Henry Ward Beecher, in a sermon shortly before his death, said America was going through a period of disgrace. This was true; for there had come to pass, what the prophetic Lincoln had foretold, that, as the result of the war, monopolies had been enthroned, that had filled the land with corruption and imperilled the liberties of the people.

To-day the period of disgrace is worse than then, for the corrupt tree which was then bearing so luxuriant a crop has had several years more in which to develop its fruit-bearing capacity.

On every hand Mammon reigns. His throne has been set up in the very place of sovereignty. His rule is universal and absolute. The price of his favor is the sacrifice of all truth, virtue and honor. Honest, hard work has become the synonym of poverty; and it has become the fixed rule of our civilization—a rule with absolutely no exception—that no one can come to great wealth except by some of the many forms of legal stealing. At his feet all organized institutions bow and worship. Politics are corrupt to the core. Our legislatures—as Beecher used to declare of that of New York—are everywhere the shambles where legislators are bought and sold like sheep. Political “bosses” possess, and lord it over, the souls and bodies of the chattel voters of the “parties” with as brutal a despotism as ever Czar or Kaiser wielded. Legislation-favored monopolists of the various means of the people’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are openly and commonly termed “Kings,” “Lords,” “Barons,” as though in undisguised contempt of the thinly veiled pretense that this is a republic.

To-day is fulfilled that which thirty-six years ago was prophesied by Lord Macauley, that, America’s public lands being all gone, England’s poverty would be reproduced in our cities. It is literally true as he foretold, that in Chicago there is a multitude of people none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner.

Our daily crop of common theft, murder, suicide and insanity is probably greater than that of any other country; while the crop of respectable, pious and educated scoundrelism, embezzlement, fraud and crime was probably never paralleled in the worst days of the worst monarchy that ever existed, for the thousands of our daily newspapers the country over have little else than the records of the universally abounding venality, corruption and wickedness with which to fill their columns.

Business, trade and commerce are nothing less than a chaos of clashing, discordant self-interests; a universal war; a pandemonium of noisy lying, overreaching, cheating and stealing.

Patriotism, too—especially with our so called upper classes—has become almost universally a “livery of Heaven to serve the devil in,” and is the particular characteristic of the hypocritical scoundrels whose whole business in life it has been to trade on the necessities of the Government, and to make money out of the wholesale theft of the public domain, the sale of the liberties of the people, and the bonding and mortgaging of the future products of their labor—even unto those of the grandchildren of generations yet unborn—to the leeches and loafing non-producers of every foreign country. The land is full of such worse than Benedict Arnolds. Blatant hypocrites they are, who—Judas-like—ostentatiously kiss the Flag and worship the republic to-day, but are ready at any convenient moment to haul down the one and overthrow the other for an extra five per cent. dividend on the bondage of the people.

The Church, as always, is the willing handmaid of the oppressor everywhere; and to suit the wealthy lords who are her chief support, preaches a Mammonized God and an insipid, harmless, garbled and un-Christlike Christ; and in all her wide domain, has no real hope or help for the groaning millions but a shadowy future world.

For this universal degeneracy the people themselves are wholly to blame. Was it not Montesquieu who said “all governments are as bad as the people will let them be?” They are the masters whensoever they will so to be. But they do not will, because they are ignorant and asleep. When they shall awake and come to a knowledge of their wrongs, they will have but to command through the ballot box, and they shall cease.

We need a new race of Whittiers, Lowells, Phillipses, Lincolns and Garrisons to arouse the people from their lethargy and inspire them to take back their stolen heritage of rights, before their one last peaceful remedy, the ballot, shall be stolen away too.

To help open their eyes, and help on that blessed time when this shall really be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, this little book was written.

THE AUTHOR.

December, 1893.