UCSB LIBRARY
 
 and rreedom 
 
 Tlxe Voice and Pen 
 of Eugene V./ Debs 
 
 WKile mere is a lower class I am in it; 
 While mere is a criminal class I am of it; 
 While mere is a soul in prison I am not free. 
 
 Published by 
 
 PHIL WAGNER 
 
 St. Louis 
 
 1916 
 
 "5
 
 r ,,
 
 Introduction 
 
 I think if I had been asked to name this work 
 that comes to us from the rare mind and tender 
 heart of 'Gene Debs, I would have called it "The 
 Old Umbrella Mender/' It was this tragic, touch- 
 ing tale that I first read in the manuscript; and it 
 is the memory of this that will always return to me 
 when I think of } the book. It is the perfect paint 
 ing from the artist's brush the sculptured monu- 
 ment from the master's chisel that makes one 
 lowly, loyal soul to live forever in the hearts of 
 humanity's lovers. 
 
 Not but that every line in the book is a treasure, 
 and every sentiment brought forth an appeal to all 
 that makes for justice, and equality, and freedom; 
 nor will it detract from, but rather add to, the 
 beauty and inestimable value of the entire collection 
 if others, likewise, carry with them the image and 
 memory of the old umbrella mender, as they travel 
 with Debs the struggling, storm-tossed way of 
 Labor and Freedom. 
 
 HENRY M. TICHENOR. 
 St. Louis, March 1, 1916.
 
 MISCELLANY 
 
 I
 
 THE OLD UMBRELLA MENDER. 
 
 Coming Nation, March 1, 1913. 
 
 It was on a cold morning late in November 
 last, just after the national election, and I was 
 walking briskly toward my office. A stiff wind 
 was blowing and a drizzling rain was falling. 
 The threads in one of the ribs of my umbrella 
 snapped asunder and the cover flew upward, as 
 it has a way of doing, and I was about to lower 
 my disabled shower-stick when I ran slapdash into 
 an old itinerant umbrella mender with his outfit 
 slung across his back and shuffling along in the 
 opposite direction. He had noticed the ill-behavior 
 of my umbrella. It snapped from its bearing even 
 as he had his eyes upon it. Perhaps it under- 
 stood. Anyway he had not a cent in his pocket 
 and he had not yet breakfasted that cold and wet 
 November morning. 
 
 He was about 65. His clothes had evidently 
 weathered many a storm and besides b^ing worn 
 and shabby were too light for that season. Over- 
 coat he had none. Nor gloves, nor overshoes. 
 Mine embarrassed me. 
 
 His hat had been brushed to a standstill. His 
 shoes were making their last stand and a pro- 
 truding toe, red with the cold, seemed to hare 
 been shoved out as a signal of distress. 
 
 The outfit of the old fellow, carried on his back,
 
 10 LABOE AND FREEDOM. 
 
 was sorry enough to fit his general makeup, and 
 if he had offered himself for sale just as he stood, 
 including his earthly belongings and his immortal 
 soul, he would have found no bidder nor brought 
 a cent. 
 
 The face of the old umbrella mender lighted 
 up with a kindly smile as he commented on the 
 strange conduct of my umbrella in slipping a 
 cog just as he happened to come along. I asked 
 him by what evil magic he did the trick and he 
 laughed in a half-hearted way just to be polite, 
 but it was plain that he had long since forgotten 
 how to laugh. 
 
 As we stepped into the shelter of an adjoining 
 store he sat down on the steps and drawing a 
 threaded needle from beneath the lapel of his 
 thin and faded coat, he began to sew the cover 
 back into its proper place. His fingers were red 
 and numb. A discolored nail partly hid a badly 
 bruised thumb. 
 
 He had difficulty in doing this bit of sewing, 
 and it plainly distressed him. His eyesight was 
 failing and his fingers were stiff in the joints. 
 Yet he strove eagerly and intently to master their 
 dumb protest. And he hoped, as he remarked, 
 that he would be able to make an extra bit of 
 money to provide himself with a pair of specta- 
 cles, now that favorable weather had set in for 
 his trade. 
 
 Poor human soul, I thought to myself, as I 
 looked down upon the weatherbeaten brother at my 
 feet! A vagabond dog among his kind would
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. *i 
 
 fare better than this worn-out old umbrella mender 
 in a civilized human community. 
 
 The warm clothes I had on made me uncom- 
 fortable as I saw him sitting there in rags mend- 
 ing my umbrella. The overcoat I wore made me 
 ashamed of myself. Every time the umbrella 
 mender looked up out of his rags I winced. 
 
 What crime had he committed that condemned 
 him to go through the world in tatters to be lashed 
 by the merciless blasts of winter and tormented by 
 hunger -pangs, and of what rare virtue was I pos- 
 sessed that entitled me to wear the best of clothes 
 and eat the choicest food ! 
 
 Dared I call him brother? And could I call 
 him brother without insulting him? 
 
 These were the reflections that agitated my mind 
 and troubled my heart. 
 
 "Good morning!" was the cheery greeting of 
 a man who passed on the sidewalk, calling me 
 by name. 
 
 The old umbrella mender fairly started at the 
 mention of my name. He had just completed his 
 bit of sewing and the threaded needle fell from, 
 his fingers. 
 
 "Excuse me!" he said timidly, "is this Mr. 
 Debs?" 
 
 "Yes," I answered. 
 
 "Eugene V. Debs?" 
 
 "Yes, brother." 
 
 "Thank God," exclaimed the old umbrella 
 mender as he fairly bounded to his feet and seized
 
 12 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 my extended hand with both of his. There were 
 tears in his eyes and his face was flushed. 
 
 "Of course I know you now/' he went on. "This 
 is your home and I have often seen your picture. 
 But this is the first time I have ever seen you 
 and if it hadn't been for your umbrella snapping 
 just as I came along, I would have passed you 
 by and the chances are that I never would have 
 seen you. God must have tipped off your um- 
 brella to give me a stop-signal." 
 
 "Say, Gene," he continued, still holding me 
 with both hands, "I am pretty well down, ain't 
 I ? " About all in and making my last stand before 
 shuffling off." 
 
 "But eay, Gtene, I never scabbed. Look at these 
 hands! I'm an old rail and I followed the busi- 
 ness for twenty-seven years. I broke and ran a 
 freight train most of that time. Never got a 
 passenger run because I was too active on griev- 
 ance committees and called a firebrand by the of- 
 ficials. I wouldn't stand for any of their dirty 
 work. If I'd been like some of ? em I'd had a 
 passenger train years ago and been saved lots of 
 grief. But I'd rather be a broken down old um- 
 brella-fixer without a friend than to be a scab 
 and worth a million." 
 
 A gleam of triumph lighted up his seamed and 
 weatherbeaten countenance. 
 
 "Did you belong to the A. R U. ?" I asked. 
 
 "Did I?" he answered with peculiar and assur- 
 ing emphasis. "I was the first man on our di- 
 vision to sign the list, and my name was first on
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 13 
 
 the charter. Look it up and you'll find me there. 
 My card I lost in Ohio where I was run in as a 
 vag. The deputy that searched me at the jail 
 took my card from my pocket and I never saw 
 it again. It was all I had left. I raised a row 
 about it and they threatened to lock me up again. 
 I was told afterwards that the deputy had scabbed 
 in the A. E. U. strike." 
 
 "Did I belong to the A. K. U. ? Well, I should 
 say I did and I am proud of it even if they did 
 put me on the hummer and pull me down to where 
 I am today. But I never scabbed. And when I 
 cross the big divide I can walk straight up to the 
 bar of judgment and look God in the face with- 
 out a flicker." 
 
 "We had the railroads whipped to a standstill," 
 he said, warming up, "but the soldiers, the courts 
 and the army of deputy United States marshals 
 that scabbed our jobs were too much for us. It 
 was the government and not the railroads that put 
 us out, and it was a sorry day for the railroad men 
 of this country. Mark what I tell you, the time 
 will come when they will have to reorganize the 
 A. R. U. It was the only union that all could 
 join and in which all got a square deal, and it 
 was the only union the railroad managers ever 
 feared." 
 
 And then he told me the melancholy story of 
 his own persecution and suffering after the strike. 
 His job was gone and his name was on the black- 
 list. Five jobs he secured under assumed names 
 were lost to him as soon as he was found out.
 
 14 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Poverty began to harass him. He picked up odd 
 jobs and when he managed to get a dollar ahead 
 he sent it to his family. His aged mother died of 
 privation and worry and his wife soon followed 
 her to the grave. Two boys were left, but what- 
 ever became of them and whether they are now 
 alive or dead, he could never learn. 
 
 The old fellow grew serious and a melancholy 
 sigh escaped him. But he was not bitter. He bore 
 no malice toward any one. He had suffered much, 
 but he had kept the faith, and his regrets were at 
 least free from reproach. 
 
 He was a broken down old veteran of the in- 
 dustrial army. He had paid the penalties of hia 
 protest against privately owned industry and the 
 slavery of his class, and now in his old age he was 
 shuffling along in his rags toward a nameless 
 grave in the pottersfield. 
 
 Had he been an obedient corporation lackey ; had 
 he scabbed on his f ellow- workers ; had he been 
 mean and selfish and cold-blooded, he would have 
 been promoted instead of blacklisted by the cor- 
 poration and honored instead of hounded by so- 
 ciety. His manhood and self-respect cost him dear- 
 ly, but he paid the price to the last farthing. Hia 
 right to work and live, his home, his family and 
 his friends were all swept away because he refused 
 to scab on his fellowmen. 
 
 The old umbrella mender stood before me proud 
 and erect and looked me straight in the eyes as 
 he finished his pathetic story. 
 
 The shabby clothes he wore were to him capi-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 15 
 
 talist society's reward of manhood and badge of 
 honor. 
 
 There was something peculiarly grand about the 
 scarred old veteran of the industrial battlefield. 
 His shabbiness was all on the outside, and he 
 seemed transfigured to me and clad in garments 
 of glory. He loomed before me like a forest-mon- 
 arch the tempests had riven and denuded of its 
 foliage but could not lay low. 
 
 He had kept the faith and had never scabbed! 
 
 THE SECRET OF EFFICIENT EXPRESSION. 
 
 Coming Nation, July 8, 1911. 
 
 The following was written for the Depart- 
 ment of Education of the University of Wis- 
 consin, under whose direction there is being 
 conducted an investigation of the subject of 
 "Distinguished Contemporary Orators or Lec- 
 turers With special reference to fertility and 
 efficiency of expression. What is the key to 
 their ability as masters of language? What 
 school subjects, or what kinds of training 
 have entered into their lives that have given 
 them power to express themselves effectively ?" 
 
 The secret of efficient expression in oratory if 
 secret it can properly be called is in having some- 
 thing efficient to express and being so filled with it
 
 16 LABOR AND FEEEDOM. 
 
 that it expresses itself. The choice of words is not 
 important since efficient expression, the result of 
 efficient thinking, chooses its own words, moulds 
 and fashions its own sentences, and creates a dic- 
 tion suited to its own purposes. 
 
 In my own case the power of expression is not 
 due to education or to training. I had no time for 
 either and have often felt the lack of both. The 
 schools I attended were primitive and when I left 
 them at fourteen to go to work I could hardly write 
 a grammatical sentence ; and to be frank I am not 
 quite sure that I can do so now. But I had a re- 
 tentive memory and was fond of committing and 
 declaiming such orations and poems as appealed to 
 me. Patrick Henry's revolutionary speech had first 
 place. Robert Emmet's immortal oration was a 
 great favorite and moved me deeply. Drake's 
 "American Flag" stirred my blood as did also Schil- 
 ler's "Burgschaft." Often I felt myself thrilled un- 
 der the spell of these, recited to myself, inaudibly 
 at times, and at others declaimed boldly and dra- 
 matically, when no one else was listening. 
 
 Everything that was revolutionary appealed to 
 me and it was this that made Patrick Henry one of 
 my first heroes; and my passion for his eloquent 
 and burning defiance of King George inspired the 
 first speech I ever attempted in public, with Patrick 
 himself as the theme. This was before the Occi- 
 dental Literary Club of Terre Haute, Ind., of which 
 I was then a member, and I still shudder as I recall 
 the crowded little club-room which greeted me, and 
 feel again the big drops of cold sweat standing out
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 17 
 
 all over me as I realized the plight I was in and the 
 utter hopelessness of escape. 
 
 The spectacle I made of myself that evening will 
 never be effaced from my memory, and the sympa- 
 thetic assurances of my friends at the close of the 
 exhibition did not relieve the keen sense of hu- 
 miliation and shame I felt for the disgrace I had 
 brought upon myself and my patron saint. The 
 speech could not possibly have been worse and my 
 mortification was complete. In my heart I hoped 
 most earnestly that my hero's spiritual ears were 
 not attuned to the affairs of this earth, at least 
 that evening. 
 
 It was then I realized and sorely felt the need 
 of the education and training I had missed and 
 then and there I resolved to make up for it as best 
 I could. I set to work in earnest to learn what 1 
 so much needed to know. While firing a switch- 
 engine at night I attended a private school half a 
 day each day, sleeping in the morning and attend- 
 ing school in the afternoon. I bought an encyclo- 
 pedia on the installment plan, one volume each 
 month, and began to read and study history and 
 literature and to devote myself to grammar and 
 composition. 
 
 The revolutionary history of the United States 
 and France stirred me deeply and its heroes and 
 martyrs became my idols. Thomas Paine towered 
 above them all. A thousand times since then I have 
 found inspiration and strength in the thrilling 
 words, "These are the times that try men's souls." 
 
 Here I should say, for the purpose of this writ-
 
 18 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ing, that from the time I began to read with a 
 serious mind, feeling keenly as I did my lack of 
 knowledge, especially the power of proper expres- 
 sion, both oral and written, I observed the structure 
 and studied the composition of every paragraph and 
 every sentence, and when one appeared striking to 
 me, owing to its perfection of style or phrasing, I 
 read it a second time or perhaps committed it to 
 memory, and this became a fixed habit which I 
 retain to this day, and if I have any unusual com- 
 mand of language it is because I have made it a 
 life-long practice to cultivate the art of expression 
 in a sub-conscious study of the structure and phras- 
 ing of every paragraph in my readings. 
 
 It was while serving an apprenticeship in a rail- 
 road shop and in later years as a locomotive fire- 
 man and as a wage worker in other capacities that 
 I came to realize the oppressions and sufferings of 
 the working class and to understand something of 
 the labor question. The wrongs existing here I 
 knew from having experienced them, and the irre- 
 sistible appeal of these wrongs to be righted deter- 
 mined my destiny. I joined a labor union and 
 from that time to this the high ambition, the con- 
 trolling purpose of my life has been the education, 
 organization and emancipation of the working 
 class. It was this passionate sympathy with my 
 class that gave me all the power I have to serve it. 
 ~i felt their suffering because I was one of thew 
 and I began to speak and write for them for the 
 same reason. In this there was no altruism, no 
 self-sacrifice, only duty. I could not have done
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 19 
 
 otherwise. Had I attempted it I should have 
 failed. Such as I have been and am, I had to be. 
 
 I abhorred slavery in every form. I yearned to 
 see all men and all women free. I detested the 
 idea of some men being ruled by others, and of 
 women being ruled by men. I believed that women 
 should have all the rights men have, and I looked 
 upon child labor as a crime. And so I became an 
 agitator and this ruling passion of my life found 
 larger expression. 
 
 In the clash of conflict which followed and the 
 trials incident to it I grew stronger. The notoriety 
 which came in consequence enlarged my hearing 
 with the people and this in turn demanded more 
 efficient means of expression. The cause that was 
 sacred to me was assailed. My very life and honor 
 were on trial. Falsehood and calumny played their 
 part. I was denounced and vilified. Everything 
 was at stake. I simply had to speak and make the 
 people understand, and that is how I got my train- 
 ing in oratory, and all the secret there is in what- 
 ever power of expression I may have. 
 
 In reading the history of slavery I studied the 
 character of John Brown and he became my hero. 
 I read the speeches of Wendell Phillips and was 
 profoundly stirred by his marvelous powers. Once 
 I heard him and was enthralled by his indescribable 
 eloquence. He was far advanced in years, but I 
 could see in his commanding presence and mellow 
 and subdued tones how he must have blazed and 
 flashed in the meridian of his powers. 
 
 At about the same time I first heard Robert G.
 
 20 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Ingersoll. He was in my opinion the perfect mas- 
 ter of the art of human speech. He combined all 
 the graces, gifts and powers of expression, and 
 stood upon the highest pinnacle of oratorical 
 achievement. 
 
 Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were 
 the two greatest orators of their time, and proba- 
 bly of all time. Their power sprang from their 
 passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a 
 world filled with light and with happy human be- 
 ings. But for this divine passion neither would 
 have scaled the sublime heights of immortal 
 achievement. The sacred fire burned within them 
 and when they were aroused it flashed from their 
 eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents 
 of eloquence. 
 
 No man ever made a great speech on a mean 
 subject. Slavery never inspired an immortal 
 thought or utterance. Selfishness is dead to every 
 art. The love of truth and the passion to serve it 
 light every torch of real eloquence. 
 
 Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to 
 the practice of law for pay the divine fire within 
 them would have burned to ashes and they would 
 have died in mediocrity. 
 
 The highest there is in oratory is the highest 
 there is in truth, in honesty, in morality. All the 
 virtues combine in expressing themselves in beau- 
 tiful words, poetic phrases, glowing periods, and 
 moving eloquence. 
 
 The loftiest peaks rise from the lowest depths
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 21 
 
 and their shining summits glorify their hidden 
 foundations. 
 
 The highest eloquence springs from the lowliest 
 sources and pleads trumpet-tongued for the chil- 
 dren of the abyss. 
 
 Wendell Phillips was inspired by the scarred 
 back, the pleading eyes, and the mute lips of chat- 
 tel slavery and his tongue, eloquent with the light- 
 ning of Jehovah's wrath, became an avenging flame 
 to scourge the horror of slavery from the earth. 
 
 Denial of one's better self seals the lips or pol- 
 lutes them. Fidelity to conviction opens them and 
 truth blossoms in eloquence. 
 
 The tongue is tipped with the flame that leaps 
 from the altar-fire of the soul. 
 
 Ingersoll and Phillips were absolutely true to 
 their convictions. They attacked monstrous evils 
 and were hated and denounced. Had they yielded 
 to the furies which assailed them they would have 
 perished. But the fiercer the attacks upon them 
 the stauncher they stood and the more eloquent and 
 powerful they became. The truth fired their souls, 
 flashed from their eyes, and inspired their lips. 
 
 There is no inspiration in evil and no power 
 except for its own destruction. 
 
 He who aspires to master the art of expression 
 must first of all consecrate himself completely to 
 some great cause, and the greatest cause of all is 
 the cause of humanity. He must learn to feel 
 deeply and think clearly to express himself elo- 
 quently. He must be absolutely true to the best 
 there is in him, if he has to stand alone.
 
 22 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Such natural powers as he may have should be 
 cultivated by the study of history, science and lit- 
 terature. He must not only keep close to the peo- 
 ple but remember that he is one of them, and not 
 above the meanest. He must feel the wrongs of 
 others so keenly that he forgets his own, and re- 
 solve to combat these wrongs with all the power at 
 his command. 
 
 The most thrilling and inspiring oratory, the 
 most powerful and impressive eloquence is the voice 
 of the disinherited, the oppressed, the suffering and 
 submerged; it is the voice of poverty and misery, 
 of rags and crusts, of wretchedness and despair; 
 the voice of humanity crying to the infinite; the 
 voice that resounds throughout the earth and 
 reaches heaven; the voice that awakens the con- 
 science of the race and proclaims the truths that 
 fill the world with light and liberty and love. 
 
 JESUS, THE SUPREME LEADER. 
 
 Coming Nation (Formerly Progressive Woman), March, 1914. 
 
 It matters little whether Jesus was born at Naz- 
 areth or Bethlehem. The accounts conflict, but the 
 point is of no consequence. 
 
 It is of consequence, however, that He was born 
 in a stable and cradled in a manger. This fact of 
 itself, about which there is no question, certifies 
 conclusively the proletarian character of Jesus
 
 LABOB AND FREEDOM. 23 
 
 Christ. Had His parents been other than poor 
 working people money-changers, usurers, mer- 
 chants, lawyers, scribes, priests or other parasites 
 He would not have been delivered from His 
 mother's, womb on a bed of straw in a stable 
 among asses and other animals. 
 
 Was Jesus divinely begotten? Yes, the same as 
 every other babe ever born into the world. He was 
 of miraculous origin the same as all the rest of 
 mankind. The scriptural account of his "immacu- 
 late conception" is a beautiful myth, but scarcely 
 more of a miracle than the conception of all other 
 babes. 
 
 Jesus was not divine because he was less human 
 than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that 
 he was supremely human, and it is this of which 
 his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of 
 him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human 
 being. 
 
 The chronicles of his time and of later days are 
 filled with contradictory and absurd stories about 
 him and he has been disfigured and distorted by 
 cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by 
 ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their 
 blind bigotry and savage superstition, but there is 
 no impenetrable myth surrounding the personality 
 of Jesus Christ. He was not a legendary being or 
 an allegorical figure, but as Bouck White and others 
 have shown us, a flesh and blood Man in the ful- 
 ness of his matchless powers and the completeness 
 of his transcendent consecration. 
 
 To me Jesus Christ is as real, as palpitant and
 
 24 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 pervasive as a historic character as John Brown, 
 Abraham Lincoln or Karl Marx. He has persisted 
 in spite of two thousand years of theological emas- 
 culation to destroy his revolutionary personality, 
 and is today the greatest moral force in the world. 
 
 The vain attempt persisted in through twenty 
 centuries of ruling class interpolation, interpreta- 
 tion and falsification to make Jesus appear the 
 divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and 
 soother of the oppressed, instead of the master 
 proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social 
 whirlwind the vain attempt to prostitute the 
 name and teachings and example of the martyred 
 Christ to the power of Mammon, the very power 
 which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates 
 his transcendent genius and proclaims the immor- 
 tality of his work. 
 
 Nothing is known of Jesus Christ as a lad except 
 that at twelve his parents took him to Jerusalem, 
 where he confounded the learned doctors by the 
 questions he asked them. We have no knowledge 
 as to what these questions were, but taking his 
 lowly birth, his poverty and suffering into account, 
 in contrast with the riches of Jerusalem which now 
 dazzled bis vision, and in the light of his subsequent 
 career we are not left to conjecture as to the 
 nature of the interrogation to which the inquisitive 
 lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple. 
 
 There are but meagre accounts of the doings of 
 Jesus until at a trifle over thirty he entered upon 
 his public "ministry^' and began the campaign of 
 agitation and revolt he had been planning and
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 25 
 
 dreaming through all the years of his yearning 
 and burning adolescence. He was of the working 
 class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood 
 to the very hour of his death. He hated and de- 
 nounced the rich and cruel exploiter as passion- 
 ately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and 
 suffering victims. 
 
 "I speak not of you all; I know whom I have 
 chosen/' was his class-conscious announcement to 
 his disciples, all of whom were of the proletariat, 
 not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them. 
 No, not one ! It was a working class movement he 
 was organizing and a working class revolution he 
 was preparing the way for. 
 
 "A new commandment I give unto you : That ye 
 love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also 
 love one another/' This was the pith and core of 
 all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teach- 
 ing love one another, be brethren, make common 
 cause, stand together, ye who labor to enrich the 
 parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall 
 be free ! 
 
 These words were addressed by Jesus not to the 
 money-changers, the scribes and pharisees, the rich 
 and respectable, but to the ragged undesirables of 
 his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal 
 was to their class spirit, their class loyalty and 
 their class solidarity. 
 
 Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in 
 his famous manifesto and today it blazes forth in 
 letters of fire as the watchword of the world-wide 
 revolution : "Workers of all countries unite : you
 
 26 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a 
 world to gain." 
 
 During the brief span of three years, embracing 
 the whole period of his active life, from the time 
 he began to stir up the people until "the scarlet 
 robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he 
 was crucified between two thieves/' Jesus devoted 
 all his time and all his matchless ability and ener- 
 gies to the suffering poor, and it would have been 
 passing strange if they had not "heard him gladly." 
 
 He himself had no fixed abode and like the 
 wretched, motley throng to whom he preached and 
 poured out his great and loving heart, he was a 
 poor wanderer on the face of the earth and "had not 
 where to lay his head." 
 
 Pure communism was the economic and social 
 gospel preached by Jesus Christ, and every act and 
 utterance which may properly be ascribed to him 
 conclusively affirms it. Private property was to his 
 elevated mind and exalted soul a sacrilege and a 
 horror; an insult to God and a crime against man. 
 
 The economic basis of his doctrine of brother- 
 hood and love is clearly demonstrated in the fact 
 that under his leadership and teaching all his dis- 
 ciples "sold their possessions and goods, and parted 
 them to all men, as every man had nxed." and that 
 they "had all things in common." 
 
 "And they, continuing daily with one accord in 
 the temple, and breaking bread from house to 
 liouse, did eat their meat with gladness and single- 
 ness of heart." 
 
 This was the beginning of the mighty movement
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 2< 
 
 Jesus had launched for the overthrow of the empire 
 of the Caesars and the emancipation of the crushed 
 and miserable masses from the bestial misrule of 
 the Eoman tyrants. 
 
 It was above all a working class movement and 
 was conceived and brought forth for no other pur- 
 pose than to destroy class rule and set up the com- 
 mon people as the sole and rightful inheritors of 
 the earth. 
 
 "Happy are the lowly for they shall inherit the 
 earth." 
 
 Three short years of agitation by the incompar- 
 able Jesus was sufficient to stamp the proletarian 
 movement he had inaugurated as the most formid- 
 able and portentous revolution in the annals of 
 time. The ill-fated author could not long survive 
 his stupendous mischief. The aim and inevitable 
 outcome of this madman's teaching and agitation 
 was too clearly manifest to longer admit of doubt. 
 
 The sodden lords of misrule trembled in their 
 stolen finery, and then the word went forth that 
 they must "get" the vagabond who had stirred up 
 the people against them. The prototypes of Pea- 
 body, McPartland, Harry Orchard, et. al., were all 
 ready for their base and treacherous performance 
 and their thirty pieces of blood-stained silver. The 
 priest of the Mammon worshipers gave it out that 
 the Nazarene was spreading a false religion and 
 that his pernicious teachings would corrupt the peo- 
 ple, destroy the church, uproot the old faith, dis- 
 rupt the family, break up the home, and overthrow 
 society.
 
 28 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 The lineal descendants of Caiaphas and Judas 
 and the pharisees and money-changers of old are 
 still parroting the same miserable falsehood to serve 
 the same miserable ends, the only difference being 
 that the brood of pious perverts now practice their 
 degeneracy in the name of the Christ they betrayed 
 and sold into crucifixion twenty centuries ago. 
 
