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INTRODUCTORY.
This contribution to Socialist propaganda literature is not intended as a mere production for the passing moment, based, though it largely is, on a passing incident. The writer hopes it will grow in value, as an expose of Capitalism, as the Socialist movement grows. The Los Angeles tragedy is only one of the countless blots that stain a vicious arrangement of human society—a society that is openly perpetuated by strife and warfare. Were it necessary, volumes could be written of the awful tales of horror that Capitalism has been guilty of in all times. The object has been in this little offering to draw a comparative picture that will condemn class rule and its resulting wars. I trust that this humble effort will meet the approval of my comrades, and that it will be largely placed in the hands of non-Socialists and so stimulate them to a wider investigation of the Cause so dear to us.
Fraternally Your Comrade,
Winfield, Kans.
When every bloody man of war is taken out and sunk, and all of hell's artillery is hammered into junk, and the Plunderbund is swatted stiff, and only those who toil shall eat and wear and use the things from mill and mine and soil, and folks that do the work that's done shall own the tools and jobs and will not feed the drones on corn and they themselves eat cobs; when Labor blows its trumpet blast in hallelujah tones and nothing but a garbage heap is left of Kings and thrones, and everyone shall sit beneath his fig-tree and his vine, and the tides of life shall mingle in the human and divine, and a little child shall lead them, as the old, old story ran, I will meet you there, my comrade, in the Brotherhood of Man.
A WAVE OF HORROR
The press reported that a "wave of horror swept over the land when James B. McNamara confessed to blowing up the Los Angeles Times building and thereby destroying 21 lives."
This speaks volumes for the reputation of the working class.
The Wave of Horror vividly disclosed the fact that the world is not accustomed to tales of wholesale murder committed by members of the working class—that it was fairly stunned to realize that workingmen—wage slaves—should do so foul a deed.
I am not going into the details or into any resume of the case—that has been amply exploited. Nor am I going into the pros and cons of probabilities or circumstantial aspects of the awful affair.
All the way from the absolute acceptance of the confession of James McNamara, that he is the lone guilty party, to the expressed opinion of those who assert that the whole thing is a monstrous frame-up engineered from start to finish to destroy the trades union movement, the inside facts of which may never be known, I leave to conjecture.
That the trick was turned at the psychological moment when the Los Angeles election seemed like a victory for the working class; that unusual and unheard of leniency towards the self-confessed dynamiters was openly published before the judge pronounced the sentence, I will not here attempt to explain; that such remarkable predictions as the following, clipped from one of the many remarkable press reports from Los Angeles the day of the judge's sentence, and which says: "If the men live and prove exemplary prisoners they will come under the operation of the parole law in seven years," that all these things may appear strange and extraordinary, I will not here discuss.
We can do a lot of guessing and that is all. Only future developments, and they may fail, can unravel this most mysterious of criminal cases, from the kidnapping at Indianapolis to the sensational confessions at Los Angeles.
I rest on the premise that James McNamara blew up the Times building and slaughtered 21 men because he says he did.
I admit the savor of "a nigger in the woodpile," but at present nobody outside the star chamber can smell him out.
What I wish to call attention to is the fact that this Wave of Horror swept the land over the confession of a workingman that he did this killing.
It's quite a rarity, is this wave of horror sentiment over wholesale murder. We understand now why it is a rarity—it is because workingmen are not in the habit of doing wholesale murder on their own account.
Wholesale and retail murder to get an enemy out of the way has always been the pleasant pastime of the ruling class.
No particular wave of horror accompanies their bloody game.
Nay, statues are erected, and lauding histories are written of the ruling class murderers.
War for plunder has been just as respectable as Sunday schools in the eyes of Christian rulers for nineteen centuries.
No Wave of Horror when the trusts wanted the Philippine Islands and the only way to get them was to murder the natives into subjection.
No Wave of Horror when the Christian capitalists of this country—I believe the whole bunch claim to be Christians—if there is a heathen among them, I beg to be corrected—shot down the workingmen at Homestead, at Pullman, at Cripple Creek or the Coeur d'Alene.
Not a wave went forth from pulpit, press or justice-bench. at these horrors.
Murder looks all right, if only the "upper classes" commit it, or hire thugs to do it for them.
The thing has been so damnably common and universal that the conscience and horse-sense of the race has become thoroughly seared and benumbed by centuries of atrocities committed by the master class.
******
Two hundred and sixty-four miners killed in the coal mines at Cherry, because the capitalist mine owners had wantonly refused to protect the mines according to the mining laws of Illinois;
Nobody went to the pen.
