expanding commerce. One may as well try to square a circle or System of Modern Chreed and Graft 11 measure creation as to induct exclusive tariff to a permanent throne. It is a lie and immoral. The natural resources, the industrial vigor of the people, their native shrewdness and ingenuity, the agricul- tural immensity and possibilities of the republic, all point the way for free exchange and harmony with the nations. Any country which enacts an excluding impost, especially a manufacturing one, of but limited agricultural possibilities, is in the last throes of senil- ity. Contrariwise, it is as bad as a head hunter. Birmingham, England, is a great manufacturing town, in the black district of that island of free trade. Years ago, it had no worthy competitor to flood its marts. Today, it has many rivals in its line of produc- tions competing with it in its own domestic market, as well as in the world wide emporiums. Yet, this free-trade country manu- factures more than ever, and better goods, with an advanced wage scale, and sells all she can wrought into shape. Her limited terri- tory and farming capacity, and other characteristics, is the true explanation why compensation will never exceed or equal the scale prevalent in the U. S. Every land produces and manufactures something which is desired by the alien consumer, even identical aticles, as man is an animal who requires and demands a frequent change of cooks. Present legislation is against natural law and the interest of the masses. Free exchange is the natural state of mankind. It invigorates the masses, stimulates inventions, keeps the foreign submersions at home, makes better workmen, levels society, equalizes wealth, preserves popular government, makes the whole world a customer, and chases the grafter. It prevents the unpatriotic greed worshiper from encouraging the sweatshop per- functory to inundate the country with their debasing personali- ties, manners, and customs, as to crowd the native born unto the wall. This land is sectional in its general make-up, therefore, It is necessary for its continued life, as a free nation, that compromise enter in the economic system to assuage all sections of its vast domains. To eliminate contention is to permanently prosper with- out involution either to the agricultural or to the mechanical in- dustries. A reckless government can soon make liberty an obloquy in its stigmatization. Being the standard of power, only by united efforts of the masses can government be restrained from a persistent impolitic course. Universal free intercourse and trade is the design of Providence; otherwise, it is a makeshift of the cunning, for aggrandizement by the select and the privileged. With hours per diem fairly rated, so that all may labor whoso desire, production would be consumed more extensively in the home market, exports more natural, and prosperity here to stay. But with himalayan pro- tection and murderous competition there will sojourn in the land, as constant factors, depleted money circulation, repleted Treasury vaults, arrogant privilege, class legislation, incinerating monopoly and trust power, debased politics, irascible strikes, riot, the repel- lent jet of crime and vice, dire poverty, the hydra grafter, financial and commercial buccaneers, official salary grabbers, the roundelay IS The Red Booh Illuminating the lobbyist, franchise purloiners, political supernumeraries, the lordly official, junketing bunches of bureaucrats, pension robbers, imperi- alism, and a whole host of poisonous ivy vines parasitically hugging the oak of the nation and draining its vital sap. Free exchange would reform the high roller of finance and the professional politi- cal grafter into the white cravatted parson so completely as to deny them a visit to Girard college. High tariff is a barricade war where the rank and file furnish the sinews and munitions of the strife while the financial, commercial, and political manipulators come in at its close, and grab all the spoils from the disabled opponents. Political legerdemain is an infliction upon, and a bane to, commer- cial enterprise. Rivals to. the republic are few, and less than few serious, as they are not supported by agricultural possibilities. They were for the open door in commercial trade; but the tactics of greed in the republic has compelled them to adopt a partially restrictive tariff much against their sense of morality and natural inclination. Reciprocity is an equivocal dodge of this poser by the tariff tinker in his policy. Ailing England, in the throes of dissolution, reaches tentatively for any nostrum which seems a panacea. But in her retrospect narcotics will but make her worse. She has earned a reputation for pure and durable workmanship and material; but with the advent of a tariff regime Britain will soon be flooded with adulteration and spuriousness, and her decay be the more rapid. The mills of Nemesis grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly well. Her sun has set and penitential tinkering means rapid dissolution. Britain with premonition requited presentiment with procrastina- tion. Fiscal Revenue, by taxation, excise, etc. Internal taxation and customs duty, excise, sales of public land, direct assessment, personal tax, and such, with lease of streets, docks, and other fran- chise privileges, are the methods the solons use in squeezing the universal sponge of national prosperity, in wringing out a tribute sufficient to move the cumbersome machinery of government. Fed- eral taxation is, in its greatest extent, collected in an indirect man- ner; while the municipal tribute assesses by the direct way, and by bond issue. Bond legislation is true economy when the bonds are for long terms, low rate, easily convertible and redeemable at any time for their face value, or a trifle upwards, and universally held pro rata throughout the nation. It would be an investment to the people much securer than the bank and trust companies, and keep the money at home. It would not yield any wide scope for the speculator to make an easy living with cheap wit. As the gov- ernment is only the masses in focus it is natural that the toiler should have the benefit of all bond investments. The select seem to have an undisputed privilege of shelving all expense of government upon the plain people. Taxation should be levied upon all kinds of visible property, and more so upon land, occupied or vacant. Per- sonal property, incomes, inheritance, bonds, commercial, and finan- cial paper, capital, bank deposits, insurance deposits, ad infinitum, Sysiem of Modern Greed and Graft 13 should be appraised and assessed. Inquisitorial obstruction should be met by a penalty for its correction. Perjury in swearing oft the assessor's appraisement should be redeemed by a term of imprison- ment. In the equalization of the burdens of taxation its cross is not very heavy. New Zealand waxes wise on this subject. Congressional enactments of direct taxation to reach the select in their incomes and by inheritance, and the like measures, to force them to their Federal obligations, were overthrown, foot and horse. They are too many even for constituted authority, the highest of national power. Congressional legislation should be inviolable and infallible, and the Supreme Court allowed no latitude in invalidating just law made by the highest authority in the land, unless it is flagrantly in con- flict with the Federal Constitution. The privileged resist all man- ner ef taxation, and when it is a case of must, arrange it so as to noiselessly drop it down upon the shoulders of the brawn of the land. Many imports, and even domestic manufacture, get touched up by the Federal, State, and municipal assessor consecutively, upon the same article, a triple-headed likin, before the purchaser gets a chance to possess it, and pay all three in its cost price. There is nothing so immoral and unfair in the world as this taxation busi- ness, and oceans of blood have been shed by the people in venting their displeasure at its unfair apportionment. Government and tax- ation are correlative terms, as much so as lawyer and finance. The world is akin in all of its endeavors. It is only different in the de- gree. All who can manifest a desire to live at the expense of oth- ers and the general public. One may behold the same in Turkey, and likewise it is discernible in America. Every living human be- ing, and even every living thing, pays an indirect tax in his, her or its consumption. It is the direct tax the powerful fight to evade by court injunctions, false swearing off, and the like. They would rather fee a tufthunter in Europe with a prodigal tip than pay their mite here in personal tax to ease the burdens on groaning labor. Are the House of Representatives and the State Assemblies big enough to hold these violators to their duties? With all that can be said in its favor any tax is more preferable than bond issue, because, in their collection ends the business. Not so with bonds. They bring interest and the speculator. Everything depends upon the masses. If they are indifEerent to public issues and morality and education, all the advice in the moral and philosophical encyclope- dia would not succor them to stay the inroads of rapacious greed and the unpatriotic ways of the select. General Appropriations by Budget. With the grafters eliminated from the pension rolls and the retired list, the numerous peculations headed off, the horde of supernumeraries run through the aberuncator, the Indians, and other able-bodied pensioners at the various public eleemosynary institutions obliged to hustle for their own keep, these, with many other equitable and just parings, would materially lighten the cross upon the shoulders of the producing masses and shrink the budget to a moral figure. A few years ago 14 The Bed Booh Illuminating the the then Congress unblnshingly raised its pay before adjourning and grabbed a whole back year in addition. Every ensuing year Congress becomes more lavish in its expenditure of the people's tribute. The corridors and committee rooms of the Federal and State capitals and the municipal hall, are the universal stage where the loblolly lobby luminaries plan their grafting assaults on Ft. Public Treasury. The light which failed elsewhere never flickers on these sedulous grafters in their spectacular acting for public graft. A MORAL WAVE Tenure and Prerogative of Officialdom. All public official sinecurists, in the Federal, State, and municipal employ, which are of a mandatory and advisory nature, exceeding a fixed annual salary, should stand before the people for their sanction, as has been outlined in the article on municipal executive commit- tees. All retiring officials should suffer the lapse of six years, on the expiration of the term of their elective incumbencies, before be- coming eligible for further public favors at the polls. Six years to be the term of tenure attached to all elective civil positions within the bestowal of the republic. The State and the municipality to carry on their ticket whatsoever Federal sinecure is located in their respective provinces, such as the customs collector, postmaster, the U. S. judges and attorneys, etc. All fees and perquisites abolished. The Federal Senate the only power, of all the machinery of gov- erment, to remain an assembly creation, for six years, as it is at present, constituting a homogeneous representative of heterogene- ous State autonomies. With pure politics the Senate may be brought back to its legitimate moorings. The public office of the Federal Supreme Court judge should be the only civil position empowered to succeed its vacancy without an interim clause by its late occu- pant: to be elective for six years, of thirty years' continuous dura- tion, and then retired on half pay. The Cabinet, and all heads in the consular and diplomatic service, and such, to be elective posi- tions. There should be two vice presidents, one to preside over the Senate, the remaining one to be speaker of the House, and eligible to succeed to the vaeancy of an unexpired term in the White House in their order named. All power should be in the House of Repre- sentatives and the Supreme Court; and for the State, it should lie with the Assembly and the State Supreme Court. The Federal Sen- ate to attend to State legislation, in its unity, and the House