of the past shows that whenever the proletarians have joined forces with the Middle Class or any section of it, the proletarians have had to bear the heat and burden of the day and when the victory has been won their allies have robbed them of its fruits.
You, yourselves, then, Workingmen, must fight this battle! To win, it is true, you will need the help of members of the other classes. But this help the economic evolution is constantly bringing you. It is a law of the economic evolution that with the progress of industrialism the ratio of the returns of capital to the capital invested constantly diminishes, (though the aggregate volume of those returns increases). You see this in the constant lowering of the rate of interest. Now, as their incomes decrease, the small capitalists and the middle class, who form the vast majority of the possessing class, become unable to continue to support the members of the liberal professions, the priests, preachers, lawyers, editors, lecturers, etc., whose chief function heretofore has been to fool the working class into supporting or at least submitting to the present system. Now, when the income of these unproductive laborers, an income drawn from the class hos-
