There are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse of the wage-slave; who toil every hour they can stand and see, for just enough to keep them alive; who are condemned till the end of their days to monotony and weariness, to hunger and misery, to heat and cold, to dirt and disease, to ignorance and drunkenness and vice!  And then turn over the page with me, and gaze upon the other side of the picture.  There are a thousand—­ten thousand, maybe—­who are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil.  They do nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to ask for it—­it comes to them of itself, their only care is to dispose of it.  They live in palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance—­such as no words can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint.  They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter; they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets, for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies.  Their life is a contest among themselves for supremacy in ostentation and recklessness, in the destroying of useful and necessary things, in the wasting of the labor and the lives of their fellow-creatures, the toil and anguish of the nations, the sweat and tears and blood of the human race!  It is all theirs—­it comes to them; just as all the springs pour into streamlets, and the streamlets into rivers, and the rivers into the ocean—­so, automatically and inevitably, all the wealth of society comes to them.  The farmer tills the soil, the miner digs in the earth, the weaver tends the loom, the mason carves the stone; the clever man invents, the shrewd man directs, the wise man studies, the inspired man sings—­and all the results, the products of the labor of brain and muscle, are gathered into one stupendous stream and poured into their laps!

This is the system.  It is the crown and culmination of all the wrongs of the ages; and in proportion to the magnitude of its exploitation, is the hypocrisy and knavery of the clerical camouflage which has been organized in its behalf.  Beyond all question, the supreme irony of history is the use which has been made of Jesus of Nazareth as the Head God of this blood-thirsty system; it is a cruelty beyond all language, a blasphemy beyond the power of art to express.  Read the man’s words, furious as those of any modern agitator that I have heard in twenty years of revolutionary experience:  “Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth!—­Sell that ye have and give alms!—­Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven!—­Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation!—­Verily, I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of Heaven!—­Woe unto you also, you lawyers!—­Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?”