of Representatives a legislator for the masses, as a whole. All other positions elective to be simply of an advisory nature, through their chief heads, to the House of Representatives. The investiture of the Federal President should be shorn of the appointing prerogative denuded of its veto power, and the position be merely nominal func- tional, advisory, and signatory. The Cabinet should be an execu- tive head of its various departments; but advisory, in its reports, to System of Modern Oreed and Graft 15 'the House of Representatives, from whom it should receive its mandates. The State machinery to be a counterpart of the Federal, in its design, as outlined above. All sinecurists to fill their positions until their successors are chosen and invested, for public policy. All State assemblies, and legislative bodies, should meet annually, to keep alive State autonomy, and to revise, amend, and nullify obsolete and effete judicature, so as to keep abreast of the times, rather than continually hatching new laws to burden the code. The legislative bodies should keep the judiciary strictly to its business, and in its proper latitudes, with very little discretion in paraphras- ing its statutes. All other enactments should be definite and con- clusive in scope. The day may be near when authority will be cen- tralized, State legislatures abolished, and State lines wiped out. No man should be allowed to flaunt the boast that he carries the col- lective vote of his constituency ensconsed in his vest pocket. The city courts might, with propriety, be better conducted for the public in- terests by the public school teacher than the political lawyer who wears the ermine there now, and with more simplicity and less pro- fessional hurdles to handicap them in dispensing and hastening the calendar's clearance. Keep the logs rolling, and don't jam the race, is the healthy mode to prevent chaos. The Vicar of Bray is too much of a feature in the civil service of today. The constitu- tion is an effective entity, and the real thing, and statically stands ready always to help the masses to redress their grievances; so, then, what is the use of reaching out for the "isms"? Affability and courtesy should be imperative in the deportment of all public servants of the people in their official intercourse with those who have public business with them. Any deviation from this rule should send them to the headsman. An earnest endeavor should be per- sisted in to remove the chronic jawsmith from the civil sinecures, in which he is realizing handsome dividends upon a watered politi- cal capital. In socialism, as with the "isms" in religion, such ten- ets are too chimerical with a sober caput for serious reflection and consideration. With their advent, there would be less individual and political freedom than exists under the present regime, and would parallel the restraints constringing on high society by fash- ion, and equal the days of the Puritans and the Covenanters. "No, no, none in mine." The people must reform themselves universally. That's the panacea. All constitutional innovations are enunciated through amendments, framed by law-making bodies, political con- ventions, and such, in their rudimentary incipiency, to be finally acted upon by the people at the polls in order to acquire impress, force, and assent, and then attached to the caudal appendage of the main and original instrument — a conclusive fiat. Alien treaties and political complexities should be immediately lodged in the House by the Secretary of State or President for its immediate con- sideration, and to prevent an ambitious coup. Impeachment should follow the least infraction of these vital laws. All officials should take office by popular vote who fill elective positions. The electoral 16 The Red Booh Illuminating tkt commission should be relegated to the archaic forgottens. The inauguration of a system of obeisance to justitiae, and not to opine such only, is what the masses prognosticate. The Civil Service Crucible. All public officials and skilled labor in the service of the nation, not in the mandatory, nor in the advisory to a mandatory authority, nor in the mili- tary class, should be invested with the insignia of office through an educational and physical examination by proper elected officials. All these query propounders should pass the gantlet of suffrage at the municipal polls before taking office. They may, in the main, be drawn from the male pundits in the public school by the municipal executive committee, in the same mode they receive candidates from the labor unions, as outlined in a prelude to this re- view. Listed in this class may be the customs inspector, the mail carrier, legation assistants, wage-earners in the post office, the de- partment clerk, the porter, and small officials in public institu- tions, the policeman and city fireman, employees on publio works in the pay of the Federal and the inferior governments, and all undergrades of office holders in the nation, as a whole, the State, and the municipalities. The preliminaries, at all times, should be free of technicalities and deceptive political chicanery. A common school education, with a fair knowledge on the duties appertaining to the position the applicant is in quest of, should be the open sesame to effect its capture. All these fiduciary positions should be permanent in character during the incumbent's good behavior and continual capability. It is the small details in life which banish final success by their omission and neglect. People get accustomed to a rut, and by indifference, which is laziness, suffer exceedingly without making an effort for its remedial cure. This is seen in politics and in private life. The Public School. A gift of the gods. From this mam- moth churn there issues forth the molded cream of future freemen who will carry this free republic, in its purity, on its Appian Way down the ages which destiny has in reprieve for it. No age, within modern research, has been so keen in ken as the one at hand. It behooves the people, then, to strive to get the best out of their possibilities. Superficial instruction, and a veneering of useless tuition in theses not compatible with their future careers, are a waste of time and fluxion, and should be discarded to be replaced by that which suits the average pupil. Studies out of the range of rudimentary education should be optional with the scholar, whether he is to give his lifetime attention to the manual or to the intellectual side of labor. Here, side by side with the ordi- nary studies of orthography, grammar, writing, arithmetic, and the like, should run studies of the Federal Constitution, moral law, physiology, with frequent lectures on the true principles under- lying industrial, commercial, financial, and political conditions. Foreign and obsolete languages, and the like, should be a choice, and not compulsory to fetter and clog a pupil's mind and defeat System of Modern Greed and Graft IV the purpose of the public school system. All supernumerary grad- uates of the Federal military and naval academies could be used in the public schools, throughout the land, as instructors in moral ethics, military tactics and evolutions and mathematics. The prin- ciples of agriculture may be a beneficial instruction. Intellectual apathy of the wage-earner prevents the palingenesy of society by his aid. The old animal, -with his vices and tricks, is irrecover- able; it is the youth the prelates and pedants should commence with, and right here in the public school. The public school will have to expand regularly to keep abreast of evolution's changes. They should have a proportional annex, where boys, in the higher courses, may resort to, and acquire familiarity with industrial tools, and the like. Also, a kindergarten for primary boys and girls. A wage- earner may acquire any amount of useful knowledge by choice and miscellaneous reading, and from the voluminous Sunday news- papers may receive a culture which will constitute him a veritable encyclopedia and a lexicographer of wisdom, if he be blessed with a retentive memory and a digestive mentality. Thrice is he armed whose cause is just — "if he hath knowledge." The public school system should be a Federal monopoly, and sky-high above politics. The military and naval cadet appointee should, unexceptionally, rise up out from the public school masses, after a brisk competitive examination, and only from this source, and of native born lads. The public school pundits, it may be annotated, should come through the civil service mill. In fact, the appointive power, by favor, in official life, should become obsolete. It is either elective, the exami- nation, or not at all. The public school should read as an antonym to greed and privilege in its phraseology. Citizen vs. the Subject and the Serf, in the anti- thesis of the fleeting passage of the freeman to the industrial and political slave is divulged the pathos of coming events. The am- bition of all strong personalities is for domination and exclusive privilege; on the contrary, the propensity of the listless masses, of all ages, has been for personal liberty and the freedom from in- dividual restraint. Man yearns for the state he surrendered in ex- change for organized society, and, yet, he is disposed to hold on to what he has got. He is on the fence which divides old Nick from the wild, raging sea. Whichsoever way he ventures in de- scending he may wish he had taken its opposite. Mankind, on the whole, is a moral degenerate, and the maximum percentage of physical grit, on the average in any nation, is an astonishing re- vealment to the uninitiated. The supinity and lack of cohesion of the masses in its public and political duties are in a parallel line with the cupidity and relaxed vigilance of the trapped fur, in seal- ing its own doom. The history of the world, perused ever so cursorily, reveals to the most frivolous reader, between its lines and In bold view, the hand of greed in its every tale of rapine and murder. Men of power and station name it politics and diplo- macy. Can any form of government endure which goes along, hand 7 18 The Red Booh Illuminating the in hand, with immorality and greed? Yet, but few possess the talent for economy and amalgamation. In the finale these become, in the very nature of their character, selfish and seclusive. This is re- iterated in their successive propagations who inherit this wealth, and, with university training, they desire to possess the earth and enslave every living thing. In this predicament, unchecked by proper legislation, palsied by political corruption and grafting, the people become demoralized, degraded, and, in the end, revert to violent means to redress their grievances. The history of mankind, In the whole of the past, reveals to the serious mind the fact that the masses have always naturally been indifferently disposed to public affairs. It then behooves officialdom, as their guardian, to remain unsullied to preserve the national integrity. It also reveals that cunning is aware of this universal weakness, and "works" it for all it is worth. It has always been thus. As the past is gorged with ignorance will education remove this human falling? Within history all nations in their most inspissated state of mental cul- ture have had their champions to advise them. Without these ex- traordinary personages civilization, which the toiler now enjoys or is supposed to enjoy, would never have been possible. Subse- quent generations have often redressed the failings of their anteces- sors; but it has not always been by tranquil methods. Plutocracy and greed, gradually undermining the morals of the people, at last bring on a social and political panic, and it is the devil take the hindmost as the surging masses rush to cover and enlist under the banners of their oppressors, each unit in distrust of the other, and all in fear of bringing up the rear and of getting left. Then liberty is dead. This is a true portrait of the disorganized masses. All people worship power, and he who is so lucky and auspicious as to enthrall a large share of it has the rest upon their knees, one ready to swat the other to do him homage. This is the secret of lost lib- erties. Man doubts and fears his neighbor, and the result is always a divided house. The homogeneousness of military unity