A hundred and forty seven working girls burned to a crisp in a shirt waist fire trap in New York;
No Wave of Horror big enough to sentence anybody for this.
The New York courts acquitted the owners of the fire trap.
Waves of horror do not sweep that way.
What is war but murder?
You don't believe me? Listen to what Senator Chauncey M. Depew once said. He was not a Socialist, as you are doubtless aware. Mr. Depew said at a republican convention a few years ago:
What is the tendency of the future? Why this war in South Africa? Why this hammering at the gates of Pekin? Why these parades of people from other empires and other lands? The American people produce two thousand million dollars' worth more than we consume, and we have met the emergency, and by the providence of God, by the statesmanship of William McKinley and by the valor of Roosevelt and his associates, we have our market in China, we have our market in Porto Rico, we have our market in Hawaii, we have our market in the Philippines".
How do you like that sort of news, you chloroformed victim of the greatest aggregation of saints that ever composed a God-fearing, Christian nation?
We produce "two thousand million dollars' worth more that we can consume" and so we go out to murder and call it war, and preachers pray God to help our side—to help us butcher "the enemy"—so we can sell the things our own workingmen and women are too poor to buy.
Does any Wave of Horror sweep over you when you meditate on this?
It's awful to think that James McNamara could have blown up the Los Angeles Times building and kill 21 men, even though he thought the building was owned by an enemy of his and his craft.
Mind, I admit all this with you—I abhor murder.
But what of your "Christian" government murdering the Filipinos so we could sell them the goods the wage earners of America created, but did not own?
This is all right, isn't it?
Didn't Chauncey Depew, and he a devout Christian, say it was?
He said it was fine—said it was a "providence of God," and didn't need any wave of horror to follow in the wake. As the poet puts it,
"The holy spirit guides aloft the shrieking shot and shell
And Christian people shout with joy at thousands blown to hell."
******
"Murder is murder," said the man who boasts that he shot a Spaniard in the back, when he heard of the arrest of the McNamaras.
It is—all the way from the crucifying of Christ by the Capitalist class down to the last gasp of the tuberculosis victim of the sweatshop and tenement.
Two hundred thousand working girls, capitalist wage slaves, unable to feed and clothe themselves on the paltry pay they receive, driven into prostitution every year;
This is MURDER.
Any Wave of Horror bothering you about this?
It does me—I have tried, convicted and sentenced the whole capitalist system for its bloody crimes, and no "parole" proposition is strung to my sentence, either.
"Murder is murder"—if you don't believe it, go into your grocery store and see the poison printed in small type on the canned goods the food trusts put out.
MURDER?
The whole damnable cut-throat capitalist system was sired, spawned and suckled on murder and could not live a day without it.
Talk about murder—our government and rulers have James McNamara skinned a city block on the murder proposition.
Look at the sad-faced little children of the slums and factories, underfed and illclad; look at the emaciated women in the sweatshops and mills; look at the rented shacks the working class call homes; look—oh, stop, don't look at all—it might change your polities, upset your religion and make a rebel out of you.
Better, if you belong to the privileged few, eat, drink and be merry and go to heaven with Pierpont Morgan when you die—maybe. Unless, perchance, there be, after all, a grain of truth in the words of Him who said, "Depart from me, ye cursed. For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked and ye clothed me not."
But apparently Jesus has been fixed by the church so his words don’t amount to anything, anyway.
All you need do to be saved is to be baptized and say your prayers.
From the viewpoint of successful capitalism, His talk about peace on earth and good will toward men is all rot.
Go into your postoffice in this, our Christian nation, and read the "Murderers Wanted" signs, if you don't believe it.
Your boy can have an opportunity to enlist and go out and shoot somebody, or get shot himself, for $16 a month if he is strong and able-bodied.
This beats "peace on earth" and "brotherhood of man" to a frazzle.
******
I do not believe in all this land anybody felt worse than I did when the news of James MeNamara's confession came. I could not believe that any member of the working class would resort to the savage methods of the capitalist class. It's hard to accept it. But what galled me most was the wave of horror that was immediately set in motion in the capitalist press and pulpit by a parcel of wolves that have countenanced all their lives all kinds of heartless murder, from the starving and freezing of their own kith and kin to the shooting of workingmen in Idaho bull pens.
I can't stand for the master class, with their slave pens and sweatshops and stolen wealth on one side and their gatling guns and armed thugs on the other, to slobber over murder.
