employers what wages and hours of labor should be.

And, after all, little it mattered to the capitalists what the
workers thought or said, so long as the machinery of government was
not in their hands. At about the very time Master Workman Stevens was
voicing the unrest of the laboring masses, and at the identical time
when the panic of 1873 saw several millions of men workless, thrown
upon soup kitchens and other forms of charity, and battered wantonly
by policemen's clubs when they attempted to hold mass meetings of
protest, an Iowa writer, D. C. Cloud, was issuing a work which showed
concretely how thoroughly Government was owned by the commercial and
financial classes. This work, obscurely published and now scarcely
known except to the patient delver, is nevertheless one of the few
serious books on prevailing conditions written at that time, and is
in marked contrast to the reams of printed nonsense then circulated.
Although Cloud was tinged greatly with the middle class point of
view, and did not see that all successful business was based upon
deceit and fraud, yet so far as his lights carried him, he wrote
trenchantly and fearlessly, embodying series after series of facts
exposing the existing system. He observed:

... A measure without any merit save to advance the interest of a
patentee, or contractor, or railroad company, will become a law,
while measures of interest to the whole people are suffered to
slumber, and die at the close of the session from sheer neglect. It
is known to Congressmen that these lobbyists are paid to influence
legislation by the parties interested, and that dishonest and corrupt
means are resorted to for the accomplishment of the object they have
undertaken ... Not one interest in the country nor all other
interests combined are as powerful as the railroad interest ... With