should be a counterpart for the masses, and as inflexible and moral. This re- public is yet in the control of the ochlocracy, although in a tug of war with plutocracy, autocracy, monocracy, oligarchy, moneyocracy, poly- ocracy, and other impure ocracies, either for the domination of the autocrat, or of a few. With the reform of the bureaucracy democracy may tarry awhile longer. It only remains for the masses to organize to prove a Joan d'Arc, or a Delilah to shear this Samson's strength with his mane and send him to his corner. Woman, unnaturally advanced to power in statecraft as a figurehead, has always been a bane to the welfare of the masses. Llbidinousness and lust has reigned supreme with her domination. It is seen in the career' of the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, Catherine of Muscovy, the queens of France, Elizabeth of Britain, Scotia's Mary, and in but very few instances has she saved her sex from universal reprobation as a ruler of kingdoms and empires. By artificial means and voluptu- ousness has she endeavored to wrest from man his by natural de- sign, in the physical and mental attributes ingrained with his sex. System of Modem Oreed and Graft 19 Nations which had endured the ordeal of the reign of lasciviousness and carnality returned to reason and created the Salic law. A few harlot reigns in succession would emasculate the most virile nation the world has ever known. Step by step, and insidiously, doth lib- erty take to wing to soar away from uncongenial climes. From a gentle murmuring protest, easily corrected in its incipiency, but which rests unheeded through many suppurative stages, until finally it resolves itself into the defiled canker of morbid immorality, and is violently assailed in the tumultuous gatherings. And all is chaos. And liberty is as dead to the former freeman as it is to the politi- cal offender incarcerated deep in the mines of Siberia or isolated upon the island of Sakhalin. It lies as prone at the feet of de- bauched power as it was prostrated in Europe subsequency to the battle of Fontanet in the mediaeval age. As ye see the gradual and consecutive changes which unconsciously blend the hero, in his transformation, into the garrulous and senile dotard of decay; the maidenly bud into the crooning granny; the mild and fleecy cirrus disappearing in the storm clouds nimbus and cumulus; the sum- mer's zephyrs to the winter's blizzard; the tropical dew to the blus- tering niveous hail and sleet; the limpid rain to the driven snow; from the warm pellucid stream of the tropics, carrying perennial youth in its meanderings, until its return a chilling undertow; from the universal oxygen to its dissolution in the heterogeneous oxides and nitrogen, and in the gradual envelopment of the diurnal by the nocturnal; the luminous light of King Sol dying down into the lunar softness of the earth's satellite; from the earth's perihelion gradually emerging into the aphelion; from temporis annual unto its centenary; from the earth's obverse position to the rest of creation until, by gradual revolution, it attains its reverse; from the interstices in clime occurring in the gradual emergement from the Orient into the land of the Occident; and, in effect, as op- posite as the silhouette to the perspective; the intaglio to the cameo; from the optimist fading into the pessimist; birth unto dissolution; yea, all these are real reticent conditions imperceptibly emerging in a methodical, cursive and dilatory manner from one extreme unto its opposite until finality. Just so will freedom of democracy silently and unconsciously slip into the state of servility to plutoc- racy. Man is an animal who tires of possession, and in its evanes- cence makes the greatest sacrifice in coveting it once again. Hellas and Rome, in ancient eras, were the progenitors of liberal forms of government. They, indeed, were no novices in the line of popular government. All their youth in Sparta, Lacedaemonia, Corinth, Ith- aca, Thebes, Athens, and like places, were trained in the further- ance of freedom to perpetuity. But the enslavement of alien peo- ples vanquished in conquest sealed their doom. And, becoming lax in vigilance by long familiarity with liberty and freedom, and lowering in moral tone, gradually they allowed themselves to be divided by the mad spirit of selfish and conquering ambition, and all tottered unto their ruin. They denied to others that which they claimed for themselves— liberty; and Nemesis Judged them in the 20 The Bed Booh Illuminating the final retribution. They were not found when wanted, and awakened, in their nakedness, to the reality of servility. Liberty had flown. Socrates was presented with the cup of hemlock; and not a protest from the populace. Their plebeian champions were badgered, hound- ed, slandered, exiled, and put to death, all martyred as liberty's champions. From Miltiades to the fall of Athens, Hellas's noblest defenders perished victims to satanic greed. The common people, in their ignorance, were powerless to succor. Carthage succumbed to Hamilcar and Hannibal's mad ambition and spirit of greed and revenge, and universal Rome became a majestic decadency through the anarchy and rapacity of the militant and autocratic Caesars. The nations of Western Asia which still exist top the earth only as moribund meteors. Liberty peeped out from its seclusive retreats to make a permanent stay in Genoa, Florence, Venice, and such, in the mediaeval ages, in imitation of former fallen greatness, only to observe the shadow of greed and run to cover once again. From a corporate materiality it faded into a diaphanous vision before the assaults of oligarchical greed and immorality. It is again on trial now, here and elsewhere; but the same foe is upon its trail as of former days. Ignorance is the bane and cause of all the woes of the world. The Danube, the Rhine, and the Tiber have been for ages the scenes of strife of the white man for mastery over his kind. Rulers, from Canute to Rurik, were inclined to believe themselves demigods. Money is now the monocratic power morality is about to tussle with. Liberty was in effigy in the republic prior to ante bellum days. But in its long speed it is going to overcome all ob- stacles, take a course over the great Atlantic ferry, and fire the heart and finally rest complaisantly on the Teuton and the Sclav. It is a light which never fails. From a manikin in its concep- tion, with "fuga temporis"; it realizes up to a Gog and Magog in its maturity. France, the Swiss, and the land of the southern cross, with New Zealand, are initiating and experimenting with popular government and industrial ownership, with the latter two states forging ahead of the earth in good government for, and by, the whole people. Many of their features have been universally adopted by other lands. Respect for individual rights prevail more in- violably in monarchical Europe than in free America, and wealth has to toe the mark to contribute its just quota in cancelling the budget. England gives a safe government, conserving individual rights, with a certain proportion of personal liberty, accompanied with paternal legislation. But there she stops, and greed outlines the rest. The money power of the world snuffed out the struggling African republics. It is rampant here; but the Constitution seems to be a spinose burr in its hindrance to its quest for the meat in its embrace. From sea to sea, in the Great Republic, liberty will never die; not as long as the Sodom and Gomorrah numerical contingent is here to save it. The fight of the plebeian and the patrician is on today, only it is in another chapter. The Central and South Ameri- can pseudo republics are only political cockpits, where the martinet is in prancing conspicuity. In the great republic the masses rule System of Modern Greed and Graft ■ 21 tropically, money literally. Officialdom is but a bottle holder to the "nouveaux riches." With the education of the coming genera- tions may come an expansion and confederation of the whole of the Americas in one grand family, and so, bounded from pole to pole and from sea to sea, and verily even from the western coasts of the Eastern hemisphere, that lie across the Atlantic, unto the coast line of demarcation on the Pacific's west, go bowling down the line of the coming ages an emblazoned beacon to illumine the path of the groping nations on their march to the dawning millennium. Mexico and the Caribbee states, pendulous to the southern borders of the land of personal freedom, join it as an embellished rococo scroll at its Rio Grande divide. All of the past is a mirror. By its aid this nation may pick the best and eschew the impractical. A more favored spot for a second Eden was never divined and inspired by the gods for its destined mission than this beautiful country of the great western republic. Here is perpetual summer at its very doors in the recreation grounds of the Bahamas and the Antilles and the lands to the South. The men of this republic, enthused with false pride and ethical views, slave that their womenkind may recline in indolence. Nothing is more mischievous than an idle woman, as is perceived in the divorce court, the redlight district, and in the gambler's den. Short-haired women and long-haired men are an anomaly to the ordinary observer, and are as freakish as a docked horse or a clipped spaniel. Coddling has developed the doll of today into a Red, usurping the first in everything except war and work. With masculine aspirations her efforts in this line are ludicrous sufficiently to arouse the risibilities on the solemn vis- age of the eternal sphinx. This article will conclude its peroration with the familiar quotation, "Corruptio optimi pessima." The Judiciary. This limb of the political tree is the execu- tive arm of the people, in any and all of the subdivisions into which it is divided, whether of the Federal, State, or municipal. It is the supreme and lawful interpreter of legislation and of litigation. Every Judge should stand before the people for his judicial position, which should be an elective one. And only in the case of the Federal and State Supreme Court judges should the sinecurist be eligible to suc- ceed himself, continuously, to a fixed age limit. This especial judicial sinecure should be the only exception, of all the elective civic positions in the gift of the people, to have the tenure power of jumping the six-year interim. Under impure political condi- tions, and spurious and class legislation, the judiciary is fast be- coming as oppressive and emasculatory as it is reported to be in the provinces of the monocrat of Persia. There should be no trav- esty of justice, and it should be gratis to proven indigence, in full reality, and extremely moderate in its expense to all and any legiti- mately pleading for relief. It should be prompt, free of clogging technicalities, effective, and moral. Misdemeanor should be tried as an "act in pais" and relegated to the police station, to be judged in primary trials by justices chosen by the people for six years. There may be courts of review and compromise, handling all cases not of 22 The Red Booh Illuminating th« a criminal character primarily, such as are seeking civil damages and restitution, under a certain amount, and those of "a vinculo matrimonii" or "a mensa et thoro" tinge, trespass, and the like. It would be well to have a special children's court, as the go-as-you're- able conditions of the times are increasing illegitimates, street arabs, homeless hoodlums, the urchin artful dodger, and such, to a riotous volume, with special reformatories for their moral and indus- trial training. Other ways should be devised, by profound minds, to keep the calendar clear of a clog in all of the municipal courts so that rapidly increasing litigation may receive expeditious atten- tion and the people and the state their relief. All business of the courts should be pursued in the open and given full and free pub- licity. Simplicity in its functional routine should be a permanent feature in its daily sessions. The judiciary should be the legisla- tive feline charged with the duty of destroying the rodents of so- ciety; but, at present, it is discouraging to the taxpayer and to public morals to perceive, by the appearance of the over-crowded cal- endar, that these pests of society have