making a few men of great wealth as much the lords of the great highways as were the robber barons of the Middle Ages, with their castles in every mountain pass and on every river ford, taking ruinous toll of every traveler; and the owners of vast "plants" of machinery as absolutely lords of the workmen who attend the machines and the greater number who are displaced by the machines as ever the feudal baron was lord of the serfs and villeins on his estates. Even if they had foreseen these evils it is hard to see how they could have prevented them; they came too late; their power was too small.
And from these evils it has come that this great republic of the new world, so long the hope of the poor and oppressed of the old world, is fast becoming like Europe socially, and threatens to become even worse than Europe. Now, when the bounties of nature, which a little while ago seemed exhaustless, have been all appropriated, this favored land presents the most violent contrasts of wealth with its pitiless power, and poverty with its abject weakness. The disinherited begin to feel their doom: their blind and hopeless but strong and desperate struggles against that doom have already