 Jesus, after the most farcical trial and the most 
 shocking travesty upon justice, was spiked to the 
 cross at the gates of Jerusalem and his followers 
 subjected to persecution, torture, exile and death. 
 The movement he had inaugurated, fired by his 
 unconquerable revolutionary spirit, persisted, how- 
 ever, through fire and slaughter, for three centuries 
 and until the master class, realizing the futility of 
 their efforts to stamp it out, basely betrayed it by 
 pretending conversion to its teachings and rever- 
 ence for its murdered founder, and from that time 
 forth Christianity became the religion, so-called, of 
 the pagan ruling class and the dead Christ was 
 metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who 
 was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into 
 the pious abstraction, the harmless theological di- 
 vinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could 
 be "washed in the blood of the lamb" and countless 
 generations of betrayed and deluded slaves kept 
 blinded by superstition and content in their pov- 
 erty and degradation. 
 
 Jesus was the grandest and loftiest of human 
 souls sun-crowned and God-inspired; a full-stat- 
 ured man, red-blooded and lion-hearted, yet sweet
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 29 
 
 and gntle as the noble mother who liad given him 
 birth. 
 
 He had the majesty and poise of a god, the pro- 
 phetic vision of a seer, the great, loving heart of a 
 woman, and the unaffected innocence and simplicity 
 of a child. 
 
 This was and is the martyred Christ of the work- 
 ing class, the inspired evangel of the downtrodden 
 masses, the world's supreme revolutionary leader, 
 whose love for the poor and the children of the 
 poor hallowed all the days of his consecrated life, 
 lighted up and made forever holy the dark tragedy 
 of his death, and gave to the ages his divine inspir- 
 ation and his deathless name. 
 
 SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A REMINISCENCE 
 
 Socialist Woman, January, 1909. 
 
 Twice only did I personally meet Susan B. 
 Anthony, although I knew her well. The first 
 time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in 
 1880, and the last time shortly before her death 
 at her home at Rochester, New York. I can 
 never forget the first time I met her. She im- 
 pressed me as being a wonderfully strong charac- 
 ter, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly 
 indifferent to criticism. 
 
 There was never a time in my life when I was 
 opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could
 
 30 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 never understand why woman was denied any right 
 or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early, 
 therefore, I was attracted to the woman suffrage 
 movement. I had of course read of Susan B. 
 Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with 
 which she was treated I concluded that she must 
 be a strong advocate of, and doing effective work 
 for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I de- 
 termined, with the aid of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, 
 the brilliant writer, who afterward became her 
 biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for 
 Miss Anthony at Terre Haute. 
 
 In due course of time I received a telegram 
 from Miss Anthony from Lafayette announcing 
 the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking 
 me to meet her at the station. I recognized the 
 distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the no- 
 torious woman, the instant she stepped from the 
 train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux 
 Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I 
 proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had 
 arranged for their reception. 
 
 I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly ex- 
 pressed for this magnificent woman. Even my 
 friends were disgusted with me for piloting such 
 an "undesirable citizen" into the community. It 
 is hard to understand, after all these years, how 
 bitter and implacable the people were, especially 
 the women, toward the leaders of this movement. 
 
 As we walked along the street I was painfully 
 aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision 
 and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 31 
 
 later I had often to defend my position,, which, of 
 course, I was ever ready to do. 
 
 The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co- 
 workers were but poorly attended and all but bar- 
 ren of results. Such was the loathing of the com- 
 munity for a woman who dared to talk in public 
 about "woman's rights" that people would not go 
 to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She 
 was simply not to be tolerated and it would not 
 have required any great amount of egging-on to 
 have excited the people to drive her from the com- 
 munity. 
 
 To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, 
 was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped 
 noticing it for there were those who thrust their 
 insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore 
 no resentment. 
 
 I can see her still as she walked along, neatly 
 but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat awry, 
 mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at 
 all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. 
 She seemed absorbed completely in her mission. 
 She could scarcely speak of anything else. The 
 rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely 
 possess her and to dominate all her thoughts and 
 acts. 
 
 On the platform she spoke with characteristic 
 earnestness and at times with such intensity as 
 to awe her audience, if not compel conviction. She 
 had an inexhaustible fund of information in re- 
 gard to current affairs, and dates and data for 
 all things. She spoke with great rapidity and
 
 32 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 forcef illness ; her command of language was re- 
 markable and her periods were all well-rounded 
 and eloquently delivered. No thoughtful person 
 could hear her without being convinced of her 
 honesty and the purity of her motive. Her face 
 fairly glowed with the spirit of her message and 
 her soul was in her speech. 
 
 But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she 
 possessed, was her moral heroism. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an emi- 
 nent degree. She fearlessly faced the ignorant 
 multitude or walked unafraid among those who 
 scorned her. She had the dignity of perfect self- 
 reliance without a shadow of conceit to mar it. 
 She was a stern character, an uncompromising per- 
 sonality, but she had the heart of a woman and 
 none more tender ever throbbed for the weak 
 and the oppressed of earth. 
 
 No leader of any crusade was ever more fear- 
 less, loyal or uncompromising than Susan B. An- 
 thony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly 
 or under greater difficulties for the good of her 
 kind and for the progress of the race. 
 
 I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook 
 hands with her at the close of my address in 
 Rochester, but a short time before she passed to 
 other realms. She was the same magnificent wom- 
 an, but her locks had whitened and her kindly 
 features bore the traces of age and infirmity. 
 
 Her life-work was done and her sun was set- 
 ting !
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 33 
 
 How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity 
 of her sunset ! 
 
 Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs 
 the bitter cup of persecution, but now she stood 
 upon the heights, a sad smile lighting her sweet 
 face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the 
 plaudits of the world. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself 
 to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in 
 the highest sense and her name deserves a place 
 among the highest on the scroll of the immortals. 
 
 LOUIS TIKAS LUDLOW'S HERO AND 
 MARTYR. 
 
 Appeal to Reason, September 4, 1915. 
 
 "And now that the cloud settled upon Saint Antoine 
 which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred 
 countenance, the darkness of it was heavy cold, dirt, 
 sickness, ignorance and want, were the lords in waiting 
 on the saintly presence nobles of great power all of 
 them; but most especially the last. Samples of a people 
 that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in 
 the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which 
 ground old people young, shivered at every corner. . . . 
 The mill which had worked them down was the mill that 
 grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces 
 and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown 
 faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and coming 
 up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent every- 
 where. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in 
 the wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and 
 lines; hunger was patched into them with straw and rags 
 and wood and paper; hunger was repeated in every 
 modicum of fire-wood that the man sawed off; hunger 
 stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started 
 up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its 
 refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription 
 on the baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his 
 scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausagre-shop, in every
 
 34 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger 
 rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in 
 the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atoms in 
 every farthing of husky chips of potato, fried with some 
 reluctant drops of oil. 
 
 "Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A 
 narrow winding street, full of offense and stench, with 
 other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by 
 rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and night- 
 caps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon 
 them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people 
 there was yet some wild- beast thought of the possibility 
 of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they 
 were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor 
 compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor 
 foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope 
 they mused about enduring or inflicting." A Tale of Two 
 Cities. 
 
 In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted 
 the picture of poverty and its starving victims in 
 France on the eve of the French revolution, and 
 yet, "every wind that blew over France shook the 
 rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine 
 of song and feather took no warning." Then the 
 storm broke and the pent-up furies were unleashed ; 
 the day of reckoning had come at last and the 
 crimes of the centuries, inflicted without mercy 
 upon the long-suffering people, were wiped out in 
 the hearts' blood of their aristocratic and profligate 
 oppressors and despoilers. 
 
 The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter 
 ago in France fills uncounted pages in the world's 
 history, but its terrible warning to the lords of mis- 
 rule and despoilers of the people has been in vain. 
 Today as ever the greed and avarice of the ruling 
 class blind them to their impending fate and drive 
 them to their inevitable doom. 
 
 In the state of Colorado in "our own free Amer- 
 ica" the conditions that make for savage and bloody
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 35 
 
 revolution are ripening with incredible rapidity 
 and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon 
 the wall, but the Rockefellers and their capitalist 
 cohorts, stricken blind as the penalty of their in- 
 satiate greed, are unable to see it. 
 
 That the monstrous crime of Ludlow, the fiend- 
 ish destruction of the tented village, the wanton 
 killing of the homeless, hunted, hopeless victims 
 half-clad, famishing, terror-stricken and defense- 
 less bludgeoned, bullied, shot down like dogs, and 
 their wives and suckling babes roasted in pits be- 
 fore their eyes that this appalling massacre, with- 
 out a parallel in history, did not infuriate the suf- 
 fering and persecuted victims of capitalism's worse 
 than satanic ferocity, fire their blood with the tiger- 
 thirst for revenge, and drench the despotic and 
 shameless state with blood is one of the miracles 
 of patience and submissiveness of the exploited, 
 downtrodden, suffering masses. 
 
 The tragic story of Ludlow, the hideous night- 
 mare of the infernal regions of the Rocky (feller) 
 Mountains written in the violated wombs of 
 shrieking- mothers and the spattered life-drops of 
 their murdered babes has yet to be traced on his- 
 tory's ineffaceable pages. The blood of the twenty- 
 three innocents who perished there will be the 
 holy fount of the writer's inspiration whose fire- 
 tipped pen will give to the world this tragic and 
 thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the moun- 
 tain ramparts of Rockefellerado. 
 
 In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the in- 
 trepid leader, the loyal comrade, the noble-hearted
 
 36 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes in mili- 
 tary uniform while pleading that the women and 
 children be spared, takes on the robes of deity and 
 joins the martyrs and heroes of history. The rifle- 
 butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his 
 brave and tender heart gave his soul to the causo 
 he loved and his name to the ages. 
 
 The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause 
 he lived and died for goes on forever ! 
 
 Louis Tikas was educated, cultured and refined, 
 a graduate of the University of Athens; yea, he 
 was more than that, he was a MAN! His heart 
 was true as his brain was clear; he followed the 
 truth and he loved justice; he sided with the weak 
 and ministered to the suffering, even as his elder 
 brother had in the days when other pharisees cruci- 
 fied the Son of Man for loving his despoiled and 
 despised fellow-men. 
 
 Loy,is Tikas made Ludlow holy as Jesus Christ 
 made Calvary! 
 
 He was the loyal leader of the persecuted colony ; 
 the trusted keeper of the tented village. He was 
 loved by every man, woman and child, and feared 
 only by the fanged wolves and hyenas that threat- 
 ened to ravage the flock. 
 
 Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly 
 fearless yet without bravado, this great and loving 
 soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves of the pits 
 and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and 
 children of the village as a loving mother might 
 over the fledglings of her brood. 
 
 Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him,
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 37 
 
 and that in the hour of their deadly peril they 
 looked to him to shield them from their brutish 
 ravishers ? 
 
 In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to 
 the supreme stature of his noble manhood. He 
 knew his time had come and with a smile upon 
 his lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he 
 faced his cruel fate. He asked no quarter for 
 himself, but only begged that mothers and babes 
 be spared; and with this touching plea upon his 
 lips and the love of his people in his soul and beam- 
 ing from his eyes, he was struck down by the hired 
 assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to mar- 
 tyrdom and immortality. 
 
 THE LITTLE LORDS OF LOVE. 
 
 Progressive Woman, December, 1910. 
 
 The children are to me a perpetual source of 
 wonder and delight. How keen they are, how alert, 
 and how comprehending ! 
 
 The sweet children of the Socialist movement 
 the little lords of light and love keep my heart 
 warm and my purpose true. The raggedest and 
 dirtiest of them all is to me an angel of light. I 
 have seen them, the proletarian little folks, swarm- 
 ing up out of the sub-cellars and down from the 
 garrets of the tenements and I have watched them 
 with my heart filled with pity and my eyes over-
 
 38 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 flowing with tears. Their very glee seemed tragic 
 beyond words. 
 
 Born within the roar of the ocean their tiny feet 
 are never kissed by the eager surf, nor their wan 
 cheeks made ruddy by the vitalizing breezes of the 
 sea. 
 
 Not for them the flotsam and jetsam upon the 
 social tides are the rosy hours of babyhood, the 
 sweet, sweet joys of childhood. They are the heirs 
 of the social filth and disease of capitalism and 
 death marks them at what should be the dewy dawn 
 of birth, and they wither and die without having 
 been born. Their cradle is their coffin and their 
 birth robe their winding sheet. 
 
 The Socialist movement is the first in all history 
 to come to the rescue of childhood and to set free 
 the millions of little captives. And they realize it 
 and incarnate the very spirit of the movement and 
 shout aloud their joy as it marches on to victory. 
 
 The little revolutionists in Socialist parades 
 know what they are there for, and in our audiences 
 they are wide awake to the very last word. They 
 know, too, when to applaud, and the speaker whi, 
 fails to enthuse them is surely lacking in some vital 
 element of his speech. 
 
 At the close of a recent meeting in a western 
 state the stage was crowded with eager comrades 
 shaking hands and offering congratulations. My 
 hand was suddenly gripped from below. I glanced 
 down and a little comrade just about big enough 
 to stand alone looked straight up into my eyes and 
 said with all the frankness and sincerity of a child :
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 39 
 
 "That was a great speech you made and I love you ; 
 keep this to remember me by." And he handed 
 me a little nickle-plated whistle, his sole tangible 
 possession, and with it all the wealth of his pure 
 and unpolluted child-love, which filled my heart 
 and moved me to tears. 
 
 In just that moment that tiny proletaire filled 
 my measure to overflowing and consecrated me 
 with increased strength and devotion to the great 
 movement that is destined to rescue the countless 
 millions of disinherited babes and give them the 
 earth and all the fulness thereof as their patrimony 
 forever. 
 
 The sweetest, tenderest, most pregnant words ut- 
 tered by the proletaire of Galilee were: "Suffer 
 little children, and forbid them not, to come unto 
 me ; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 THE COPPOCK BROTHERS: HEROES OF 
 HARPER'S FERRY. 
 
 Appeal to Reason, May 23, 1914. 
 
 "O, patience, felon of the hour! 
 
 Over thy ghastly gallows-tree 
 Shall climb the vine of Liberty, 
 
 With ripened fruit and fragrant flower." 
 
 So wrote William Dean Howells, then a rising 
 young poet and author in Columbus, Ohio, in 
 November, 1859, on the eve of John Brown's ex- 
 ecution at Charleston, Va. In the month before. 
 on the night of October 16th, John Brown, at
 
 40 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 the head of twenty-one men, sixteen of whom were 
 white and five black, marched on Harper's Ferry 
 and delivered the attack that sent his body to the 
 gallows and his soul to immortal glory. 
 
 The heroic blood of old Brown himself flowed 
 in the veins of all his twenty-one intrepid young 
 followers. There was not a coward among them. 
 Three of them were Brown's own sons and two 
 others were near relatives. 
 
 Brown was fifty-nine; his adjutant general 
 twenty-four. All his followers were young men, 
 some of them barely of age. 
 
 When Colonel Eichard J. Hinton, who followed 
 John Brown in Kansas, heard of the intended raid 
 on Harper's Ferry, he said to Kagi, the stripling 
 adjutant general:" "You'll all be killed." "Yes, 
 I know it, Hinton," was the ready reply, "but the 
 result will be worth the sacrifice." 
 
 Kagi was said to resemble "a divinity student 
 rather than a warrior," and when taunted by an 
 adversary, he answered, "We will endure the 
 shadow of dishonor, but not the stain of guilt." 
 
 "These words of John Henry Kagi," wrote 
 Hinton, "expressed the spirit of John Brown's men 
 and, in an especial sense, the character of the 
 young and brilliant man who fell riddled with bul- 
 iets into the Shenandoah. Thirty miles below, the 
 blood-tinged stream flowed through the lands of 
 his father's family." 
 
 Spartan souls were these who inarched on Har- 
 per's Ferry that fateful night, there to strike a 
 blow at the cost of their lives that was destined to
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 41 
 
 make Harper's Ferry more famed than Waterloo 
 a blow that was to emancipate a race and change 
 abruptly the whole current of American history. 
 
 ''Down the still road, dim white in the moon- 
 light, and amid the chill of the October night, 
 went the little band, silent and sober." 
 
 The twenty-one young heroes who followed old 
 Jo 1m Brown on that historic night were of the 
 exalted type that Emerson described : "When souls 
 reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept 
 a knowledge and motive without selfishness." 
 
 It is related that when Garibaldi was organizing 
 his army of liberation in Italy, he was asked what 
 inducements he had to offer to new recruits. 
 Promptly the rebel chieftain answered: "Poverty, 
 hardships, battles, wounds, and victory !" 
 
 That was all Captain Brown had to offer his 
 devoted followers, with crushing defeat instead of 
 victory at the end, and yet they enlisted with a 
 zeal that could not have been surpassed if the 
 world's most coveted prizes had been their prom- 
 ised reward. 
 
 Think of the utter abnegation, unselfishness and 
 loftiness of purpose of that valiant little band who 
 marched deliberately into the jaws of hell that 
 October night to break the fetters of a despised 
 and alien race ! How many of their detractors and 
 persecutors were animated by motives so pure and 
 exalted ? 
 
 No wonder that Victor Hugo protested so elo- 
 quently, albeit in vain, against John Brown's ex- 
 ecution. 'Think of a republic," he indignantly
 
 42 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 exclaimed, "murdering a liberator !" and when the 
 bloody deed was done the illustrious Frenchman 
 flung back the prophetic challenge: "The time 
 will come when your John Brown will be greater 
 than your George Washington." 
 
 Among Brown's men in the attack on Harper's 
 Ferry there were two Quaker brothers, Edwin and 
 Barclay Coppock, stalwart young abolitionists from 
 Iowa, whose unfaltering devotion to the cause, he- 
 roic self-sacrifice and tragic death constitute one 
 of the most thrilling and inspiring chapters in 
 American history. 
 
 Edwin, the elder brother, was captured with his 
 leader and shared his fate on the gallows. Barclay 
 made good his escape with Owen Brown, to be 
 killed later as a lieutenant, while recruiting a 
 regiment for the war which had then actually be- 
 gun. 
 
 Edwin and Barclay Coppock were born of 
 Quaker parents near Salem, Ohio, Edwin on June 
 30, 1835, and Barclay on January 4, 1839, so that 
 Edwin was 24 and Barclay not quite 21 when the 
 attack was made on Harper's Ferry. 
 
 Salem was at that time the center of abolition- 
 ism in that section. It was settled by Quakers 
 and they were strongly anti-slavery in sentiment. 
 The headquarters of the "Western Anti-Slavery 
 Society" was located here, and here also was pub- 
 lished the "Anti-Slavery Bugle," official organ of 
 the movement, of which Benjamin S. Jones, Oliver 
 Johneon and Warren E. Robertson were editors 
 They waged uncompromising warfare against slav-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 43 
 
 ery, attacked the United States constitution as it 
 was then being interpreted, and denounced the 
 churches that would not corne out openly in favor 
 of abolition. They were called "Disunion Aboli- 
 tionists," "Covenanters" and ''Infidels." But noth- 
 ing daunted, they demanded the unconditional 
 surrender of the slave power. 
 
 During one of the annual conventions held at 
 the Hicksite Friends' church in Salem and in the 
 midst of a violent speech that was being delivered 
 against the encroachments of slavery on Northern 
 soil under the fugitive slave law, an excited man 
 entered with a telegram in his hand and announced 
 breathlessly that the four o'clock train, due in 
 thirty minutes, had aboard of it a southern man 
 and his wife and a colored slave girl as a nurse. 
 It was at once proposed that they proceed to the 
 depot in a body and meet the train on arrival. 
 The meeting was hastily adjourned. Intense en- 
 thusiasm prevailed. They marched to the depot 
 cheering as they went and when the train pulled 
 in they boarded it, took the slave girl without pro- 
 test from her master and mistress and marched 
 back to the hall with her in triumph. The liber- 
 ated girl was christened Abby Kelly Salem, in 
 honor of Abby Kelly Foster, one of the speakers 
 at the convention, and the city of Salem. The 
 girl grew up to splendid womanhood and was high- 
 ly esteemed by all who knew her. 
 
 The old town hall, still standing, is where many 
 an anti-slavery meeting was held in that day. The 
 most stirring and eloquent appeals were made in
 
 44 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 this old meeting house by such noted abolitionists 
 as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, 
 Susan B. Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, Horace 
 Mann, John Pierpont, Gerrit Smith, Fred Doug- 
 las, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Owen 
 Lovejoy, Abby Kelly Foster, George Thompson of 
 England, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Collyer, 
 John P. Hale and many others. 
 
 The walls of the old town hall resounded daily 
 and nightly with the patriotism and love of free- 
 dom of Quaker Salem. 
 
 It was in this atmosphere and under the in- 
 fluence of these impassioned teachings that the 
 Coppock brothers, sons of a nearby Quaker farmer, 
 grew up to young manhood. It had been in- 
 grained into their very nature that all men were 
 created equal and that slavery was a crime against 
 God and man, and with this conviction they re- 
 solved to shoulder their muskets and go out and 
 fight to liberate the slaves. 
 
 The family moved to Iowa in the meantime and 
 it was here that these young Quaker enthusiasts 
 first met John Brown, who was then waging his 
 warfare against slavery in the free soil conflict 
 in that state. From now on their die was cast. 
 They would follow the grim old chief to victory 
 or death. It proved to be death for them both 
 and when it came they met it with a calmness 
 and resignation possible only to the loftiest hero- 
 ism. 
 
 Barclay Coppock was barely twenty years of age 
 at the time of the attack on Harper's Ferry. His
 
 LABOE AND FREEDOM. 45 
 
 escape was almost a miracle. A heavy reward was 
 offered for him dead or alive. After weeks of the 
 most intense privation and suffering, lying con- 
 cealed in the brush during the day and moving 
 chiefly by night, he picked his way back to the 
 family home at Springdale, Iowa, The governor 
 of Virginia issued a requisition for his return, 
 which was not granted. The young men at Spring- 
 dale and that vicinity organized to protect young 
 Coppock and served notice on the Virginia officers 
 who were on his track that ''Springdale is in arms 
 and is prepared at a half hour's notice to give 
 them a reception of 200 shots." 
 
 In the following spring Barclay returned to 
 Salem and here again the Virginia authorities re- 
 newed their efforts to capture him. But Barclay, 
 now among his old neighbors and friends, defied 
 them. He sent word to the officers in pursuit of 
 him as to where he might be found, but they wisely 
 refrained from attempting to take him. 
 
 It was at this time that Barclay was a guest 
 of the Bonsall family of Salem, the elder Bonsall 
 being one of the leading abolitionists of that day. 
 Charles Bonsall, his son, who still lives at Salem, 
 knew the Coppock brothers well and has a distinct 
 recollection of Barclay's stay at his father's home. 
 
 "During Barclay's sojourn at our home," writes 
 Charles Bonsall in a personal letter, "a detective of 
 Salem heard of his being in our neighborhood and 
 boasted of his intention to arrest Barclay and se- 
 cure the reward there was on his head. Barclay 
 heard of the boast and wrote a letter to the de-
 
 48 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 tective informing him that he might select five 
 other men and he would meet them all single- 
 handed and alone at any point outside the city that 
 he might name, and they could have the privilege 
 of capturing him and securing the reward. The 
 detective did not undertake the job. . . . Bar- 
 clay Coppock never knew what fear was. When a 
 boy in his teens he often went to the woods and 
 slept alone all night on the ground, under the 
 trees, from the sheer love of adventure. He was 
 the best shot with his eight-inch Colt I ever saw. 
 On one occasion, in his uncle's woods south of 
 Salem, with his revolver, he shot a grey squirrel 
 from a big oak tree and put two more balls through 
 its body before it reached the ground. His nerves 
 were as calm and steady in a fight as in his sleep, 
 and while with us his trusted "navy" was always 
 strapped under his coat, while in his coat-pocket 
 he carried a small pistol ready for any emergency 
 at close quarters. It would have been impossible 
 to capture him alive/' 
 
 Barclay Coppock's escape and the execution of 
 his brother but intensified his hatred and horror of 
 slavery. He was now thoroughly aroused and in- 
 tent upon plunging anew into the fight. Return- 
 ing to Iowa, and convinced that civil war was now 
 inevitable, he prepared actively for the conflict. 
 
 "Now comes one of those remarkable facts of su- 
 per-epochal history," continues Bonsall, "which go 
 to show that when revolutionary periods focalize, 
 revolutions in public sentiment are brought about 
 in almost a twinkling. In the spring of 1861, just
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 47 
 
 about one year from the time the United States 
 Government was offering a reward of one thousand 
 dollars for Barclay Coppock, dead or alive, the 
 same government lifted its hat and humbly bowed 
 to him, and begged him to accept a first lieuten- 
 ant's commission in Company C, Third Kansas 
 volunteers. He accepted the coin mission and at 
 once proceeded to organize his company. Captain 
 Allen of Ashtabula of the same company., came to 
 Salem to recruit volunteers and the writer,, to- 
 gether with half a score of other abolition boys, en- 
 listed in Coppock's company. . . . Soon after 
 Lieutenant Coppock was on his way from Spring- 
 dale to Fort Leavenworth to join his regiment 
 there. The rebels in Missouri, hearing of his com- 
 ing, burned the railroad bridge across the Little 
 Platte river near St. Joseph, and the train carry- 
 ing the troops was precipitated into the river in 
 the darkness of night and brave Lieutenant Cop 
 pock was killed in the wreck." 
 
 Thus perished, still in his boyhood, as heroic a 
 heart, as noble a soul, as ever gave up his life in 
 the cause of freedom. Had he been spared he 
 would without doubt have become one of the famed 
 heroes of the war of the rebellion. 
 
 Edwin Coppock was executed from the same gal- 
 lows as his old chief, but two weeks later. His 
 trial, like that of Brown, was a farce. Conviction, 
 sentence and execution of all of Brown's men that 
 were captured was a foregone conclusion. 
 
 While awaiting the execution of his sentence,
 
 48 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Edwin wrote to Mrs. Brown,, wife of his dead 
 leader : 
 
 "I was with your sons when they fell. Oliver 
 lived but a very few moments after he was shot. He 
 spoke no word, but yielded calmly to his fate. 
 Watson was shot at ten o'clock Monday morning 
 and died about three o'clock Monday afternoon. 
 ' , . . . After we were taken prisoners he was 
 placed in the guardhouse with me. He complained 
 of the hardness of the bench on which he was ly- 
 ing. I begged hard for a bed for him, or even a 
 blanket, but could obtain none. I took off my coat 
 and placed it under him and held his head in my 
 lap, in which position he died without a groan or 
 struggle." 
 
 In a letter to friends in Iowa, under date of No- 
 vember 22d, three weeks before his execution, he 
 wrote : 
 
 "Eleven of our little band are sleeping now in 
 their bloody garments with the cold earth above 
 them. Braver men never lived ; truer men to their 
 plighted word never banded together." 
 
 Rigidly true to their convictions were all these 
 young heroes. Not one showed the white feather 
 in the last hour. Serenely and without a quiver 
 each of them met his cruel fate. 
 
 John Brown had trained up his men in the 
 strictest discipline. Not a drop of liquor was al- 
 lowed in his camp. Tobacco was tabooed. Profane 
 language was forbidden. 
 