routed Tabby, claws and all, with utter discomfiture. All bona fide and intelligent citizens should stand their chances for a call to jury duty, and none excused for reasons of standing or privilege. A term for a court should mean fifty-two weeks, the same duration as other callings which labor for a stipend. The prevalent mode in court circles of promoting and countenancing privilege, pulls, favors, badgering, the shyster, the straw bail, and numerous cases of such casuistry from pure proceed- ings, should meet with legislative castigation, and get a thorough refutation and renovation by these solons. The code needs a thorough revision by a constitutional convention, with a subversion of many of its unjust features. The Police. This body of men at the close of the late bloody chasm, known as the pelican bowlder, and ye watchman and ye mid- night crier, and commonly dubbed a rounder and a man without a trade or business, or else a bungling workman and lazy tout, has at last, by expansion, become an efficient body through organization and public necessity. High tariff, murderous and soul-destroying competition, the proletarian deluge, class legislation, and the like, have swollen its bulk from a mere battalion unto the magnitude of an army corps, and made its members as self-important as the officials in heraldry of a tramontane royal court. At a time, close in the rear of modernity, many newly arrived aliens of a commi- grating variety, entered its tabooed ranks, to wield its medicine stick and swing these clubs down upon the Yankee mutton top, by the aid of the grafting politician ; but since it has become a lucrative and wealth producing digging, and panning out the yellow particles handsomely, many natives have ventured to dare its duties, and, aided by a little rear persuader, have managed to jump the ques- tioner and scored a clean land within the muster line. It is a cinch at the public feast these sagamores enjoy, with the only insomnia- producing worry of pounding a patrol, pinching the esculent peanut, blowing foam, paying and collecting tribute, junketing the trolley,' System of Modern Greed and Graft 23 and getting familiar with pleasant features on the rounds. His greatest cinch is on duty in public and charitable buildings. But then this felicity is shy on graft. There is no good without its accompa- niment of evil. The taxpayer is mulcted in supplying monopoly with police patrol. The people of this republic are the most moral and law-abiding upon the earth's crust, and yet governed the most. An anomaly which mystifies the alien pate, simply because these econo- mists do not understand the meaning of political graft. There are enough of public supernumeraries in the whole of this republic, serving the nation for its weal or woe, to start a respectable state in some other part of the globe. But the ordinary policeman Is not proof against demoralization, and he has shown in the past that, if he is not firmly hedged to his legitimate duties by strict disci- pline, he can, and does, assume the role of the veritable Janizary and Mameluke banditti and marauder of the Mohammedan monarchy. He should show ten years' continuous residence and citizenship, and it is even contended that he should be a native by birth of this re- public, before being eligible to the paraphernalia of the modern cop; of a good moral character; and wedded to some Industrial or pro- fessional calling. His compensation should be more on the par with the average pay in the industrial callings. He should be kept strictly to his automatic functions, with no assumption of mandatory power. The police, the same with the public school, as a public necessity, freed of political domination. The third degree, as unconstitution- ally exercised and unlawfully used by the overzealous and ubiqui- tous police power, is a relic of the Spanish Inquisition of the XlVth century. It is an imposition by these self-constituted Judges, in their powwows looking for promotion and power, to welch vagaries out of refractory prisoners who stand mute. The house of deten- tion is a hotbed of vice and crime. Here is where the aggrieved party is caged, pending a trial, detained as a witness, surrounded by criminals similarly jugged for the same purpose, while the aggres- sor, or aggressors, are roaming the streets and highways of the public thoroughfares enjoying the delights of straw bail, and looking out for the opportunity to obtain more boarders for the keeper of this pen. The public pay a heavy scot to support the police and the fire department. Appointees to the force should pass through the civil service examination mill. There are no more vital branches conjoining the political tree than the various ones of the police, city fire department, and the building, sanitary, and alimental in- spectors. The latter three divisions of inspectorship should be rig- idly kept to their duties or suffer summary dismissal. The sleuth should constantly be a vigil observer, in lieu of proper legislation, of the ways and doings of the insurance profession. In the life — to prevent criminal policies of the graveyard kind, and the like; in the realty — to prevent criminal policies of swindlers, firebugs, and the like; in the marine — to prevent scuttlers, wreckers, and the like. The banking system, for savings, and the like, and all places of deposits of money on interest, and otherwise, by the masses, should be hedged about, for the safety of the creditors, with bands of steel. %i The Bed Booh Illuminating th« POPULATION Population moves along symmetrical lines of well established laws In the emboltement of nature. Higher civilization shows a tendency to keep it at a normal level. The statistician is a pessi- mist, and an insurance speculator, who heralds theoretical and fan- ciful opinions, from a standpoint of irrefutable and dogmatic au- thority, that an overcrowded state is the fate of mankind, with its necessary evil of a system of euthanasia. Already many, and increas- ing in volume annually, spinsters have appeared on the scene as an hitherto unconsidered factor to refute these prophets. The "new woman," an artificial mushroom seeded by false conditions now usurping morality throughout the land in its economics, has gath- ered her skirts and Jumped the barriers which kept her erstwhile to her natural position. She vies to rival her brother in masculinity. With the aid of the Inventor, the commercial school, the academy, and such, she has reduced compensation with perfunctory work, and with the privileges now usurped as rights accorded her sex, and the pa- ternity of the obliging court ousting justice to give room to senti- ment, with parsimonious economy of her meagre wage, and covetous to a virtue, she has certainly done irreparable damage to certain light employments usually enjoyed by the head of the family. Her advent has left a trail of Immorality, and she is fast degenerating Into a correlative devoid of beauty and feminine grace. Employed by men of avaricious character on a pittance wage, she has gone far to garland greed and suicide the nation. With all manner of subter- fuges by the modern belle to evade the logos of Biblical Injunction on the marriage banns as employed by her, and her claims of emanci- pation from whatever she vacillatingly conceives, continuously, cer- tainly presages no good for the republic's futurity. With her world- ly advent amidst the contentions of men, due and sustained by greed and various other motives, more so than ability, has appeared unbidden the guests of vice and of crime. An equal wage, or one in just proportion for talented work performed with man, would for- ever eliminate her from further Industrial experiment, and return her back to her domestic and natural duties designed by the Power that doth all things for the best. A woman who is not feminine is a freak and a nonentity in nature, and loses her wand in wielding man. Another factor vitally concerned in regulating population is the influence of heavenly bodies in the stellar void. They, in their various changes, in concordance with the hypothesis of periodicity, will the earth droughts or install the reign of pluvious, or con- ceive a prolong term of extreme heat or cold, thereby Inducing meteorological and geological changes which send the pestilence, famine, all manner of catastrophe, and such. Also, the evil influ- ences of man upon his kind. These are all aids of Siva, per lire- em of Modern Greed and Graft 25 vocable laws, In preserving order upon the planets, who, with Vish- nu, Is ever hovering nearby and shaping man's course, unconsciously to him, and whether he wills or not. The birth-rate and death-rate fluctuate alternately at various times in the volume of ascendency, or to the contrary. The Chinese empire vaunts 450,000,000 inhabi- tants of the "homo genus;" but, as these foxy, bland, and oblique- eyed bestial worshipers are not very contentious, and economical to penuriousness, and can live in a bureau drawer, It is not sur- prising that they have become an ocean of humanity in the last 10,000 years or so. They still have room for as many more. But immutable law will soon interfere, and their volume will as steadily decline as it has arisen. It is the same with Hlndostan. Large populous centres develop the best there is in man and also at the same time the worst. They encourage the sciences, arts, and in- vention, with knowledge in general. Yet, at the same time, such ushers in evils of society; for instance, the cunning rodents and non- producers cornering enormous wealth; rates human life cheap; elim- inates the under dog; and germinates poverty, crime and vice, and Injustice. The baser side of competition slips the sentinel with a stolen countersign in the congested centres, and soon the fight is a tussle of the Jackal with the coyote. But Siva, at times, will oust Vishnu in spite of heroic resistance. This is a condition which per- plexed the ancient sage; but his troubles were mild In comparison to the condition which now confronts the modern philosopher to mitigate in this mechanical age. Migration is but a frugal remedy. It partly relieves an alien home district to carry its troubles to other lands. LA VOYAGEUR. Hark I List to the stormy petrel's uncanny cries, And the booming peals of the breaking seas thunder, Sending midnight terror and panic within the flies, To startle the restless emigre in his flitty slumber. — Sir Reynard Vulpine Lupui. Immigration. For the native born it reads, as it has for the red man, "ultlmus Romanorum." Every shipload of the proletariate of any alien land turned loose upon these fulsome shores is a hand- saw thrust through the Phrygian cap which tops the constitutional pole of freedom on the village green. Coincident with the era of the early sixties the population of the republic stood a trifle over 81,- 000,000 people, Including the slaves, which were a solecism to a free land. The natural increase of such a volume would not, under any conditions, have swollen its aggregate up to date over 40,000,000 units. This number, made a subtrahend to the minuend the repub- lic now boasts of containing, would result in a remainder which represents the stranger who has crossed her thresholds within the last tri-decennium. The merest tyro in manipulating figures may get a result which will show to the Interested that the native born is more than eclipsed by the alien in numerical bulk. This stream 26. The Red Booh Illuminating the of polyglot peoples, within even the last decade, accounts for the sluice of depraved and ignorant humanity who are so alarmingly congesting her cities from the countries in Southern Europe and Western Asia. These pilgrims are pushing her industrial workers into the woods and cuckooing their democratic homes. The grand- est people in the world are retiring in consternation before this unwashed rabble thrust upon this land by privileged monopoly, the grafting politician, the alien Atlantic ferry steamers, the consular legation outpost of moneyocracy, and the crowned and titled heads of the Eastern hemisphere, to get rid of their troublesome chaff at the expense of American national life. There is some denned, mu- tually understood, and translucent motive in organized monopoly deluging this free land thus with this fellahin avalanche of human nothing. The goatherders of the tundras of Western