monstrous presumption, airily proclaimed their superiority and
incessantly harped upon the need of elevating and regenerating the
masses.

And who, it may be curiously asked, were the classes self destined or
self selected to do this regenerating? The commercial and financial
element, with its peculiar morals so adjusted to its interests, that
it saw nothing wrong in the conditions by which it reaped its wealth
--conditions that made slaves of the workers, threw them into
degradation and poverty, drove multitudes of girls and women into
prostitution, and made the industrial field an immense concourse of
tears, agony and carnage. Hanging on to this supreme class of wealth,
fawning to it, licking its very feet, were the parasites and
advocates of the press, law, politics, the pulpit, and, with a few
exceptions, of the professional occupations. These were the
instructors who were to teach the working class what morals were;
these were the eminences under whose guidance the working class was
to be uplifted!

Let us turn from this sickening picture of sordid arrogance and
ignorance so historically true of all aristocracies based upon money,
from the remotest time to this present day, and contemplate how the
organized part of the working class regarded the morals of its
"superiors."

While the commercial class, on the one hand, was determined on
beating down the working class at every point, it was, on the other,
unceasingly warring among itself. In business dealings there was no
such recognized thing as friendship. To get the better of the other
was held the quintessence of mercantile shrewdness. A flint-hard,