 These men weir in deadly earnest and their as- 
 ceticism attested their single-hearted fidelity to
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 49 
 
 their cause. They were profoundly convinced that 
 slavery was a national crime and that it was their 
 patriotic duty, at whatever cost, to wipe that insuf- 
 ferable stigina from the land. 
 
 And who shall say that they were not right; or 
 that they forfeited their brave lives in vain ? 
 
 A few days before the gallows claimed him., John 
 Brown wrote to his family, "I feel no conscious- 
 ness of guilt and I am perfectly certain that very 
 soon no member of the family will feel any possible 
 disposition to blush on my account." 
 
 The Coppock brothers were typical of all the 
 brave young abolitionists who banded together to 
 strike a blow that rocked this nation as if Jehovah 
 in his wrath had laid hold on it. Quaker lads, 
 "grave, quiet, reserved, even rustic in their ways," 
 they lived bravely up to their convictions and 
 sealed their devotion to the cause of freedom with 
 their precious young life blood. 
 
 The noble character of Edwin Coppock is re- 
 vealed in the following pathetic letter written to 
 his uncle on the eve of his execution. There is no 
 bitterness in his heart at the last hour. Like the 
 great Galilean who also perished for sympathizing 
 with the lowly and oppressed, he was calm and re- 
 signed in the presence of his fate. Like all such 
 souls he was gifted with prophetic vision, as his 
 letter shows : 
 
 Charleston, December 13, 1859. 
 Joshua Coppock: 
 
 My Dear Uncle I seat myself by the stand to 
 write for the first and last time to thee and thy 
 dear family. Though far from home and over- 
 taken by misfortune, I have not forgotten you. 
 Tour generous hospitality towards me, during my
 
 50 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 short stay with you last spring, is stamped in- 
 delibly upon my heart, and also the generosity 
 bestowed upon rny brother who now wanders, an 
 outcast from his native land. But thank God, he 
 is free. I am thankful it is I who has to suffer 
 instead of him. 
 
 The time may come when he will remember me. 
 And the time may come when he may still further 
 remember the cause in which I die. Thank God 
 the principles of the cause in which we were 
 engaged will not die with me and my brave com- 
 rades. They will spread wider and wider and 
 gather strength with each hour that passes. The 
 voice of truth will echo through our land, bring- 
 ing conviction to the erring and adding members 
 to the glorious army who will follow its banner. 
 The cause of everlasting truth and justice will go 
 on conquering and to conquer until our broad and 
 beautiful land shall rest beneath the banner of 
 freedom. I had fondly hoped to live to see the 
 principles of the Declaration of Independence fully 
 realized. I had hoped to see the dark stain of 
 slavery blotted from our land, and the libel of our 
 boasted freedom erased, when we can say in truth 
 that our beloved country is the land of the free 
 and the home of the brave; but that cannot be. 
 
 I have heard my sentence passed; my doom is 
 sealed. But two more short days remains for me 
 to fulfill my earthly destiny. But two brief days 
 between me and eternity. At the expiration of 
 those two days I shall stand upon the scaffold to 
 take by last look of earthly scenes. But that 
 scaffold has but little dread for me, for I hon- 
 estly believe I am innocent of any crime justify- 
 ing such punishment. But by the taking of my 
 life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is 
 but hastening on that glorious day, when the slave 
 will rejoice in his freedom and say, "I, too, am a 
 man, and am groaning no more under the yoke 
 of oppression." 
 
 But I must now close. Accept this short scrawl 
 as a remembrance of me. Give my love to all the 
 familv. Kiss little Joey for me. Remember me 
 to aH my relatives and friends. And now fare- 
 well for the last time. 
 
 From thy nephew, TCDWTN COPPOCK. 
 
 Two days later the slave state of Virginia hung 
 Edwin Coppock by the neck until he was dead. The 
 gallant John E. Cook went to the scaffold with 
 him. The account says : 
 
 "After the cap had been placed on their heads, 
 Coppock turned toward Cook and stretched for-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 51 
 
 ward his hand as far as possible. At the same time 
 Cook said, 'Stop a minute where is Edwin's 
 hand?' They then shook hands cordially and 
 Cook said, 'God bless you.' The calm and collected 
 manner of both was very marked. . . . They 
 both exhibited the most unflinching firmness, say- 
 ing nothing, with the exception of bidding fare- 
 well to the ministers and the sheriff." 
 
 More than half a century has passed since John 
 Brown and his faithful followers gave up their 
 lives to set the black men free, but history has yet 
 to do them justice. Some day the hatred and 
 prejudice will all have died away and then these 
 men, summoned to the bar of enlightened judg- 
 ment, will be crowned as the greatest heroes in 
 American history. 
 
 THE SOCIAL SPIRIT. 
 
 Appeal to Reason. 
 
 We need to grow out of the selfish, sordid, brutal 
 spirit of individualism which still lurks even in 
 Socialists and is responsible for the strife and con- 
 tention which prevail where there should be con- 
 cord and good will. The social spirit and the so- 
 cial conscience must be developed and govern our 
 social relations before we shall have any social revo- 
 lution. 
 
 If there are any among whom the social spirit
 
 52 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 should find its highest expression and who should 
 be bound fast in its comradely embrace and give to 
 the world the example of its elevating and human- 
 izing influence, it is the Socialists. They of all 
 others have come to realize the hardening and bru- 
 talizing effect of capitalist individualism in the 
 awful struggle for existence and it is to them a 
 cause of unceasing rejoicing that they live at a 
 time in the world's historic development when the 
 very conditions which resulted from this age-long 
 struggle forbid its continuance and proclaim its 
 approaching termination. 
 
 The rule of individualism which has governed 
 society since the days of primitive communism has 
 effectually restrained the moral and spiritual de- 
 velopment of the race. It has brought out the 
 baser side of men's nature and set them against 
 each other as if the plan of creation had designed 
 them to be mortal enemies. 
 
 Typical capitalists are barren of the social spirit. 
 The very nature of the catch-as-catch-can encounter 
 in which they are engaged makes them wary and 
 suspicious, if not downright hateful of each other, 
 and the latent good that is in them dies for the 
 want of incentive to express itself. 
 
 The other day I saw two such capitalists shake 
 hands. It was pitiable. Their hearts had no part 
 in the purely perfunctory ceremony. They hap- 
 pened to meet and could not avoid each other. And 
 so they mechanically touched each other's reluctant 
 hands, standing at right angles to each other for
 
 L<LBOR AND FREEDOM. 53 
 
 a moment not face to face and then passing on 
 without either looking the other in the eyes. 
 
 This cold and heartless ceremony typified the 
 relation begotten of capitalist individualism in 
 which men's interests are competitive and antago- 
 nistic and in which each instinctively looks out 
 for himself and is on the alert to take every pos- 
 sible advantage of his fellow-man. 
 
 The result of this system is inevitably a race 
 of Ishmaelites. 
 
 How differently two Socialist comrades shake 
 hands ! Their hearts are in their palms and the 
 joy of greeting is in their eyes. They have the 
 social spirit. Their interests are mutual and their 
 aspirations kindred. If one happens to be strong 
 and the other weak, the stronger shares the weak- 
 ness and the weaker shares the strength of his 
 comrade. The base thought of taking a mean ad- 
 vantage, one of the other, does not darken their 
 minds or harden their hearts. They are joined 
 together in the humanizing bonds of fellowship. 
 They multiply each other and they rejoice in 
 their comradely kinship. The best there is in each, 
 and not the worst, as in the contact of individual- 
 ism, is appealed to and brought forth for the bene- 
 fit of both. 
 
 What an elevating, enlarging and satisfying re- 
 lation ! 
 
 And this is the "dead level" of mediocrity and 
 servitude to which we are to sink when this rela- 
 tion becomes universal among men as it will in the 
 International Socialist Republic !
 
 54 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 So at least we are told by those who in the pres- 
 ent system have acquired the instincts and impulses 
 of animals of prey in the development of their 
 imagined superiority by draining the veins and 
 wrecking the lives of their vanquished competitors, 
 but we are not impressed by the virtues of the sys- 
 tem of which they stand as the shining examples. 
 * * * * 
 
 Thru all the ages past men, civilized men, 
 so-called, have been at each other's throats in the 
 struggle for existence, and the spirit of individul- 
 ism this struggle has begotten, the spirit of hard, 
 sordid, brutal selfishness, has filled this world with 
 unutterable anguish and woe. 
 
 But at last the end of the reign of anarchistic 
 individualism is in sight. The social forces at 
 work are undermining and destroying it and soon 
 its knell will be sounded to the infinite joy of an 
 emancipated world. 
 
 The largest possible expression of the social 
 spirit should be fostered and encouraged in the So- 
 cialist movement and among Socialists themselves. 
 In spite of the hindrances which beset us in our 
 present environments and relations, we may yet cul- 
 tivate this spirit assiduously to our increasing mu- 
 tual good and to the good of our great movement. 
 
 In our propaganda, in the discussion of our 
 tactical and other differences and in all our other 
 activities, the larger faith that true comradeship 
 inspires should prevail between us. We need to be 
 more patient, more kindly, more tolerant, more 
 sympathetic, helpful and encouraging to one an-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 55 
 
 other, and less suspicious, less envious, and less con- 
 tentious, if we are to educate and impress the peo- 
 ple by our example, and by the effect of our teach- 
 ings upon ourselves win them to our movement, 
 and realize our dream of universal freedom and 
 social righteousness. 
 
 ROOSEVELT AND HIS REGIME. 
 
 Appeal to Reason, April 20, 1907. 
 
 The only time in my life I ever saw Theodore 
 Roosevelt was years before he became president 
 of the United States. I was aboard of a train 
 in the far west, where Roosevelt was then said to 
 be following ranch life, and as he and several 
 companions in cowboy costume entered the car 
 at a station stop, he wa*s pointed out to me. I 
 did not like him. The years since have not altered 
 that feeling of aversion except to accentuate it. 
 
 I have since seen the nation mad with hero 
 worship over this man Roosevelt, but I have not 
 been impressed by it. Very "great" men some- 
 times shrivel into very small ones and finally van- 
 ish in oblivion in the short space of a single gen- 
 eration. 
 
 The American people are more idolatrous than 
 any "heathen" nation on earth. They worship 
 their popular "heroes," while they last, with pas- 
 sionate frenzy, and with equal madness do they
 
 56 LABOR AXD FREEDOM. 
 
 hunt down the sane "fools" who vainly try to 
 teach them sense. Theodore Eoosevelt and George 
 Dewey as "heroes" and Wendell Phillips and John 
 Brown as "fools" are notable illustrations. Amer- 
 ican history is filled with them. 
 
 But my personal dislike of the cowboy in imita- 
 tion who has since become president, however 
 justifiable, would scarcely warrant a public attack 
 upon his official character, and this review, being 
 of such a nature, is inspired, as will appear, by 
 entirely different motives. 
 
 There are those, and they constitute a great 
 majority of the American people, who stand in 
 awe of their president, supposedly their servant, 
 but in fact their master; they speak of him with 
 a kind of reverential adulation as a lordly per- 
 sonage, a superior being to be looked up to and 
 worshiped rather than a fellowman to be respected 
 and loved. There are others who betray equal 
 ignorance in a more vulgar fashion by coarse ti- 
 rades for which there is often as little excuse a? 
 there is for the extreme adulation. 
 
 Regarding the president of the United States, 
 as I do, simply as a citizen and fellowman, the 
 same as any other, I shall speak of him and his 
 acts free alike from awe and malice, and if I place 
 him in the public pillory, where he has placed so 
 many others, to be seen and despised of men, it will 
 be from a sense that his official acts, so often in 
 flat denial of his profession, merit the execration 
 of honest men. 
 
 In arraigning President Roosevelt and his ad-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 57 
 
 ministration I have no piivate spite nor personal 
 grudge to satisfy, but an obligation to redeem and 
 a principle to vindicate. 
 
 I shall go about it as I would any other moral 
 duty, asking no favors and prepared to accept all 
 consequences. 
 
 In the first place, I charge President Roosevelt 
 with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that 
 ever occupied the executive seat of the nation. 
 His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted 
 moral courage the bluff of a bully and his "square 
 deal" a delusion and a sham. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore 
 Roosevelt and incidentally for such others a? are 
 also for the same distinguished gentleman, first, 
 last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery 
 politician, swollen purple with self-conceit: he is 
 shrewd enough to gauge the stupdity of the masses 
 and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero wor- 
 ship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is 
 that in superlative degree. 
 
 Only a few days ago he appeared in a charac- 
 teristic role. Rushing into the limelight, as nec- 
 essary to Kim as breath, he shrieked that he and 
 "Root" were "horrified" because of certain scandal- 
 ous and revolting charges made by oneof his own 
 former political chums. Of course, he and "Root" 
 of Tweed fame, the foxiest "fixer" of them all, 
 were "horrified" because of the shock to their po- 
 litical virtue, but it so happened that the horror 
 took effect only when they found themselves un- 
 covered. The taking of Harriman's boodle for
 
 58 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 corruptly electing him president and the use of 
 the stolen insurance funds for the same criminal 
 purpose did not "horrify" the president and 
 "Root," nor would they be "horrified" yet if they 
 had not been caught red-handed in the act with 
 the booty upon their persons. 
 
 The cry of the exposed malefactor and all his 
 pack of yelpers that he is the victim of a "plot" 
 by his own friends and supporters, the very gentle- 
 men (sic) who furnished him with free special 
 trains, paid his campaign expenses and in fact 
 bought the presidency for him, is so palpably false 
 as to be absolutely ridiculous and only brings into 
 bolder relief the hypocrisy and fraud it was de- 
 signed to conceal. 
 
 This much is preliminary to the extraordinary 
 official conduct of the president which has "hor- 
 rified" not only its victims but millions of others, 
 and now prompts this review and protest. 
 
 Something over a year ago Charles Moyer, Wil- 
 liam Haywood and George Pettibone, of Colorado, 
 leading officials of the Western Federation of Min- 
 ers, were overpowered and kidnaped by a gang of 
 thugs and torn from their families at night by 
 conspiracy of two degenerate governors and an- 
 other notorious criminal acting for the Mine and 
 Smelter Trust, one of the most stupendous aggre- 
 gations of force and plunder in all America. 
 
 Every decent man and woman was "horrified" 
 by this infamy and the whole working class of the 
 nation cried out against it. 
 
 Was Roosevelt also "horrified"?
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 59 
 
 Yes! 
 
 Because the Mine and Smelter Trust had kid- 
 naped three citizens of the republic? 
 
 Oh, no ! 
 
 The three citizens were only working cattle and 
 he never had any other conception of them. 
 
 He was "horrified" because the Mine and Smel- 
 ter Trust, unclean birds that feather their nests, 
 especially in Colorado, with legislatures and United 
 States senatorships, had not killed instead of kid- 
 naping their victims. 
 
 Then and there Theodore Roosevelt disgraced 
 himself and his high office, and his cruel and cow- 
 ardly act will load his name with odium as long as 
 it is remembered. 
 
 The Mine and Smelter Trust had put up the 
 funds and used its vast machinery for Roosevelt, 
 and now Roosevelt must serve it even to the extent 
 of upholding criminals, approving kidnaping and 
 murdering its helpless victims. 
 
 When Roosevelt stepped out of the White House 
 and called Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone mur- 
 derers, men he had never seen and did not know; 
 men who had never been tried, never convicted and 
 whom every law of the land presumed innocent 
 until proven guilty, he fell a million miles beneath 
 where Lincoln stood, and there he grovels today 
 with his political crimes, one after another, find- 
 ing him out and pointing at him their accusing 
 fingers. 
 
 No president of the United States has ever de-
 
 60 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 scended to such depths as has Roosevelt to serve 
 his law-defying and crime-inciting masters. 
 
 The act is simply scandalous and without a par- 
 allel in American history. 
 
 What right has Theodore Roosevelt to prejudge 
 American citizens, pronounce their guilt and hand 
 them over to the hangman ? In a pettifogging law- 
 yer such an act would be infamous; in the presi- 
 dent of the nation it becomes monstrous and stag- 
 gers belief. 
 
 All that Roosevelt knows about Moyer, Haywood 
 and Pettibone he knows from his friends, their 
 kidnapers. 
 
 The millions of working men and women, em- 
 bracing practically ever labor union in America, 
 count for nothing with him. He is not now stand- 
 ing for their votes. He is fulfilling his obligation 
 to the gentlemen ( !) who put up the coin that 
 elected him; paying off the mortgage they hold 
 upon his administration. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt is swift to brand other men 
 who even venture to disagree with him as liars. 
 He, according to himself, is immaculate and in- 
 fallible. 
 
 The greatest liar is he who sees only liars in 
 others. 
 
 When Theodore Roosevelt, president of the 
 
 United States, denounced Charles Moyer, William 
 Haywood and George Pettibone as murderers, he 
 uttered a lie as black and damnable, a calumny as 
 foul and atrocious as ever issued from a human 
 throat. The men he thus traduced and vilified,
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. (il 
 
 sitting in their prison cells for having dutifully 
 served their fellow-workers and having spurned the 
 bribes of their masters, transcend immeasurably the 
 man in the White House, who, with the cruel mal- 
 evolence of a barbarian, has pronounced their doom. 
 
 A thousand times rather would I be oue of those 
 men in Ada county jail than Theodore Roosevelt 
 in the White House at Washington. 
 
 Had these men accepted, with but a shadow of 
 the eagnerness Roosevelt displayed, the debauching 
 funds of the trust pirates, they would not now 
 languish in felons' cells. 
 
 The same brazen robbers of the people and cor- 
 rupters of the body politic who put Moyer, Hay 
 wood and Pettibone in jail, also put Theodore 
 Roosevelt in the White House. 
 
 This accounts for his prostituting the high office 
 Lincoln honored and resorting to methods that 
 would shame a Bowery ward-heeler. 
 
 Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone are not mur- 
 derers ; it is a ghastly lie, and I denounce it in the 
 name of law and in the name of justice. I know 
 these men, these sons of toil; I know their hearts, 
 their guileless nature and their rugged honesty. 
 I love and honor them and shall fight for them 
 while there is breath in my body. 
 
 Here and now I challenge Theodore Roosevelt. 
 He is guilty of high crimes and deserves impeach- 
 ment. 
 
 Let him do his worst. I denounce him and defy 
 him. 
 
 During my recent visit at Washington I learned
 
 62 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 from those who know him what they think of 
 Roosevelt. Among newspaper men he is literally 
 despised. Their true feeling is not apparent in 
 what they write, for they know that the slightest 
 offense to the president is lese majeste and means 
 instantaneous decapitation. 
 
 For the second time, Theodore Roosevelt, presi- 
 dent of the United States, has now publicly con- 
 victed Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. He has 
 not pronounced condemnation upon Harry Thaw, 
 or any rich man charged with murder. He has, 
 however, made a postmaster of a man at Chicago 
 charged by the Chicago Tribune with having shot 
 another man in a midnight brawl over disreputa- 
 ble women, and then used his influence to make the 
 same man mayor of that city. 
 
 Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, the three work- 
 ingmen kidnaped by the Mine and Smelter Trust, 
 have now been in jail fourteen months; they have 
 not been tried, but twice condemned by President 
 Roosevelt, the last time but a few days ago, in con- 
 nection with Harriman, his former political pal 
 and financial backer. These men are in prison 
 cells, their bodies in manacles and their lips sealed. 
 They cannot speak for themselves. They are voice- 
 less and at the mercy of calumny. No matter how 
 grossly outraged, they must submit. 
 
 For a man clothed with the almost absolute pow- 
 er of a president to strike down men gagged and 
 bound, as these men are, he must have an unspeak- 
 ably brutal and cowardly nature, just such a nature 
 as the governor of an empire state must have to
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. <)3 
 
 turn a deaf ear to the agonizing entreaties of a 
 shrieking, shuddering woman and see her dragged 
 into the horrors of electrocution. 
 
 The true character of this man is being gradu- 
 ally revealed to the American people. He has 
 never been anything but an enemy of the working 
 class. He joined a labor organization purely as a 
 demagogue. In all his life he never associated with 
 working people. His writings, before he became 
 a politician, show that he held them in contempt. 
 When he entered political life he soon learned how 
 to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and 
 have his press agent do the rest, and it was this 
 species of demagoguery, the very basest conceiv- 
 able, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and 
 gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart 
 despised as an inferior race. 
 
 In his book on "Ranch Life and the Hunting 
 Trail," page 10, written long before he entered 
 politics, Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for 
 those who toil. After describing cowboys when 
 "drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier 
 towns/' he closes with this comparison, which 
 needs no comment: "They are much better fel- 
 lows and pleasanter companions than small farmers 
 or agricultural laborers ; nor are the mechanics and 
 workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the 
 same breath." 
 
 The pretended friendship for the great body of 
 workingmen who are not to be compared to drunken 
 cowboys has served its demogogical purpose, but 
 the final chapter is not yet written. There will be
 
 64 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 an awakening, and every official act of Theodore 
 Roosevelt will be subjected to its searching scru- 
 tiny. He has always been on the side of capital 
 wholly, while pretending the impossible feat of serv- 
 ing both capital and labor with equal fidelity, and 
 only the deplorable ignorance of his dupes has 
 applauded him in that hypocritical role. 
 
 The anthracite miners, or their children at least, 
 will some day know that it was President Theodore 
 Roosevelt who handed them over to the coal trust 
 with a gold brick for a souvenir, labeled "Arbi- 
 tration." 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an auto- 
 crat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily 
 detected. He belongs to the "upper crust" and at 
 the very best he can conceive of the working class 
 only as contented wage-slaves. And no one knows 
 better than he how easily these slaves are duped 
 and how madly they will cheer and follow a cheap 
 and showy "hero." 
 
 The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was 
 made president by the industrial captains and the 
 robbers in general of the working class. They 
 picked him for a winner and he has not failed 
 them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by 
 trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is es- 
 sentially the monarch of a trust administration. 
 
 If this be denied, Roosevelt is challenged to an- 
 swer if it was not the railroad trust that furnished 
 him gratuitously with the special trains that bore 
 him in royal splendor over all the railways of the 
 nation. He is challenged to publish the list of
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 65 
 
 contributors to his political sewer funds, amount- 
 ing to millions of dollars, and freely used to buy 
 the votes that made him president. 
 
 Did, or did not, the men known as trust mag- 
 nates put up this boodle? Boodle drawn from the 
 veins of labor? 
 
 Will Mr. Eoosevelt deny it? 
 
 Did he not know at the time that his man Cor- 
 telyou was holding up the trusts for all they would 
 "cough up" for his election? 
 
 Will he dare plead ignorance to intelligent per- 
 sons as to who put up the money that debauched 
 the voters of the nation ? 
 
 It is true that a spasm of virtuous indignation 
 seized him when he found that the trusts had 
 slipped the lucre into his slush funds when he was 
 not looking, but this was only after he saw the 
 people looking behind the curtain. Then he 
 bounded to the foot-lights and denounced Alton B. 
 Parker as a liar for charging that the trusts were 
 furnishing the boodle to make him president, but 
 no man not feeble-minded was deceived as to who 
 was the liar. 
 
 Read the Washington press dispatch in the Kan- 
 sas City Journal of April 4th: "It was declared 
 in banking circles that light could be shed on the 
 question of campaign contributions in 1904 if the 
 books of the national Republican committee were 
 thrown open." 
 
 The books will not be thrown open. Roosevelt 
 will not allow it; he knows they contain the damn- 
 ing evidence of his guilt.
 
 66 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 The case is clearly stated in the platform of the 
 Democratic state convention of Missouri, adopted 
 in 1906, which reads as follows: 
 
 "We believe Theodore Roosevelt insincere. Pre- 
 tending to inveigh against the crimes of trusts and 
 corporations, he openly defended Paul Morton, 
 when, as manager of the Santa Fe railroad, he was 
 compelled to confess enormous rebates to the Colo- 
 rado Fuel and Iron Company. It was Roosevelt 
 who advanced the pernicious doctrine that you 
 must punish the corporation, not its officials who 
 cause it to commit crime. It was Roosevelt who 
 denounced large campaign contributions, while his 
 secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the 
 corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds 
 ever known in the history of American politics." 
 
 President Roosevelt may shout "liar" until he 
 turns as black in the face as are the cracksmen at 
 heart who burglarized the safes of the New York 
 insurance companies to land him in the White 
 House, while he was toying with the names of 
 "Jimmy" Hyde and Chauncey Depew as pawns in 
 the corrupt game, but the "damned spot" will not 
 out until the whole truth is known and the whole 
 crime expiated. 
 
 The publication of the Roosevelt-Harriman cor- 
 respondence places the president in his true colors 
 before the American people. It explains his hot 
 haste in condemning Moyer, Haywood and Petti- 
 bone to the gallows and pending Taft to Idaho to 
 assure the smelter trust and warn the protesting 
 people that the kidnaping of the workingmen was
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 67 
 
 sanctioned by the White House and would have the 
 support of the national administration. 
 
 A more shameful perversion of public power 
 never blackened the pages of history. 
 
 This national scandal shows up the president's 
 two-faced character so clearly and convincingly 
 that it leaves not so much as a pin-hole for escape. 
 It is a damning indictment of not only the presi- 
 dent, but the whole brood of plutocrats, promoters 
 and grafting politicians who have been looting this 
 nation for years. 
 
 There is one among these illuminating epistles 
 which I want to burn in the minds of the work- 
 ing class dupes who have been bowing in the dust 
 before this blustering bully of the White House: 
 "Personal. 
 
 "October 1, 1904.- My Dear Mr. Harriman : A 
 suggestion has come to me in a round-about way 
 that you do not think it wise to come to see me 
 in these closing weeks of the campaign, but that 
 you are reluctant to refuse, inasmuch as I have 
 asked you. Now, my dear sir, you and I are prac- 
 tical men, and you are on the ground and know 
 the conditions better than I do. 
 
 "If you think there is any danger of your visit 
 to me causing trouble, or if you think there is noth- 
 ing special I should be informed about, or any mat- 
 ter in which I could give aid, why, of course, give 
 up the visit for the time being, and then, a few 
 weeks hence, before I write my message, I shall 
 get you to come down to discuss certain govern-
 
 68 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ment matters not connected with the campaign. 
 With great regards, sincerely yours, 
 
 (Signed) "THEODOKE KOOSEVELT." 
 
 Does not this brand the president with the du- 
 plicity of a Tweed and the cunning of a Quay? 
 
 Would a president who is honest with the peo- 
 ple clandestinely consort with the villain he char- 
 acterizes as a liar and all that is vicious? 
 
 The disclosures made in the secret correspond- 
 ence strip the president of the last shred of decep- 
 tion with which to cloak his perfidy. The mask 
 is lifted and the exposure is complete. It is in 
 the president's own handwriting in a letter to 
 Harriman that would never have seen the light had 
 not circumstances forced it upon the attention of 
 a betrayed people. It is adroitly phrased, but its 
 meaning is not in doubt. He knew Harrimon then 
 as he knows him now; wanted his boodle and in- 
 sinuatingly coaxed him to sneak to the White 
 House when no one was looking, and only after he 
 was discovered did he denounce Harriman as a 
 liar and fall into his usual fit of moral epilepsy. 
 
