The Power-Holding Class

VS.

The Public.

Imaginary Dialogue of

McKinley and Hanna.

ACT I.

Time-evening after adjournment of Congress. Scene 1. White House-President's private library. President intently gazing on diagram.

(Enter SENATOR HANNA.)

Good-evening, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT (pointing to diagram): See there! Behold! look! lo! The diagram is no air-drawn dagger, no false creation of the mind proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain. It is sensible to feeling as to sight. That pitchy cloud of infernal darkness still marshals the public the way the Power-holding Class has been going for upward of forty years. The maw of the lower regions ransacked and made to give up her concealed destruction could not give vent to a more horrible blast. What will a discerning public think (points to pamphlet) of this tragic tomfoolery? What a portentous embodied show and efflorescence of shoddy guffawing picturesqueness! (Reads from pamphlet:)

What is the tendency of the future? Why this war in South Africa? Why this hammering at the gates of Pekin? Why this marching of troops from Asia to Africa? Why these parades of people from other empires and other lands? It is because the surplus productions of civilized countries of modern times are greater than civilization can consume. It is because this overproduction goes back to stagnation and to poverty.

The American people produce $2,000,000,000 worth more than we can consume, and we [the Power-holding Class] have met the emergency, and, by the providence of God, by the statesmanship of William McKinley and by the valor of Roosevelt and his associates (applause), we have our market in Cuba, we have our market in Porto Rico, we have our market in Hawaii, we have our market in the Philippines, and we stand in the presence of 800,000,000 of people with the Pacific as an American lake. and the American artisan producing better and cheaper goods than any country in the world, and, my friends, we go to American labor and to the American farm and say that with McKinley for another four years there is no congestion for America. Let invention proceed, let production go on, let the mountains bring forth their treasures, let the factories do their best, let labor be employed at the highest wages, because the world is ours, and we have conquered it by republican principles and by republican persistency in the principles of American industry and of America for Americans.

Contrast this babbling inconclusive palaver with the glaring ghastliness of the diagram's stern, cold, and bare realities. A glance at its Medusa face is enough to freeze the soul. The Senator's speech mocks and ignominiously crucifies tired labor. The Philadelphia oration should have been graceful, grave, decorous, brief, and pregnant. Why did you suffer that eminently poisonous professor of blarney, with a mind all churned to froth, to dance on such airy tiptoe?

SENATOR: You forget those clear-starched hypocrisies,

Imperialism and Prosperity, require bablative booming. Eloquent speakers have never been statesmen since the world began. I saw the fatality of his falsities before the Senator had concluded his speech at Philadelphia. During its rapturous delivery I could but reflect that the liveliest image of Hades on earth that I could form to myself was that of a poor bladder of a creature blown up by popular wind, and bound to keep himself blown under pain of torment all the while and the cracking to pieces of all good that was in him. Mr. President, you fail to distinguish between commercial prosperity and public prosperity. The two are not co-related. Each is the antipode of the other. Senator Depew is the product and pupil of Commodore Vanderbilt, the pioneer who marshaled the way of Trust. As a capitalization of water the Vanderbilt system is magnificent. William H. sounded the keynote of commercial prosperity when he exclaimed, "The public be damned!"

PRESIDENT: Come, let us argue calmly. Political economists all agree that the distribution of wealth is a matter solely of human institution. Statistics show the nation's wealth to be sixty-five thousand millions. Under the fiscal policy of the Republican party, 125,000 of the uncrowned American kings represent thirty-three thousand millions and 1,375,000 American barons twenty-three thousand millions. Less than half the families in America are propertyless; seven-eighths hold but one-eighth of the nation's wealth, while 1 per cent. hold more than the remaining 99.

SENATOR: What of it? By the Republican system of Indirect Taxation the carcass of industrial wealth was cast into the national field, and the vultures of all breeds and orders flocked to the banquet.

PRESIDENT: But our Power-holding Class is growing alarmed for the safety of its gardens of Aladdin. Grave

lawyers are advising their rich clientèle if any be usurped the remaining limitations of the Constitution signify very little.

SENATOR: Imperialism and prosperity are ending as hurricanes always end, the worst gust being the last.

PRESIDENT: The counsel of a Wall Street syndicate representing millions (writes (reads):

The Constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union. Either Thomas Jefferson did not comprehend the Constitution he assisted in creating or William McKinley has violated it.

A letter from one of our great banking clients quotes from the inaugural address of ex-President Harrison. (Reads:)

The community that by concert, open or secret, among its citizens denies to a portion of its members their plain rights under the law has severed the only safe bond of social order and prosperity. The evil works, from a bad center, both ways. It demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector.

Here is another quoting precedents without number to prove that no republic has ever governed subject provinces and preserved its own freedom, and denouncing imperialism, colonial expansion, and benevolent assimilation as unconstitutional usurpations of authority. The writer adds (PRESIDENT reads):

This Constitution is no stronger than its weakest link. It is the Magna Charta which sacredly conserves the vast wealth of the Power-holding Class.

Many correspondents fittingly inquire, If the Constitu