I have no mortal use for the self-confessed methods of James McNamara—but I have a damned sight less use for the whole pack of hypocritical thieves that have stolen their millions and back their stolen property with cannon.
Pardon my strong language, but nothing less fits the case.
The wan, hungry faces of the outraged victims, the sobs of the women and babies—oh, the horrible murders of Mammon. These haunt me and will when the McNamara affair is long forgotten.
For me, I take my pledge with George Kirkpatrick:
"I refuse to slay your mother's son. I refuse to plunge a bayonet into the breast of your sister's brother. I refuse to slaughter your sweetheart's lover. I refuse to butcher your little child's father. I refuse to wet the earth with blood and blind kind eyes with tears. I refuse to assassinate you and then hide my stained fists in the folds of any flag. I refuse to be flattered into hell's nightmare by a class of well-fed snobs, crooks and cowards who despise our class socially, rob our class economically and betray our class politically."
Nay, more—I refuse to uphold a Christless system that makes an Otis hire hungry scabs and drives a rebellious workingman to deeds of violence in retaliation.
I give my pledge, my life, that the earth shall belong to all, and feed and clothe all in Brotherhood and not War.
This is the lesson in the MeNamara ease, if lesson were needed.
******
This Wave of Horror that swept the land because James McNamara confessed that he blew up the Los Angeles Times building, and thereby killed 21 men—do not let this wave depart until it engulfs all manner of murder and outrage that a society of class rule breeds.
Do not let it depart until it arouses you to the crime of one class doing all the useful work and another class taking the proceeds.
In all this world of murder there is but one cure for murder, that is, Socialism.
The trial is over at Los Angeles, Job Harriman, the Socialist, was defeated after its sensational ending, but the capitalist system of hate and murder goes on.
Because the MeNamaras have dropped off the map, do not for a moment imagine your morbid hunger for murder stories need cease to be gratified.
Your Wave of Horror can still go on doing business at the old stand.
Pick up your capitalist paper—you are possibly too poor to take a Socialist paper at 50 cents a year, so you take a capitalist sheet at 50 cents a month—and read it.
See anything about murders?
You will find enough about preventable mine disasters, railroad wrecks and burning fire traps to fill all our penitentiaries, were the greedy horde who care more for dollars than human lives brought to justice, leave alone the horrible war news around the world.
Hardly a newspaper printed but it tells the story of some disheartened mortal, hungry and homeless, committing suicide because a master class owns all the jobs and refuses to let him use one.
MURDER?
Don't stop at being horrified at the McNamara case by any means; read up on some of the big slaughters that come off as regular as clock-work.
If the capitalist papers fail to furnish enough murder stories to keep your Wave of Horror in motion, read the history of the civilized and christianized white man.
It beats Blue Beard and the tales of the South Sea cannibals.
Any section of our Christian master class can double-discount the wildest heathen that ever prayed to a wooden god when it comes to butchering humans.
If there is anything that Christian civilization is long on it's the art of murder.
When it comes to savage machines for taking human life, your white man's country has no competitor.
For a record of blood-curdling butchering the "Christian" stands in a class all by himself.
"Christian" England took the Hindoo "rebels" that imagined their own land belonged to them, and loaded them into the mouths of cannon and shot them off, just to show the poor deluded pagans how the pious followers of the gentle Jesus did things.
Over in the Philippine Islands our beloved rulers, instead of blowing a native "rebel" out of the mouth of a cannon, blew his belly full of water till it burst and death ended the awfullest kind of torture.
Did you have any Wave of Horror down your way when this beastly method of murder was going on?
Or is it all right to murder for the Plunderbund and dub it "patriotism" and "manifest destiny" and "benevolent assimilation" and all the other polite names that are coined to make bloodshed a holy act?
Let me tell you that murder is murder, no matter how you try to veneer the accursed crime.
A Wave of Horror—have you ever read the story of the Irish famine and how British royalty, nobility, gentility and lordly land pirates all took enough grain rent that awful year[1] from Irish peasants to have fed the thousands who died there of starvation?
"The Queen has lands and gold, mother;
The Queen has lands and gold,
While you are forced to your empty breast
A skeleton babe to hold—
A babe that is dying of want, mother,
As I am dying now,
With a ghastly look in its sunken eye
And famine upon its brow."
"There is many a brave heart here, mother,
Dying of want and cold,
While only across the Channel, mother,
Are many that roll in gold;
There are rich and proud men, there, mother,
With wondrous wealth in view,
And the bread they fling to their dogs to-night
Would give life to me and you."