 From now on there will be a sharp decline in 
 the stock of Theodore Koosevelt. The capitalist 
 papers may continue to boom him as the only savior 
 and his corps of press agents at the White House 
 may continue to grind out three-column stories 
 about the awful conspiracy of his "trusty" friends 
 to ruin him, but his bubble is pricked and the cheap 
 glory in which he reveled is departing forever. 
 
 The people have been sadly deceived for a time, 
 but the march of events is opening their eyes.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. G9 
 
 Only the very ignorant and foolish believe that 
 a president who has surrounded himself with Wall 
 Street darlings as cabinet ministers has any serious 
 designs on the trusts. 
 
 The Ryan, Boot and Roosevelt combination Is 
 ideal. It speaks for itself, and with such shining 
 lights as Taft, Cortelyou, Knox and Paul Morton 
 surrounding it, all lingering doubt is removed, and 
 the fools' paradise is in the full blaze of its glory. 
 
 Space will not permit a review of the personnel 
 of the president's official family, at least two of 
 whom, had the law been enforced, would now be 
 in penitentiary. 
 
 The story of President Roosevelt and Paul Mor- 
 ton, if truthfully told, would make a luminous 
 chapter in railroad rascality and political jobbery. 
 It was to this notorious strike-breaker and self- 
 confessed criminal that Roosevelt issued a bill of 
 moral rectitude long as Pope's essay that landed 
 him into the eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year insur- 
 ance graft he now holds down. 
 
 There is in this "promotion" the very climax 
 of the irony of boodle. 
 
 Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on 
 the C. B. & Q., and reared a monument to theft 
 at Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime 
 all the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific, 
 is fit, indeed, to be the cabinet associate and con- 
 fidential chum of a president who puts him at the 
 head of the company whose funds were stolen to 
 buy his election. 
 
 William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it
 
 70 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 is easy to understand why Roosevelt has decided to 
 make this illustrious son his successor as president 
 of the United States and is now grooming him 
 with the patronage of the national administration. 
 Taft is a man after Eoosevelt's own heart. Among 
 his early acts as a judge he fined the bricklayers of 
 Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a 
 strike; he was next whirled to Toledo by special 
 train and ordered by the Toledo, Ann Arbor and 
 North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction 
 binding and gagging its striking engineers and 
 firemen and locking their leader up in jail and he 
 complied with alacrity. From that time on it has 
 been smooth sailing for the accommodating judge 
 and there is not a bloated plutocrat in the land 
 who would not hail with joy the election of William 
 Taft as president ; he would be almost as acceptable 
 to these vultures as Roosevelt himself. 
 
 The manner in which President Roosevelt ma- 
 nipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative 
 offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends 
 of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but 
 will receive due attention later on. The case of 
 ex-Senator Burton is an instance in point. Other 
 senators had taken thousands in similar cases to 
 Burton's paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton 
 was marked by Roosevelt for refusing to crook the 
 knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless 
 ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars. 
 
 The president did not have a call to "go after" 
 his old friends, Chauncey Depew and Thomas
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 71 
 
 Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see crime 
 punished and criminals jailed. 
 
 When Roosevelt was making his continental 
 campaign in the palatial special trains furnished 
 free by the railroad trust he stopped at Abilene, 
 Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and 
 opened his speech there in these words : "I am 
 glad to be at the home of the senior senator from 
 Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet hi? 
 neighbors and friends. I want to say that no 
 man in this world has done more, and I had almost 
 said, as much, to place me where I am now, than 
 your distinguished senator." 
 
 Fine way the president had of showing his grati- 
 tude. Burton should have known better and taken 
 warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to 
 a man something is going to happen. "My dear" 
 is then due to be metamorphosed with startling 
 suddenness into an "atrocious liar." 
 
 Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self- 
 appointed central luminary in the solar system. All 
 others must be contented with being fire-flies. He 
 must violate all traditions and smash all precedents. 
 He is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He 
 must have the center of the stage and hold the un- 
 divided attention of the audience. Any stunt will 
 do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a 
 prize-fighter or a "gun-man" is always good for 
 an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to 
 Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery 
 of cameras and a squad of artists and reporters is 
 good for thousands of columns about the marvel-
 
 72 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 cms virility and fertility of the greatest president 
 since Washington. He is followed with minute 
 and eager details as he darts from cellar to roof, 
 inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression, 
 throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches 
 a bite from a workingman's pail, shakes hands with 
 a startled section man and is off like a flash to look 
 after some other section of the planet that it may 
 not drop out of its shining orbit. 
 
 Mighty savior of the human race ! 
 
 Such is Theodore Eoosevelt, the president who 
 condemns workingmen as murderers when they are 
 objectionable to the trusts that control his admin- 
 istration. 
 
 Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will 
 cheerfully certify to Eoosevelt as the anointed of 
 the Lord. And this will make another interesting 
 chapter for a later review : a chapter that will deal 
 with Ireland as the political as well as spiritual 
 adviser of "Jim" Hill and the Great Northern, and 
 of court decisions awarding him thousands of acres 
 of land and making of the alleged follower of the 
 Tramp of Galilee a multi-millionaire; a chapter 
 that will tell of a high priest sounding the political 
 keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for 
 a promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a 
 land of freedom in which the state and church are 
 absolutely divorced. 
 
 Only a few of the facts about Eoosevelt and hi? 
 regime have been here ptated, but enough to satisfy 
 all honest men that Theodore Roosevelt is ike. 
 Friend of the Enemies and the Enem-y of the 
 Friends of this Republic.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 73 
 
 INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. 
 
 American Socialist, May 27, 1915. 
 
 First of all, allow me to quote with approval the 
 following paragraph from "An Introduction to 
 Sociology" by Arthur Morrow Lewis : "* * * 
 the greatest single achievement of the science of so- 
 ciology is the concept of society, not as a collection 
 of institutions., and sociology as an explanatory 
 catalog or inventory after the fashion of Spen- 
 cer, but as a process of development, and the sci- 
 ence of sociology as the analysis and explanation of 
 the process." 
 
 Also the following from an essay on Eevolution 
 by George D. Herron : "Every revolution or true 
 reform, every new and commanding faith, is in 
 the direction of man's becoming his own evolver 
 and creator. Every uplifting light or law perforces, 
 in the place of the evolution that is blind and 
 chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and hu- 
 manly directed." 
 
 There is still room for reform and betterment in 
 the present social system, but this is of minor con- 
 sequence compared to the world's crying need for 
 industrial and social reorganization. 
 
 The next great change in history will be, must 
 be, the socialization of the means of our common 
 life. 
 
 Privately owned industry and production for in- 
 dividual profit are no longer compatible with social 
 progress and have ceased to work out to humane 
 and civilized ends.
 
 74 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 With all its marvelous progress through inven- 
 tion and discovery and all its monumental achieve- 
 ments in the arts and sciences, this poor world of 
 ours -has not yet learned how to feed itself. That 
 is the problem of problems now confronting us 
 more and more insistently and until that is solved 
 the world is halted and it will either resume its 
 march toward industrial and social democracy or 
 be shaken to its foundations and into possible 
 chaos by violent explosion. 
 
 There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for 
 a hungry being. All the laws, all the materials 
 and all the forces are at hand and easily available 
 for the production of all things needed to provide 
 food, raiment and shelter for every man, woman 
 and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and 
 misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock 
 and sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted 
 civilization. But these tools and materials and 
 forces must be released from private ownership and 
 control, socialized, democratized, and set in opera- 
 tion for the common good of all instead of -the pri- 
 vate profit of the few. 
 
 It is well stated, "that civilization is at present 
 rudimentary, and that it is to develop indefinitely." 
 
 l^ow, in view of the fact that the crops this year 
 (1914) are the most abundant ever produced, that 
 there is no market for the almost sixteen million 
 bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the 
 same time there are millions of unemployed in the 
 land who are without food and without clothing
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 75 
 
 and who, with their wives and children, are doomed 
 to indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn 
 and indisputable fact it would seem that there could 
 be but one opinion among students and thinkers 
 as to the one great, vital and essential thing to 
 do for the relief of our common humanity and for 
 the promotion of the world's progress and civiliza- 
 tion, and that that one thing is the one to be 
 emphasized with all the power at our command. 
 
 A privately owned world can never be a free 
 world and a society based upon warring classes 
 cannot stand. 
 
 Such a world is a world of strife and hate and 
 such a society can exist only by means of militarism 
 and physical force. 
 
 The education of the people, not the few alone, 
 but the entire mass in the principles of industrial 
 democracy and along the lines of social develop- 
 ment is the task of the people to he emphasized 
 and that task let it be impressed upon them can 
 be performed only by themselves. 
 
 The cultured few can never educate the uncul- 
 tured many. All history attests the fact that all 
 the few have ever done for the many is to keep 
 them in ignorance and servitude and live out of 
 their labor. 
 
 To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, 
 better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, 
 and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual 
 kindness and good will, based upon mutual inter-
 
 76 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ests, is to render real service to the cause of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 To quote Herron once more: 
 
 "Socialism is a deliberate proposal to lay the 
 will of man upon the unfolding processes and ends 
 of nature and history. It invokes the faith that 
 shall be equal to the acceptance of its proposal 
 of its supreme challenge to the universe." 
 
 A MESSAGE TO THE CHILDREN. 
 
 Campaign Leaflet, National Campaign, 1912. 
 
 The Socialist party is the only party that has the 
 children at heart; the only party that takes them 
 into its confidence ; the only party that has a mes- 
 sage for them in a campaign year. 
 
 In my travels about the country I have met 
 many thousands of little children and their fresh 
 and eager faces have always given me joy and their 
 merry voices have filled me with delight and made 
 me stronger for my work. 
 
 These children are not yet old enough to join the 
 Socialist party and have an active part in its 
 great work, but they are old enough to understand 
 why their parents belong to it, and why they are 
 pround of their card of membership, and of the red 
 button they wear, to show that they are socialists 
 and that as socialists they are working hand in 
 hand with thousands and thousands of others to
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 77 
 
 change things so that this world may be a better, 
 kinder and sweeter world for us all to live in. 
 
 Now let me talk directly as 1 may to the more 
 than thirty millions of children and young folks 
 in our country who are less than eighteen years of 
 age. I fancy I can see them all spread out in all 
 directions, far as the eye can reach, and farther and 
 farther still to the very shores of the seas and lakes 
 and gulf that bound our western continent. 
 
 What a wonderful audience I am about to ad- 
 dress ! Not a grown person in it. Only children. 
 Millions of them and all eager to hear the message- 
 that socialism has to offer to the child-world. 
 
 My dear little children, I am sure you will un- 
 derstand me when I say that in speaking to you 
 of socialism I feel very near to all of you and I 
 know you will believe me when I tell you that 1 
 would if I could make you all happy and keep you 
 sweet and loving toward each other all your lives. 
 
 Most of you are the children of the poor, some 
 of the well-to-do, and a few of the rich, but all of 
 you are the children of the same Father and all of 
 you are sisters and brothers in the same great 
 family of humankind. 
 
 If any of you feel that you are better than others 
 because you wear better clothes or live in better 
 houses or go in what you think is "better society," 
 it is because your young minds and hearts have 
 been tainted by wrong example and wrong educa- 
 tion. It is this wicked feeling that corrupts the 
 conscience and hardens the heart and begets the
 
 78 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 envy and hate of our fellow-beings, instead of their 
 love and good will. 
 
 When that best friend the children ever had on 
 earth said, "Suffer little children and forbid them 
 not, to come unto me; for such is the kingdom of 
 heaven" he meant all children, poor and rich, but 
 especially the poor. He loved and pitied them be- 
 cause of their poverty and suffering. 
 
 He himself had been born in a manger and when 
 he was grown up he said sorrowfully that "he had 
 not where to lay his head." He did not despise 
 little children because the}' were poor and neg- 
 lected and shabbily dressed but he loved them all 
 the more; and as he looked down upon them his 
 heart melted with compassion and the tears of ten- 
 derness filled his eyes: and then he became grave 
 and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as he 
 thought of those who sat in rich church pews and 
 piously thanked the Lord that they were not as 
 other people. He denounced them as hypocrites for 
 pretending to be religious while they robbed the 
 poor and turned the little children into the street 
 to suffer hunger and fall into evil ways. 
 
 Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the 
 suffering poor heard with gladness the message of 
 the Lowly Xazarene and since he was moved to 
 tears by the sight of the little children of the 
 street, but the world has not yet learned the mean- 
 ing of his tender and touching words, "Suffer little 
 children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; 
 for of such is the kingdom of heaven." If he were 
 to walk the streets of New York or Chicago, or
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 79 
 
 Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities when: 
 the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves 
 as he once walked the streets of .Jerusalem he 
 would grow sick at heart as he saw the little ones 
 he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to 
 monstrous machines and slowly put to death to 
 swell the profits of the greedy mill owners who sit 
 in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the phari- 
 sees he scourged without mercy twenty centuries 
 ago. 
 
 The children of the working people have always 
 been poor because the world has never been just. 
 For ages and ages those who have build ed the 
 houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun 
 the wool, woven the cloth, supplied the food we 
 eat and the clothes we wear, and furnished the 
 homes we live in, have been the poor and despised, 
 while those who profited by their labor and con- 
 sumed the good things they produced, have been 
 the rich and respectable. 
 
 Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered 
 the poverty of his class and when he grew up it 
 was not the rich and respectable, but the poor and 
 despised who loved him, and opened their arms to 
 receive him, and heard gladly his tender and com- 
 forting ministrations. He was one of them in pov- 
 erty and suffering and in all his loving anrl sell- 
 denying life he never forgot them. Had he de- 
 serted the poor from whom he sprang, had he gone 
 over to the rich as their preacher, or their judge, 
 or their lawyer or teacher or scribe as so many 
 of his pretended followers have done and are still
 
 80 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 doing he never would have been crucified, nor 
 would the world today know that he had ever lived. 
 
 It was because, and only because, Jesus loved and 
 served the poor and rebuked the rich who robbed 
 them, and threatened to array them against their 
 rich despoilers, that he was condemned to die and 
 that the cruel nails were driven into his hands and 
 feet on the cross at Calvary. 
 
 Jesus taught that the earth and the air and the 
 sea and sky and all the beauty and fulness thereof 
 were for all the children of men ; that they should 
 all equally enjoy the riches of nature and dwell to- 
 gether in peace, bear one another's burdens and 
 love one another, and that is what socialism teaches 
 and why the rich thieves who have laid hold of the 
 earth and its bounties would crucify the socialists 
 as those other robbers of the poor crucified Jesus 
 two thousand years ago. 
 
 Now let us see what message the Socialist party 
 has for the children and why all children should be 
 socialists and help to speed the day when the 
 brotherhood of socialism shall prevail throughout 
 the earth. 
 
 But first let me say that the Socialist party has 
 reason to know that the children have great influ- 
 ence when they become interested in a given work 
 and set their hearts on doing that work. The So- 
 cialist party knows better than to ignore the chil- 
 dren as if they were china dolls or stuffed teddy 
 bears, as all the other parties do, for it knows by 
 what they have already done that when once they 
 get fairly started they will make the air hum like
 
 LABOK AND FREEDOM. 81 
 
 swarms of bees with the glad tidings of socialism. 
 
 The little boys and girls who have already be- 
 come socialists are among the busiest workers for 
 our party and they love so well to work for social- 
 ism that it is play to them and fills their hearts 
 with joy. They wear the red button and they know 
 why it is red and what its meaning is; they tack 
 up bills and distribute dodgers advertising our 
 meetings ; they sell tickets, take up collections, act 
 as ushers, provide the soap-box for the corner 
 speaker, carry chairs for the women so they may 
 sit in comfort after their day's work, go around 
 among the neighbors and remind them of the meet- 
 ing and not to forget to attend, sell socialist books, 
 papers and pamphlets, and do a score of other 
 things which are just as useful in their way as the 
 speech of the orator that wins the applause of the 
 people. 
 
 Now the Socialist party is the only party in the 
 world that wants to put an end once and forever 
 to all kinds of child labor and to have it so that all 
 children, white and black, without a single excep- 
 tion, shall be allowed to grow up in the free air, 
 \ritfi plenty of time for mirth and play; that they 
 shall all have decent homes to live in, comfortable 
 beds to sleep in, plenty of good food to eat, plenty 
 of good clothes to wear and that when they reach 
 the proper age they shall go to school and college 
 and continue their course until they have obtained 
 a sound and practical education. Then they will 
 have strong, healthy bodies, trained minds and 
 skilled hands, and not only enter cheerfully upon
 
 82 LABOK AND FREEDOM. 
 
 the duties of life, but be certain of making it a suc- 
 cess. 
 
 If you listen to the old fogies who still belong 
 to the parties their grandfathers did and who have 
 not moved an inch from their grandfathers' graves, 
 they will tell you that socialists are foolish people 
 and that what they propose never can be done. 
 That is what the fogies of every age have always 
 said. They are the "wise" people who do things in 
 the same way that their dead grandparents did be- 
 fore them, who never change their minds, never 
 accept a new idea, never grow, and who are always 
 dead long before they are buried and forgotten the 
 day after the funeral. Whatever you may be I beg 
 of you not to be a fogy, nor to follow a fogy's 
 solemn advice. His brain has ceased to work if 
 it ever did work. He is mentally stagnant and 
 moss-covered and votes the same old ticket with no 
 more idea of what he is voting for than a wooden 
 Indian. 
 
 The Socialist party says there have got to be 
 some changes and has set about making them, or at 
 least getting ready to make them. It says that the 
 world is big enough for all the people that are in 
 it, with plenty of room to spare for groves and 
 parks and playgrounds; that there is land enough 
 to go around without crowding; that there are 
 farms enough, or can be easily provided, to raise 
 all we can eat, so that no child in all the world 
 need to go hungry ; that there is plenty of coal and 
 iron, oil and gas, gold and silver and other min 
 erals and metals, stored in the earth ; that there are
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 88 
 
 forests and mountains and water courses galore; 
 that there are mills and mines and factories and 
 ships and railways and telegraphs, and the power 
 supplied free by nature to run them all ; that there 
 are millions of men and women ready to do all the 
 work that may be required to build homes., raise 
 crops, bake bread and cake too weave cloth, 
 make clothes and everything else that is necessary 
 for everybody, and have time enough besides to 
 build schools and provide playgrounds for every 
 last one of the children, with plenty of toys thrown 
 in to make this earth a children's paradise. 
 
 Now why should not just these things come to 
 pass and why should not you children help us 
 speed the day when they shall come to pass ? 
 
 Everything you can possibly think of to make 
 this earth sweet and beautiful and to make life a 
 blessed joy for us all is within our reach. The 
 raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion 
 them into forms of beauty and use are at our 
 finger tips. We have but to put ourselves in har- 
 mony with nature and with one another to spread 
 far and wide the gospel of life and love and once 
 more hear "the sons of God shout for joy." 
 
 Socialists not only dream of the good day com- 
 ing when the world shall know that men are broth- 
 ers and that women are sisters to each other, but 
 they are at work with all their hearts and all their 
 heads and hands to make that dream come true. 
 
 If you want to know what the plans of the so- 
 cialists are in detail read their platform, attend 
 their lectures and study their literature.
 
 84 LABOtt AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Socialism is the greatest thing in all the world 
 today aiid the boys and girls of this generation 
 who will be remembered in the next are those who 
 are clear-eyed enough to see that socialism is com- 
 ing and are at the battle-front fighting bravely to 
 overcome the prejudice against it and to pave the 
 way for it so that it may come soon and in peace 
 and order. 
 
 Many of us who have been long in service will 
 not be here when the bells peal forth the joyous 
 tidings that socialism has triumphed and that the 
 people are free, but the children that now are will 
 live to see it and in the day of their rejoicing they 
 will not forget those who toiled without recom- 
 pense that they might live without dread of pov- 
 erty or fear of want. 
 
 As we look about us today we see that the world 
 is filled with suffering and despair and when we 
 come to look into the cause of it we find that it is 
 a reproach to us all. As I write the news comes 
 of the fierce battle that is being fought between ten 
 thousand hungry miners in West Virginia and the 
 thugs and ex-convicts and murderers armed by the 
 coal corporations to force the strikers back into 
 their dismal and hopeless pits. The battle has al- 
 ready lasted two days. Many on both sides have 
 been killed, but the capitalist papers are doing all 
 they can to hush it up. 
 
 Long ago the miners were evicted from the com- 
 pany's wretched hovels. They and their wives and 
 children live in tented fields and the brutal guards 
 have even driven the women and children from
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 85 
 
 there into the wilderness to starve that the strike 
 may be broken and the miners compelled to go back 
 to work at the terms of their greedy and heartless 
 masters. 
 
 And why is this awful battle raging and human 
 beings murdering each other as if they were wild 
 beasts? Because a few gluttonous slave owners 
 like Henry Gassaway Davis and the Watsons and 
 Elkinses who dwell in gorgeous palaces on vast 
 estates occupying whole mountain ranges, privately 
 own the mines and minerals which were intended 
 for all, and consequently the thousands of miners 
 and their wives and children are at their mercy, 
 and when they meekly asked for five per cent more 
 wages so their families would not suffer for bread 
 the brutal lords of the mines sent out their private 
 army of assassins to hunt them down and kill them 
 as if they were mad dogs. 
 
 The Socialist party says that those mines should 
 be owned by all the pople and that is what will 
 come to pass when the socialists get into power, and 
 then the green hills of West Virginia and other 
 states will no longer echo with the rifle shots of 
 corporation assassins, nor run red with the blood 
 of honest workingmen slain to appease the greed 
 of their soulless masters. 
 
 In February last, four boys were hanged in Chi- 
 cago. The oldest was twenty-one, the youngest 
 barely out of his childhood. They had held up and 
 robbed and murdered a poor truck farmer for the 
 little money he had on his person. Not one of 
 these boys ever had a decent home. They were
 
 86 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 born in poverty, reared in ignorance, and sur- 
 rounded by vice and filth. 
 
 This is cultivating crime and reaping the har- 
 vest. We socialists weep as we think of the cruel 
 fate of those four poor, friendless boys who died on 
 the gallows while they were still in their childhood, 
 because the world has not yet learned that there is 
 greater profit in raising children than there is in 
 raising hogs. 
 
 The frightful stories of the little children in the 
 mills of Lawrence and the cruel suffering they en- 
 dured is still fresh in the public memory. When 
 the poor and despairing mothers, their hearts 
 wrung with agony and their eyes blinded with 
 tears, attempted to save their children from starva- 
 tion by placing them in the keeping of sympathiz- 
 ing friends, they were beaten, insulted, and with 
 babies at their breasts thrown into jail, bleeding 
 and stunned, by the brutal police acting under or- 
 ders from the far more brutal mill owners. 
 
 The world will never know the suffering and ter- 
 ror these poor working people especially the 
 women and children had to endure for daring to 
 ask the millionaire mill owners for a pittance more 
 in return for their labor to keep the wolf of hunger 
 from their gloomy hovels. 
 
 When the Socialist party gets into power those 
 mills at Lawrence and all others like them will be 
 taken over by the people and operated for the good 
 of all, and then the workers will keep the wealth 
 they prod/uce for themselves, instead of turning it 
 over to the greedy mill bosses ; they will have decent
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 87 
 
 homes to live in, food in plenty on their tables, and 
 their children will go to school to be properly edu- 
 cated instead of to the mills to be ground into 
 profits to gorge their idle owners. 
 
 In March last, Mrs. L. F. Jellson of Salem, Ore- 
 gon, gave poison to each of her four little children, 
 her own offspring, because they were starving and 
 she was poor and had no way to get them bread. 
 She then poisoned herself and all she asked in the 
 note she left was that she and her darling children 
 be buried together. This poor heart-broken soul 
 was driven to destroy herself and her precious bab^ 
 because the world as it now is would not allow them 
 to live. 
 
 Think for just a moment of all the food there is 
 in the world and all there might be and then tell 
 me if socialists are wrong and foolish and wicked 
 for saying that the self-murder of this poor woman 
 and the murder of her children is a terrible crime 
 of which society is guilty and for which there is no 
 excuse on earth or in heaven. 
 
 A recent investigation showed that in the City 
 of St. Louis there are 16,000 young women who 
 receive as wage-earners less than $8 per week and 
 over 3,000 who receive from $3 to $4 per week. 
 
 It is easy to see from this why so many little- 
 girls and younger women are forced to enter upon 
 the path which leads to shame and sorrow and 
 which seldom bears the impress of returning foot- 
 steps. 
 
 When the giant Titanic met her fate, fifty little 
 bellboys went down with her to the bottom of the
 
 88 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 sea. They were ordered, according to the account, 
 to their regular posts in the main cabin and warned 
 by their captain not to get into the way of the 
 escaping passengers. James Humphries, as quar- 
 termaster and eye witness said, "throughout the 
 first hour of confusion and terror these lads sat 
 quietly on their benches. Not one of them at- 
 tempted to enter a lifeboat. Not one of them was 
 saved/' 
 
 Can you read this without being moved to tears ? 
 Brave, noble little lads ! I almost feel as if it had 
 been a privilege to go down with these great little 
 souls to their watery grave. 
 
 The little boys who perished here were poor boys, 
 many of them without fathers, and others obliged 
 to support widowed mothers and little brothers and 
 sisters younger than themselves. 
 
 What a lesson this touching, deeply pathetic in- 
 cident teaches and what a world of meaning there 
 is in the ?ad circumstances of their tragic death ! 
 
 Had they not been poor children, little waifs, 
 they would not have been locked in the cabin to 
 perish like rats. They Arould not, in fact, have 
 been there at all, and had it not been for the pride 
 and pomp, the greed and luxury that paraded the 
 upper deck, the Titanic never would have gone to 
 the bottom of the sea. 
 
 And now, my children, I must come to a close. 
 I have taken up much of your time, but I have only 
 been able to trace in barest outline what the So- 
 cialist party is organized for, what it aims to do, 
 and will do, and why the children, above all, should
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 89 
 
 vie with each other in helping it to grow and speed- 
 ing the happy day of its success. 
 
 When that day comes the rejoicing people will 
 realize that the kingdom of heaven, so long prayed 
 for, has been set up here on earth in the social 
 brotherhood of all mankind. 
 
 ..* 
 
 SOCIAL REFORM. 
 
 While there is a lower class I am in it; 
 While there is a criminal class I am of it ; 
 While there is a soul in prison I am not free. 
 
 DANGER AHEAD. 
 
 International Socialist Review, January, 1911. 
 
 The large increase in the Socialist vote in the 
 late national and state elections is quite naturally 
 hailed with elation and rejoicing by party mem- 
 bers, but I feel prompted to remark,, in the light 
 of some personal observations made during the 
 campaign, that it is not entirely a matter of jubila- 
 tion. I am not given to pessimism, or captious 
 criticism, and yet I cannot but feel that some of 
 the votes placed to our credit this year were ob- 
 tained by methods not consistent with the prin-
 
 90 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ciples of a revolutionary party, and in the long 
 run will do more harm than good. 
 
 I yield to no one in my desire to see the party 
 grow and the vote increase, but in my zeal I do not 
 lose sight of the fact that healthy growth and a 
 substantial vote depend upon efficient organization, 
 the self-education and self-discipline of the mem- 
 bership, and that where these are lacking, an in- 
 flated vote secured by compromising methods, can 
 only be hurtful to the movement. 
 
