"Your Webster's Dictionary defines property as a thing owned, exclusive right of possession.
"Your Amendments to your United States Constitution, Article V, also gives assent to property. They say, 'Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.'
"You have created it into and described it as wealth, or money. You have advanced it from stage to stage and perfected and increased its power to make it a fluid currency system without which no one can obtain or purchase the necessities of life. You have outlawed compulsory slavery, for a better system which compels you to voluntarily hire yourself out.
"Those in power, to protect themselves, helped to pass strong laws for property control. Not content with the ownership of basic raw materials, real estate, financial affairs, transportation, utilities, and food production and distribution, they systematically entered into every sphere of industrial manufacturing—commercial fields, transportation, shipping, in fact every necessity of your life's existence—through individual ownership, partnership, companies, corporations, holding companies, national and international cartels, and chain company stores.
"To supply the labor they need in their enterprises, most of you, through necessity, hire yourselves out to them either individually or through union contracts.
"Their accumulative hoarding, cartel, and pool forming to control, monopolize, and corner industry are such that you are forced to purchase your necessities from them only, at the highest profit. Thus you pay for products, which, without your labor, could not have been created into value. Your ownership and lack of ownership of property, wealth, and power are the main contributive causes for 98% of the laws you make and have on your statute books.
"Your controlling class who largely contribute to political campaigns influence your ruling class through political parties who openly or secretly help to elect some of their representatives to your Congress, or appoint former directors, and attorneys as members of important key cabinet and diplomatic offices. Their numerous inside and outside lobbyists and subservient newspapers influence the passing and suppression of laws. They even volunteer as advisers to your administrations. Most of your professional politicians 'kowtow' and are servile to them.
"There is always great agitation going on in regard to labor. Next to war, it is the most important problem to your government and most exciting discussions and newspaper headliners.
"Your moneyism and labor struggles are an old, festering sore. These struggles are the general cause of your poverty and destitution. Your system is such that you have no cure in sight. No matter how successful you may be in your unionized demands for more remuneration, prices and values are bound to spiral upward, increasing your living cost in proportion. You are infallibly moving in a vicious circle which tends for the rich to get richer. Many among you are born with pronounced natural aptitudes; some of you have strongly developed these aptitudes and inclinations and constantly use your full mentality and energy for accumulation and hoarding for your own use. But you also use this proficiency especially to gain power through the need of others. The school boy with the accumulative instinct will spend most of his time training himself to become an expert marble shooter in order to win those of his schoolmates. Even though they should find his full bag of marbles and divide them amongst themselves, or should he voluntarily give them the marbles, there is no question that he is bound to always win them back again.
"It is the same with your money and wealth; their division among all of you would not heal your economic diseases, because it would be only a question of a short time before most of you would lose yours to the shrewd and crafty ones among you; very possibly to the same ones who held them before.