ceiving any kind of education worth the name. The children of the poor and of the workers are condemned at the start to a state of ig

norance.

Thus, in spite of ourselves, we have already established one aristocracy, the aristocracy of knowledge.

This condition is not merely perilous to the country but it will inevitably prove fatal to its progress and ideals.

Moreover, it is absolutely unnecessary. There is no possible reason why knowledge should be monopolized. Knowledge should be just as much the possession of the poorest as of the richest. The child of the worker should have as much opportunity for culture and higher education as the child of the millionaire.

More than that, if we consider the interests of society at large and of the future of the race, that the child of the worker should have the utmost of education is far more important. Under the existing state of facts the loss to society is incalculable and staggering. Knowledge is power, we continue to parrot, and yet we deprive ninety per cent. of the next generation of all such power.

Yet such results must always be expected of a government chosen in the sole interests of the

exploiting class and composed of its members and representatives. All hope of betterment from government so constituted is very idle. If legislators chosen by and for the exploiting class could be induced to accept even the slightest improvement it would be in the nature of only a benevolence, condescendingly conferred and like all benevolences, certain to be futile. The complete education of the children of the masses is of no concern to the gentlemen that constitute the parasitical kind of government that at present we endure. They do not see that there is any necessity for widespread and advanced education. To a great many of them their material interests are all the other way. They do not believe in much education for the children of the working class because they think education would spread discontent among them and make them dissatisfied with their lot. They will say so if you ask them frankly. Their interest is that there shall be a large body of workingmen content and docile and willing to accept prevailing conditions, and therefore these employers are on sufficient grounds opposed to "too much education" for all children except their own.

Inevitably they look at the matter from the viewpoint of their own interest and always will.

Consequently so long as government is conducted by and for the employing class, there will never be any change in the condition under which the children of the workers are condemned to ignorance any more than there will be in that other condition under which the cost of living steadily increases but without a corresponding increase in wages.

What is incumbent upon workers therefore is that they shall insist upon having a government truly representative of themselves and their class, being by far the largest part of the population. The only way they can get that kind of a government is by electing men of their own class to every office. The fiction has been carefully nursed by the Parasites that workingmen, being of inferior intellect, are incapable of discharging the duties of government. It is hardly necessary to dwell long on this old fake. It is part of the game by which the working class is kept from its just share of power. The snobbish assumption is that because a man works with his hands he is therefore unable to think with his brain. This is, of course, merely preposterous. The best thinkers in this country to-day are among those classed as workingmen. You can go into any average labor union and hear a higher order

of debate and a more intelligent conduct of affairs than you will find in the national House of Representatives, and everybody that has had the chance for comparison knows that this is perfectly true.

But anyway, what is demanded for the security of the country as well as for the future of the worker and his children is that all workers should unite in the determination that since this country is a Republic and Democracy is the eternal law of truth and since the working class constitute the vast majority of the population the working class united will have an ever increasing share in the country's govern

ment.

It is a very strange fact that the workers of America seem to be the only workers in the world that have not yet begun to awaken to the basic facts of the conditions that surround and threaten them. Elsewhere we see the workers uniting and beginning to demand their own. Only in the United States do they seem contented to keep on voting for the employers instead of for themselves, and using their great power to make their condition worse instead of better.

Every other nation that has a parliamentary form of government has in it many representa

tives of the working class. At present the government of the United States does not contain one.

Easily 70 per cent. of the population of this country belongs to the working class. In the National House of Representatives sit 435 members. If that body were truly representative, 304 of its members would be of the working class. Instead of this, we never have more than four or five members that by any stretching of imagination can be said to have ever belonged to the working class and except for a single Congress not one that was chosen distinctively to represent that vast majority of the population:

This is the strangest fact in our national life, and after one has contemplated it for a time, all wonder vanishes that in legislation and the management of the government labor is continually the victim of the tricks and rotten devices a few of which have been instanced in a

foregoing chapter. Likewise no one need longer be astonished to learn that the government is conducted in the interest of the exploiters, nor that conditions prevail here at which every intelligent foreign visitor gasps in astonishment; for here is the fact that makes all these things easy.