twenty thousand dollars. If you give or take a million dollars' worth of rebates, you may also be fined twenty thousand dollars. Justice is blind, she exacts the same penalty relentlessly from all offenders, large or small. This latest decision of the United States courts moves reformers to tears, socialists to smiles. It is one more illustration of a social law we are beginning to understand, namely, that whoever controls the means of production in a society must and will control the government of that society. It is not the bad laws, or unjust judges, that make possible the rule of the trusts; it is the trusts, born out of the evolving mode of production, that make the laws and the judges. This open avowal by the courts that the law can not bind the trusts is merely a sign that capitalism in the United States has developed so far that the trust magnate can come out into the open and laugh at the attempts of the little capitalists to hamper him. Raymond in the Chicago Tribune, commenting on this court decision, predicts that "big shippers will once more coerce the railroad corporations into granting them concessions, and the result will be that the little fellows will be driven to the wall. They will stay in that position until congress gives them relief, because under the present ruling of the court a way has been opened for indiscriminate rebating which the government cannot possibly prevent." We with "nothing to lose but our chains, and a world to win," can await the action of congress without uneasiness. It may attempt to play another act in the "trust-busting" farce, but this now seems unlikely, the farce is about played out. It will probably do nothing; in that case the trusts will grow faster than ever, the little capitalists and their politicians will drop by the wayside, and the field will be cleared for the coming struggle between workers and owners.

Trade Schools and Wages. The Exponent, Mr. Van Cleave's monthly, asks on what grounds we base our assertion in the February Review that trades schools will lower wages by placing skilled and unskilled labor on the same basis. It follows up its question with an argument on the increased productivity of skilled labor, from which it appears that the editor thinks or pretends to think that the wages of a laborer rise or fall in proportion to the value of his product. But they don't. They rise and fall in proportion to the cost of producing the laborer, feeding, clothing and educating him. The last item accounts for the existing difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers. If several years of special training are required to fit a young man for a given trade, there must be some inducement to him in the way of extra wages, otherwise he would instead of taking the training go to work at once in some trade more easily learned. But

if the training of a skilled mechanic is to be made part of the school training of every boy, machinists will be as cheaply produced and plentiful as bill clerks, and their wages will come down in proportion. For the rest, the Exponent is greatly mistaken in thinking that we intended to charge the capitalists with improper motives. It is populists, not socialists, who talk of the Conspiracies of Capital. Socialists think that capitalists and proletarians alike are made of one common clay and act as circumstances forces them to act. The Exponent is doing a good thing in advocating technical schools; they will prove far more beneficial to the working class than the editor seems to realize. When all labor is skilled, industrial democracy will not be far off.

Stick to the Main Issue. The whole question of "immediate demands" and municipal programs turns on what we as socialists really want to accomplish at each campaign. Do we want as many political offices as possible for our members? Or do we want to carry on such propaganda and educational work as will make clear-headed revolutionists out of the working people who are now indifferent? Just how best to get the offices is a debatable question, but those who have pursued them most successfully have often laid great stress on the "dishonesty" of Republican and Democratic politicians and promised an honest and economical administration. Such a campaign may momentarily catch the votes of taxpayers whose small capital is being taken from them by "corrupt" office-holders and "lawless" corporations. But let a socialist administration be elected by such votes, and let it start any radical action in the interest of the wage-workers, as for example appropriating money from the city treasury in aid of strikers or refusing police protection to strike-breakers, and how many of these votes would it hold when election day came around again? Meanwhile, the propaganda against "graft" has no interest for the men whom we must really count on when the final struggle comes. It makes very little difference to the wage-worker whether taxes are low or high. In fact, he is likely to be better off if the city administration is wasteful than if it is economical, for jobs are not so scarce. Tammany Hall in New York and the Busse machine in Chicago are kept in power by wage-workers who see that their immediate interests are better served by the "immoral" politicians allied with big business interests than by the "moral" reformers who would cut off wasteful expenditures. What we need to emphasize in our propaganda, first, last and all the time is that the laborer using modern machinery gets. back as wages only a small part of the value he produces. We need then to show him that by uniting with his fellow workers, organized industrially and politically, he can get all he produces. When he sees

that, he will care very little whether the wealth he has produced is "stolen" from one set of grafters by another set of grafters or not. What he will want is to keep it himself. If ten million American workingmen saw these things clearly, capitalism would not last long. The capitalists themselves, each eager for all he can grab today and tomorrow, are furnishing plenty of object lessons to help our propaganda along. So let us stick to the main issue, and results will come.

Work Day Sunset Chant

BY CHARLOTTE PORTER.

Gray-blue swims the air in the sky's upper height,
Grey-blue flows the sea-dreaming river,

Dull red glow the lights ere their hour to shine bright
Athwart the blue stream where they quiver.

The arm of the Working-Day strikes his last stroke,
His forge-embers glimmer to Westward;
The swart wolf-throat factories belch their last smoke,
The trolley-kites screech their prey restward.

All day wolves and kites of Life's drudgers took toll;
They miss now a maintage far better,—

The skill of the Worker earns pay in his Soul

The purpose to smite off Toil's fetter.

And mixed with black forge-smoke puged pure, spiring high,

His sigh for free joy in work soars to God's sky,-
Lo, there! where the blue glows intenser,

It breathes out that prayer in God's censer.