This is the fact about labor's discontent. It feeds on its own betterment. It increases because our prosperities and the general social atmosphere have created and stimulated in every class new wants and new determinations. Of a struggle that has become sacred to us Edmund Burke spoke in the English Parliament. He heard the tory taunt that the Americans were not oppressed, to which he answered: "Mr. Speaker, the question is not whether the Americans are oppressed or not; but whether they think they are."
That increasing millions in the wage receiving class have come to think as they do about economic imperfections over which men have control, constitutes our industrial problem as its political counterpart was the problem of our rebellious forebears.
These breeding dissatisfactions constitute a pressure from below that will be neither shamed nor checked by optimistic platitudes about the rise of wages. On the long curves, generation by generation, the purchasing power of labor's income has risen and the working hours are fewer. The wiser socialists know this and proclaim it.
"What, then, is the fuss about?" The fuss has to do with a thing that is wholly relative. This may have the simplest graphic expression
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Let the upper line stand for the increasing income of the more prosperous and the lower line for the in-
