pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more
laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent "panics" and "hard
times" when the mills and the mines shut down. And these wage slaves had
practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life--their
work. So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt,
lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health,
from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women
had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming
burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of
children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.

He proved the case for himself. He began making tours of the city,
discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime
and crime and poverty of a great industrial center. He poked into the
Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered
into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and
hung about saloons. Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down
into the city's underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves,
women walking the streets as prostitutes.

And over this broad foundation of the "people" rose the structure of
business and politics, equally corrupted--or so it seemed to Joe, as it
does to every one who is fresh to the facts. Men at the top gathering
into their hands the necessities of life: oil, meat, coal, water-power,
wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social
exchange; snatching strings of banks wherein the people's money was
being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation,
to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush
opposition. So had arisen a "Money Power" that was annuling democracy.