Asia, migrat- ing with the ghetto and the sink of Southern Europe, swarm in the sty of the steerage, where greed herds them with less consideration than the cowboy gives the "straying maverick with a branding iron and its further keep, or the shipper to his porcine freight in the box-car on its way to the abattoir. Here can be heard the clack and cluck of many dialects, the patois and idioms of many provinces, and, above all, the yodel of the Swiss and Tyrolese migrators. With the entrance of this cheap labor there comes a transformation amid the urban communities. Segregating in particular quarters of the communities more favorable to their propagation, they here keep alive and nourish uncouth customs of their native slums. Unas- similable, and reticent, and seclusive, what money they acquire through their rodent ways they circulate only among themselves, with a certain percentage homeward bound. They exist only for self. They are harder to fight by legitimate labor for their extirpa- tion than the one put up by the grasshoppers against the western farmer. They are as fraternizing with the native as an importa- tion of statues wrought in potter's clay. No other country the world over, organized, ancient or modern, has ever lost its head so completely to greed as to permit universal alien immigration and segregation to proletary its expanse and annihilate its own people, as one may behold in this republic at this hour. Alien ignorance is what the land is next to and up against, and it is here and distrib- uted, either by design or chance, in the cities in such numerical vol- ume as to become a powerful factor in president making, if not the president maker, and is politically strong enough to keep her gates open to those of their kind who are to follow. Grafting politicians ensconce the new arrivals with the suffrage franchise in a ready- made-to-order outfit to shorten their period of inconvenience. The greed of yore, in carrying the slavery system is followed by a ret- ribution which demands a passing through the ordeal of suc- cessive epochs of tribulation as is now, and has been, seen in the morbid conditions the land is floundering through, and more to follow, and the end not in sight Nature gives her blows with com- pound interest. The hamlet, village, town and city, are swarming with this human vermin, as may be observed by the outlandish rigs System of Modem Greed and Graft 27 that adorn their corpuses, and the polyglot gabble of hot air ex- ploded in their noisy vocal efforts. The native is, indeed, a "rara avis" when this "gens de peu" is out of doors. False industrial intelligence spread abroad and broadcast by monopoly, the profli- gacy and prodigality of the idle rich peregrinator rambling abroad, showering tips right and left, high tariff, the desire for pauper labor to increase the gains of the greedy, the avaricious, and the selfish captains, all this unpatriotic self-worship offers the foreign royal ties, aided by an alien and knighted steamship subsidized director- ate, an opportunity to unload its undesirables upon America's agi tated conditions. "A bas" this rabble! — the Mafia, the Carbonari the Dacoits, the Sicilian brigand, the Greek bandit, the Mediter- ranean pirate, the highbinder, the proletariat, the sans culotte, the Syrian pack peddler and robber, the Armenian, Russian, and Rou- manian Jew, and what not. The republic will survive without this Oriental bow of ignorance to the Occident. The seraglio is out of place in the purity of the Olympian virtues. Besides their menace to free institutions, of which they do not know the meaning of, this chattel, and do not learn, they are an extra burden upon the repub- lic's revenues, productive industry, charity, executive law, morality, and the like. In the 1,000 battles fought in the early sixties 2,000,- 000 men perished on the field, in the camp, the hospital, and for a brief time following after its close, from its lethal effects. This con- stituted the virile strength of the nation. They are gone forever, and in the nature of things ordained this nation will never possess their worth again. The new generation, minus the alien which is so loud roundabout, Is the offspring of inferior material which the conflict rejected. France has never recovered from Napoleon's mad ambition during the revolution. If the French had attempted to recoup their waste with unrestricted immigration deluging their country and debauching her politics, as is prevalent in the TJ. S. of today, only paralleled by the invasion of Rome and England in bygone times, that country today would be French only in memory. The apathy of the citizen, and the hoodoo on the mesmerized states- man, give an explicit explanation for this fatal condition in the po- litical economy at this writing. It is ludicrous to uphold, as a world- wide bluff, the Monroe doctrine for the remainder of the American continent, and leave the U. S. open for the tail end of humanity to desecrate and pollute her soil and its institutions. Many skilled workmen pass the vigilant inspectors, who dissipate their energies wholly upon the steerage, by escaping the barriers set up, and come in as the intermediate passenger, and even the first class cheap tofter on the cattle ship, the excursion trip, and the like, without being questioned by these public servants. Others slip by the bars, and pass in as the complement of a ship's crew, desert, and remain here. Many such ways have these sojourners of rushing the blockade of the Federal bulldogs. With a short sojourn they are empowered with the ballot. Continual prosperity for them, with a cut-rate scale, keeps these rodents an occludent exile in this verdant land; but at the slightest turn of the industrial vane toward adversity off they rush 8 28 The Bed Book Illuminating the to their homes in the land of their nativity with their hoarded sav- ings, tarrying there until better times smile again upon this un- sophisticated republic. Is this not a farce upon popular govern- ment and free institutions? Egypt became a spectre of former self because of aggrandizement of the rights, privileges, and freedom of the masses of her own and other peoples. This republic is tread- ing the trail Which marks her an intaglio from the Egyptian die, and greed may yet prove the ruin and downfall of her greatness, of which not the scintilla or vestige will remain to show the pass- ing of a grand nation. The poor and illiterate of all nations are herded in a round-up by educated cunning,, and driven hither and thither by monopoly over the world, with as much gusto as a seras- kier manoeuvres an army of Mohammedan fanatics. SOME OF OUR NEIGHBORS WHO ARE FHM UP THE COUNTRY The Jew (Meester). Malassimilable people are always a men- ace to any government, and more so to a popular form. This poly- glot and aberrant gazeebo, a trickry race, begotten in sections among all the nations of the earth to its extreme antipodes, is not the Hebrew of Abraham's day. He is now but a commercial ivy grafted and grafting upon the oak of Gentile industry. He is the sweat- shop perfunctory in communities where greed of lucre has ousted patriotism. Left handed in transcribing these Ghetto geese aTe as odd in escaping manual toll, which is a raca to their race. Rivaling the Moslem in prayer he is, at the same time, an incarnation Of greed. From Aleph to Thau he knows the routine of spurious and shoddy barter. This Marmoset counterpart and second-hand haber- dasher is a physical and a moral coward and knave, and yet, at the same time he is the most cruel Of the abattoir gladiators in obtain- ing Kosher meat. His race preserves its identity and cohesion only by a community of interest, and from this source, in and out of the synagogue, they derive that counsel and encouragement which keeps them intact and gives them the earth. They stand together as a unit, the most complete and effective organization the world has ever known, and a living example to all the nations. To cozen every- body, give as little and as spurious as they can, and get all they can, is the mental exercise of the voluble Jew, sleep or awake. Evade work and public burden and circumvent the insurance company, is the counsel of the Jew to his kind. And yet, the Jew has his foibles, his hobbies, and his susceptibilities; to know these is to floor the Jew. Intellectual and wealthy Jews prefer the Geatile at the head of their financial affairs. They distrust and shun their own lower classes; and, in many cases, drop their Jewish cognomen, and adopt a brand new American name, up to date. They are a stranger to personal cleanliness, and with their hook-nose contour of facial physiognomy, the inevitable whiskers, frock-tail coat, the antediluvian stovepipe tile, have managed to retain these charac- teristics Intact for ages. The phrenological acquisitive protuber- System of Modern Oreed and Graft 29 ance on their brain box remains, and has remained, unreduced for centuries. They have suffered more in the cause of acquisition, from the days of the golden calf clear up to the Spanish "auto da fe," than any race of men who ever existed, and yet not go to legiti- mate work. They hustle all places of charity and gratuity. Their women are as money mad as the Solomon-Isaacs of the family. And the women are brazen in their effrontery before public gaze in their various postures at eventide on the stoops of their ghetto dwell- ings. The Jew is "with us, but he takes good care not to be of us." They take on traits unconsciously, however, of their climatic en- vironments, yet still remain the Jew. Salaaming and obsequious to constituted power and concrete conditions, they are merciless and supercilious In their exactions and requirements when they obtain a free hand. Accumulations of money which they never spend, reaching to great riches in extent, the result of shady trans- actions, and shoddy barter, have often obligated the state in a pawn to his credits. He doesn't spin to any great extent; but, oh Jews- land, he Is a reaper. In the mechanical trades wherever the Jew has entered, perfunctorily prepared by the industrial schools and colleges, it may be seen at a glance the hand of the counselors in their community of interest. He gravitates to the lightest trades and to the best paying. The Jew is handicapped by the inability to become anything more than a superficial and perfunctory crafts- man. Education of the masses is going to lose the Jew in the vor- tex of the assimilable tide. He obtains a situation, as a general thing, through Jewish patrens of the firm he desires employment of. They are the human jackal in pursuit of gain (game) ; and insult and assault they run up against In their quest is received with meekness and servility. But this is only borne with equanim- ity to further enhance their power to acquire, and in the finale to pillory their lampooners and deriders back with compound and com- plex usury. They vie with the cat in the patience of waiting for their prey. He manages by penuriousness and denials to become a power in time wherever he hangs up his headgear. And all through shoddy. Driven from countries, or hedged in defined limits and power by such which have grown wise on his characteristic tal- ents and money absorbing powers, these clamorous merchants swarm here without a protest. They offer a pestiferous counter to the insurance premium. They have raped the finance and adulterated commerce, and it is they who have improvised the spirit of im- placable greed now settling down, as a cloud of lava ashes, upon the people, and enshrouding them In its deepening dust, of which the ute*s very nature and race Is a synonym simon pure. The Jew is the original grafter. He is as much of a pantomime in his vocal efforts as any member of the so-called Latin races. He Is a linguist with his shoulders and the palms of his hands. They are a stiff-necked variety, and. If not severely repulsed, will rush over the Christian people and contend their rights. This brief excerpt of this slum dweller and sweatshop perfunctory is his true eulogy — a faithful picture of the old clo' man, with his renovated but much-worn nab- 30 The Red Booh Illuminating tht iliments, which he barks to the ignorant and the impecunious. The Jew, the Italian, and the Chinaman adjudge all philanthropists as non comps. They simply cannot comprehend charity. Italian (Dago and Guinea). Sprawling into the western hem- isphere, and spreading over both the main Americas and desecrating free institutions, is this illiterate proletary of macaroni land. With the basest of competition, and hyena and jackal habits and customs, this detonator of the land of quasi-slavery and peonage is segregated as a cuckoo in the homes of the ousted natives. He becomes as despicable here in his abuse of liberty as he was as servile at home in his sycophancy to power and title. His cupidity is as violent as the Jew's, but he lacks the something the Jew has ingrained in him to acquire his coveted desires. Worthy people of Italy rarely expatriate themselves. They average with the rest of mankind. But it is this tinsel people the republic receives who make up the cargo of the trans-Atlantic money-getters. For a temporary gain the captains of industry would debase the freemen of their native land and their posterity. With the guinea come the merciless as- sassin and the picayunish counterfeiter. He is an emulous rival of his darker brother, the negro, In avaricious abstinence, by denying himself anything and everything but the utmost meagre necessities of possible life in order to hoard and save his pittance wage for fu- ture felicity in his natal province. Segregated in vast number he therefore drains a country of its wealth, as well as he pauperizes its Industrials. The compensation he draws from greed for perfunctory labor leaves the circulation for good, as the part which travels beyond the ferry, to be banked in the provincial depositaries of sunny Italy and Sicily, only visits these parts again as the ingot, satisfying for value received; the remaining part is kept in circula- tion and exercise only among themselves in their segregated quar- ters. What little percolates back to general circulation is from sheer necessity, which compels these rodents to blow themselves. In- grained with vendetta, born by hatred of his oppressors, he is here a monopolizer of police vigilance and a burden upon the budget. With low cunning and taciturnity toward the native, clannish, wholly unmindful of his surroundings, and abstracted to his greed, and self-immersed, he is a paragon of a nonentity. He is the value- less culllngs of his native heath, and for this small fry the money chasers of this free land displace and degenerate a grand people. He is a slum dweller. This expositive illustration is a true enuncia- tion of this small fry. Chinaman (The Monk and Celestial Chinkie). This lecherous hybrid, a cross between a Dodo bird and a polliwog, in his rare and small traits of the half-civilized mind, by his pussy ways, his bland, meek, and deceptive deportment, is the most dangerous fac- tor of all of the competitive visitors and sojourners to the morals of the republic. The most immoral people which top the earth's crust, and the highest in zest to vice, Taoism was inoculated throughout their mass to stay this inroad of decay. He captivates System of Modern Oreed and Graft 31 the feminine sentiment, "a la Chinoise," with his purr and sleek, artful and childlike expressions, and his well concocted sweets. But a more deceptive wolf, cloaked in a lamb's skin, was never created to badger the happiness of mankind. He has more tricks up his sleeve to deceive misguided women evangelists, in their Christian endeav- ors, than the professional blackleg ever conjured up to sweep a table of its chips. These crafty, libidinous, kittysol chinkies, chlnook chatterers, and abacus calculators, have no regard for the Sabbath, or the customs of the people they are sojourning with, nor, after their demise, defile their bones with its soil. He is devoid of human sympathy, and a victim of repellent epidermal afflictions. What benefit he is to any Christian land is a query the sage has not as yet devised an answer. He is a rodent in cunning, and he is extremely reticent and uncommunicative. Unassimilable, cold, un- fraternizing, viceful, he is malapropos to free institutions and its people. Hs is the odd end of humanity. He builds a house from its top downward; he cuts anything he desires with the knife pro- pelled toward him; he dines with a pair of sticks skurrying his meagre food to his facial orifice; he slumbers on a shelf; and he is the antipode to all other peoples who top the planet. Dilatory in yielding redress to outraged patrons he is the opposite where fan- tan and the pipe are in vogue. In the one instance the sen is the obstacle; the other a yen or a tael is never considered. This opium fiend uses the chop suey seclusive den as a means to in- veigle and deflour the young and immature. It is only deteriorated politics which allows his presence to contaminate and pollute civ- ilized society. All alien countries do not exhibit joy when the American workman commingles in their midst to compete for hire; but here every old thing which comes along is received with open arms. A Mongolian should be as rare here as a dog on a street in England. He is a slum dweller, with plenty of dermoid troubles to instruct a clinic, and is a filigree appendage to the human family. Their moon feast, yue ping, is a thanksgiving to the dragon for pointing out to them the way to America. Negro. To acquire the right conception of the black he must be seen and studied in his original conditions as they exist in his normal habitat in the littoral and lowlands of the Atlantic and Gulf States. Africa has always been a continent obfuscated in intellect. Greed, cloaked as a slave-pirate, ha3 had a surfeit here in the traffic and kidnapping of a bestial race the most debased on the land's surface, which has led to many serious conflicts among the commercial nations. This republic's sacrifice, reflected in its military monuments and headstones, is a lasting re- minder to coming generations of a baneful homage to greed in aid- ing and abetting the slave dhew in its inhuman mission. American soil is a whited sepulchre, for hecatombs of its valiant whose bones lie bleaching beneath the sod as their everlasting necropolis and catacomb, martyred in the cause of slavedom. Retribution followed slaughter still farther in its exactions, and gave posterity a colossal monetary burden as a debited obligation to bondholders, and a land- 32 The Red Booh Illuminating the slide in the shape of a grafting pension budget. Nemesis is still unsatisfied. Monopoly and graft have gained the ascendency, and immigration of the scum of other lands is on the flood, with other horrors still in abeyance. Mankind is heterogeneous in its hue, variety, quality, and condition. Gray matter runs from zero upward to the present quality, as one may see it today in the scientist and the mathematician. At present, the Caucasian races, of the Aryan type, are used as a standard to gauge the mind of mankind. By this denomination the negro is discovered to be but one degree above the chimpanzee in intellectual acumen, and by many anthropologists and biologists he is supposed to be a beast. No historian has ever chronicled a nation so beset with such race problems as confronts the republic at this hour, superinduced by supinity and greed. Cuf- fee divides with the polyglot tide rolling upon the American beaches the herculean task awaiting solution by the statesman and the com- ing generations of tomorrow. Ensnared yesterday from congenial climes, adapted to his every necessity by natural selection, and im- pelled to inhospitable environments by hostile agencies, moral law, outraged by such violation of her eternal precepts, has avenged his subserved rights in enforced servility a hundred fold upon his greedy traducers. The sins of the father shall descend upon the shoulders, and sit there even to many generations, is what this land is up against at this moment. Already a prominent feature in the popula- tion statistics, and increasing alarmingly, steeped in ignorance and vice, and wills to remain so, unassimilable, unreliable, shiftless mentally and physically, participating meagerly in civilized comforts and ways, secretive as the foxes, a chronic purloiner, egregious and gregarious with his kind, infinitely unclean, abject, with a low cunning which takes the initiated to deprehend him "en flagrante delicto" in his crimes, thick-skulled, strong of animal scent, kinky wool, flattened proboscis, jaundiced hued eyeball, bestial in his passions and habits, extremely deceitful, overflowing with animal spirits which passes current as good nature, and has saved bim from extermination for his other failings, fond of gewgaws and personal decoration with outlandish trumpery, all this, and much more, proves him a thorn in the republic's side upon whom love's labor is lost. The average status of his mental culture is displayed in his criss-cross signature, and the standard of this towdry race in business is measured only in his well-known habit as a chicken fancier. A rasher of flitch and a pone, or a sack of cornmeal, and work on the plantation will suspend until this Bantu Hottentot has consumed his rations. And must the negro be coddled to increase his kind and leave the poor white, in an impoverished South, to wither and die? To what extent may hysteria and senti- ment carry the "ami des noirs" and misguided donors to polish the dross and relegate the pure metal to the scrap heap? It will, indeed, be a very short time before it becomes a mooted question whether this is a white man's monopoly or that of an African jungle. But one drop of negro blood through miscegenation, circulating in a person's veins, emphatically pronounces him or her a negro in all System of Modern Oreed and Graft 33 their traits and character. This plainly shows the displeasure of moral law at the transfusion of definite creation. The offspring of miscegenation, of either mankind or the brute creation, is a deteriora- tion in symmetry and corporeal expression, and degeneration in phys- ical and mental attributes; and in brute creation procreation is lim- ited in continuity. In the tropics humankind is bred in all hues, many of which defy classification. And in this state mongrel man is more obnoxious and repellent to normal man than is the stray canine cur roaming the municipal highways. The metisse of the southland is a renegade both to his white neighbor on his right and his black brother on his left. Gravitating furtively along the lines of least resistance unto seclusive retreats marooned deep in the woods, and off of traveled highways, domiciling individually or in segregated bunches to escape public observation on his manner of support and of his immoral habits, the negro is, indeed, a puzzle to the philosopher. As the negro, through miscegenation, approaches a canescent hue, he lives only to plunder his way through life with low cunning, either on the blacks or upon the possessions of the whites. "Look out for a yaller nigger," is pithy with truism. They have kept the littoral and lowlands of the Southland as backward as medievalism is to be seen on the Guinea coast of the Dark Con- tinent. The couscous diet there would fit this ebon voodoo alarmist trimmer than a banquet on the planter's poultry and porcine rooters. Their stereotyped reply that "the white man has taken all the world- ly enjoyments and given Jesus only to the nigger" is an answer to the query about their predatory and pilfering nocturnal habits upon the plantations. Swarms of pickaninny negroes swing the box-cars in the South and travel and maraud for hundreds of miles, super- naturally endowed with low cunning. The negro is a selfish giver, but a generous and persistent beggar. During their camp-meeting festivities, at the dark of the moon, he is a rude and ruthless dis- turber to the slumbers of the dwellers within the sty and upon the roost. A "sun do move" coal black exhorter and revivalist of the A. M. B. C. demanded of the sinners that before opening services it was indispensable to a successful spirit manifestation that all flasks of nippitato be brought to the altar for confiscation and destruc- tion. Many terrified negroes, having voodoo visions of past conjura- tions and spooks, complied. A short while after the close of the camp meeting services the minister was found so helplessly intoxi- cated that he needed a stomach pump to save his earthly exit. An honest and moral negro is a freak, as much so as a docile jungle tiger. A negro