Americans are so close to slavery that they are ready to tumble over the precipice toward it right now.
 You don’t know it because they feed you on dope; they feed you on liquor; they feed you on the funny papers to make you laugh like idiots; they feed you on Punch and Judy stuff over the radio; they feed you on degraded slop at the movies. So as long as they can make you contented with such an existence it is easy for them to take four-fifths of everything you earn.
 The people of America must wake up.
 The international financiers have been taking one country after another away from the people until they have them all tied up in a knot over in Europe.
 One doesn’t dare raise his voice against the governments under financial dictators in Europe. They will either shoot him or put him in a concentration camp and starve him.
 The same international gangsters that are doing that in Europe today are the same financiers that are preparing to do it in Amer­i­ca tomorrow.
 Do you think there is any difference in the dictators of Europe? They’re all the same—just common blood-hounds for the finan­ciers.
 Some people in this country say we ought to have a dictator here. Such fools should be sentenced to live in one of those European countries that are ruled by dictators as a punishment for advocating such horrors.
 America is the best governed country in the world today. It isn’t governed as well as it should be, but it is governed better than any other country that I know anything about.
 The American Government allows you folks to come here and listen to me tell about the infernal financiers.
 If you had a financial dictator in America now, he would not let you assemble here to learn how they skin you.
 Do you think those dictators in Europe run those countries themselves? They are only the barkers who take their orders from the financiers. Before any one of those hounds can say what he is going to do, he must get his orders from the financiers.
 How do these international swindlers who control your banks skin you out of your earnings?
 Well, to begin with, they loan manufacturers money to buy materials and pay wages. Then they force them to pay such wages to the workmen as they stipulate.
 When workmen see the manufacturer sitting in a great, big chair, in a great, big office, they say, “He is a mighty big man. We'll ask him to raise our wages.” Little do they know that it is the financiers who decide the wage scale to be paid workingmen.
 Financiers not only tell manufacturers what the wage scale is to be, but by controlling the markets they are able to force merchants to buy and sell products at their prices.
 So financiers both decide the workingmen’s wages and also the price he must pay for his living expenses. Yes, workingmen, the