 The danger I see ahead is that the Socialist party 
 at this stage, and under existing conditions, is apt 
 to attract elements which it cannot assimilate, and 
 that it may be either weighted down, or torn 
 asunder with internal strife, or that it may become 
 permeated and corrupted with the spirit of bour- 
 geois reform to an extent that will practically de- 
 stroy its virility and efficiency as a revolutionary 
 organization. 
 
 To my mind the working class character and the 
 revolutionary integrity of the Socialist party are 
 of first importance. All the votes of the people 
 would do us no good if our party ceased to be a 
 revolutionary party, or came to be only incidentally 
 so, while yielding more and more to the pressure 
 to modify the principles and program of the party 
 for the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the 
 day of its expected triumph. 
 
 It is precisely this policy and the alluring prom- 
 ise it holds out to new members with more zeal 
 than knowledge of working class economics, that 
 constitutes the danger we should guard against
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 91 
 
 in preparing for the next campaign. The truth is 
 that we hare not a few members who regard vote- 
 getting as of supreme importance, no matter by 
 what method the votes may be secured, and this 
 leads them to hold out inducements and make rep- 
 resentations which are not at all compatible with 
 the stern and uncompromising principles of a revo- 
 v lutionary party. They seek to make the Socialist 
 propaganda so attractive eliminating whatever 
 may give offense to bourgeois sensibilities that it 
 serves as a bait for votes rather than as a means of 
 education, and votes thus secured do not properly 
 belong to us and do injustice to our party as well 
 as to those who cast them. 
 
 These votes do not express socialism and in the 
 next ensuing election are quite as apt to be turned 
 against us, and it is better that they be not cast 
 for the Socialist party, registering a degree of 
 progress the party is not entitled to and indicating 
 a political position the party is unable to sustain. 
 
 Socialism is a matter of growth, of evolution, 
 which can be advanced by wise methods, but never 
 by obtaining for it a fictitious vote. We should 
 seek only to register the actual vote of socialism, no 
 more and no less. In our propaganda we should 
 state our principles clearly, speak the truth fear- 
 lessly, seeking neither to flatter nor to offend, but 
 only to convince those who should be with us and 
 win them to our cause through an intelligent un- 
 derstanding of its mission. 
 
 There is also a disposition on the part of some 
 to join hands with reactionary trade-unionists in
 
 92 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 local emergencies and in certain temporary situa- 
 tions to effect some specific purpose, which may or 
 may not be in harmony with our revolutionary 
 program. No possible good can come from any 
 kind of a political alliance, express or implied, 
 with trade-unions or the leaders of trade unions 
 who are opposed to socialism and only turn to it 
 for use in some extremity, the fruit of their own 
 reactionary policy. 
 
 Of course we want the support of trade-unionists, 
 but only of those who believe in socialism and are 
 ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow 
 of capitalism. 
 
 The American Federation of Labor, as an organi- 
 zation, with its Civic federation to determine its 
 attitude and control its course, is deadly hostile to 
 the Socialist party and to any and every revolu- 
 tionary movement of the working class. To kow- 
 tow to this organization and to join hands with its 
 leaders to secure political favors can only result 
 in compromising our principles and bringing dis- 
 aster to the party. 
 
 Not for all the vote of the American Federation 
 of Labor and its labor-dividing and corruption 
 breeding craft-unions should we compromise one 
 jot of our revolutionary principles; and if we do 
 we shall be visited with the contempt we deserve 
 by all real Socialists, who will scorn to remain in 
 a party professing to be a revolutionary party of 
 the working class while employing the crooked and 
 disreputable methods of ward-heeling politicians to 
 attain their ends.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 93 
 
 Of far greater importance than increasing the 
 vote of the Socialist party is the economic organiza- 
 tion of the working class. To the extent, and only 
 to the extent, that the workers are organized and 
 disciplined in their respective industries can the 
 Socialist movement advance and the Socialist party 
 hold what is registered by the ballot. The election 
 of legislative and administrative officers, here and 
 there, where the party is still in a crude state and 
 the members economically and politically unfit to 
 assume the responsibilities thrust upon them as the 
 result of popular discontent, will inevitably bring 
 trouble and set the party back, instead of advanc- 
 ing it, and while this is to be expected and is to an 
 extent unavoidable, we should court no more of that 
 kind of experience than is necessary to avoid a 
 repetition of it. The Socialist party has already 
 achieved some victories of this kind which proved 
 to be defeats, crushing and humiliating, and from 
 which the party has not even now, after many 
 years, entirely recovered. 
 
 We have just so much socialism that is stable and 
 dependable, because securely grounded in econom- 
 ics, in discipline and all else that expresses class- 
 conscious solidarity, and this must be augmented 
 steadily through economic and political organiza- 
 tion, but no amount of mere votes can accomplish 
 this in even the slightest degree. 
 
 A vote for socialism is not socialism any more 
 than a menu is a meal. 
 
 Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped, 
 and the place to begin is in the industries where
 
 94 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 the workers are employed. Their economic power 
 has got to be developed through efficient organiza- 
 tion, or their political power, even if it could be de- 
 veloped, would but react upon them, thwart their 
 plans, blast their hopes, and all but destroy them. 
 
 Such organization to be effective must be ex- 
 pressed in terms of industrial unionism. Each in- 
 dustry must be organized in its entirety, embrac- 
 ing all the workers, and all working together in 
 the interests of all, in the true spirit of solidarity, 
 thus laying the foundation and developing the 
 superstructure of the new system within the old, 
 from which it is evolving, and systematically fitting 
 the workers, step by step, to assume entire control 
 of the productive forces when the hour strikes for 
 the impending organic change. 
 
 Without such economic organization and the 
 economic power with which it is clothed, and with- 
 out the industrial co-operative training, discipline 
 and efficiency which are its corollaries, the fruit 
 of any political victories the workers may achieve 
 will turn to ashes on their lips. 
 
 Now that the capitalist system is so palpably 
 breaking down, and in consequence its political 
 parties breaking up, the disintegrating elements 
 with vague reform ideas and radical bourgeois ten- 
 dencies will head in increasing numbers toward 
 the Socialist party, especially since the greatly en- 
 larged vote of this year has been announced and the 
 party is looming up as a possible dispenser of the 
 spoils of office. There is danger, I believe, that 
 the party may be swamped by such an exodus and
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 95 
 
 the best possible means and, in fact, the only ef- 
 fectual means of securing the party against such 
 a fatality is the economic power of the industrially- 
 organized workers. 
 
 The votes will come rapidly enough from now 
 on without seeking them and we should make it 
 clear that the Socialist party wants the votes only 
 of those who want socialism, and that, above all, as 
 a revolutionary party of the working class, it dis- 
 countenances vote-seeking for the sake of votes and 
 holds in contempt office-seeking for the sake of 
 office. These belong entirely to capitalist parties 
 with their bosses and their boodle and have no place 
 in a party whose shibboleth is emancipation. 
 
 With the workers efficiently organized indus- 
 trially, bound together by the common tie of their 
 enlightened self-interest, they will just as naturally 
 and inevitably express their economic solidarity in 
 political terms and cast a united vote for the party 
 of their class as the forces of nature express obedi- 
 ence to the law of gravitation. 
 
 PIONEER WOMEN IN AMERICA. 
 
 Progressive "Woman, April, 1912. 
 
 In looking over some old letters a day or two ago 
 I found a postal card which Susan B. Anthony had 
 written to me over thirty years ago, and, strangely 
 enough, it was held fast by a letter that was writ- 
 ten to me about the same time by Wendell Phillips,
 
 96 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 as if these two epistles had been attracted to each 
 other and held together in the bonds of mutualism 
 as were the great souls who had written them in 
 their heroic struggle for human enfranchisement. 
 
 The faded and time-worn old card carried me 
 back to the day I met Miss Anthony at the depot on 
 her arrival at Terre Haute, where she was to speak 
 in public for her sex. At that time Mrs. Ida 
 Husted Harper, who afterward became Miss An- 
 thony's confidential friend and authorized biogra- 
 pher, and I, and two or three others, were about the 
 only people in Terre Haute who believed that 
 woman was a human being and entitled to the 
 rights of citizenship. We had arranged these meet- 
 ings for Miss Anthony and her three active coad- 
 jutors in woman's cause at that time, and they ar- 
 rived according to the schedule. 
 
 I shall never forget how Miss Anthony impressed 
 me. She had all the charm of a real woman and all 
 the strength of a perfect man. Style, personal 
 adornment, she did not know; vanity found no 
 lodgment in her great soul. She was born with a 
 heroic purpose, and she set out in fulfillment of 
 that purpose with a spirit of dauntless valor and 
 determination which knew "no variableness or 
 shadow of turning" to the day that ended her con 
 secrated life and she passed from the scenes of 
 men. 
 
 The trials, privations, insults borne by this grand 
 old pioneer will never be known by tho?e who are 
 in the ranks today. An event characteristic of the 
 struggle in which she engaged almost single-handed
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. '.n 
 
 for so many years was her arrest and trial for vot- 
 ing in the presidential election of 1872. A fine of 
 one hundred dollars and costs was imposed upon 
 her, which she vowed she would not pay, even if 
 she were sent to jail. When Miss Anthony said a 
 thing she meant it. That fine was never paid. 
 
 It was, after all, a stroke of good fortune that 
 Miss Anthony was the victim of this barbarous 
 indignity. It inspired one of the greatest speeches 
 of her life. In opening this dramatic plea and pro- 
 test she said : 
 
 "Friends and Fellow-Citizens : I stand before 
 you tonight under indictment for the alleged 
 crime of having voted at the last presidential elec 
 tion, without having a lawful right to vote. It 
 shall be my work this evening to prove to you that 
 in thus voting I not only committed no crime,, but. 
 instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guar- 
 anteed to me and all United States citizens by the 
 National Constitution, beyond the power of any 
 State to deny." 
 
 She then quoted from the preamble of the Fed- 
 eral Constitution : "We, the people of the United 
 States," etc., and proceeded : 
 
 "It was we, the people; not we, the white male 
 citizens ; nor yet we the male citizens ; but, we the 
 whole people, who formed the union. And we 
 formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but 
 to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and 
 the half of our posterity, but to the whole people 
 women as well as men. And it is a downright mock- 
 ery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the
 
 98 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of 
 the only means of securing them provided by this 
 democratic-republican government the ballot. The 
 early journals of Congress show that when the com- 
 mittee reported to that body the original articles of 
 confederation, the very first article which became 
 the subject of discussion was that respecting equal- 
 ity of suffrage. Article 4 said: 'The better to se- 
 cure and perpetuate mutual friendship and inter- 
 course between the people of the different States 
 of the Union, the free inhabitants of each of the 
 States (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from jus- 
 tice excepted) shall be entitled to all the privileges 
 and immunities of the free citizen of the several 
 States/ 
 
 "Thus, at the very beginning did the fathers see 
 the necessity of the universal application of the 
 great principle of equal rights to all, in order to 
 produce the desired results a harmonious union 
 and a homogeneous people." 
 
 Miss Anthony then quoted the New York State 
 Constitution : "No member of this State shall be 
 disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges 
 secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of 
 the land or the judgment of its peers." 
 
 She then proceeded with her argument, which 
 has never been and never will be answered. It is 
 to be regretted that space forbids more ample quota- 
 tion in this article. Here is a glowing paragraph 
 from her impassioned plea which is characteristic 
 of the entire address : 
 
 "To them (women) this government has no just
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 99 
 
 powers derived from the consent of the governed. 
 To them this government is not a democracy. It 
 is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a 
 hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristo- 
 cracy ever established on the face of the globe; an 
 oligarchy of wealth,, where the rich govern the poor. 
 An oligarchy of learning, where the educated gov- 
 ern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, 
 jrhere the Saxon rules the African, might be en- 
 dured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes 
 father, brothers, husband, sons the oligarch over 
 the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of 
 every household ; which ordains all men sovereigns, 
 all women subjects; carries dissension, discord and 
 rebellion into every home of the nation." 
 
 There has never been a more logical unanswer- 
 able argument for the political enfranchisement of 
 women than was here made by Miss Anthony. And 
 yet only a very few of the people were fair enough 
 to listen, intelligent enough to understand, or can- 
 did enough to give approval, if they did. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony's whole career was one tem- 
 pestuous struggle for the rights of her sex. She 
 never wavered and she never wearied in the conflict. 
 She had the moral courage of a martyr, and such 
 she was as certainly as any that ever perished at 
 the stake. 
 
 On my visit to Johnstown, 1ST. Y., recently, the 
 comrades pointed out the spot where Elizabeth 
 Cady Stanton, another pioneer heroine of the move- 
 ment, was born. Mrs. Stanton has long since been 
 gathered to her fathers, but her work remains an
 
 100 * LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 imperishable monument in memory of her achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 It was at the first Woman's Rights convention 
 ever held in the United States, July 19, 1848, that 
 Mrs. Stanton delivered an oration that will forever 
 have a place in the literature of woman's struggle 
 for freedom. The doctrine she advocated was at 
 that time little less than treason, but she knew it 
 was true, and she boldly took her stand and main- 
 tained it to the end. In her speech at this first con- 
 vention she said : 
 
 "Now is the time for the women of this country, 
 if they would save our free institutions, to defend 
 the right, to buckle on the armor that can best re- 
 sist the keenest weapons of the enemy contempt 
 and ridicule. The same religious enthusiasm that 
 nerved Joan of Arc to her work nerves us to ours. 
 In every generation God calls some men and women 
 for the utterance of the truth, a heroic action, and 
 our work today is the fulfilling of what has long 
 since been foretold by the prophet. * * * We do 
 not expect our path will be strewn with the flowers 
 of popular applause, but over the thorns of bigotry 
 and prejudice will be our way, and on our banner 
 will beat dark storm-clouds of opposition from 
 those who have entrenched themselves behind the 
 stormy bulwarks of custom and authority, and who 
 have fortified their position by every means, holy 
 and unholy. But we will steadfastly abide the re- 
 sult. Unmoved we will bear it aloft. Undauntedly 
 we will unfurl it to the gale, for we know that the 
 storm cannot rend from it a shred, that the electric
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 101 
 
 flash will but more clearly show to us the glorious 
 words inscribed upon it : 'Equality of Rights/ ' : 
 
 There was thrilling power in the burning elo- 
 quence of Mrs. Stanton, but only they who had a 
 part in the struggle at that time could have any 
 conception of what bitter hatred, blind prejudice 
 and malign persecution there were to overcome. 
 
 In February, 1854, Mrs. Stanton made a notable 
 plea for the political rights of women to the legisla 
 ture of New York. In mentally invoicing an aver- 
 age legislature today one gets some idea of the self- 
 imposed task of this brave old pioneer, and the 
 indomitable spirit required to undertake it, of 
 arousing a body of sodden bourgeois legislators, 
 ward politicians, to recognize the right of women 
 to breathe the air of civilized citizenship and be- 
 long to themselves. In this thoroughly militant 
 and inspiring appeal she said : 
 
 "The tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before 
 the bar of Common Sense. His majesty no longer 
 awes the multitude; his scepter is broken; his 
 crown is trampled in the dust; the sentence of 
 death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks 
 and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated 
 his authority ; and now, that the monster is chained 
 and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look 
 him in the face, and to demand of her brave sires 
 and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty, 
 if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find 
 relief. * * * 
 
 "We demand the full recognition of all our rights 
 as citizens of the Empire State. We are persons ;
 
 102 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 natives, free-born citizens; property holders, tax- 
 payers, yet we are denied the exercise of our right 
 to the elective franchise. We support ourselves, 
 and, in part, your schools, colleges, churches, your 
 poor-houses, jails, prisons, the army, the navy, the 
 whole machinery of government, and yet we have 
 no voice in your councils. We have every qualifi- 
 cation required by the constitution necessary to the 
 legal voter but the one of sex. We are moral, vir- 
 tuous and intelligent, and in all respects quite equal 
 to the proud white man himself, and yet by your 
 laws we are classed with idiots, lunatics and ne- 
 groes." 
 
 These two sturdy pioneers in woman's struggle 
 present a magnificent picture in the perspective. 
 They did not know the meaning of discouragement. 
 They were strangers to weakness and fear. 
 
 Both were of heroic mould. Both were born and 
 endowed for great service and both made their 
 names synonymous with the struggle of their sex 
 to shake off the fetters of the centuries. 
 
 Mrs. Stanton was born in 1815, ante-dating Miss 
 Anthony by five years. They were inseparable 
 friends, and they who saw them together say that 
 their love and fealty toward each other was so beau- 
 tiful and touching that it was an inspiration to all 
 their co-workers and shamed to silence all their 
 bickerings and petty jealousies. 
 
 They both lived to be over eighty years. After 
 full half a century of unrelaxing fidelity to their 
 principles and unceasing battle for their cause they 
 saw but the beginning of the glorious fruition of
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 103 
 
 their consecrated service. Such has been the fate 
 of all who, like these great souls, loved principle 
 better than popularity and humanity more than 
 themselves. 
 
 The women who are in the ranks today may well 
 rejoice that these grand women and others who 
 shared in their bitter persecution blazed the way 
 through the dense wilderness of ignorance, prejud- 
 ice and hatred for what is now a world movement, 
 with millions proudly bearing its banner, inscribed 
 with the conquering shibboleth: Equal Freedom 
 and Equal Opportunities for All Mankind.
 
 SPEECHES
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 107 
 
 UNITY AND VICTORY. 
 
 Speech Before State Convention of American Federation of 
 Labor, Pittsburg, Kansas, August 12, 1908. 
 
 Introduction by Chairman Cable. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Convention : I assure you it is 
 a great privilege on my part to present to you at 
 this time a gentleman who needs no introduction at 
 my hands; a gentleman who is known to you and 
 who is known to the workingmen throughout the 
 length and breadth of this country as a true and 
 tried trade unionist and the candidate of the So- 
 cialist party for President of the United States. I, 
 therefore, take great pleasure in presenting to you 
 Brother Eugene V. Debs. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, Delegates and Fellow Workers : 
 It is with pleasure, I assure you, that I embrace 
 this opportunity to exchange greetings with you in 
 the councils of labor. I have prepared no formal 
 address, nor is any necessary at this time. You 
 have met here as the representatives of organized 
 labor and if I can do anything to assist you in the 
 work you have been delegated to do I shall render 
 that assistance with great pleasure. 
 
 To serve the working class is to me always a duty 
 of love. Thirty-three years ago I first became a 
 member of a trade union. I can remember quite 
 well under what difficulties meetings were held and 
 with what contempt organized labor was treated
 
 108 LABOR AND FEEEDOM. 
 
 at that time. There has been a decided change. 
 The small and insignificant trade union has ex- 
 panded to the proportions of a great national or- 
 ganization. The few hundreds now number mil- 
 lions and organized labor has become a recognized 
 factor in the economics and politics of the nation. 
 
 There has been a great evolution during that 
 time and while the power of the organized work- 
 ers has increased there has been an industrial de- 
 velopment which makes that power more necessary 
 than ever before in all the history of the working 
 class movement. 
 
 This is an age of organization. The small em- 
 ployer of a quarter of a century ago has practically 
 disappeared. The workingman of today is con- 
 fronted by the great corporation which has its iron- 
 clad rules and regulations, and if they don't suit 
 he can quit. 
 
 In the presence of this great power, workingmen 
 are compelled to organize or be ground to atoms. 
 They have organized. They have the numbers. 
 They have had some bitter experience. They have 
 suffered beyond the power of language to describe, 
 but they have not yet developed their latent power 
 to a degree that they can cope successfully with the 
 great power that exploits and oppresses them. 
 Upon this question of organization, my brothers, 
 you and I may differ widely, but as we are reason- 
 able men, we can discuss these differences candidly 
 until we find common ground upon which we can 
 stand side by side in the true spirit of solidarity
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 109 
 
 and work together for the emancipation of OUT 
 class. 
 
 Until quite recently the average trade unionist 
 was opposed to having politics even mentioned in 
 the meeting of his union. The reason for this is 
 self-evident. Workingmen have not until now 
 keenly felt the necessity for independent working 
 class political action. They have been divided be- 
 tween the two capitalist parties and the very sug- 
 gestion that the union was to be used in the interest 
 of the one or the other was in itself sufficient to 
 sow the seed of disruption. So it isn't strange that 
 the average trade unionist guarded carefully 
 against the introduction of political questions in 
 his union. But within the past two or three years 
 there have been such changes that workingmen have 
 been compelled to take notice of the fact that the 
 labor question is essentially a political question, 
 and that if they would protect themselves against 
 the greed and rapacity of the capitalist class they 
 must develop their political power as well as their 
 economic power, and use both in their own interest. 
 Workingmen have developed sufficient intelligence 
 to understand the necessity for unity upon the 
 economic field. All now recognize the need for 
 thorough organization. But organization of num- 
 bers of itself is not sufficient. You might have all 
 the workers of the comrhy embraced in some vast 
 organization and yet they would be very weak if 
 they were not organized upon correct principles; 
 if they did not understand, and understand clearly,
 
 110 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 what they were organized for, and what their or- 
 ganization expected to accomplish. 
 
 I am of those who believe that an organization 
 of workingmen, to be efficient, to meet the demands 
 of this hour, must be organized upon a revolution- 
 ary basis ; must have for its definite object not only 
 the betterment of the condition of workingmen in 
 the wage system, but the absolute overthrow of 
 wage slavery that the workingman may be emanci- 
 pated and stand forth clothed with the dignity and 
 all other attributes of true manhood. 
 
 Now let me briefly discuss the existing condition. 
 We have been organizing all these years, and there 
 are now approximately three millions of American 
 workingmen who wear union badges, who keep step 
 to union progress. At this very time, and in spite 
 of all that organized labor can do to the contrary, 
 there is a condition that prevails all over this coun- 
 try that is well calculated to challenge the serious 
 consideration of every workingman. To begin 
 with, according to the reports furnished us, twenty 
 per cent of the workingmen of this country are now 
 out of employment. I have here a copy of the New 
 York World containing a report of the labor com- 
 missioner of the State of New York who shows that 
 during the quarter ending June 30 there were in 
 that state an army of union men out of employment 
 approximating thirty-five per cent of the entire 
 number; that is to say, in the State of New York 
 today, out of every one hundred union men (these 
 reports are received from the unions themselves, 
 verified by their own officers, so there can be no
 
 LABOIi AND FREEDOM. Ill 
 
 question in regard to them), out of every 100 union 
 men in New York, 35 are out of employment. The 
 percentage may not he so large in these western 
 states where the industrial development has not 
 reached the same point, but go where you may, east 
 or west, north or south, you will find men, union 
 men, who are begging for the opportunity to work 
 for just enough to keep their suffering souls within 
 their famished bodies. A system in which such a 
 condition as this is possible has fulfilled its mis- 
 sion, stands condemned, and ought to be abolished. 
 
 According to the Declaration of Independence, 
 man has the inalienable right to life. If that be 
 true it follows that he has also the inalienable right 
 to work. 
 
 If you have ,no right to work you have no right 
 to life because you can only live by work. And if 
 you live in a system that deprives you of the right 
 to work, that system denies you the right to live. 
 Now man has a right to life because he is here. 
 That is sufficient proof, and if he has the right to 
 life, it follows that he has the right to all the 
 means that sustain life. But how is it in this out- 
 grown capitalist system ? A workingman can only 
 work on condition that he finds somebody who will 
 give him permission to work for just enough of 
 what his labor produces to keep him in working 
 order. 
 
 No matter whether you have studied this econ- 
 omic question or not, you cannot have failed to 
 observe that during the past half century society 
 has been sharply divided into classes into a cap-
 
 112 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 italist class upon the one hand, into a working class 
 upon the other hand. I shall not take the time 
 to trace this evolution. I shall imply call your 
 attention to the fact that half a century ago all a 
 man needed was a trade and having this he could 
 supply himself with the simple tools then used, 
 produce what he needed and enjoy the fruit of his 
 labor. But this has been completely changed. The 
 simple tool has disappeared and the great machine 
 has taken its place. The little shop is gone and the 
 great factory has come in its stead. The worker 
 can no longer work by and for himself. He has 
 been recruited into regiments, battalions and arm- 
 ies and work has been subdivided and specialized; 
 and now hundreds and thousands and tens of thou- 
 sands of workingmen work together co-operatively 
 and produce in great abundance, not for themselves, 
 however, for they no longer own the tools they 
 work with. What they produce belongs to the 
 capitalist class who own the tools with which they 
 work. A man fifty years ago who made a shoe 
 owned it. Today it is possible for that same 
 worker, if still alive, to make a hundred times as 
 many shoes, but he doesn't own them now. He 
 works today with modern machinery which is the 
 property of some capitalist who lives perhaps a 
 thousand miles from where the factory is located 
 and who owns all the product because he owns the 
 machinery. 
 
 T have stated that society ha? been divided into 
 two warring classes. The capitalist owns the tool 
 in modern industry, but he has nothing to do with
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 113 
 
 its operation. By virtue of such ownership he has 
 the economic power to appropriate to himself the 
 wealth produced by the use of that tool. This ac- 
 counts for the fact that the capitalist becomes rich. 
 But how about the working class? In the first 
 place they have to compete with each other for the 
 privilege of operating the capitalist's tool of pro- 
 duction. The bigger the tool and the more gen- 
 erally it is applied, the more it produces, the 
 sharper competition grows between the workers for 
 the privilege of using it and the more are thrown 
 out of employment. Every few years,, no matter 
 what party is in power, no matter what our domes- 
 tic policy is, how high the tariff or what the money 
 standard, every few years the cry goes up about 
 "over-production" and the working class is dis- 
 charged by the thousands and thousands, and are 
 idle, just as the miners have been in this field for 
 many weary months. 
 
 No work, no food, and after a while, no credit, 
 and all this in the shadow of the abundance these 
 very workers have created. 
 
 Don't you agree with me, my brothers, that this 
 condition is an intolerable and indefensible one, 
 and that whatever may be said of the past, this 
 system no longer answers the demands of this time ? 
 Why should any workingman need to beg for work ? 
 Why forced to surrender to anybody any part of 
 what his labor produces? 
 
 Now, I ask this question, and it applies to the 
 whole field of industry : If a hundred men work in 
 a mine and produce a hundred tons of coal, how
 
 114 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 much of that coal are they entitled to ? Are they 
 not entitled to all of it? And if not, who is en- 
 titled to any part of it? If the man who produces 
 wealth is not entitled to it, who is? You say the 
 capitalist is necessary and I deny it. The capitalist 
 has become a profit-taking parasite. Industry is 
 now concentrated and operated on a very large 
 scale; it is co-operative and therefore self -operative. 
 The capitalists hire superintendents, managers and 
 workingmen to operate their plants and produce 
 wealth. The capitalists are absolutely unnecessary ; 
 they have no part in the process of production 
 not the slightest. 
 