"A Wave of Horror"—it ought to have deluged the earth long ago.
The rack-renting in Ireland and America, too, still goes on.
It's a famine all the time for multitudes all over the civilized world.
The great murderers of the earth sit on thrones and live in splendor.
The McNamaras are the smallest kind of fry.
They have gone to the pen—the big assassins still stalk about.
The amazing wonder is that the earth isn't over-run with half-crazed dynamiters.
The whole social structure is crazy, blood-thirsty and brutal.
Hate begets hate, just as love will beget love when we become decent enough to try it.
"The Queen has lands and gold, Mother;
The Queen has lands and gold,
While you are forced to your empty breast
A skeleton babe to hold."
"The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the sons of men—millions of them—have not where to lay their heads."
"A Wave of Horror"—may it sweep over mankind until Socialism ends a monstrous system where plutocratic parasites own lands and gold and the women of the working class hold skeleton babes to empty breasts—where it is considered all right and "patriotic" to go out and murder that these parasites may revel in splendor and fools go frantic and sing of the glories of war and feel no waves of horror over the crime.
******
A Wave of Horror over the mad act of James McNamara that killed 21 men?
Awful as it was, it isn't a puny drop in the bloody bucket.
Listen—this is from the New York Independent—not a Socialist paper. This conservative journal said in its issue of March 14, 1907:
"It is the common consensus of opinion among investigators that industrial casualties in this nation number more than 500,000 yearly. Dr. Josiah Strong estimates the number at 564,000. As there are 525,600 minutes in a year, it may readily be seen that every minute (day and night) our industrial system sends to the grave-yard or to the hospital a human being, the victim of some accident inseparable from his toil. We cry out against the horrors of war, but the ravages of industrial warfare are far greater than those of armed conflict. * * * But whose interest is it that the lives of the workers shall be guarded? The employer class has no material interest in the matter. The worker is "free" legally, to refuse to work under dangerous conditions. If, economically, he must accept work under these conditions (or starve), that is another matter."
And yet, every mine, mill, factory and railroad could be so guarded with safety appliances that accidents and loss of life would be reduced to a minimum.
But what does the Plunderbund care for human life when Dollars are in sight?
What does a workingman or a workingwoman or a child of the working class amount to, anyway, in the eyes of the masters that the working class votes to maintain in power?
What do the masters care that Disease, the dirty brood of Poverty and Filth, reaps its awful harvest every year, if only more Dollars can swell their Coffers? Nothing—and the masters can murder every minute of the day more than James McNamara could have killed if the Los Angeles Times building had been packed with human beings from cellar to roof the night he set off his dynamite; and, be it said to the disgrace of beings boasting of being made in the image of God, no wave of horror follows the fiendish deeds of the masters.
This thing of Hell, this murder trade, has gone on for ages and will continue just as long as we run this earth as a gambling den instead of a home for the workers.
It will go on, one continual tragedy, until all classes are merged into one class—the working class—and the earth shall be owned, operated and used for all the childern of men.
So long as anarchy reigns in our industrial structure, juggling millionaires out of the lucky few and driving the millions into poverty, just so long will some jobless victim, or some blind leader of jobless victims, likely throw the deadly bomb. Just so long will some tool of the masters, sitting in power, decorate and desecrate our postoffices with enticing appeals to young men to join an army of killers whose sole purpose is to keep the masters in power.
Unless we heed the gospel of Socialism and recognize human brotherhood in all the means of producing and distributing our daily bread and unless we do this pretty soon, only God knows what will happen.
"Within a short time," says Victor Berger, "we shall have TWO NATIONS in every civilized country, and especially in America, both of native growth. One nation will be very large in number, but semi-civilized, half-fed, half-educated and degenerated from over-work and misery; the other nation will be very small in number, but over-civilized, over-fed, over-cultured and degenerated from too much leisure and too much luxury. What will be the outcome? Some day there will be a volcanic eruption. The hungry millions will turn against the over-fed few. A fearful retribution will be enacted on the capitalist class as a class, and the innocent will suffer with the guilty. Such a revolution will retrograde civilization; it might throw the white race back into barbarism."
Congressman Berger speaks the truth and any man or woman who does not to-day realize that he speaks the truth is a blind interpreter of past history and present day conditions.
Do you want something infinitely more awful than happened in France?
Do you want a Wave of Horror too appalling to contemplate?
Do you want Murder absolutely unchained from its mad-house and the dogs of internecine war turned loose?
If you do not want these things, you had better get busy right away.
I want to tell you there is no time to lose.
