"And this remarkable article concludes with these words of prophecy:
The agrarian difficulties of Russia, France, Italy, Ireland, and of wealthy England, show us that ere long the urban and the rural populations will be standing in the same camp. They will be demanding the abolition of that great and scandalous paradox whereby, though production has increased three or four times as much as the mouths it should fill, those mouths are empty. The backs it should clothe are naked; the heads it should shelter, homeless; the brains it should feed, dull or criminal, and the souls it should help to save, brutish. Surely it is time that science, morality and religion should speak out. A great change is coming. It is even now at our doors. Ought not men of good will to consider how they shall receive it, so that its coming may be peaceable?
"And here," Max added, "is the great work of Prof. Scheligan, in which he quotes from _The Forum_, of December, 1889, p. 464, a terrible story of the robberies practiced on the farmers by railroad companies and money-lenders. The railroads in 1882 took, he tells us, one-half of the entire wheat crop of Kansas to carry the other half to market! In the thirty-eight years following 1850 the railroad interest of the United States increased 1580 per cent.; the banking interest 918 per cent., and the farming interest only 252 per cent. A man named Thomas G. Shearman showed, in 1889, that 100,000 persons in the United States would, in thirty years, at the rate at which wealth was being concentrated in the hands of the few, own _three-fifths of all the property of the entire country_. The _American Economist_ asserted, in 1889, that in twenty-five years the number of people in the United States who owned their own homes had fallen from five-eighths to three-eighths. A paper called _The Progress_, of Boston, in 1889, gave the following significant and prophetic figures:
The eloquent Patrick Henry said: "We can only judge the future by the past."
When Egypt went down 2 per cent. of her population owned 97 per cent. of her wealth. The people were starved to death.
When Babylon went down 2 per cent. of her population owned all the wealth. The people were starved to death.