 Now I insist that it is the workingman's duty 
 to so organize economically and politically as to 
 put an end to this system ; as to take possession in 
 his collective capacity of the machinery of produc- 
 tion and operate it, not to create millionaires and 
 multi-millionaires, but to produce wealth in plenty 
 for all. That is why the labor question is also a 
 political question. It makes no difference what 
 you do on the economic field to better your condi- 
 tion, so long as the tools of production are pri- 
 vately owned, so long as they are operated for the 
 private profit of the capitalist, the working clas^ 
 will be exploited, they will be in enforced idleness, 
 thousands of them will be reduced to want, some 
 of them to vagabonds and criminals, and this con- 
 dition will prevail in spite of anything that or- 
 ganized labor can do to the contrary. 
 
 The most important thing for the workingman 
 to recognize is the class struggle. Every capitalist,
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 115 
 
 every capitalist newspaper, every capitalist attor- 
 ney and retainer will insist that we have no classes 
 in this country and- that there is no class struggle. 
 President Iioosevelt himself has declared that class- 
 consciousness is a foul and evil thing. Now, what 
 is class-consciousness? It is simply a recognition 
 of the fact on the part of the workingman that his 
 interest is identical with the interest of every other 
 workingman. Class-consciousness points out the 
 necessity for working-class action, economic and 
 political. 
 
 What is it that keeps the working class in sub- 
 jection? What is it that is responsible for their 
 exploitation and for all of the ills they suffer? 
 Just one thing; it can be stated in a single word. 
 It is Ignorance. The working class have not yet 
 learned how to unite and act together. There are 
 relatively but few capitalists in this country ; there 
 are perhaps twenty millions of wage workers, but 
 the capitalists and their retainers have contrived 
 during all these years to keep the working class 
 divided, and as long as the working class is divided 
 it will be helpless. It is only when the working 
 class learn and they are learning daily and by 
 very bitter experience to unite and to act together, 
 especially on election day, that there is any hope 
 for emancipation. 
 
 The workingmen you represent, my brothers, are 
 in an overwhelming majority in every township, 
 county and state of this nation. You declare you 
 are in favor of united action, but still you don't 
 unite. You unite under certain conditions within
 
 116 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 your union, you get together upon the economic 
 iield to a limited extent, but you have yet to larn 
 that before you can really accomplish anything you 
 have got to unite in fact as well as in name. The 
 time is coming when workingmen will be forced 
 into one general organization. The time is coming 
 when they will be compelled to organize on the basis 
 of industrial unionism. 
 
 At this very hour there is a strike on the Canadian 
 Pacific. Eight thousand workingmen who are more 
 or less organized and who have been wronged in 
 many ways, have finally gone out on strike. There 
 are other thousands remaining at their posts and 
 non-union men flowing in there will be hauled to 
 their destination by union men, and union men will 
 continue to work until their eight thousand broth- 
 ers have lost their jobs and many of them have be- 
 come tramps. That is called organization, but it 
 is not so in fact. It is at best organization of a 
 very weak and defective character. Xow, the right 
 kind of organization on the Canadian Pacific would 
 embrace all the workers. They should all be in- 
 cluded within the same organization and then have 
 one general working agreement with the company 
 so that if there was a violation of it, it would con- 
 cern every man in the service. But how is it at 
 present ? The engineers, conductors, trainmen and 
 switchmen are in separate unions and after they 
 have been signed up, the company can treat the 
 rest just as they please, for they know that if they 
 strike and the others remain in their service, as 
 they are bound to do under their agreement, they
 
 LABOtt AND FREEDOM. 117 
 
 can very easily supplant them and remain in per- 
 fect control of the system. We have had enough 
 of that kind of experience and we ought to profit 
 by it. We ought to realize that there is but one 
 form of organization that answers completely, one 
 in which all subscribe to the same rules and act to- 
 gether in all things, and you will have to organize 
 upon that basis or see your unions become prac- 
 tically worthless. 
 
 Now let us consider another line briefly for the 
 benefit of those who have opposed political action. 
 We are all aware of the trend of the decisions re- 
 cently rendered by the United States supreme 
 court. Three decisions have been rendered in rapid 
 succession which strike down the rights of labor 
 and virtually strip organized labor of its power. 
 Under these decisions organized labor has been out- 
 lawed, and while upon this question I want to sug- 
 gest that this body at the proper time in its de- 
 liberations put the following questions to the can- 
 didates for the United States senate and house of 
 representatives in the State of Kansas and request 
 them to answer : 
 
 In view of the fact that the United States su- 
 preme court has rendered a number of decisions 
 placing the working class at a tremendous disad- 
 vantage in its struggle with the employing class for 
 better conditions, we respectfully submit to the 
 candidates for the United States senate and house 
 of representatives the following questions : 
 
 1. Are you in favor of issuing injunctions 
 against trade union members because they refuse
 
 118 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 to patronize a non-union employer and advise their 
 friends to do likewise? 
 
 2. Will you introduce and vote for a measure 
 setting aside the decision of the supreme court of 
 the District of Columbia in the case of Buck Stove 
 and Range Company against officers of the A. F. of 
 L., making it a criminal act for a labor union to 
 place an employer on its unfair list ? 
 
 3. Are you in favor of classifying trade unions 
 as "trusts in restraint of trade/' as was done by the 
 supreme court in the case of Lowe vs. Lawler, and 
 will you introduce a measure, should you be elected, 
 providing for the exemption of trade unions from 
 the operation of the anti-trust law under this court 
 decision ? 
 
 4. Do you endorse the supreme court decision 
 making it lawful for a corporation to discharge a 
 man because of his membership in a labor union? 
 If you do not, will you introduce and vote for a 
 bill setting aside this decision of the supreme court 
 and making it unlawful for a corporation to dis- 
 charge a man because he is a member of a trade 
 union ? 
 
 Here are these candidates in the State of Kansas 
 for the United States senate and house of represen- 
 tatives and if they are elected they will have the 
 power to control legislation, and it is perfectly 
 proper that you, as the representatives of the work- 
 ers, should put these questions squarely to these 
 candidates and demand that they answer them. 
 They are very simple questions. The United States 
 court has rendered a decision to the effect that a
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 119 
 
 trade union is a trust and that if it exercises its 
 legitimate powers it is a criminal conspiracy in re- 
 straint of trade. That decision of the court con 
 gress has the power to set aside, and if a man stands 
 as a candidate for congress, in the upper or lower 
 branch, and appeals to you for your vote and bear 
 in mind he can only be elected by your vote it is 
 right and proper that you should know if he is in 
 favor of the decision or opposed to it. And if he 
 is in favor of this decision he is your enemy. 
 
 Now, these candidates are trying to carry water 
 on both shoulders. They declare they will give both 
 labor and capital a square deal, and I want to say 
 that is impossible. No man can be for labor with- 
 out being against capital. No man c<n be for capi- 
 tal without being against labor. 
 
 Here is the capitalist ; here are the workers. Here 
 is the capitalist who owns the mines; here are the 
 miners who work in the mines. There is so much 
 coal produced. There is a quarrel between them 
 over a division of the product. Each wants all he 
 can get. Here we have the class struggle. Now. is 
 it possible to be for the capitalist without being 
 against the worker. Are their interest not diamet- 
 rically opposite? 
 
 If you increase the share of the capitalist don't 
 you decrease the share of the workers ? Can a door 
 be both open and shut at the same time ? Can you 
 increase both the workers' and the capitalist's share 
 at the same time ? There is just so much produced, 
 and in the present system it has to be divided be- 
 tween the capitalists and the workers, and both
 
 120 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 sides are fighting for all they can get. and this is 
 the historic class struggle. 
 
 We have now no revolutionary organization of 
 the workers along the lines of this class struggle, 
 and that is the demand of this time. The pure and 
 simple trade union will no longer answer. I would 
 not take from it the least credit that belongs to it. 
 I have fought under its banner for thirty years. I 
 have followed it through victory and defeat, gen- 
 erally defeat. I realize today more than ever before 
 in my life the necessity for thorough economic or- 
 ganization. It must be made complete. Organiza- 
 tion, like everything else, is subject to the laws of 
 evolution. Everything changes, my brothers. The 
 tool you worked with twenty-five years ago will no 
 longer do. It would do then; it will not do now. 
 The capitalists are combined against you. They 
 are reducing wages. They have control of the 
 courts. They are doing everything they can to 
 destroy your power. You have got to follow their 
 example. You have got to unify your forces. You 
 have got to stand together shoulder to shoulder on 
 the economic and political fields and then you will 
 make substantial progress toward emancipation. 
 
 I am not here, my brothers, to ask you, as an 
 economic organization, to go into politics. Not at 
 all. If I could have you pass a resolution to go 
 into politics I would not do it. If you were in- 
 clined to go into active politics as an organization 
 I would prevent such action if I could. You repre 
 sent the economic organization of the working class 
 and this organization has its own clearly defined
 
 LABOR AND FEEEDOM. 121 
 
 functions. Your economic organization can never 
 become a political machine, but your economic or- 
 ganization must recognize and proclaim the neces- 
 sity for a united political party. You ought to pass 
 a resolution recognizing the class struggle, declar- 
 ing your opposition to the capitalist system of pri- 
 vate ownership of the means of production, and 
 urging upon the working class the necessity for 
 working class political action. That is as far as 
 the economic organization need to go. If you were 
 to use your economic organization for political pur- 
 poses you would disrupt it, you would wreck it. 
 
 But I would not have you renounce politics, 
 nor be afraid to discuss anything. Who is it that 
 is so fearful you will discuss politics? It is the 
 ward-heeling politician, and isn't it because he 
 knows very well that if you ever get into politics in 
 the right way he will be out of a job ? He is afraid 
 you will get your eyes open. 
 
 Why should a union man be afraid to discuss 
 politics ? He belongs to a certain party ; his father 
 belonged to that party and his grandfather be- 
 longed to that party, and perhaps his great-grand- 
 father belonged to the same party, and that is 
 probably the only reason he can give for belonging 
 to that party. He don't want anybody to suggest 
 to him the possibility of being lifted out of that 
 party and into some other. 
 
 Parties change. The party that was good forty 
 years ago is completely outgrown and corrupt and 
 has now no purpose but the promotion of graft and 
 other vicious practices.
 
 122 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Workingmen in their organized capacity must 
 recognize the necessity for both economic and poli- 
 tical action. I would not have you declare in favor 
 of any particular political party. That would be 
 another mistake which would have disastrous re- 
 sults. If I could have you pass a resolution to sup- 
 port the Socialist party I would not do it. You 
 can't make Socialists by passing resolutions. Men 
 have to become Socialists by study and experience, 
 and they are getting the experience every day. 
 
 There is one fact, and a very important one, that 
 I would impress upon you, and that is the necessity 
 for revolutionary working class political action. 
 
 No one will attempt to dispute the fact that our 
 interests as workers are identical. If our interests 
 are identical, then we ought to unite. We ought to 
 unite within the same organization, and if there is 
 a strike we should all strike, and if there is a boy- 
 cott all of us ought to engage in it. If our interests 
 are identical, it follows that we ought to belong to 
 the same party as well as to the same economic 
 organization. What is politics? It is simply the 
 reflex of economics. What is a party? It is the ex- 
 pression politically of certain material class inter- 
 ests. You belong to that party that you believe will 
 promote your material welfare. Is not that a fact ? 
 If you find yourself in a party that attacks your 
 pocket do you not quit that party? 
 
 Now, if you are in a party that opposes your 
 interests it is because you don't have intelligence 
 enough to understand your interests. That is 
 where the capitalists have the better of you. As a
 
 LABOR AND FRKKDO.M. 123 
 
 rule, they are intelligent., and shrewd. They under- 
 stand their material interests and how to .protect 
 them. You find the capitalists as a rule belonging 
 only to capitalist parties. They don't; join a work- 
 ing-class party and they don't vote the Socialist 
 ticket. They know enough to know that Socialism 
 is opposed to their economic interests. Xow, hoth 
 republican and democratic parties are capitalist 
 parties. There is not the slightest doubt about it. 
 It can be proved in a hundred different ways. You 
 know how the republican party treated the demands 
 of labor in its recent national convention. You 
 know, or ought to know, what has taken place un- 
 der the present administration. You know, or ought 
 to know, something about the democratic party, na- 
 tional, state and municipal. If there are those who 
 say that the democratic party is more favorable to 
 labor than the republican party it is only necessary 
 to point to the southern states where it has ruled 
 for a century. In no other part of the nation are 
 workingmen in so wretched a condition. In no 
 other part are working people so miserably housed, 
 so wretchedly treated as they are in the southern 
 states where the democratic party rules supreme. 
 
 At this very hour miners in Alabama are on 
 strike under a democratic administration. I know 
 the condition there, for I have been in the mines. 
 I know many of those men personally. I know 
 under what conditions they have had to work. I 
 have been in the shacks in which they live and have 
 seen their unhappy wives and ill-fed children. I 
 know whereof I speak. Only in the last extremity
 
 124 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 have those men gone out on strike. They bore all 
 these cruel wrongs for years and were finally forced 
 out on strike. And then what happened? The 
 very first thing the democratic governor did was 
 to send the soldiers to scab the mines. It doesn't 
 make any difference to you, if workingmen are 
 starved and shot down, which party is in power. It 
 occurs under both republican and democratic ad- 
 ministration. There will be no change as long as 
 you continue to support the prevailing capitalist 
 system, based upon the private ownership of the 
 tools with which workingmen work and without 
 which they are doomed to slavery and starvation. 
 
 Now, I repeat that this body should declare 
 against this system of private ownership and in 
 favor of the collective ownership by the workers of 
 the tools of production. This will give you a clear 
 aim and definite object. This will make your move- 
 ment revolutionary in its ultimate purpose, as it 
 ought to be, and as for immediate concessions in 
 the way of legislation by capitalist representatives 
 and more favorable working conditions, you work- 
 ingmen have only to poll two million Socialist votes 
 this fall, and you will get those concessions freely 
 and you will not get them in any other way. You 
 will not frighten, you will not move the great cor- 
 porations by dividing your votes between the re- 
 publican and democratic parties. It doesn't make 
 any difference which of these two parties wins, you 
 lose ! They are both capitalist parties and I don't 
 ask you to take my mere word for it. I simply ask, 
 my brothers, that you read and study the platforms
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 125 
 
 for yourself. I beg of you not to have an ignorant, 
 superstitious reverence for any political party. It 
 is your misfortune if you are the blind follower of 
 any political leader, or any other leader. It is your 
 duty as & workingman, your duty to yourself, your 
 family, to quit a party the very instant you find 
 that that party no longer serves you ; and if you 
 continue to adhere to a party that antagonizes your 
 interests, if you continue to support a system in 
 which you are degraded, then you have no right to 
 complain. You must submit to what comes, for 
 you yourself are responsible. 
 
 Let me impress this fact upon your minds : the 
 labor question, which is really the question of all 
 humanity, will never be solved until it is solved 
 by the working class. It will never be solved for 
 you by the capitalists. It will never be solved for 
 you by the politicians. It will remain unsolved un- 
 til you yourselves solve it. As long as ) r ou can 
 stand and are willing to stand these conditions, 
 these conditions will remain; but when you unite 
 all over the land, when you present a solid class- 
 conscious phalanx, economically and politically, 
 there is no power on this earth that can stand be- 
 tween you and complete emancipation. 
 
 As individauls you are helpless, but united you 
 represent an irresistible power. 
 
 Is there any doubt in the mind of any thinking 
 workingman that we are in the midst of a class 
 struggle ? Is there any doubt that the workingman 
 ought to own the tool he works with? You will 
 never own the tool you work with under the present
 
 126 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 system. This whole system is based upon the pri- 
 vate ownership by the capitalist of the tools and 
 the wage-slavery of the working class, and as long 
 as the tools are privately owned by the capitalists 
 the great mass of workers will be wage-slaves. 
 
 You may, at times, temporarily better your con- 
 dition within certain limitations, but you will still 
 remain wage-slaves, and why wage-slaves? For just 
 one reason and no other you have got to work. To 
 work you have got to have tools, and if you have 
 no tools you have to beg for work, and if you have 
 got to beg for work the man who owns the tools you 
 use will determine the conditions under which you 
 shall work. As long as he owns your tools he owns 
 your job, and if he owns your job he is the master 
 of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You 
 are subject to his interest and to his will. He de- 
 cides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he 
 decides whether you shall live or die. And in that 
 humiliating position any one who tries to persude 
 you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting 
 your intelligence. You will never be free, you will 
 never stand erect in your own manly self-reliance 
 until you are the master of the tools you work with, 
 and when you are you can freely work without the 
 consent of any master, and when you do work you 
 will get all your labor produces. 
 
 As it is now the lion's share goes to the capitalist 
 for which he does nothing, while you get a small 
 fraction to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, and 
 reproduce yourself in the form of labor power.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 127 
 
 That is all you get out of it and all you ever will 
 get in the capitalist system. 
 
 Oh, my brothers, can you be satisfied with your 
 lot ? Will you insist that life shall continue a mere 
 struggle for existence and one prolonged misery 
 to which death comes as a blessed relief? 
 
 How is it with the average workingman today? 
 I am not referring to the few who have been fa- 
 vored and who have fared better than the great 
 mass, but I am asking how it is witli the average 
 workingman in this system? Admit that he has 
 a job. What assurance has he that it is his in 
 twenty-four hours ? I have a letter from an expert 
 glass worker saying that the new glass machine 
 which has recently been tested, has proven conclu- 
 sively that bottles can be made without a glass 
 blower. Five or six boys with these machines can 
 make as many bottles as ten expert blowers could 
 make. Machinery is conquering every department 
 of activity. It is displacing more and more work- 
 ingmen and making the lot of those who have em- 
 ployment more and more insecure. Admit that a 
 man has a job. What assurance has he that he is 
 going to keep it ? A machine may be invented. He 
 may offend the boss. He may engage in a little 
 agitation in the interest of his class. He is marked 
 as an agitator, he is discharged, and then what is 
 his status? 
 
 The minute he is discharged he has to hunt for a 
 new buyer for his labor power. He owns no tools ; 
 the tools are great machines. He can't compete 
 against them with his bare hands. He has got to
 
 128 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 work. There is only one condition under which he 
 can work and that is when he sells his labor power, 
 his energy, his very life currents, and thus disposes 
 of himself in daily installments. He is not sold 
 from the block, as was the chattel slave. He sells 
 ten hours of himself every day in exchange for just 
 enough to keep himself in that same slavish condi- 
 tion. 
 
 The machine he works with has to be oiled, and 
 he has to be fed, and the oil sustains the same rela- 
 tion to the machine that food does to him. If he 
 could work without food his wage would be reduced 
 to the vanishing point. That is the status of the 
 workingman today. 
 
 What can the present economic organization do 
 to improve the condition of the workingman ? Very 
 little, if anything. If you have a wife and two or 
 three children, and you take the possibilities into 
 consideration, this question ought to give you grave 
 concern. You know that it is the sons of working- 
 men who become vagabonds and tramps, and who 
 are sent to jail, and it is the daughters of working- 
 men who are forced into houses of shame. 
 
 You are a workingman, you live in capitalism, 
 and you have nothing but your labor power, and 
 you don't know whether you are going to find a 
 buyer or not. But even if you do find a master, if 
 you have a job, can you boast of being a man among 
 men? 
 
 No man can rightly claim to be a man unless he 
 is free. There is something godlike about man-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 129 
 
 hood. Manhood doesn't admit of ownership. Man- 
 hood scorns to be regarded as property. 
 
 Do you know whether you have a job or not? 
 Do you know how long you are going to have one ? 
 And when you are out of a job what can your union 
 do for you ? I was down at Coal gate, Oklahoma, on 
 the Fourth of July last, where six hundred miners 
 have been out of work for four long months. They 
 are all organized. There are the mines and machin- 
 ery, and the miners are eager to work. But not ;i 
 tap of work is being done, and the miners and 
 their families are suffering, and most of them live 
 in houses that are unfit for habitation. This awful 
 condition is never going to be changed in capital- 
 ism. There is one way only and that is to wipe out 
 capitalism, and to do that we have to get together, 
 and when we do that we will find the way to eman- 
 cipation. 
 
 You may not agree with me now, but make note 
 of what I am saying. The time is near when you 
 will be forced into economic and political solidarity. 
 
 The republican and democratic parties are alike 
 capitalist parties. Some of you may think that Mr. 
 Bryan, if elected, will do great things for the work- 
 ers. Conditions will remain substantially the same. 
 We will still be under capitalism. It will not mat- 
 ter how you many tinker with the tariff or the cur- 
 rency. The tools are still the property of the 
 capitalists and you are still at their mercy. 
 
 Now let me show you that Mr. Bryan is no more 
 your friend than is Mr. Taft. You remember when 
 the officials of the Western Federation of Miners
 
 130 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 were kidnaped in Colorado, and when it was said 
 they should never leave Idaho alive. It was the 
 determination of the Mine Owners' Association that 
 these brave and loyal union leaders should be foully 
 murdered. When these brothers of ours were bru- 
 tally kidnaped by the collusion of the capitalist gov- 
 ernors of two states, every true friend of the work- 
 ing class cried out in protest. Did Mr. Bryan utter 
 a word? Mr. Bryan was the recognized champion 
 of the working class. He was in a position to be 
 heard. A protest from him would have tremendous 
 weight with the American people. But his labor 
 friends could not unlock his lips. Not one word 
 would he speak. Not one. 
 
 Organized labor, however, throughout the length 
 and breadth of the land, took the matter in hand 
 promptly and registered its protest in a way that 
 made the nation quake. The Mine Owners' Asso- 
 ciation took to the tall timber. Our brother union- 
 ists were acquitted, vindicated, and stood forth 
 without a blemish upon their honor, and after they 
 were free once more, Mr. Bryan said, "I felt all the 
 time that they were not guilty." 
 
 Now if your faithful leaders are kidnaped and 
 threatened to be hanged, and you call upon a man 
 who claims to be your friend, to come to the rescue 
 and he refuses to say a word, to give the least help, 
 do you still think he is your friend? Mr. Br} r an 
 had his chance to prove his friendship at a time 
 when labor sorely needed friends, when organized 
 labor cried out in agony and distress. But not a 
 word escaped his lips.
 
 LABOR AXD FREEDOM. 131 
 
 Why did not Mr. Byran speak ? He did not dare. 
 Mr. Bryan knew very well that the kidnapers of 
 those men were his personal friends., the association 
 of rich mine owners, who had largely furnished his 
 campaign funds. For Mr. Bryan personally I have 
 always had a high regard. I am not attacking him 
 in any personal sense at all. 
 
 But the extremity to which a man is driven who 
 tries to serve both capital and labor ! It can't be 
 done. Mr. Bryan did not dare to speak for labor 
 because if he had he would have turned the mine 
 owning capitalists against him. He is afraid to 
 speak out very loudly for capitalists for fear the 
 workers will get after him. He has compromised 
 all around for the sake of being president. 
 
 You have heard him denounce Roger Sullivan. 
 Mr. Bryan, four years ago, in denouncing this cor- 
 ruptionist, at the time of the nomination of Alton 
 B. Parker, said he was totally destitute of honor 
 and compared him to a train robber. Notwith- 
 standing this fact, Mr. Bryan recently invited Sul- 
 livan to his home in Lincoln, took him by the hand 
 and introduced him to his family. Mr. Bryan 
 also invited Charley Murphy, the inexpressibly 
 rotten Tammany heeler of New York. Mr. Bryan 
 had him come to Lincoln so as to conciliate Tam- 
 many, and they were photographed together shak- 
 ing hands. 
 
 No man can serve both capital and labor at the 
 same time. 
 
 You don't admit the capitalists to your union. 
 They organize their union to fight you. You or-
 
 132 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ganize your union to fight them. Their union con- 
 sists wholly of capitalists; your union consists 
 wholly of workingmen. It is along the same line 
 that you have got to organize politically. You 
 don't unite with capitalists on the economic field ; 
 why should you politically ? . 
 
 You have got to extend your cUss line. You 
 can declare yourselves in this convention and make 
 your position clear to the world. You can give 
 hope and inspire confidence throughout the state. 
 
 And now in closing, I wish to thank you, each of 
 you, from my heart, for your kindness. I appre- 
 ciate the opportunity you have given me to address 
 you and whether you agree with me or not, I leave 
 you wishing you success in your deliberations and 
 hoping for the early triumph of the labor move 
 ment. 
 
 The convention passed a unanimous rising vote 
 of thanks at the close of the address. 
 
 POLITICAL APPEAL TO AMERICAN 
 WORKERS. 
 
 Opening Speech of National Campaign, Riverview Park, 
 Chicago, June 16, 1912. 
 
 Friends, Comrades and Fellow-Workers: We 
 are today entering upon a national campaign of 
 the profoundest interest to the working class and 
 the country. In this campaign there are but two
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 133 
 
 parties and but one issue. There is no longer 
 even the pretense of difference between the so-called 
 Eepublican and Democratic parties. They are sub- 
 stantially one in what they stand for. They are 
 opposed to each other on no question of principle 
 but purely in a contest for the spoils of office. 
 
 To the workers of the country these two parties 
 in name are one in fact. They, or rather., it, 
 stands for capitalism, for the private ownership of 
 the means of subsistence, for the exploitation ol 
 the workers, and for wage-slavery. 
 
 Both of these old capitalist class machines are 
 going to pieces. Having outlived their time they 
 have become corrupt and worse than useless and 
 now present a spectacle of political degeneracy 
 never before witnessed in this or any other coun- 
 try. Both are torn by dissension and rife with dis- 
 integration. The evolution of the forces underly- 
 ing them is tearing them from their foundations 
 and sweeping them to inevitable destruction. 
 
 We have before us in this city at this hour an 
 exhibition of capitalist machine politics which 
 lays bare the true inwardness of the situation in 
 the capitalist camp. Nothing that any Socialist 
 has ever charged in the way of corruption is to 
 be compared with what Taft and Eoosevelt have 
 charged and proven upon one another. They are 
 both good Republicans, just as Harmon and Bryan 
 are both good Democrats and they are all agreed 
 that Socialism would be the ruination of the coun- 
 try.
 
 134 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Puppets of the Ruling Class. 
 
 Tai't and Roosevelt in the exploitation of their 
 boasted individualism,, and their mad fight for 
 official spoils have been forced to expose the whole 
 game of capitalist class politics and reveal them- 
 selves and the whole brood of capitalist politicians 
 in their true role before the American people. They 
 are all the mere puppets of the ruling class. They 
 are literally bought, paid for and owned, body and 
 soul, by the powers that are exploiting this nation 
 and enslaving and robbing its toilers. 
 
 What difference is there, judged by what they 
 stand for, between Taft, Roosevelt, La Follette, 
 Harmon, Wilson, Clark and Bryan? 
 
 Do they not all alike stand for the private own- 
 ership of industry and the wage-slavery of the 
 working class? 
 
 What earthly difference can it make to the mil- 
 lions of workers whether the Republican or Demo- 
 cratic political machine of capitalism is in com- 
 mission ? 
 
 That these two parties differ in name only and 
 are one in fact is demonstrated beyond cavil when- 
 ever and wherever the Socialist party constitutes 
 a menace to their misrule. Milwaukee is a case in 
 point and there are many others. Confronted by 
 the Socialists these long pretended foes are forced 
 to drop their masks and fly into each other's arms. 
 
