[31] Lincoln Steffens in Everybody's Magazine, beginning September, 1910.
[32] McClure's Magazine, 1911.
[33] Governor Woodrow Wilson, Speech of April 13, 1911.
[34] The Outlook, Nov. 18, 1911.
CHAPTER III
THE POLITICS OF THE NEW CAPITALISM
We are told that the political issue as viewed by American radicals is, "Shall property rule, or shall the people rule?" and that the radicals may be forced entirely over to the Socialist position, as the Republicans were forced to the position of the Abolitionists when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Ray Stannard Baker notes also that capital is continually the aggressor, as were the slaveholders, and that the conflict is likely to grow more and more acute, since "no one imagines that these powerful men of money will give up their advantage lightly" any more than the old slaveholders did.
Another "insurgent" publicist (Mr. William Allen White) says that the aim of radicalism in the United States is "the regulation and control of capital" and that the American people have made up their minds that "capital, the product of the many, is to be operated fundamentally for the benefit of the many." It is one of those upheavals, he believes, which come along once in a century or so, dethrone privilege, organize the world along different lines, take the persons "at the apex of the human pyramid" from their high seats and "iron out the pyramid into a plane."[35]