Nye, in Watson's Magazine.

"WHAT HAS BECOME OF THE SURPLUS?"

All

sometimes painting fences, always seeking honest employment and never afraid of work. When seventeen years of age he had the opportunity given him to learn the machinist's trade. This he eagerly embraced and at nineteen he left home to battle for a livelihood. went well for a time. Then came a strike, and the shop where he worked was closed. His little savings rapidly diminished. It was in a time of general business depression. The great manufacturing trusts and monopolies were well stocked with their products and they desired to raise prices. Hence they let labor become a drug on the market. was the old, old story, the oft-played game, in which the few who controlled the markets and enjoyed monopoly rights have the producing and consuming millions completely at their mercy, and in which, coming and going, the privileged lords of the market and the street reap their millions out of the poor. "For a time," said Gor

It

don Nye recently, when in a reminiscent mood, "it seemed that everything went wrong. All doors of opportunity were closed.. Everything seemed to conspire to press me downward towards the frightful abyss where exist the starving and the hopeless ones. I was hundreds of miles from home. I tried to get work at anything in order to earn an honest dollar. I tramped the highways day after day, but with no success. At length my last penny was spent. I was a common Hooligan, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep save on the bare ground. I lost flesh rapidly. But in this condition of wretchedness I was by no means alone. Numbers of men were like me vainly seeking work and slowly starving.

MONEY MADNESS.

Some of them fell by the wayside; others, after struggling desperately to maintain their self-respect and manhood, at last seemed to give up all hope and became

Nye, in Watson's Magazine.

members of the vast family of human derelicts. I saw many such tragic spectacles. When at last I reached home I was so emaciated that my own friends

did not recognize me."

It was during this terrible experience that the soul of the young man awoke. He was a part of the democracy of the out-ofworks. He felt the pangs of hunger which thousands of others were feeling. He did not desire charity. He only asked for the boon of an apportunity to earn an honest living, but this was denied him; while all around the thousands of starving and homeless ones he saw people spending more money on horses, carriages, luxuries and foolish extravagances than a hundred men like himself could hope to earn in a lifetime. This spectacle forced the young man to think and to think

WHERE IS OUR BOASTED
PROSPERITY?

"What a farce it is to talk of the schools providing equal opportunity for all when there are hundreds of thousands of children in our city schools who cannot learn because they are hungry!"-W. H. Maxwell, Superintendent of New York City Schools.

seriously and fundamentally. Here was something wrong; here was the fruit of injustice and inequality; here was want that was in no wise the result of idleness, shiftlessness or dissipation. On the other hand, was vast wealth, the fruit of privilege, gambling or indirection, and not the result of thrift and frugality on the part of those who had acquired it. It was the old story of human suffering on the part of the multitude that the few might unjustly acquire unearned and often undeserved wealth and power, against which the democratic revolution was a protest. It was precisely the same phenomenon as was seen in class - ruled

lands, where equality of opportunities and of rights was denied the people; where through special privilege, oppression and indirection the few were able to live off of the many.

Could this be the result of democracy in practical operation? Could a state where there was guaranteed equality of opportunities to all and special privileges to none present so hideous a spectacle as that which he perceived on every side? Or had the government become recreant to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the fundamental principles upon which the fathers builded?

It did not take him long to discern the fact that privilege, monopoly in land, monopoly in transportation, protective tariffs and other forms of privilege were the great feeders of inequality and the most prolific mother of misery and in