 Twin Agencies of Wall Street. 
 The baseness, hypocrisy and corruption of these 
 twin political agencies of Wall Street and the nil-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 135 
 
 ing class cannot be expressed in words. The 
 imagination is taxed in contemplating their 
 crimes. There is no depth of dishonor to which 
 they have not descended no depth of depravity 
 they have not sounded. 
 
 To the extent that they control elections the 
 franchise is corrupted and the electorate debauched, 
 and when they succeed in power it is but to exe- 
 cute the will of the Wall Street interests which 
 finance and control them. The police, the militia, 
 the regular army, the courts and all the powers 
 lodged in class government are all freely at the 
 service of the ruling class, especially in suppress- 
 ing discontent among the slaves of the factories, 
 mills and mines, and keeping them safely in sub- 
 jugation to their masters. 
 
 How can any intelligent, pelf-respecting wage- 
 worker give his support to either of these corrupt 
 capitalist parties? The emblem of a capitalist 
 party on a working man is the badge of his ignor- 
 ance, his servility and shame. 
 
 Marshalled in battle array, against these corrupt 
 capitalist parties is the young, virile, revolutionary 
 Socialist party, the party of the awakening work- 
 ing class, whose red banners, inscribed with the 
 inspiring shibboleth of class-conscious solidarity, 
 proclaim the coming triumph of international So- 
 cialism and the emancipation of the workers of 
 the world. 
 
 The Two Political Force?. 
 
 Contrast these two political forces and the par- 
 ties through which these forces find concrete ex-
 
 136 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 pression ! On the one side are the trusts, the cor- 
 porations, the banks, the railroads, the plutocrats, 
 the politicians, the bribe-givers, the ballot-box stuf- 
 fers, the repeaters, the parasites, retainers and job- 
 hunters of all descriptions; the corruption funds, 
 the filth, slime and debauchery of ruling class poli- 
 tics; the press and pulpit and college, all wearing 
 capitalism's collar, and all in concert applauding 
 its "patriotism" and glorifying in its plundering 
 and profligate regime. 
 
 On the other side are the workers and pro- 
 ducers of the nation coming into consciousness of 
 their interests and their power as a class, filled 
 with the spirit of solidarity and thrilled with the 
 new-born power that throbs within them; scorn- 
 ing further affiliation with the parties that so long 
 used them to their own degradation and looking 
 trustfully to themselves and to each other for re- 
 lief from oppression and for emancipation from 
 the power which has so long enslaved them. 
 
 Honest toil, useful labor, against industrial rob- 
 bery and political rottenness ! 
 
 These are the two forces which are arrayed 
 against each other in deadly and uncompromising 
 hostility in the present campaign. 
 
 Corrupt Capitalist Politics. 
 
 We are not here to play the filthy game of capi 
 talist politic?. There is the same relative differ 
 ence between capitalist class politics and working 
 class politics that there is between capitalism and 
 Socialism.
 
 LABOR AND FREKDOM. 137 
 
 Capitalism, having its foundation in the slavery 
 and exploitation of the masses, can only rule by 
 corrupt means and its politics are essentially the 
 reflex of its low and debasing economic character. 
 
 The Socialist party as the party of the work 
 ing class stands squarely upon its principles in 
 making its appeal to the workers of the nation. 
 It is not begging for votes, nor seeking for votes, 
 nor bargaining for votes. It is not in the vote mar- 
 ket. It wants votes, but only of those who want it 
 those who recognize it as their party and come 
 to it of their own free will. 
 
 If, as the Socialist candidate for president, 1 
 were seeking office and the spoils of office I would 
 be a traitor to the Socialist party and a disgrace 
 to the working class. 
 
 To be surp we want all the votes we can get 
 and all that are coming to us but only as a 
 means of developing the political power of the 
 working class in the struggle for industrial free- 
 dom, and not that we may revel in the spoils of 
 office. 
 
 Political Power. 
 
 The workers have never yet developed or made 
 use of their political power. They have played the 
 game of their masters for the benefit of the master 
 class and now many of them, disgusted with their 
 own blind and stupid performance, are renouncing 
 politics and refusing to see any difference between 
 the capitalist parties financed by the ruling class 
 to perpetuate class rule and the Socialist party or-
 
 138 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 ganized and financed by the workers themselves 
 as a means of wresting the control of government 
 and of industry from the capitalists and making 
 the working class the ruling class of the nation 
 and the world. 
 
 The Socialist party enters this campaign under 
 conditions that could scarcely be more favorable 
 to the cause it represents. For the first time every 
 state in the union is now organized and represented 
 in the national party, and every state will have 
 a full ticket in the field : and for the first time 
 the Socialists of the United States have a party 
 which takes its rightful place in the great revolu- 
 tionary working class movement of the world. 
 
 Four years ago with a membership of scarcely 
 forty thousand we succeeded in polling nearly half 
 a million votes; this year when the campaign is 
 fairly opened we shall have a hundred and fifty 
 thousand dues-paying members and an organiza- 
 tion in all regards incalculably superior to that 
 we had in the last campaign. 
 
 We are united, militant, aggressive, enthusias- 
 tic as never before. From the Eastern coast to the 
 Pacific shore and from the Canadian line to the 
 Mexican gulf the red banner of the proletarian 
 revolution floats unchallenged and the exultant 
 shouts of the advancing hosts of labor are borne 
 on all the breezes. 
 
 There Is But One I?svc. 
 
 There is but one issue that apreal=; to thr- c. 
 army the unconditional surrender of the
 
 LABOR A"N T D FKEKDOM. 139 
 
 capitalist class. To be sure this cannot be achieved 
 in a day and in the meantime the party enforces 
 to the extent of its power its immediate demands 
 and presses steadily onward toward the goal. It 
 has its constructive program by means of which 
 it develops its power and its capacity, step by step, 
 seizing upon every bit of vantage to advance and 
 strengthen its position, but never for a moment 
 mistaking reform for revolution and never losing 
 eight of the ultimate goal. 
 
 Socialist reform must not be confounded with 
 so-called capitalist reform. The latter is shrewdly 
 designed to buttress capitalism ; the former to over- 
 throw it. Socialist reform vitalizes and promotes 
 the social revolution. 
 
 The National Convention. 
 
 The national convention of the Socialist party 
 recently held at Indianapolis was in all respects 
 the greatest gathering of representative Socialists 
 ever held in the United States. The delegates 
 there assembled demonstrated their ability to 
 deal efficiently with all the vita] problems which 
 confront the party. The convention was permeated 
 in every fiber with the class-conscious, revolutionary 
 spirit and was thoroughly representative of the 
 working class. Every question that came before 
 that body was considered and disposed of in ac- 
 cordance with the principles and program of the 
 international movement and on the basis of its 
 relation to and effect upon the working class. 
 
 The platform adopted by the convention is a
 
 140 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 clear and cogent enunciation of the party's prin- 
 ciples and a frank and forceful statement of the 
 party's mission. This platform embodies labor's 
 indictment of the capitalist system and demands 
 the abolition of that system. It proclaims the iden- 
 tity of interests of all workers and appeals to them 
 in clarion tones to unite for their emancipation. 
 It points out the class struggle and emphasizes 
 the need of the economic and political unity of 
 the workers to wage that struggle to a successful 
 issue. It declares relentless war upon the entire 
 capitalist regime in the name of the rising work- 
 ing class and demands in uncompromising terms 
 the overthrow of wage-slavery and the inauguration 
 of industrial democracy. 
 
 In this platform of the Socialist party the his- 
 toric development of society is clearly stated and 
 the fact made manifest that the time has come for 
 the workers of the world to shake off their oppres- 
 sors and exploiters, put an end to their age-long 
 servitude, and make themselves the masters of the 
 world. 
 
 To this end the Socialist party has been organ- 
 ized ; to this end it is bending all its energies and 
 taxing all its resources; to this end it makes its 
 appeal to the workers and their sympathizers 
 throughout the nation. 
 
 The Capitalist System Condemned. 
 In the name of the workers the Socialist party 
 condemns the capitalist system. In the name of 
 freedom it condemns wage-slavery. In the name
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 141 
 
 of modern industry it condemns poverty, idleness 
 and famine. In the name of peace it condemns 
 war. In the name of civilization it condemns the 
 murder of little children. In the name of enlight- 
 enment it condemns ignorance and superstition. 
 In the name of the future it arraigns the past at 
 the bar of the present, and in the name of human- 
 ity it demands social justice for every man, woman 
 and child. 
 
 The Socialist party knows neither color, creed, 
 sex, nor race. It knows no aliens among the op 
 pressed and down-trodden. It is first and last the 
 party of the workers, regardless of their national 
 ity, proclaiming their interests, voicing their as 
 pirations, and fighting their battles. 
 
 It matters not where the slaves of the earth 
 lift their bowed bodies from the dust au^ seek 
 to shake off their fetters, or lighten the burden that 
 oppresses them, the Socialist party is pledged to en- 
 courage and support them to the full extent of its 
 power. It matters not to what union they belong, 
 or if they belong to any union, the Socialist party 
 which sprang from their struggle, their oppres- 
 sion, and their aspiration, is with them through 
 good and evil report, in trial and defeat, until 
 at last victory is inscribed upon their banner. 
 
 Fighting Labor's Battles. 
 
 Whether it be in the textile mills of Lawrence 
 and other mills of New England where men, wom- 
 en and children are ground into dividends to gorge 
 a heartless, mill-owning plutocracy; or whether it
 
 142 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 be in the lumber and railroad camps of the far 
 Northwest where men are herded like cattle and 
 insulted, beaten and deported for peaceably assert- 
 ing the legal right to organize; or in the conflict 
 with the civilized savages of San Diego where men 
 who dare be known as members of the Industrial 
 Workers of the World are kidnaped, tortured and 
 murdered in cold blood in the name of law and 
 order; or in the city of Chicago where that gorgon 
 of capitalism, the newspaper trust, is beni upon 
 crushing and exterminating the pressmen's un- 
 ion ; or along the Harriman lines of railroad where 
 the slaves of the shops have been driven to the al- 
 ternative of striking or sacrificing the last vestige 
 of their manhood and self-respect, in all these bat- 
 tles of the workers against their capitalist oppres- 
 sors the Socialist party has the most vital concern 
 and is freely pledged to "render them all the assist- 
 ance in its power. | 
 
 These are the battles of the workers in the war 
 of the classes and the battles of the workers, 
 wherever and however fought, are always and ev- 
 erywhere the battles of the Socialist party. 
 
 When Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were 
 seized by the brutal mine owners of the western 
 states and by their prostitute press consigned to 
 the gallows, the Socialist party lost not an hour 
 in going to the rescue, and but for its prompt and 
 vigorous action and the resolute work of its press 
 another monstrous crime against the working class 
 would have blackened the pages of American his- 
 tory.
 
 LABOK AND FUKKDO.M. 14U 
 
 Persecution of Loyal Leaders. 
 
 In the unceasing struggle of the workers with 
 their exploiters the truly loyal leaders are always 
 marked for persecution. Joseph Ettor and Arturo 
 G'iovannitti would not now he in jail awaiting trial 
 for murder had they betrayed the slaves of the 
 Lawrence mills. They were staunch and true; 
 their leadership made for industrial unity and 
 victory, and for this reason alone the enraged 
 and defeated mill-owners are now hent upon send- 
 ing them to the electric chair. 
 
 These fellow-workers of ours who are now on 
 trial for murder are not one whit more guilty of 
 the crime with which they are charged than I am. 
 The man who committed the murder was a police- 
 man, an officer of the law ; the victim of the crime 
 was as usual a striker, a wage-slave, a poor work- 
 ing girl. Ettor and Giovannitti were two miles 
 from the scene at the time and when the news came 
 to them they broke into tears and these two work- 
 ingmen who would have protected that poor girl's 
 life with their own are now to he tried for her 
 murder. 
 
 Was ever anything in all the annals of heart- 
 less persecution more monstrous than this? Have 
 the mill-owners gone stark mad? Have they in 
 their brutal rage become stone-blind? Whatever 
 the answer may be, it is certain that the Socialist 
 party and organized labor in general will never 
 see these two innocent workers murdered in cold 
 blood, nor will their agitation and protest cease 
 until they have been given their freedom.
 
 144 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 The Campaign Now Opening. 
 
 In the great campaign now pending the people, 
 especially the toilers and producers, will be far 
 more receptive to the truths of Socialism than ever 
 before. 
 
 Since the last national campaign they have had 
 four years more of capitalism, of political corrup- 
 tion, industrial stagnation, low wages and high 
 prices, and many, very many of them have come to 
 realize that these conditions are inherent in the 
 capitalist system and that it is vain and foolish 
 to hope for relief through the political parties of 
 that system. These people have had their eyes 
 opened in spite of themselves. They have been 
 made to see what the present system means to them 
 and to their children, and they have been forced 
 to turn against it by the sheer instinct of self- 
 preservation. 
 
 They look abroad and they see this fair land 
 being rapidly converted into the private preserves 
 of a plutocracy as brutal and defiant as any privi- 
 leged class that ever ruled in a foreign despotism ; 
 they see machinery and misery go hand in hand : 
 they see thousands idle and poverty-stricken all 
 about them while a few are glutted to degeneracy ; 
 they see troops of child-slaves ground into luxuries 
 for the rich while their fathers have become a drug 
 on the labor market; they see parasites in palaces 
 and automobiles and honest workers in hovels or 
 tramping the ties : they see the politics of the rul- 
 ing corporations dripping with corruption and pu- 
 tridity; they see vice and crime rampant, prosti-
 
 LABOE AND FREEDOM. 145 
 
 tution eating like a cancer, and insanity and dis- 
 ease sapping the mental and physical powers of the 
 body social,, and involuntarily they cry out in 
 horror and protest, THIS IS EXOUGH ! THERE 
 MUST BE A CHANGE! And they turn with 
 loathing and disgust from the Republican and 
 Democratic parties under whose joint and several 
 maladministration these appalling conditions have 
 been brought upon the country. 
 
 The message of Socialism, which a few years 
 ago was spurned by these people, falls today upon 
 eager ears and receptive minds. Their prejudice 
 has melted away. They are now prepared to cast 
 their fortunes with the only political party that 
 proposes a change of system and the only party 
 that has a right to appeal to the intelligence of 
 the people. 
 
 First Socialist Congressman. 
 
 The political beginning of the Socialist party 
 in this country is now distinctly recognized by its 
 most implacable enemies. A single Socialist con- 
 gressman has been sufficient to arouse the whole 
 nation to the vital issue of Socialism which con- 
 fronts it. Victor L. Berger as the first and until 
 now the only representative of labor, has had the 
 power, single-handed and alone, to compel the 
 respectful consideration of the American congress, 
 for the first time in its history, of the rights and 
 interests of the working class. To be sure the 
 capitalists do not relish this and so they have 
 consolidated the Republican and Democratic forces 
 in Berger's district to defeat him, but the rising
 
 146 LABOR AND FEEEDOM. 
 
 tide of Socialism will overwhelm them both and 
 not only triumphantly re-elect Berger but a score 
 of others to make the next congress resound with 
 the demands of the working class. 
 
 Xow is the time for the workers of this nation 
 to develop and assert their political as well as 
 their economic power, to demonstrate their unity 
 and solidarity. 
 
 Back up the economic victory at Lawrence with 
 an overwhelming victory at the ballot box ! Sweep 
 the minions of the mill-owners from power and 
 fill every office from the ranks of the workers; 
 Deliver a crushing rebuke to the hireling-officials 
 of San Diego by a united vote of the workers that 
 will rescue the city from the rule of the degener- 
 ates and place it forever under a working class 
 administration. 
 
 The Only Democratic Party. 
 
 The Socialist party is the only party of the 
 people, the only party opposed to the rule of the 
 plutocracy, the only truly democratic party in the 
 world. 
 
 It is the only party in which women have equal 
 rights with men, the only party which denies mem- 
 bership to a man who refuses to recognize woman 
 as his political equal, the only part} 7 that is pledged 
 to strike the fetters of economic and political slav- 
 ery from womanhood and pave the way for a race 
 of free women. 
 
 The Socialist party is the only party that stands 
 a living protest against the monstrous crime of
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 147 
 
 child labor. It is the only party whose triumph 
 will sound onee and forever the knell of child 
 slavery. 
 
 There is no hope under the present decaying 
 system. The worker who votes the Republican or 
 Democratic ticket does worse than throw his vote 
 away. He is a deserter of his class and his own 
 worst enemy,, though he may be in blissful ignor- 
 ance of the fact that he is false to himself and his 
 fellow-workers and that sooner or later he must 
 reap what he has sown. 
 
 Wages and Cost of Living. 
 
 The latest census reports, covering the year 1909, 
 show that the 6,615,046 workers in manufactories 
 in the United States were paid an average wage 
 of $519 for the year, an increase of not quite 9 per 
 cent in five years, and an increase of 21 per cent in 
 ten years, but the average cost of living increased 
 more than 40 per cent during the same time, to 
 that in point of fact the wages of these workers 
 have been and are being steadily reduced in the pro- 
 gressive development of production under the capi- 
 talist system, and this in spite of all the resistance 
 that has been or can be brought to bear by the 
 federated craft unions. Here we are brought face 
 to face with the imperative need of the revolu- 
 tionary industrial union, embracing all the work- 
 ers and fighting every battle for increased wages, 
 shorter hours and better conditions with a solid 
 and united front, while at the same time pressing 
 steadily forward in harmonious co-operation and
 
 148 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 under the restraints of self-discipline, developing 
 the latent abilities of the workers, increasing their 
 knowledge, and fitting them for the mastery and 
 control of industry when the victorious hosts of 
 labor conquer the public powers and transfer the 
 title-deeds of the mines and mills and factories 
 from the idle plutocrats to the industrial workers 
 to be operated for the common good. 
 
 Industrial Unity. 
 
 If the printing trades were organized on the 
 basis of industrial unionism the spectacle of local 
 unions in the same crafts pitted against each other 
 to their mutual destruction would not be presented 
 to us in the City of Chicago, and the capitalist 
 newspaper trust would not now have its heel upon 
 the neck of the union pressmen. For this lament- 
 able state of affairs the craft union and William 
 Randolph Heart, its chief patron and promoter, are 
 entirely responsible. 
 
 The Socialist party presents the farm workers 
 as well as the industrial workers with a platform 
 and program which must appeal to their intelli- 
 gence and command their support. It points out 
 to them clearly why their situation is hopeless un- 
 der capitalism, how they are robbed and exploited, 
 and why they are bound to make common cause 
 with the industrial workers in the mills and fac- 
 tories of the cities, along the railways and in the 
 mines in the struggle for emancipation. 
 
 The education, organization and co-operation of 
 the workers, the entire body of them, is the con-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 149 
 
 scious aim and the self-imposed task of the So- 
 ciajist party. Persistently, unceasingly and en- 
 thusiastically this great work is being accomplished. 
 It is the working class coming into consciousness 
 of itself, and no power on earth can prevail against 
 it in the hour of its complete awakening. 
 
 Socialism Is Inevitable. 
 
 The laws of evolution have decreed the down- 
 fall of the capitalist system. The handwriting is 
 upon the wall in letters of fire. The trusts are 
 transforming industry and next will come the 
 transformation of the trusts by the people. So- 
 cialism is inevitable. Capitalism is breaking down 
 and the new order evolving from it is clearly the 
 Socialist commonwealth. 
 
 The present evolution can only culminate in in- 
 dustrial and social democracy., and in alliance 
 therewith and preparing the way for the peaceable 
 reception of the new order, is the Socialist move- 
 ment, arousing the workers and educating and fit- 
 ting them to take possession of their own when at 
 last the struggle of the centuries has been crowned 
 with triumph. 
 
 In the coming social order, based upon the so- 
 cial ownership of the means of life and the pro- 
 duction of wealth for the use of all instead of 
 the private profit of the few, for which the Socialist 
 party stands in this and every other campaign, 
 peace will prevail and plenty for all will abound 
 in the land. The brute struggle for existence will 
 have ended, and the millions of exploited poor will
 
 150 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 be rescued from the skeleton clutches of poverty 
 and famine. Prostitution and the white slave traf- 
 fic, fostered and protected under the old order, will 
 be a horror of the past. 
 
 The social conscience and the social spirit will 
 prevail. Society will have a new birth, and the 
 race a new destiny. There will be work for all, 
 leisure for all, and the joys of life for all. 
 
 Competition there will be, not in the struggle 
 for existence, but to excel in good work and in 
 social service. Every child will then have an 
 equal chance to grow up in health and vigor of 
 body and mind and an equal chance to rise to its 
 full stature and achieve success in life. 
 
 Socialist Ideals. 
 
 These are the ideals of the Socialist party and 
 to these ideals it has consecrated all its energies 
 and all its powers. The members of the Socialist 
 party are the party and their collective will is the 
 supreme law. The Socialist party is organized and 
 ruled from the bottom up. There is no boss and 
 there never can be unless the party deserts its 
 principles and ceases to be a Socialist party. 
 
 The party is supported by a dues-paying mem- 
 bership. It is the only political party that is so 
 supported. Each member has not only an equal 
 voice but is urged to take an active part in all 
 the party councils. Each local meeting place is 
 an educational center. The party relies wholly 
 upon the power of education, knowledge, and mu-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 151 
 
 tual understanding. It buys no votes and it makes 
 no canvass in the red-light districts. 
 
 The press of the patty is the most vital factor 
 in its educational propaganda and the workers are 
 everywhere being aroused to the necessity of build- 
 ing up a working class press to champion their 
 cause and to discuss current issues from their point 
 of view for the enlightenment of the masses. 
 
 This Is Our Year. 
 
 Comrades and friends, the campaign before us 
 gives us our supreme opportunity to reach the 
 American people. They have but to know the true 
 meaning of Socialism to accept its philosophy and 
 the true mission of the Socialist party to give it 
 their support. Let us all unite as we never have 
 before to place the issue of Socialism squarely be- 
 fore the masses. For years they have been de- 
 ceived, misled and betrayed, and they are now 
 hungering for the true gospel of relief and the 
 true message of emancipation. 
 
 This is our year in the United States ! Social- 
 ism is in the very air we breathe. It is the grand- 
 est shibboleth that ever inspired 'men and women 
 to action in this world. In the horizon of labor 
 it shines as a new-risen sun and it is the hope 
 of all humanity. 
 
 Onward, comrades, onward in the struggle, until 
 Triumphant Socialism proclaims an Emancipated 
 Race and a New World !
 
 152 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. 
 
 Campaign Speech, Pabst Park, Milwaukee, Wis., July 21, 1912. 
 
 Friends, Fellow-Socialists and Fellow- Workers : 
 The existing order of things is breaking down. 
 The great forces underlying society are steadily at 
 work. The old order has had its day and all the 
 signs point to an impending change. Society is 
 at once being destroyed and re-created. 
 
 The struggle in which we are engaged today is 
 a struggle of economic classes. The supremacy is 
 now held by the capitalist class, who are combined 
 in trusts and control the powers of government. 
 The middle class is struggling desperately to hold 
 its ground against the inroads of its trustified and 
 triumphant competitors. 
 
 This war between the great capitalists who are 
 organized in trusts and fortified by the powers of 
 government and the smaller capitalists who con- 
 stitute the middle class, is one of extermination. 
 The fittest, that is to say the most powerful, will 
 survive. This war gives rise to a variety of issues 
 of which the tariff is the principal one, and these 
 issues are defined in the platforms of the Republi- 
 can and Democratic parties. 
 
 With this war between capitalists for supremacy 
 in their own class and the issues arising from it, 
 the working class have nothing to do, and if they 
 are foolish enough to allow themselves to be drawn 
 into these battles of their masters, as they have 
 so often done in the past, they must continue to 
 suffer the consequences of their folly.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 153 
 
 Parties Express Economic Interests. 
 
 Let us clearly recognize the forces that are un- 
 dermining both of the old capitalist parties, creat- 
 ing a new issue, and driving the working class 
 into a party of their own to do battle with their 
 oppressors in the struggle for existence. 
 
 Parties but express in political terms the eco- 
 nomic interests of those who compose them. This 
 is the rule. The Eepublican party represents the 
 capitalist class, the Democratic party the middle 
 class and the Socialist party the working class. 
 
 There is no fundamental difference between the 
 Republican and Democratic parties. Their prin- 
 ciples are identical. They are both capitalist par- 
 ties and both stand for the capitalist system, and 
 such differences as there are between them involve 
 no principle but are the outgrowth of the conflict- 
 ing interests of large and small capitalists. 
 
 The Eepublican and Democratic parties are 
 alike threatened with destruction. Their day of 
 usefulness is past and they among them who see 
 the handwriting on the wall and call themselves 
 "Progressives" and "Insurgents," are struggling in 
 vain to adjust these old parties to the new condi- 
 tions. 
 
 Two Economic Classes. 
 
 Broadly speaking, there are but two economic 
 classes and the ultimate struggle will narrow down 
 to two political parties. To the extent that the 
 workers unite in their own party, the Socialist par- 
 ty, the capitalists, large and small, are driven into
 
 154 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 one and the same party. This has happened al- 
 ready in a number of local instances, notably in 
 the City of Milwaukee. Here there is no longer 
 a Republican or Democratic party. These have 
 merged in the same party and it is a capitalist par- 
 ty, by whatever name it may be known. 
 
 Temporarily this united capitalist party, com- 
 posed of the two old ones, may stem the tide of 
 Socialist advance, but nothing more clearly reveals 
 the capitalist class character of the Republican and 
 Democratic parties to their own undoing and the 
 undoing of the capitalist system they represent. 
 
 The great capitalists are all conservatives, 
 "standpatters" ; they have a strangle-hold upon the 
 situation with no intention of relaxing their grip. 
 Taft and Roosevelt are their candidates. It may 
 be objected that Roosevelt is a "Progressive." That 
 is sheer buncombe. Roosevelt was president almost 
 eight years and his record is known. When he 
 was in office and had the power, he did none of 
 the things, nor attempted to do any of the things 
 he is now talking about so wildly. On the con- 
 trary, a more servile functionary to the trusts than 
 Theodore Roosevelt never sat in the presidential 
 chair. 
 
 La Follette vs. Roosevelt. 
 
 Senator La Toilette now makes substantially this 
 same charge against Roosevelt, but by some strange 
 oversight the senator did not discover that Roose- 
 velf s presidential record was a trust record until 
 after Roosevelt threw him down in the "Progres- 
 sive" scramble for the Republican nomination.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 155 
 
 When Senator La Follette supposed he had 
 Roosevelt's backing, he pronounced him "the great- 
 est man in the world/' and it was only after he 
 fell victim to Roosevelt's duplicity that he made 
 the discovery that Roosevelt had always been the 
 tool of the trusts and the enemy of the people. 
 Test of Parties. 
 
 There is one infallible test that fixes the status 
 of a political party and its candidates. Who fi- 
 nances them ? 
 