At this very hour there are hundreds of thousands hungry, homeless and out of work.
There is a vast army who know no way to settle social wrongs save to destroy, pillage and kill.
This is the fruit the tree of Capitalism has borne.
This is the harvest gathered from a social system that creates two classes—one that does all the useful work and another that does no useful work, but takes all the proceeds.
This is the monstrous crime Humanity is guilty of when it denies any member of its race full and free opportunity to produce and own those things the body and mind require.
You fling defiance into the face of the Almighty when you believe, assist or knowingly vote that one class shall live off the sweat of another's brow.
******
James McNamara blew up the Los Angeles Times building because he saw in Harrison Gray Otis an enemy of organized labor.
It was class fighting class with fang and claw.
It was the war way, the murder way.
Was it right? No. Was it wisdom? No. If the McNamaras had been Socialist students, instead of prejudiced and ignorant members of the democratic party, they would have struggled to overturn the system that creates class war, hate and poverty, and would have appealed to their blind followers with tons of Socialist literature instead of exploding sticks of dynamite.
You, who shudder with a Wave of Horror at the act of James McNamara, are doing something that is liable some day to explode with more tragedy than the wreck and slaughter of The Los Angeles Times building when you stick your devilish republican or democratic ticket into the ballot box and register your vow that a band of pirates shall rob the working class of nine-tenths of what it produces—aye, that shall condemn thousands of workers to not even have a chance to work at all and receive a niggardly one-tenth of their labor.
A Wave of Horror?
Would to God I could paint the picture of desolation your rotten old party ballot perpetuates in this land of plenty.
From the cotton fields of the South, where the sad-faced women and children toil in the fields for a chance to merely exist on this beautiful earth, and eat and sleep in hovels that their proud masters would think unfit kennels for their dogs, on to the industrial Wage-slave warrens of our Northern cities, where paupers beg for jobs and eat the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, on through the wilderness of thieves, harlots, outcasts and tramps, on through jails and asylums, through the slums and into the hideous night—man, woman, won't you shudder at this foul thing a herd of greedy swine have made of our common heritage?
And you vote that this nightmare, this insult to God and man, this tribute to devils, shall go on?
And yet you have a wave of horror when James McNamara confesses to murdering only 21 men.
Man, the Plunderbund you vote to keep in power runs a string of bloody exhibitions from the Atlantic to the Pacific that make the McNamara performance look like thirty cents.
You have sent the McNamaras to the penitentiary at San Quentin. But what good will that do if you send a tool of the Plunderbund to the White House?
******
Just as the McNamaras are taken to the penitentiary for killing 21 men—a horrible incident, if you please, of war between labor and its masters—nearly a hundred miners are suffocated and roasted in the mines at Briceville, Tenn.
Near this scene of death, at Fraterville, in the same state, about 700 miners were put to death in 1902 by a mine explosion.
Safe-guarding appliances in the mines to prevent these holocausts cost money—explosions cost only the lives of workingmen.
Workingmen are plentiful and cost less than safety appliances and Capitalism in Christian America runs things on a cash register basis.
Capitalism can murder and devastate like a fiend with no Wave of Horror to sentence the murderers to the pen.
Over in famishing India King George holding high carnival at his Durbar acclamation—the regal fete that proclaims him tyrant of the Hindoos.
Millions of dollars spent in gorgeous festivities for this royal bum—dollars wrung from the sweat and anguish of the working class—and at the very moment millions starving to death in India because English lords have robbed them of their products.
A famine in India? Yes. A famine in China? Yes. But the granaries of India and China are full of food, the product of fat years before the famine came.
But those that produced all this food do not own it.
The capitalists, who do no work—the loafers—they own the bread, because we run our social system that way.
Listen—Bishop Sellow, of the Free Methodist Church, a returned missionary from the famine district in China, states that though hundreds of thousands have died of the pestilence brought on by hunger, there is no real shortage of food, but the food is in the hands of a few men.
"There is food in plenty," declares Bishop Sellow, "within reach of the famine area, but it is just as impossible for a starving people to obtain a handful of rice as it would be for a pauper to borrow money without security. In the famine area there is rice in plenty. But the upper classes have it for sale."
"The upper classes have it for sale"—did you ever notice anything similar to this in America?
When it comes to dollars and cents, what's the difference between a "heathen" and a "Christian" plutocrat, anyway?
The truth is, there are no real famines.
Nature can produce enough in one good year to feed the world for three or four years, and occasionally withholds the rain in order to give the soil a little rest. Of course, there are barren spots of earth, but there is more than enough good country everywhere to care for the race.
