WHAT is to be the aftermath of Equitable Corruption? We do not refer especially to the inevitable changes in the life-insurance system, but to the moral, social, and political results. For years radical speakers and radical newspapers have been indiscriminately assailing Wall Street and organized capital. They have been denouncing the relations between government and predatory wealth. They have been attacking the conscience and the moral integrity of the great captains of finance and appealing to the people to throw off their "shackles." Everybody knew that there was a measure of truth in these charges, but the indictment failed to make an indelible impression upon the minds of the great mass of the people. When one set of financiers stole a railroad from another set of financiers, the average man might regard the transaction as immoral, but it was not close enough to his personal interests to awaken his resentment. When a trust increased the cost of a necessary of life it was an impersonal sort of transaction which aroused wrath, but bred a corresponding sense of helplessness. After all, the consumer was not quite sure that the trust was wholly responsible. Besides, he liked to sell his own labor or products at the highest price, and was willing to concede something of the same right to others. But Equitable Corruption has made its appeal to a wholly different sentiment. The man in the street suddenly comes to see how "high finance" has been fattening off his scanty savings—off the savings he laid by for the support of his widow and children in case they were left alone. He sees how men who were supposed to be of unimpeachable integrity were systematically and studiously and ingeniously corrupt. He sees how men of the highest reputation lent their names to a band of organized swindlers. He sees how government has been debauched to protect year after year these highly respectable criminals. He sees how they have been able to purchase immunity from prosecution or publicity. He sees how they formed an alliance with Wall Street on one hand and the state government on the other; how prominent lawyer-politicians in both parties were generously retained by the insurance corruptionists; how the money of the policy-holder was freely spent in buying the privilege to continue looting the policy-holder; how men of seemingly the highest standing in the community could wantonly violate the most sacred of all trusts and feel no shame. Then he sees how when one set of Wall Street operators is forced out by exposure another set calmly steps in and proceeds to pile falsehood upon falsehood and illegality upon illegality. And he is asked to accept this as reform, and to pour in more of his hard-earned money to keep the machinery running! What is going to be the effect of it? Nothing that Lawson has ever said, nothing that Bryan has ever said, nothing that all the socialist orators in the country have said about Wall Street and high-finance politics, ever carried a thousandth part of the conviction that has come from the exposure of Equitable Corruption.—New York World.