 With this test applied to Theodore Roosevelt 
 we have no trouble in locating him. He is above 
 all "a practical man." He was practical in allow- 
 ing the steel trust to raid the Tennessee Coal and 
 Iron Company ; he was practical when he legalized 
 the notorious "Alton Steal" : he was practical when 
 he had Harriman raise $240,000 for his campaign 
 fund, and he is practical now in having the steel 
 trust and the harvester trust, who made an ante- 
 room of the White House when he was president, 
 pour out their slush funds by millions to put him 
 back in the White House and keep him there. 
 
 Financed by the Trusts. 
 
 Taft and Roosevelt, and the Republican party of 
 which they are the candidates, are all financed 
 by the trusts, and is it necessary to add that the 
 trusts also consist of practical men and that they 
 do not finance a candidate or a party they do not 
 control ? 
 
 Is the man not foolish, to the verge of being 
 feeble-minded, who imagines that great trust mag-
 
 156 LABOE AND FREEDOM. 
 
 nates, such as Perkins, McCormick and Munsey, 
 are flooding the country with Roosevelt money 
 because he is the champion of progressive prin 
 ciples and the friend of the common people ? 
 
 The truth is that if the Bull Moose candidate 
 dared to permit an itemized publication of his 
 campaign contributions in his present mad and dis- 
 graceful pursuit of the presidency, as he has been 
 so often challenged to do by Senator La Toilette, 
 it would paralyze him and scandalize the nation. 
 
 Roosevelt must stand upon the record he made 
 when he was president and had the power, and 
 not upon his empty promises as a ranting dema- 
 gogue and a vote-seeking politician. 
 
 For the very reason that the trusts are pouring 
 out their millions to literally buy his nomination 
 and election and force him into the White House 
 for a third term, and if possible for life, the people 
 should rise in their might and repudiate him as 
 they never have repudiated a recreant official who 
 betrayed his trust. 
 
 So much for the Republican party, led by Lin- 
 coln half a century ago as the party of the people 
 in the struggle for the overthrow of chattel slav- 
 ery, and now being scuttled by Taft and Roose- 
 velt in base servility to the plutocracy. 
 
 The Democratic Party. 
 
 The Democratic party, like its Republican ally, 
 is a capitalist party, the only difference being that 
 it represents the minor divisions of the capitalist 
 class. It is true that there are some plutocrats
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 157 
 
 and trust magnates in the Democratic party, but 
 as a rule it is composed of the smaller capitalists 
 who have been worsted by the larger ones and are 
 now demanding that the trusts be destroyed and, 
 in effect, that the laws of industrial evolution be 
 suspended. 
 
 The Democratic party, like the Republican par- 
 ty, is financed by the capitalist class. Belmont, 
 Ryan, Roger Sullivan, Taggart and Hinky Dink 
 are liberal contributors to its fund. The Tammany 
 organization in New York, notorious for its cor- 
 ruption and for its subserviency to the powers that 
 rule in capitalist society, is one of the controlling 
 factors in the Democratic party. 
 
 Woodrow Wilson is the candidate of the Demo- 
 cratic party for president. He was seized upon as 
 a "progressive"; as a man who would appeal to 
 the common people, but he never could have been 
 nominated without the votes controlled by Tam- 
 many and the "predatory interests" so fiercely de- 
 nounced in the convention by William Jennings 
 Bryan. 
 
 It is true that Woodrow Wilson was not the first 
 choice of Belmont, Ryan, Murphy and the Tam- 
 many corruptionists, but he was nevertheless satis- 
 factory to them or they would not have agreed to 
 his nomination, and since the convention it is quite 
 apparent that Wilson has a working agreement 
 and a perfect understanding with the predatory 
 interests which Bryan sought to scourge from the 
 convention.
 
 158 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 Bryan and Wilson. 
 
 In liis speech before the delegates denouncing 
 Ryan, Belmont and Murphy, Bryan solemnly de- 
 clared that no candidate receiving their votes and 
 the votes of Murphy's "ninety wax figures" could 
 have his support. Woodrow Wilson received these 
 votes and without these and other votes controlled 
 by "the interests" he could not have been nomi- 
 nated, and if Bryan now supports him he simply 
 stultifies himself before the American people. 
 
 Mr. Wilson is no more the candidate of the 
 working class than is Mr. Taft or Mr. Roosevelt. 
 Neither one of them has ever been identified with 
 the working class, has ever associated with the 
 working class, except when their votes were wanted, 
 or would dare to avow himself the candidate of 
 the working class. 
 
 When the recent strikes occurred at Perth Am- 
 boy and other industrial centers in New Jersey, 
 Governor Woodrow Wilson ordered the militia out 
 to shoot down the strikers just as Governor Theo- 
 dore Roosevelt ordered out the soldiers to murder 
 the strikers at Croton Dam, N. Y., for demanding 
 the enforcement of the state laws against the con- 
 tractors. 
 
 They Reek With Corruption. 
 
 Both the Republican and Democratic parties 
 reek with corruption in their servility to the capi- 
 talist class, and both are torn with strife in their 
 mad scramble for the spoils of office. 
 
 The Democratic party has had little excuse for
 
 \ LABOR AND FREEDOM. 159 
 
 existence since the Civil War, and its utter impo- 
 tcncy to deal with present conditions was made 
 glaringly manifest during its brief lease of power 
 under the Cleveland administration. Should this 
 party succeed to national power once more, seeth- 
 ing as it is with conflicting elements which are 
 held together by the prospect of official spoils, its 
 career as a national party would be brought to 
 an early close by self-destruction. 
 
 The Eepublican convention at Chicago and the 
 Democratic convention at Baltimore were com- 
 posed of professional politcians, office-holders, of- 
 fice-seekers, capitalists,, retainers, and swarms of 
 parasites and mercenaries of all descriptions. 
 
 There were no workingmen in either conven- 
 tion. They were not fit to be there. All they are 
 fit for is to march in the mud, yell themselves 
 hoarse, and ratify the choice of their masters on 
 election day. 
 
 The working class was not represented in the 
 Republican convention at Chicago or the Demo- 
 cratic convention at Baltimore. Those were the 
 political conventions of the capitalist class and 
 the few flattering platform phrases in reference 
 to labor were incorporated for the sole purpose of 
 catching the votes of the working class. 
 
 Let the American workers remember that they 
 are not fit to sit as delegates in a Eepublican or 
 Democratic national convention ; that they are not 
 fit to write a Republican or Democratic national 
 platform; that all they are fit for is to elect the 
 candidates of their masters to office so that when
 
 160 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 they go out on strike against starvation they may 
 be shot dead in their tracks as the reward of their 
 servility to their masters and their treason to them- 
 selves. 
 
 Vital Issue Ignored. 
 
 The vital issue before the country and the world 
 is not touched, nor even mentioned in the Repub- 
 lican or Democratic platforms. Wage-slavery un- 
 der capitalism, the legalized robbery of the work- 
 ers of what is produced by their labor, is the funda- 
 mental crime against modern humanity, but there 
 is no room for the mention of this vital fact, this 
 living issue in the platforms of the Republican and 
 Democratic parties. They continue to babble about 
 the tariff and other inconsequential matters to 
 obscure the real issue and wheedle the workers 
 into voting them into power once more. 
 
 These parties have been in power all these years, 
 why have they not settled the tariff and the cur- 
 rency and such other matters a? make up their 
 platform pledges? 
 
 Let Them Act Now. 
 
 While the Republican convention was in session 
 at Chicago and while the Democratic convention 
 was in session at Baltimore, the Republican and 
 Democratic congress was also in session at Wash- 
 ington. These parties already have the power to 
 make good their promises, then why do they not 
 exercise that power to redeem their pledges and 
 afford relief to the people? 
 
 In other words, why do not the Republican and
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 161 
 
 Democratic parties perform at Washington in- 
 stead of promising at Chicago and Baltimore? 
 How many more years of power do they require 
 to demonstrate that they are the parties of the 
 capitalist class and that they never intend to legis- 
 late in the interest of the working class, or provide 
 relief for the suffering people. 
 
 The Republican and Democratic platforms are 
 filled with empty platitudes and meaningless 
 phrases, but they are discreetly silent about the 
 millions of unemployed, about the starvation wages 
 of factory slaves, about the women and children 
 who are crushed, debased and slowly tortured to 
 death by the moloch of capitalism, about the white 
 slave traffic, about the bitter poverty of the masses 
 and their hopeless future, and about every other 
 vital question which is worthy of an instant's con- 
 sideration by any intelligent human being. 
 
 The Socialist Party. 
 
 In contrast with these impotent, corrupt and 
 senile capitalist parties, without principles and 
 without ideals, stands the virile young working 
 class party, the international Socialist party of 
 the world. The convention which nominated its 
 candidates and wrote its platform at Indianapolis 
 was a working class convention. 
 
 The Socialist party is the only party which hon- 
 estly represents the working class in this cam- 
 paign and the only party that has a moral right 
 to appeal to the allegiance and support of the work- 
 ers and producers of the nation.
 
 162 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 I am not asking you to give your votes to this 
 party but only that you read its platform, study 
 its program, and satisfy yourselves as to what its 
 principles are, what it stands for, and what it 
 expects to accomplish. 
 
 The Socialist party being the political expres- 
 sion of the rising working class stands for the 
 absolute overthrow of the existing capitalist sys- 
 tem and for the reorganization of society into an 
 industrial and social democracy 
 
 Death to Wage-Slavery. 
 
 This will mean an end to the private ownership 
 of the means of life ; it will mean an end to wage- 
 slavery; it will mean an end to the army of the 
 unemployed; it will mean an end to the poverty 
 of the masses, the prostitution of womanhood, and 
 the murder of childhood. 
 
 It will mean the beginning of a new era of civ- 
 lization; the dawn of a happier day for the chil- 
 dren of men. It will mean that this earth is for 
 those who inhabit it and wealth for those who 
 produce it. It will mean society organized upon a 
 co-operative basis, collectively owning the sources 
 of wealth and the means of production, and pro 
 ducing wealth to satisfy human wants and not to 
 gorge a privileged few. It will mean that there 
 shall be work for the workers and that all shall 
 be workers, and it will also mean that there shall 
 be leisure for the workers and that all shall en- 
 joy it. It will mean that women shall be the 
 comrades and equals of men. sharing with them
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 168 
 
 on equal terms the opportunities as well as the 
 responsibilities, the benefits as well as the burdens 
 of civilized life. 
 
 The Socialist party, the first and only inter- 
 national party, is rising grandly to power all 
 around the world. In every land beneath the sun 
 it is the party of the dispossessed, the impover- 
 ished and the heavy-laden. 
 
 It is the twentieth century party of human 
 emancipation. 
 
 It stands for a world-wide democracy, for the 
 freedom of every man, woman and child, and for 
 the civilization of all mankind. 
 
 The Socialist party buys no votes. It scorns 
 to traffic in ignorance. It realizes that education, 
 knowledge and the powers these confer are the only 
 means of achieving a decided and permanent vic- 
 tory for the people. 
 
 A Clean Campaign. 
 
 The campaign of the Socialist party is a clean 
 campaign; it is essentially educational; an appeal 
 to intelligence, to manliness, to womanliness, and 
 to all things of good report. 
 
 The workers are opening their eyes at last. They 
 are beginning to see the light. They are taking 
 heart of hope because they are becoming conscious 
 of their power. 
 
 They are rallying to the standard of the Social- 
 ist party because they know that this is their party 
 and that here they are master, and here they sit 
 at their own political hearthstone and fireside.
 
 164 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 No longer can the workers be pitted against each 
 other in capitalist parties by designing politicians 
 to their mutual undoing. They have made the dis- 
 covery that they have brains as well as hands, that 
 they can think as well as work, and that they do 
 not need politicians to advise them how to vote, 
 nor masters to rob them of the fruits of their la- 
 bor. 
 
 Slowly but surely there is being established the 
 economic and political unity and solidarity of the 
 workers of the world. The Socialist party is the 
 political expression of that unity and solidarity. 
 
 Unity the Keynote. 
 
 I appeal to the workers assembled here today in 
 the name of the Socialist party. I appeal to you 
 as one of you to unite and make common cause in 
 this great struggle. 
 
 To the extent that you have made progress, to 
 the extent that you have developed power, and to 
 the extent that you have achieved victory, to that 
 extent you are indebted to your own class-conscious 
 efforts and your own industrial and political or- 
 ganization. To the extent that you lack power, 
 to the extent that you are defeated and kept in 
 bondage, to that extent you lack in economic and 
 political solidarity. 
 
 Rightly organized and soundly disciplined on 
 both the economic and political fields, the working 
 class can prevail against the world. 
 
 The economic organization and the political par- 
 ty of the working class must both be revolutionary
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 165 
 
 and they must work together hand in hand. In- 
 dustrial unionism means industrial solidarity, but 
 craft unionism means division and disaster. The 
 printing trades pitted against each other in Chi- 
 cago in their struggle with the newspaper trust 
 furnish a fatal illustration of the weakness and 
 treachery of craft division in the present industrial 
 conflict. 
 
 The Workers of Milwaukee. 
 
 The workers of Milwaukee have to an exceptional 
 extent overcome the obstacles to unity and have 
 worked together with signal success on both the 
 economic and political fields. I appeal to them in 
 the name of the future to get closer and closer 
 together in the bonds of economic and political 
 solidarity. If they do this their complete arid final 
 victory is assured. 
 
 The Socialist party of Milwaukee has marched 
 steadily to the front since it first began its career. 
 Its latest defeat was its greatest victory. It 
 forced the Republicans and Democrats to unmask 
 and to fly into each other's arms. There is no 
 Republican or Democratic party in Milwaukee. 
 They are dead, and in the coming election their 
 remains, masquerading as a party of the people, 
 will be buried by the Socialist party. 
 
 The First Congressman. 
 
 The Socialists of Milwaukee will always have 
 the distinction of having elected the first repre- 
 sentative of the working class to the congress of 
 the United States. Victor L. Berger has made
 
 166 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 good at Washington. For the first time since he 
 is a member the voice of labor has been distinctly 
 heard on the floors of congress, and in every 
 emergency when the working class needed a cham- 
 pion at the seat of power, they found him ready 
 and eager to espouse their cause and defend their 
 interests. 
 
 It was to defeat Berger's re-election that the Re- 
 publicans and Democrats in Milwaukee combined, 
 just as they did to defeat Emil Seidel for mayor 
 and drive the Socialist administration from power. 
 
 But Berger is making a record at Washington 
 and the Socialist administration made a record 
 in Milwaukee that will stand the test of time, and 
 if the workers now rally their forces in support 
 of Berger, he will be triumphantly re-elected against 
 the combined opposition of the old parties, and in 
 the next municipal election the City of Milwaukee 
 will be permanently restored to a Socialist ad- 
 ministration. 
 
 Comrades, you are face to face with the greatest 
 struggle you have ever had since the Socialist par- 
 ty was organized. You are now to be tested in 
 every fiber as to your fitness to hold the ground 
 you have gained and to press on to greater vic- 
 tories. May you be permeated to the core with 
 the spirit of the Socialist movement and enter 
 the fray resolved that victory shall be inscribed 
 upon your banners. 
 
 Ettor and Qiovanmtti. 
 I must not fail in the presence of all these work-
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 167 
 
 ers to speak of Joseph EttorandArturoGiovannitti, 
 the leaders of the Lawrence strike, \vho are in 
 prison and soon to be tried upon the charge of 
 murder, of which the} 7 are as innocent as if they 
 had never been born. 
 
 This infamous charge has been trumped up 
 against them by the defeated mill owners for no 
 other reason than that they stood up bravely and 
 fought successfully against great odds, the battles 
 of the wage-slaves of the mills. Unless the work- 
 ers unite in support of these two leaders they may 
 be sent to the electric chair. Should we suffer these 
 brave comrades to fall victims to such a monstrous 
 crime, it would be a foul and indelible blot upon 
 the whole labor movement. Let us arouse the 
 workers of the nation in their behalf and prove to 
 them when their trial takes place that we are as 
 true* to them as they were to the wage-slaves in 
 the industrial battle at Lawrence. 
 
 Comrades, this is our year! Let us rise to our 
 full stature, summon our united powers, and 
 strike a blow for freedom that will be felt around 
 the world ! 
 
 CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM. 
 
 Campaign Speech, Lyceum Theatre, Fergus Falls, Minn., 
 August 27, 1912. 
 
 Friends and Fellow-Workers: The spirit of 
 our time is revolutionary and growing more so 
 every day. A new social order is struggling into
 
 168 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 existence. The old economic foundation of society 
 is breaking up and the social fabric is beginning 
 to totter. The capitalist system is doomed. The 
 signs of change confront us upon every hand. 
 
 Social changes are preceded by agitation and 
 unrest among the masses. We are today in the 
 transition period between decaying capitalism and 
 growing Socialism. The old system is being shaken 
 to its foundations by the forces underlying it and 
 its passing is but a question of time. The new 
 system that is to succeed the old is developing 
 within the old and its outline is clearly revealed 
 in its spirit of mutualism and its co-operative 
 manifestations. 
 
 For countless ages the world has been a vast 
 battlefield and the struggle for existence a per- 
 petual conflict. Primitive peoples were compelled 
 to fight nature to extort from her the means of 
 livelihood. Since the forces of nature have been 
 conquered and nations have become civilized the 
 struggle of men is no longer to overcome nature 
 but with one another for existence. 
 
 In this struggle which has appealed to the basest 
 and not to the best in man the cunning few have 
 triumphed and now have the masses at their mercy. 
 These few are closely allied in their economic mas- 
 tery as they are also in their control of the politi- 
 cal machinery. Their money and their mercenaries 
 controlled the Republican convention at Chicago, 
 wrote its platform and dictated its nominees, and 
 the same is true of the Democratic convention at 
 Baltimore.
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 109 
 
 As for the so-called Progressive convention, it is 
 sufficient to say that there is no attempt to con- 
 ceal the fact that it was financed and controlled 
 by three conspicuous representatives of the plu- 
 tocracy which largely owns and rules the land. 
 
 Political parties are responsive to the interests 
 of those who finance them. This is the infallible 
 test of their character and applied to the Republi- 
 can, Democratic and Progressive parties, these par- 
 ties stand forth as the several political expres- 
 sions of the several divisions of the capitalist class. 
 The funds of all these parties are furnished by 
 the capitalist class for the reason, and only for the 
 reason, that they represent the interests of that 
 class. 
 
 Professional politicians of whatever party are 
 very much alike and in one respect at least they 
 are like workingmen, they serve the interests of 
 their masters, and for the same reason. 
 
 The patriotism of professional politicians is re- 
 flected in the material interests of the master class 
 and this fact has become so apparent that their 
 noisy theatricals have lost their magic and now 
 excite but the scorn and derision of intelligent, 
 working men and women. 
 
 The Republican, Democratic and Progressive 
 conventions were composed in the main and con- 
 trolled entirely by professional politicians in the 
 service of the ruling class. 
 
 There were no working men and no working 
 women at the "Republican convention, the Demo- 
 cratic convention, or the Progressive convention .
 
 170 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 These were clearly not working class conven- 
 tions. Ladies and gentlemen of leisure were in 
 evidence at them all. Wage-slaves would not have 
 been tolerated in their company. They repre- 
 sented the wealth and culture and refinement of 
 society and they were there to applaud and smile 
 approval upon the professional politcians and pa- 
 triots who were doing their work. 
 
 But there was a fourth convention held this year 
 which did not attract the wealthy and leisure 
 classes. It was a convention great in purpose, 
 though not big in numbers. This convention was 
 held at Indianapolis and represented the working 
 class. The delegates who composed this conven- 
 tion were chosen by the workers and paid by the 
 workers to represent the interest of the workers 
 and to clear the way for the workers in the present 
 campaign. 
 
 The Socialist convention was the only demo- 
 cratic convention and the only progressive con- 
 vention held this year; the only convention that 
 represented a dues-paying party membership and 
 whose acts before becoming effective must be rati- 
 fied by a referendum vote of the party. 
 
 The Socialist party is the only party in this 
 campaign that stands against the present system 
 and for the rule of the people; the only party that 
 boldly avows itself the party of the working class 
 and its purpose the overthrow of wage-slavery. 
 
 So long as the present system of capitalism pre- 
 vails and the few are allowed to own the nation's 
 industries, the toiling masses will be struggling
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 171 
 
 in the hell of poverty as they are today. To tell 
 them that juggling with the tariff will change this 
 beastly and disgraceful condition is to insult their 
 intelligence. The professional politicians who 
 have been harping upon this string since infant 
 industries have become giant monopolies know bet- 
 ter. Their stock in trade is the credulity of the 
 masses. 
 
 The exploited wage-slaves of free trade England 
 and of the highly protected United States are the 
 victims of the same capitalism ; in England the 
 politicians tell them they are suffering because 
 they have no protective tariff and in the United 
 States they tell them that the tariff is the cause 
 of their poverty. 
 
 And this is the kind of a confidence game the 
 professional politicians have been playing with the 
 workers of all nations all these years. To keep 
 them in subjection by playing upon their ignorance 
 is the rule that governs their campaigns for votes 
 among the workers. The "issues" upon which they 
 keep the workers divided into hostile camps are 
 of their own making. 
 
 Since the foundation of the government one or 
 the other of these capitalist parties has been in 
 power and under their administration the work- 
 ing and producing millions have been reduced to 
 poverty and slavery. Professor Scott bearing has 
 shown in his work on the wages of American work- 
 ers that half of the adult males of the United 
 States are earning less than $500; that three- 
 quarters of them are earning' less than $600 a
 
 172 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 year; that nine-tenths of them are receiving less 
 than $900 a year, while 10 per cent only receive 
 more than that figure. 
 
 Professor Nearing also shows the starvation 
 wages for which women are compelled to work 
 in the present system. One-fifth of the whole num- 
 ber of women workers receive less than $200 per 
 year; three-fifths receive less than $325; nine- 
 tenths receive less than $500. Only one-twentieth 
 of the women employed are paid more than $600 
 per year. 
 
 These figures bear out the report of the Chicago 
 vice commission to the effect that the low wages 
 of women and girls go hand in hand with prostitu- 
 tion. Despite all attempts to control the white 
 slave traffic, which is now organized as one of the 
 great profit-extorting trusts, along with the rest 
 of the trusts, prostitution, like a terrible cancer, 
 is eating out the very heart of our civilization. 
 
 And in the presence of this appalling condition 
 the professional politcians prattle about tariff re- 
 vision and indulge in silly twaddle about currency 
 reform and regulation of the trusts. 
 
 The Socialist party is absolutely the only party 
 which faces conditions as they are and declares un- 
 hesitatingly that it has a definite and concrete plan 
 and program for dealing with these conditions. 
 
 The Socialist party as the party of the exploited 
 workers in the mills and mines, on the railways 
 and on the farms, the workers of both sexes and 
 all races and colors, the working class in a word, 
 constituting a great majority of the people and in
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 173 
 
 fact THE PEOPLE, demands that the nation's 
 industries shall be taken over by the nation and 
 that the nation's workers shall operate them for 
 the benefit of the whole people. 
 
 Private ownership and competition have had 
 their day. The Socialist party stands for social 
 ownership and co-operation. The one is Capital- 
 ism; the other Socialism. The one industrial des- 
 potism, the other industrial democracy. 
 
 The Republican, Democratic and Progressive 
 parties all stand for private ownership and com- 
 petition. The Socialist party alone stands for so- 
 cial ownership and co-operation. 
 
 The Republican, Democratic and Progressive 
 parties believe in regulating the trusts ; the Socialist 
 party believes in owning them, so that all the peo- 
 ple may get the benefit of them instead of a few 
 being made plutocrats and the masses impover- 
 ished. 
 
 The Republican, Democratic and Progressive 
 parties uphold the wage system; the Socialist par- 
 ty demands its overthrow. 
 
 It is under the wage system that the 22,000 op- 
 eratives in the cotton and woolen mills at Law- 
 rence, Massachusetts, have been compelled to work, 
 or slave rather, according to Commissioner Neill, 
 for an average of $8.76 per family. To earn this 
 average wage, according to the commissioner's of- 
 ficial report, requires the combined service of fa- 
 ther, mother and three children. This is slavery 
 with a vengeance. The mill is a sweat-hole; the
 
 174 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 
 
 hovel a breeding-pen. Home there is none. And 
 there never will be under the wage system. 
 
 What have the Republican, Democratic and Pro- 
 gressive parties to offer to the wage-slaves of Law- 
 rence, to the wage-slaves of the steel trust, to the 
 wage-slaves of the mines, to the wage-slaves of the 
 lumber and turpentine camps of the South, the 
 wage-slaves of the railroads, the millions of them, 
 male and female, black and white and yellow and 
 brown, who produce all this nation's wealth, sup- 
 port its government and conserve its civilization, 
 and without whom industry would be paralyzed 
 and the nation helpless? What, I ask, has any of 
 these capitalist parties, or all of them combined, 
 for the working and producing class in this cam- 
 paign ? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 
 
 These parties are bidding stronger than ever 
 for the labor vote this year. That vote is now not 
 so easily delivered as in the past. The competi- 
 tion for the votes of the wage-workers is the dis- 
 tinguishing feature of the present campaign. Thou- 
 sands of workers are now doing their own think- 
 ing. They have discovered that workers are as 
 much out of place in a capitalist party as capital- 
 ists are in a workers' party. They have also found 
 that politics express class interests and that the 
 interests of those who make the wealth and those 
 who take it are not identical. That is where the 
 Socialist party comes in and where the workers 
 come in the Socialist party. 
 
 The working class is in politics this year. It
 
 LABOR AND FREEDOM. 175 
 
 has always been in politics for its master; this 
 year it is in politics for itself. 
 
 The most promising fact in the world today is 
 the fact that labor is organizing it? power; its eco- 
 nomic power and its political power. 
 
 The workers who have made the world and who 
 support the world, are preparing to take possession 
 of the world. This is the meaning of Socialism 
 and is what the Socialist party stands for in this 
 campaign. 
 
 We demand the machinery of production in the 
 name of the workers and the control of society in 
 the name of the people. We demand the abolition 
 of capitalism and wage-slavery and the surrender 
 of the capitalist class. We demand the complete 
 enfranchisement of women and the equal rights 
 of all the people regardless of race, color, creed 
 or nationality. We demand that child labor shall 
 cease once and forever and that all children born 
 into the world shall have equal opportunity to 
 grow up, to be educated, to have healthy bodies and 
 trained minds, and to develop and freely express 
 the best there is in them in mental, moral and 
 physical achievement. 
 
 We demand complete control of industry by the 
 workers; we demand all the wealth they produce 
 for their own enjoyment, and we demand the earth 
 for all the people.
 
 Pege 
 The Old Umbrella Mender 9 
 
 The Secret of Efficient Expression 15 
 
 Jesus, the Supreme Leader. 22 
 
 Susan B. Anthony 29 
 
 Louis Tikas 33 
 
 The Little Lords of Love 37 
 
 The Coppock Bros 39 
 
 The Social Spirit 51 
 
 Roosevelt and His Regime 55 
 
 Industrial and Social Democracy 73 
 
 A Message to the Children 76 
 
 Social Reform 89 
 
 Danger Ahead 89 
 
 Pioneer Women in America 95 
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 Unity and Victory 107 
 
 Political Appeal to American Workers 132 
 
 The Fight for Freedom ,. 152 
 
 Capitalism and Socialism 167

 
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