means or by conquest." It is thus apparent that the latter part of his political platform and his trust platform are one and the same. Like Mr. Havemeyer and the other "captains of industry" he cares nothing for "our ethics and does not know enough of them to apply them." But he does know how to squeeze liberty out of the Filipinos and dollars out of the miners.

Of course he was not elected. He is now and has long been a candidate for the United States Senate. In late years New York has been his home. But foreign residence seemed in no wise to weaken his candidacy as long as his "barrel" was on tap. His money has been in painful evidence at all recent elections, and his accredited political agents were the most active supporters last winter of the allied corporation cohorts seeking to seat Peabody despite his failure to reach a majority of votes, even after all the fraudulent ballots were thrown out. The pernicious and demoralizing part of the Smelter-Trust in legislative matters, especially in defeating the Eight-Hour Law, will receive attention in our next chapter.

CORRUPTING OUR SCHOOLS.

The trusts are now reaching out for our schools. Rockefeller's Chicago University is familiar to us all. We have

seen academic freedom denied in the

Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto. Recently Mr. Rockefeller gave $66,000 to the University of Nebraska, and Chancellor Andrews' acceptance of the same has made an important issue in the politics of that state. Not long ago Mr. Carnegie tried to give $25,000 to the University of Mississippi, but the rebuff he received from Governor Vardaman strikes such an important note that it ought to be sounded from the house-tops all over the

land. The governor says:

"We have in Mississippi the purest and best stock of men and women under God's heaven, and we do not want them warped from the broad spirit of fairness.

and integrity and purity which has made us the proud people we are to-day, by being taught to bow down in a thankful humbleness to such men as Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, and become subservient to the spirit of greed and commercialism which has bred the trust and fostered the slavery of the American workingman. I would rather see the walls of our state university and our colleges crumble into dust and the buildings be battered and grimy than that they should be built up and handsomely painted and furnished by this money which has been coined from the blood and tears of the toiling masses, 'demanding the usury of self-respect,' which we cannot afford to pay.

"We may not have in Mississippi the scientific equipment for imparting knowledge and all the modern accessories that make up the great institutions of learning, but we have the means of making strong and stalwart men and women, who scorn the slavery of wealth and stand unequaled in their proud independence of thought.”*

Simon Guggenheim recently gave to the State School of Mines at Golden $75,000, and on October 2d, last, occurred the

elaborate ceremonies of the laying of the The railroads made special rates and all corner-stone of the "Guggenheim Hall." the politicians, including our governor sands of people besides, and all assembled and congressmen, were there and thou

on the momentous occasion to render

homage to Simon Guggenheim, the donor, There, facing the tall but silent chimneys -the great head of the Smelter-Trust. of its latest victim, with the cry of misery and destitution audibly rising from a thousand throats, congratulations were extended, and the great Simon, son of Mayer, and king of the Smelter-Trust,

was volubly commended to the favor and affection of the impressed and impressive assemblage of citizens and students. At last the ceremonies were ended, the people dispersed and the sun sank into a black

*The Commoner, August 25, 1905.

the life-blood from industries, to levy taxes through watered stock, to appropriate and hold out of use mines, lands, sites and other natural opportunities, and to control and corrupt legislatures, courts and schools, then more than its publicity or its manners must receive attention. Its power to oppress, extort and corrupt must be analyzed and understood. At last, when its particular brand of special privilege and monopoly is so

clearly exposed that even "he who runs may read," a long-suffering and indignant people will then rise in their sovereign might and seize for themselves the citadel of power theretofore so destructively used against them, by the imperious corporations and trusts.

(To be continued.)

Denver, Colo.

J. WARNER MILLS.

I.

MONG the positive factors that are

a determining influence in the great battle of Titans that is now being waged in America-the warfare of corporate wealth and monopoly dominated by the great gamblers of Wall street, the princes of privilege and the bosses and controlled machines, and the forces of democracy-are the young men who with superb courage and moral enthusiasm are stepping out on the firing lines of freedom, spurning the bribe of privileged wealth and ignoring the sinister threats of the economic and political masters of the nation. Many of these young men have been born in homes of comparative wealth and luxury. They have been educated in leading colleges and environed by the influences that are so rapidly ranging on the side of reaction. But they have inherited the divine gift of imagination, which enables them to feel as well as to think. The man of reason untouched by the light of imagination and born and reared among the comfortable classes may and often does wholly fail to see, feel and understand the condition of those who are victims of injustice and inequality of opportunities. But he to whom Genius has given the supreme

gift-the seeing eye, the hearing ear and the feeling heart-cannot pass through life to-day in the republic, and be true to his higher self, if he ignores the fundamentally unjust conditions that obtain in our midst. He must become a traitor to his own soul if he closes his eyes to the poison that is eating into the heart of national life. Try as he may, he cannot escape the degradation of his manhood if he ignores the treason being committed in the name of free government or steels his heart to the injustice, oppression and exploitation of the multitude, rendered possible by the brazen prostitution of our political misrepresentatives by the "lords of land and money," by the princes of privilege and the master-gamblers of Wall street.

