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order of which we speak? It is our modern industrial system, with its world-wide markets, based upon the institution of private property. It is the private ownership by a few members of society of the means of production and resources of life; such private ownership creating two classes—one the bourgeoisie, or propertied class, the other the proletariat, or propertyless class. The propertied are thus made a privileged class who grow enormously wealthy by absorbing or confiscating the labor products of the propertyless, who become the dependent hirelings of the propertied.
Under the operations of the private property system modern Governments, whether an Empire, a Constitutional Monarchy, or a Democratic Republic, such as we have now in the United States, are merely the managing committees, organized for the purpose of conducing the affairs of industry in the interests of the property-holding class.
The social, moral, political, and religious institutions of society are but the reflex of the economic.
The American Republican was proclaimed 109 years ago to-day, and its existence made possible because the men of that were, comparatively speaking, economically free and equal. Their material and physical conditions was such as to make the Republic possible.
The declaration of independence that "all men are by nature created free and equal" is as much as truth, but less an actuality to the people of the United States to-day as when our forefathers pro-claimed it. The men of that day possessed political freedom because they enjoyed economic liberty, and we, their descendants, are disenfranchised, because we are disinherited—deprived of the means of life.
The industrial or economic enslavement of the workers—the wealth producers—has destroyed their political power and rendered them the play-things of that modern social devil-fish the politician. The poor have no liberties, political or otherwise, which the rich may choose to deny them. The right to sell their labor is contingent upon whether the rich choose to buy it. The chance to be a slave, a wage-slave, is even denied to millions of the propertyless class, who annually perish of hunger, disease, and misery because
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