The labor unions regulated wages and hours, but they were powerless to control the prices of the necessaries of life.

The Trusts could at pleasure create famine or plenty.

They usually willed to make it famine so they themselves might acquire more millions with which to pay for marble palaces, fast motor cars, ocean-going yachts and expensive establishments at Newport.

Food was ever dearer and of poorer quality, clothes cost more, rents and taxes were higher.

She thought of the horrors in the packing houses at Chicago recently made the subject of a sensational government report--putrid, pestiferous meats put up for human food amid conditions of unspeakable foulness, freely exposed to deadly germs from the expectorations of work people suffering from tuberculosis, in unsanitary rotten buildings soaked through with blood and every conceivable form of filth and decay, the beef barons careless and indifferent to the dictates of common decency so long as they could make more money.