quoted: "The railroads control absolutely the legislatures
of a majority of the states of the Union; they make and
unmake United States Senators, congressmen, and governors,
and are practically dictators of the governmental policy of
the United States."

"Gentlemen, I have merely sketched the power of one of the seven groups
that constitute the brain of the Plutocracy.* Your twenty-four billions
of wealth does not give you twenty-five cents' worth of governmental
power. It is an empty shell, and soon even the empty shell will be taken
away from you. The Plutocracy has all power in its hands to-day. It
to-day makes the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, and
the state legislatures. And not only that. Behind law must be force to
execute the law. To-day the Plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the
law it has at its beck and call the, police, the army, the navy, and,
lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of us."

* Rockefeller began as a member of the proletariat, and
through thrift and cunning succeeded in developing the first
perfect trust, namely that known as Standard Oil. We cannot
forbear giving the following remarkable page from the
history of the times, to show how the need for reinvestment
of the Standard Oil surplus crushed out small capitalists
and hastened the breakdown of the capitalist system. David
Graham Phillips was a radical writer of the period, and the
quotation, by him, is taken from a copy of the Saturday
Evening Post, dated October 4, 1902 A.D. This is the only
copy of this publication that has come down to us, and yet,
from its appearance and content, we cannot but conclude that
it was one of the popular periodicals with a large