"EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY" Many reformers admit that no reforms can bring us towards democracy as long as class rule continues.

Henry George, for example, recognizes that his great land reform, the government appropriation of rent for public purposes, is useless when the government itself is monopolized, "when political power passes into the hands of a class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants."[83] In precisely the same way every great "State Socialist" reform must fail to bring us a single step towards real democracy, as long as classes persist.
That strongly marked social classes do exist even in the United States is now admitted by Dr.Lyman Abbott, Andrew Carnegie, and by innumerable other, by no means Socialistic, observers.
"The average wage earner," says John Mitchell, "has made up his mind that he must remain a wage earner.

He has given up the hope of a kingdom to come where he will himself be a capitalist."[84] This feeling is almost universally shared by manual wage earners, and very widely also by salaried brain workers.

Large prizes still exist, and their influence is still considerable over the minds of young men.

But, as was pointed out recently in an editorial of the _Saturday Evening Post_, they are "just out of reach," and the instances in which they actually materialize are "so relatively few as to be negligible." Even if these prizes were a hundred fold more numerous than they are, the children of the wage earners would still not have a tithe of the opportunity of the children of the well-to-do.
To-day in the country opportunities are no better than in the towns.