no STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



with its multitudes in filth and misery and its few in luxury 

 and splendor; its squalid street peddler and rag-picker and its 

 million dollar skyscraper and then the lonely and isolated 

 "peasant" in the country is not to be the abiding condition of 

 human society. All this must pass away, not with a rush or a 

 revolution, but by a natural, steady and healthy growth. Man's 

 birthright is the pure air, the freshness and beauty of nature, 

 the nearness to mother earth, the purity and cheer of the unde- 

 filed snow, the opportunity for work and also the pleasure, the 

 convenience, the culture of mutual association and unselfish 

 co-operation. There will in time be a decentralization. This 

 will be the mature fruit of perfectly developed co-operation. 



It would be interesting to let the imagination have free play 

 and attempt to form a picture of the rural community when 

 this goal shall have been reached. But that kind of dreaming 

 is hardly profitable even if we had ample leisure for it. 



No one can yet foretell what shape this "Industrial Democ- 

 racy" towards which we are moving will ultimately take. What 

 we know is that we are now living and struggling in an age 

 which may most fittingly be called the age of Industrial Tyranny 

 or Industrial Aristocracy. 



Whenever we want anything, we humbly ask : "What must 

 I give for that? What is the price of this?" But when we have 

 anything to offer, we just as meekly ask, "What will you give?" 



\\niat lies before us, and to which fortunately the people of 

 this country now seem to be awakening, is the struggle to free 

 society from the yoke of plutocracy, from the despotism of 

 aggregated wealth. 



Here, however, is one thing which I must not forget to 

 emphasize, but which in the heat of the strife we are apt to 

 forget. We owe, I venture to say, as much to the "Money 

 power" as it owes to us. What have not the money getters and 

 the wealth gatherers done for us and for the world? How 

 would the great inventions have been made useful, how would 

 the vast industrial progress, of which we all justly boast, have 

 been brought about, unless somebody had gathered the capital 

 into piles large enough to construct and put in motion the wheels 

 of the vast system of machinery which today is the pride of 

 the world? 



