Here, he thought, were the citadels of the plutocrats, America's aristocracy of money, the strongholds of her Coal, Railroad, Oil, Gas and Ice barons, the castles of her monarchs of Steel, Copper, and Finance.

Each of these million-dollar residences, he pondered, was filled from cellar to roof with costly furnishings, masterpieces of painting and sculpture, priceless art treasures of all kinds purchased in every corner of the globe with the gold filched from a Trust-ridden people.

For every stone in those marble halls a human being, other than the owner, had been sold into bondage, for each of these magnificent edifices, which the plutocrat put up in his pride only to occupy it two months in the year, ten thousand American men, women and children had starved and sorrowed.
Europe, thought Jefferson as he strode quickly along, pointed with envy to America's unparalleled prosperity, spoke with bated breath of her great fortunes.

Rather should they say her gigantic robberies, her colossal frauds! As a nation we were not proud of our multi-millionaires.

How many of them would bear the searchlight of investigation?
Would his own father?
How many millions could one man make by honest methods?
America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, not because of her millionaires, but in spite of them.
The United States owed its high rank in the family of nations to the country's vast natural resources, its inexhaustible vitality, its great wheat fields, the industrial and mechanical genius of its people.