refrain, popular in the South, "White man up in de parlor, eatin' his lamb, nigger down in de barnyard stealin' his ham," displays the trend of his mind. The planters south are foraged by the negro to the tune of many millions annually in farm produce and stock. A few years ago a sheeny proclivity with quick-rtah Jews, of bartering vile liquor for purloined raw cotton from the planta- tion, was dampened in its ardor by a few Jewish nocturnal necktie parties. The most troublesome homo the country is inflieted with is the mestizo hybrid, negro and Indian mixed. The offspring of the 34 The Bed Booh Illuminating the negro and Chinese mesalliance is a freak for sure. A negro who died a few years ago, coddled and nourished by political pap and the white man's treasury, an Abraham of his people and a beacon light for them to steer by, a Maryland ex-slave, espoused with a white helpmeet, educated in Canada and Boston as high as the negro brain will sop knowledge, became at last, in his yielding to char- acteristic race weakness, a defendant to his sponsor in the govern- ment's endeavor to induce him to restitute a large amount of em- bezzled money he obtained by an overdrawn check, of which he had knowledge. The African negro brain admits only of a veneering, and of an automatic and superficial intellectual acquisition, with no creative power. He imitates, but he doesn't invent. He is a human magpie. Under all circumstances he will ever be a depend- ent — a white man's burden. All nations shun the society of the negro. He is simply among progressive nations matter out of place. In his native climes he Is apropos to nature's plans, as nature knows her business, and never makes a mistake. In the tumultuous throngs of the active white races he is simply dazed and wants to know what it is all about. With as much imbecility as the Esquimau displays who thinks all white men daft who suffer so much in their quest for placer gold. He is a withering blight upon morality and indus- try in the Southland. He is simply an excuse for the grafter, black and white, to work the tear sack of the sentimental giver. It will take a modern fortune in obtaining liquid sunshine sufficiently to Illumine a way for the discovery of any virtues in the average negro. "Manana" is his appeal to the urgent planter desiring his labor. Familiarity with the negro eventually leads him to personal assault and a stealth upon one's possessions. He is more eclipsed mentally than any organized life upon the globe. No lone or strange white man is safe in his habitat and purlieus after the sun sinks below the line if he Is known, or suspected, to have anything whatsoever that some negro desires. He has an ostrich stomach, the molars of an equine, a sluggish brain, venous blood, and thoroughly dislikes work and the superior race. A certain president, some few years ago, desired San Domingo, it was surmised, to induce the negro to migrate thither. But his hegira and exodus has been postponed by political grafters and experimenters in race culture. This republic flourishes and nurtures a bunch of exotic humanosities more sur- feited with fads than the Doubuhars are with visions. Grafting by miscegenation is always violently protested by nature. The negro is a slum dweller. Multitudes of Americans do not know the negro- therefore, view his presence with equanimity. Not so in the South- land. He is perfectly known there. The above is a true gloss of the black man. Vi et armis (by the force of arms) . The "dernier ressort" of a people in "au dgsespoir" of political relief and floundering in the muck of immorality and greed. Born in lands where the will of the despot, autocrat and monocrat is triumphantly dominant it is unseemly and out of place in a country in this di-decennial century System of Modem Oreed and Graft 35 with a universal ballot and an ironclad constitution. These are ever ready to help matters when the deferential masses wisely em- ploy them. Might is not right and doesn't fill the bill in lieu of education and morality. These are the true panacea and no other means can usurp them. War is a pastime where the plain people are the victims, and the leaders and the instigators and abettors the harvesters of the glory and the spoils. The universal cry of "t6te-d'armee" in Gauldom in the XVIIIth century brought the man on horseback, and with his withering sway a way was prepared for Sedan and the Teuton. France has never recovered her virility for her temerity. The masses cannot retain personal liberty with im- morality, intellectual torpidity, and political apathy, and relaxed vigilance on public questions, as is now the rule and not the excep- tion. Vesuvius greed, the numerically increasing unsolved involuted problems of the day, which require gray matter expenditure, and are gathering moss in their rut, are the unreduced forts in the rear, and they become more of a storm-scud the farther the base recedes to the rear. These serious problems, despite the boca volumes of charlatanism of the jingoist, are the jacks and derricks which are wrenching the Constitution from its anchorage. These unredressed morbid conditions at last gybe into the emeute and get by the states- man in his inability to solve the quiz, and loom suddenly into a "casus belli." It is then up to boots and spurs to cross the Rubicon, and in the chaos of subsequent events to the strongest belong the spoils, the reply of Alexander to his captains. It is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous in all human events. The popu- lar mind errs in its decisions, collectively to a man, as fallibly as the judgment of the single individual. When the cry of despair is wafted out into the nethermost regions of the unfathomable void of eternal space, in which all creation is afloat, the ministering gods hover quickly and surely over the scene. Their ransom has always been severe. The fields, streams, and mountain valleys of the Orient have for ages absorbed the crimson of myriads of men, immolated in butchery by the ambition of greed, while their bleaching bones have made a whited sepulchre of the earth. From the siege of Troy to Arbela, and from Marathon to Carthage and to Csesarism, and from Moscow to Sedan, the butcher was the arbiter of man's un- compromising wrangle, "ultima ratio regum." Men perform pro- digious deeds of valor and heroic daring in emulous rivalry of con- testants, stimulated in the strength of their bucolic blood by the smiles of the lady fair, while women suffer and deny themselves for the virtue of love only. 'Tis true, Fate surpasseth all under- standing. Civilization is a great rival of the butcher in uniform in weeding out the population. It is a bloodless method, minus the martial glory to the victor, or still less in any way disproportion- ing the ratio of the sexes, with the enslavement of the vanquished. Cunning, clothed in broadcloth and silk, now chants the paeans — 'tis not the soldier — and money is the leader. Higher civilization means fewer people. It is only the poor and ignorant who keep up im- mense populations, which is synonymous with illiteracy. There 36 The Bed Booh Illuminating the flourish more liberty and justice among smaller communities. But in the exegesis of a veteran revolutionist, a vraisemblance In its lucidity, who had been balked in his every scheme of physical force for "principle, non homines/' ends are attained by more apposite means than the strife of combat. Diplomacy means hedging and dodging skillfully to get an antagonist at a disadvantage; arbitra- tion is a resort for selfish monetary bugs, with human welfare a secondary consideration. "Huat caelum," justice and morality must rule forevermore. Man proposes, but God disposes. Nations are vieing, one with the other, in commercial supremacy. They have their Teneriffe-Gibraltar and their Colon-Panama strategical bars up against the world as strongly as monopoly is up against the in- dividual and the masses. Individually, man judges the world from his own standpoint. If he is prosperous, it is but little below Para- dise; if unfortunate, it is "hell with the lid off." The gods first irate then destroy. A military leader who falls short of the feat of putting two able-bodied men up to the other fellow's one, anywhere and everywhere, front, rear, and flank, is in the wrong business. System of Modern Greed and Graft 37 REVIEW AND CONCLUSION The peruser, the most superficial, may perceive in this succinct resume the trend and import of its platitudinous comments. The masses themselves are, for the most part, responsible for the indus- trial and political troubles which are throttling the nation, sprouted from the seeded greed of the classes. Incompetency of craftsmen is a great factor in the increase of the army of the loitering artisans. Psychical, rather than psychological, conditions are what affects man in his physical being through his moral nature. The sequel to these compendious commentaries, treated extemporaneously through- out this small volume, points the moral that, with education, in- dustrial-political union, morality, less public indifference, congenial occupations, and such, conditions may be vastly and materially im- proved. This should be the crantara of the masses. The political mountebank and charlatan attempts to elucidate translucent and tentative panaceas to ameliorate the people's woes, and the halloo of the spellbinder, from the tail end of a cart, with his bracer and specific, is the hot air from a windjammer on the still-hunt for graft. Morality and pure political ideas, must be inculcated into the youth in the public school, as thoroughly as were trained the Spar- tan youth, and the indifferent adult left to pursue his course. Old bucks are unregenerates; but the coming volumes of the national book need the moral training which insures safety for popular gov- ernment. The industrial school should flourish without limit. La- bor should organize politically and govern the country, giving to all their just dues. With the enslavement of brawn follows the en- thrallment of the intellectual toiler, and all will become a derelict upon the sea of monopoly. The chronic and useless officeholder should get his quietus. Innovations politically descanted upon throughout this glossary are to be taken figuratively, not literally. They are crude elaborations, portrayed for the purpose of drawing public attention to the focus wherein the trouble lies of the political and industrial patient, to aid them in preventing a constitutional cadaver. Serious constitutional reforms require profound thought and pondering meditation of the ablest minds, and procrastination in duration of time, to create instruments nigh infallible as the Fed- eral Constitution, from which such reforms should take their pat- tern. Portrayals in this digested dissertation otherwise are true to life. "Not for the few, but to the many" the rising generation should be taught at home and in the school. Immigration should be in- stantly checked. The finances become a government monopoly, and the only monopoly permissible. The fiscal policy reformed. In fact, the word politics should become archaic and obsolete in the common vocabulary, and business and moral principles manage the ship in its domestic as well as in its alien waters to preserve its integ- rity. The negro should be eliminated, by inducement or deportation. 