Lawyers receive preferment and fees from business—there is no other large source of support for lawyers. Judges are chosen from among these same lawyers. Usually they are lawyers who have won preferment and emolument. Legislators are lawyers and business men, or the representatives of lawyers and business men. The result is as logical as it is inevitable.
The wealth owners control the machinery of government because they pay the taxes and provide the campaign funds. They control public officials because they have been, are, or hope to be, on the payrolls, or participants in the profits of industrial enterprises.
10. It is "Their United States"
The man fighting for bread has little time to "turn his eyes up to the eternal stars." The western cult of efficiency makes no allowances for philosophic propensities. Its object is product and it is satisfied with nothing short of that sordid goal.
The members of the wealth owning class are relieved from the food struggle. Their ownership of the social machinery guarantees them a secure income from which they need make no appeal. These privileges provide for them and theirs the leisure and the culture that are the only possible excuse for the existence of civilization.
The propertied class, because it owns the jobs, the industrial products, the social surplus, the channels of public opinion and the political machinery also enjoys the opportunity that goes with adequately assured income, leisure and culture.
The members of the dominant economic class hold a key—property ownership—which opens the structure of social wealth. Those who have access to this key are the blessed ones. Theirs are the things of this world.
The property owners enjoy the fleshpots. They hold the vantage points. The vital forces are in their hands. Economically, politically, socially, they are supreme.
If the control of material things can make a group secure, the wealth owners in the United States are secure. They hold property, prestige, power.
The phrase "our United States" as used by the great majority of the people is a misnomer. With the exception of a theoretically valuable but practically unimportant right called "freedom of contract," the majority of the wage earners in the United States have no more excuse for using the phrase "our United States" than the slaves in the South, before the war, for saying "our Southland."