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Harvester Trust holds you up for your tools and machinery; the mercantile companies sweat you for the necessities you buy; the bankers charge you three rates of interest and demand a mortgage on your crop for security. If there is anything left after these fleecers get through with you the railroads and the gamblers in cotton take the rest. They have reduced you to such slavery that you cannot afford to employ help in your fields so that your wife and babies are forced to assist you on the farms in order to get an animal existence for yourselves.
Under existing arrangements the farmer finds himself in the same position as the wage worker when buying or selling. The wage worker sells labor power and the farmer sells the produce of the farm which has absorbed his labor power. In selling this produce the farmer cannot fix the price. It is fixed by his enemies, the capitalist class and the gamblers in his produce. He is helpless as a seller. In buying his tools, wagons, lumber and other materials he finds that his enemies, the capitalist class, also fix the price of these things. As a buyer he is also helpless. Here are two forces that bind the farmer to the soil like Wamba, slave to Cedric the Saxon, in Scott's novel, "Ivanhoe." These forces bind not only the farmer but his wife and children also and force them all to work like galley slaves for a scanty living and to pile up wealth for over-rich capitalists.
The Trusts.
The same class robs both the wage worker and the farmer and both should be united against the fleecers. The masters have combined into great organizations of capital and are rapidly gathering the scattered capital of America into one huge mass for their own benefit. These trusts have been slowly developing for a half-century and, like the machine, they give great power to the owners. Like the machine, also, they displace labor. In fact, they may be said to be great labor-saving organizations, as they bring scattered plants under common control and by scientific management they produce more wealth with less workers than the individual plants did.
Take the iron business as an example. There used to be thousands of iron plants, owned by thousands of capitalists. The ore deposits were owned by one set and
