How can such a state of things be remedied save by a revolution? The
people may listen to the “outs” who pretend to tell them that it may;
but should they come to the “ins” they would follow in the footsteps of
their predecessors. The machine is running down hill too fast to be now
stopped; the tide of power has set too strongly toward corruption to be
reversed; the political body is too thoroughly impregnated with the
poison to make its purging possible by any change of medicine. The
disease is incurable because it is in the system more than in the
individual men who run it. It has had its youth, its manhood, and is now
in its old and decaying age. No power can save it; and those who think
they can, who think that they can patch it up with tonics for a time,
are only preparing for a worse ruin when the crash shall come.
But the people would not care so much about the government; they would
be willing to let the politicians run it as they please, and enjoy its
spoils as they have for a century; they would even endure, as they have,
uncomplainingly, any extortion that their earnings would permit without
reducing them to the starvation point; but when in addition to the
absorption of all their earnings to pay the debts of official
extravagance and vicious legislation it is threatened to foreclose the
mortgages on the industries and sell them out, and thus take away their
means of livelihood, they have a right, indeed it is their duty, to
object, and they are beginning to do it in real earnest.