38 The Bed Booh Illuminating the to outlying possessions, or any unsettled land which can be pur- chased. This should be commenced Immediately, as this increasing ignorance will soon put free institutions to a test and may cost un- told sacrifices. He is the "Hannibal ante portas" of this republic. Go he must, sooner or later. This black Importation has divided the country at one time, and may do so again. All the present troubles of the country are accredited to the negro and slavery. Whichever way they are traced they lead up to and read negro. The producer is the angel who has to dig down deep in his jeans to get the neces- sary wherewithal and friction remover to smooth the journals in the machinery of government. The masses, by politico-industrial union, may give monopoly all that is coming to it, and give it — speedily. Greed is as old as the geological series of the earth itself. The con- tents of this succinct arraignment of modern facts and evils are known to the tens of thousands of America's democracy; but it is the hundreds of thousands not so fortunate this missive will en- deavor to arouse — the phlegmatic man with the pick, the shovel, the hoe, and the reins. The best of political systems need constant vigi- lance and repair or they will decay in their rut, and carry private as well as public business down in the general ruins to perdition. Government should be conducted under the auspices of a business regime, eliminating politics, and run on business principles. This mode of government makes private affairs more remunerative and less trying, and society more humane in its transactions, with com- pensation more equitable. The terrible passions imbued in the hu- man frame are the cause of all the woes of mankind. Can they be surmounted? He who can has solved the riddle of life. They have never yet universally. Morality is an attribute of the gods. Sel- fishness, envy, vice, crime, hate, fear, inebriety, malice, jealousy, slander, and the whole host of them. It is here where society must be redeemed, and to spring from the classes and percolate down- ward. The masses are apt Imitators of the classes, either of their vices or virtues to their weal or woe. It is at present, with the av- erage worklngman, the carousal and "Down, down, down, where the Wiierzburger flows;" and with the classes it is supercilious hauteur and disdain of the common herd. Will this lion and lamb ever lie down together without the former getting up on the outside of the other? Not as they are constituted at present they never will. If all people were as pert as one another, and all life methodical, con- ditions would be more level but unbearably Insipid, without chic or snap. Whatever conditions are installed some evil will permeate the- good, and grow more voluminous with inattention. Man has the power to fit himself to any perverse state fate consigns him to, and grows so accustomed, even to an enforced base condition, that he seems loath to make an effort to escape his thralldom. Indifference Is the bane of mankind through all ages. The rich can afford to bo generous; but the poor are compelled to be parsimonious. And pov- erty will always be a factor. Man must constantly repair his laws and customs to fit evolution's sinuous changes or suffer Inconven- iences and injustice, as he is up against at present. Ignorance, In- System of Modern Qreed and Graft 39 difference, and the passions are the mandatory trio which keeps man in subjection to adverse fate and the present trying conditions of society. Subheaded under this trio may be listed all the vices and crimes of society, with the morbid industrial and political condi- tions. Will man ever have the spirit to brood over him long enough to empower him to escape the meshes and chains enveloping and weighting him down? There is no doubt but that man is slowly approaching the ideal; but he is being dragged over a bed of coals in reaching his "ne plus ultra." He will be as canescent as driven snow, burned "en creux" to the bone, and as bloodless as a turnip by the time he gets to the stage where he is willing to do unto others as he wishes to be done by. He cannot hurry natural design, but he can mitigate its tribute if he prefers so to do. This is the efforts of the moralist. He will be weeded out and mighty few in number when regenerated. Possessors of wealth are not favored sons of Nemesis, any more than is the victim of adversity the sub- ject of her wrath. Ostentatious and lavish wealth, and the idle and rich profligate, are only illumined evils of society held aloft to the gaze of the indifferent masses as a part of their retribution, the same they may correct when they correct themselves. Man has always been used as a scourge to his fellows. No law can finally check the cunning — the French revolution was unable to do it. There is not anything wholly good; the same holds true with evil. For some reason mankind, and all organized life, go through their varied careers subject to vicissitudes of health and happiness. It has always been thus, and always probably will be. What the purposes of creation contemplate no man can devise. He is subject to his moulder. His knowledge of the finite is limited, and of the infinite he knows nothing. History repeats itself, and can any man truly say that the present is immeasurably far ahead of the period 10,000 years rearward, or that the same du- ration of time ahead of this era will shadow modernity, and eclipse it in human happiness and knowledge, or that evolution will be back- ward and not forward? It is neither a guess for the optimist nor a pule for the pessimist. Like the mythical hero of legendary lore, Theseus, the toiler will need a skein of silken cord to wend his way out from the labyrinth of besetting plagues infesting his path. Man has got to become as gentle as a child, and as wise as a serpent, to get the best out of camel life and his equitable portion. He lives now only in a bogmire of filth and injustice, with all the world and the gods against him, and the devil only for him. Volumes might be written on this theme of modern greed and injustice, graft, and political peculation, and the morbid conditions emanating from such evils, without exhausting the subject; but what's the use when the specific is at hand to cure the disease? It is known that in the very nature of things all conditions are possible, and nothing im- possible. Others will have their say in the defense of the rights of man, and this consolation comforts and repays the writer for his sacrifices in ushering this mission down along the line on its dove- like errand to the despairing and disconsolate. This disquisition Is 40 The System of Modem Greed and Graft a focus -where has centered the experience and the observation of the writer for a number of past years. The reader, North and South, East and West, may notice some familiar fact here recited which he is personally acquainted with. There are no theories bur- dening the book, but concrete facts solely, and only half unfolded in their dilation. The superlative and the emphatic is a congener with a work of this kind, and it can best be displayed with the parti- cipial adjective, for which this essay is conspicuous. It may not be in line with true rhetoric, but it brings all syncretisms more clearly to the toiler, and shows him that variances can only be closed by morality and education. A man astride of a suspended wire would soon lose Ms equilibrium, in the tendency of his avoirdupois to seek a new gravitable centre, if he but momentarily relaxed his tension and vigilance. Well, in another sense, it is just as easy to fall into the true idea that this country today owes its perpetuity of free in- stitutions to the morality and integrity of the dwellers upon the farmstead. He is the Secretary-bird to antagonize deletitious plu- tocracy and an antitoxine versus their proposed system of monetary dietetics. There is no jocundity in dormant and lethargic inaction, politically, of the masses to right prevalent conditions. A great portion of this book refers to conditions as they exist in the larger of the cities of the land and congested communities, as regards vice, crime, and competition — "smaller ones in proportion." The palin- genesie of society will never scorify greed and obtain a permanent stay if it has to anticipate its incipiency from the politician. With a regime of a gladsome aureola guiding the masses there then ushers in the annulment of those who live by the toil of others 1 — the pub- lic servants, the speculator, and the idle of all classes, and the grafter. All is idle speculation and morbid theory with the one ex- ception of hard work. Is the prevalent conditions of the republic a beginning of its end? One thing is sure — all is vanity. The me- chanical work of this book, in its make-up, style, and front cover, was a labor performed by the writer, a job compositor, to help to pay its way and send it rejoicing on its errand of harmony and good will to the toilers of the world. "Sic Transit Gloria Mvndi" FINIS. ADDENDA FRENCH Agiotage — stock brokerage.***A la Chinolse — Chinaman's way.*** Ami des noirs — negro lover.***Au desespoir-^-in despair.***Bizarre — fantastio,***Blas6— to repletion.***Chapeau bas— hats off.***Che- min de fer — railroad.***Courage sans peur et sans reproehe— duty without fear or favor.***Cul de sac — a trap and a blind lead.***De trop — out of place.***Droit au travail — the right to toil.***En creux — burned d«ep.***Fait accompli — for things accomplished.***Fils — son.***PraiB — expense.***Gens de peu — slum dwellers.***Inesperto (Ital.) riche — newly made rich.***Ivresse — intoxicated. •"Naissance — from birth.***Noblesse oblige — courtesy of the exalted.***Neuveau and nouvelle rich* — the newly male and female rich.***Palingenesie — regeneration.***Passe-partout— the principal key.***Rira Men qui rira le dernier — he laughs well who laughs last.****Sans culotte— revolutionist. ***Sottise — to gambol in play.***T§te d'armee— the army! GERMAN Ich die* — I serve. GREEK Ewigkeit — eternity.***Zeitgeist — spirit of the age. LATIN Ab initio — beginning.***Act in pais — out of court, and not for rec- ord.***Ad rem — to the purpose.***A posse ad esse — possibility to a reality.***Arcana imperii — state secrets.***Argumentum baculinum — arguing with a club.***Auri sacra fames — a greed for gold.***Cor- ruptio optimi pessima — corruption of the best becomes the worst.*** Dum vivimus vivamus — while we live let us live.***Bn flagrante de- licto — caught with the goods on him.***Ex usu — from long use.*** Fraus pia — pious frauds.***Fuga temporis — flight of time.***Furor loquendi — a windjammer.***Hannibal ante portas — the enemy is at the gates.***Homo homini lupus — man is a wolf to his fellow.*** Immensum quiddam et infinitum — boundless.***Imperium in im- perio — money power bulldozing ofiicialdom.***In setemum — forever. ***In ssecula saeculorum — ages upon ages.***In situ — proper place. ***Labor omnia vincit — labor conquers everything.***Lapis philo- sophorum — magic stone.***Lex talionis — to retaliate.***Lex terras- law of the land.***Lucri causa — insatiable hunger for gold.***Mare clausum — inland waters.***Meum — get off the earth.***Mutatis mu- tandis — plutocracy changing front.***Natale solum— an American by many generations of same.***Non persona grata — small fry.***No- vus homo — an upstart.***Odi profanum vulgus — contempt for the people by the select.***Offlcina gentium — workshop of the world.*** O temporal O mores! — the heartless times and soulless manners of modernity.***Otia dant vitia — idleness runs to vice.***Petltio prin- cipii — begging the question.*** Principia, non homines — principles, not men.***Qualis vita, finis ita — as is life, so is its end.***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — who can stop graft?***Quot homines, tot sententise — many men, much contention.*** Quo vadis — whence cometh these gifts, and whither doth they go?***Regnant populi — the people yet enjoy political suffrage. ***Ruat caelum — even if the heavens collapse.***Sic semper tyrannis — go away back, yet pluto- crats, and sit down.***Sic transit gloria mundi — so passeth away all glory of the worlds.***Status quo — no change.***Sui generis — unique.***Tu quoque, Brute! — Judas: there are yet more of them.*** Ultimus Romanorum — the last of the Yankee.***Ultima ratio regum — the last in irreconcilable argument — war.***Vade mecum — com- panion.***Vendidit hie auro patriam — selling his soul and country for lucre.***Veritas vincit — truth conquers in the end.***Vestigia nulla retrorsum — no retracing beaten paths.*** — Vi et armis — by the force of arms.***Virtute et labore — morality and labor is the true religion.***Vivat respublica! — long live popular government! SPANISH Auto da ffi (Portuguese) — burning of Jews.*** — En cueros — naked. ***Manana — any old time but now.***No hay cerradura si es de oro la ganzua — a key of gold will unfasten any lock.***Quin sabe — who knows? riEDLCVAL, Etc. Ic haebbe mete td etanne — we still have pork and — to eat*** "Isms" — looking for graft***Sir Reynard Vulpine Lupus — the foxy and wolfy quiller. Cornell University Library arV13130 The plea of the toiler 3 1924 031 339 181 olin.anx WILLIAM Q. HEWITT, Printer, 21-2IJ Vtuidtswater Street, Monro Builiiiujf, New York.