No young man of imagination, we repeat, can remain silent in the presence of the commercial and political degradation that is eating into the moral fiber of church, state and press and is sapping the independence and freedom of the people, without stultifying his higher nature and becoming recreant to America; and it is a glorious fact that to-day the finest natures among the young men are realizing the supreme peril and are an

swering the summons of civilization in the name of justice and human rights. Like Jefferson and Franklin, Hancock and Adams, in the dawning days of the great epoch of democracy; like Lafayette and Young France in the days of Rousseau and the Encyclopedists; like Mazzini and Young Italy at a later period; like Garrison, Whittier, Lowell, Phillips and other young men who led the battle against chattel slavery in our midst; like John Bright, Richard Cobden and their co-laborers in the England of the forties of the last century, these young democrats of thought, of feeling and of action, successors to the torch-bearers and wayshowers of freedom in every battle since the dawn of the age of reason and of man, are overmastered by the moral enthusiasm and passion for justice that more than anything else speak of the divine origin and the eternal persistence and onward march of the human soul. As in the earlier day, so with us, these young leaders cannot be bribed or browbeaten into silence; for, as Hugo described their compatriots of the former time: "Freedom was the nurse that bent over their cradles; that ample breast suckled them all; they all have her milk in their bodies, her marrow in their bones, her granite in their will, her rebellion in their reason, her fire in their intelligence."

They possess the idealism of lovers of justice, the poet's finer feeling and the philosopher's keen intellectual penetration. They feel as men should feel while exercising their God-given reason. They realize what modern democracy has done for humanity. She has been the world's great emancipator. The eighteenth century beheld her august advent; the nineteenth century was flooded with the light of her despotism-dispelling torch. Gladstone declared that the keynote of the nineteenth century was "Unhand me!" That was democracy articulating her mandate through the voice of society. Her mission was to liberate man, that he might grow; that all that was finest and truest in his being might express itself;

that all the children of earth might be true to the best in them, be free and unafraid. Her mission was to liberate humanity from the triple despotism of injustice, ignorance and superstition and to teach man the law of solidarity.

These things are clear to the twentiethcentury apostle of freedom-clearer, indeed, than to the masters who wrought in the gray dawn of the coming day. Our young men who have taken their places on the outposts of progress recognize the great law of solidarity and realize the duty that is imposed on manhood. They know that without justice and a full recognition of the fact that the happiness, prosperity and development of each is and must be the concern of all, the ends of the great revolution will fail of fulfilment. They know that the ideals of the new orderliberty, justice and fraternity-will if realized change the face of the world and that in proportion as they have been realized, the happiness, growth and prosperity of all the people have been furthered. They know that in proportion as democracy has been introduced into the life of the nation and has been maintained in its purity, the government of the people has been advanced. There never was a truer utterance than the observation of the profound Frenchman, De Tocqueville, that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." And they know that though popular government has achieved great things for the people, it has failed to secure the equality of opportunities and of rights or the blessings of liberty, justice and fraternity that would have followed the advent of democracy if she had come full-statured in our midst; that the fathers, though achieving so much, failed in one vital point-failed to safeguard freedom from the stealthy advance of privilege, which is fatal to democracy.

In the old time the vicious dogma of the divine right of rulers and the supposed sanctity of an hereditary aristocracy led to privileged classes that enslaved and exploited the masses through the long

centuries of civilization, until the day of democracy when these things were overthrown in America, in France, in Switzerland and some other lands. The new revolution gave political independence for all the people and safeguarded them from the old forms of privilege that had enslaved them. But while giving political independence or emancipation, the leaders of the republican movement failed to complement this with provisions for economic independence or emancipation, and through this failure at a vital point it became possible for a commercial feudalism to arise and for another despotism of privilege based on monopoly rights and special favors to come into existence and to rapidly grow in power, influence and prestige until it became a master-class, ruthless, sordid and despotic in spirit and quite as powerful in government and in the economic world as an hereditary aristocracy, while its actions became more dangerous because less direct or obvious. Like the Di Medici family, which absolutely ruled Florence for a long period of time without ever holding any office or interfering with the machinery of the republic, the new plutocracy based on privilege has become more and more the master in democratic lands. Thus the failure to secure the people against the enslaving influence of monopoly and privilege necessarily left them exposed to the despotism of plutocracy,—an evil that has developed with startling rapidity during the past generation and whose reactionary, imperialistic and oppressive influence is nowhere so marked as it is to-day in the great American republic.

Now seeing all these things and realizing that democracy demands the overthrow of the new despotism-that her slogan is "Back to the people!" who are the true source of government and arbiters of law, and that she furthermore imperatively demands that economic independence which shall secure equality of opportunities and of rights, these young men are following the example of Jefferson and of Lincoln in the two supreme crises

of our earlier history, and are throwing their influence for democracy based on freedom, justice and fraternity; democracy that shall utterly destroy the despotism of privilege; democracy that shall recognize in fact as well as in theory the people as the source and arbiters of government.

II.

Among the young men who are foremost in this irrepressible conflict between freedom and despotism, between ustice for all and the tyranny of privileged wealth, is David Graham Phillips, the brilliant author of The Cost, The PlumTree, The Deluge, Golden Fleece, The Social Secretary, and The Reign of Gilt.

Mr. Phillips was born in Madison, Indiana, in 1867. His father was a banker, an old-time Republican who had joined the party when it stood for human freedom and lofty moral idealism; when it fostered freedom in thought and speech and set moral values high above all sordid considerations. He entered the party when the spirit of Lincoln dominated, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, permeated it. In that early day no political body since the time of Jefferson so perfectly reflected the true democratic spirit which ever demands and welcomes free and full discussion of all great questions that arise in the nation. The Republican party at that time was the party of moral ideals, of ethical advance, of freedom of the press, freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Few men in those days would have dreamed that that great party would soon become the bondslave of privileged interests and corporate greed, or that the voice of her noblest statesmen, those who had refused to wear the corporation collars, would be silenced when they demanded free discussions which might expose the graft or the unjust advantages being enjoyed by the masters of the machines who substitute for free discussion, intellectual activity and educational agitation, the Bourbon declaration of "Stand pat."