We have had it drummed into us that famine and pestilence are visitations of Providence.
It's a blundering lie. They are visions of capitalism.
Capitalism is the devil that walketh about as a roaring lion seeking whom it may devour.
If you doubt this, I might quote some Scripture for you—passages that the average preachers are prone to overlook in their strenuous efforts to save souls. The Old Book is full of them—here are a few that will do:
You will find this in the X Psalm. It reads:
"The wicked in his pride persecuteth the poor. He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages; in the secret places doth he murder the innocent; his eyes are privily set against the poor. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den; he lieth in wait to catch the poor; he doth catch the poor, when he draweth them into his net."
Yes—Capitalism sits in "lurking", in "secret" places, and concocts all the devilment that pesters the race.
That's the main occupation of your prominent republican and democratic politicians.
They "catch the poor" and they "draw them into their net."
No matter by whom and for whom The Los Angeles Times building was dynamited, the sensational confession on the eve of election was pulled off exactly on time to "catch the poor" and "draw them into their net."
One press report from Los Angeles reads:
"Every effort was made to connect Harriman (Socialist candidate for mayor) directly with the McNamara case. No point was left uncovered. The night before election a large squad of men were sent from house to house in large districts, telling that Harriman had been arrested charged with complicity in bribing jurors in the McNamara case. * * * In opposition to the Socialists was a compact group, consisting of the preachers, the saloonkeepers, the proprietors of all the gambling houses and the houses of ill-fame. The churches were still farther aided by the women who infest all the hotels and apartment houses where the white slave traffic is openly acknowledged to exist. All of the corrupt element in the city banded together and fought desperately to keep the Socialists out.—(From Milwaukee Daily Leader.)
Capitalism, backed by "preachers, saloonkeepers and proprietors of houses of ill-fame," led like hell and charged Job Harriman, the latchets of whose shoes not a one of them is worthy to unloose, with being connected with a crime.
And the lie drew enough into the "net" to defeat Harriman.
The infamy of this elegant bunch of capitalist lick-spittles and their cowardly conspiracy to defeat Socialism ought to call for another wave of horror.
The outfit would crucify Christ again to-day rather than see a Socialist victory.
Capitalism is destroying over a million lives a year in these United States—murdering them outright, starving them and making physical and moral wrecks of men, women and children.
It is war, heartless war, from the first day of January till the last day of December, year after year.
Child slavery exists, because child labor can be gotten cheap.
The cradle is furnishing tender flesh and blood for your masters to grind into coin. No matter to them if the little children do not live long, no matter if their joyless lives are soon snuffed out by the accursed system.
What does Big Business care for murder—unless some crazed workingman, like the McNamaras, chance to do the murder—then comes a wave of horror.
More than 500,000 human beings crushed every year in preventable accidents and mine explosions!
That is nothing, compared to the profits in the game.
More than 600,000 girls living in prostitution and white slavery, because capitalism pays them wages too small to live honest lives.
The average lives of these girls is five years.
The white slave syndicate figures on needing 200,000 fresh recruits every year to assure an attractive stock, as some quit the business, or become too diseased to keep it up, before the five years roll around with its death sentence.
When you vote for Capitalism you vote for this thing to go on.
And that unknown quantity carried off annually by disease bred of filth and unsanitary conditions and poverty—the biggest toll of all to the god of Mammon.
But what of this, anyway, man? Why, your capitalist courts have declared that a workingman is only worth $350 more than a mule, and it is blamed hard and expensive, too, to collect the $350.
After your lawyers and courts are done with you, I should judge you would be left with about seventy-five cents clear, so virtually you bring in the neighborhood of six bits more than the mule. I suppose a woman would not be worth so much, and a child less.
Here is the court decision that has established the market value of a workingman. The decision was rendered in the federal court, at Cleveland, in December last (1911), and the rendering is reported as follows:
"The jury in the federal court awarded the Hailey-Okla. Coal Co. $30,507 damages against the Globe Oil Co. for losses occasioned in the explosion in the Haileyville, Okla., mine in 1908. The verdict places the damages for 29 men dead and 10 wounded at $500 each; for mules at $150 each."
This discloses what you would probably bring on the auction block. If you are young and strong you are worth $500; mules $150.
It will be noted that there is no discrimination in allowing settlement between the 29 that were killed and the 10 that were wounded.
The wounded probably had a leg or arm torn off or their eyes put out.
They were just as useless to the capitalist class as the dead ones.
The federal court figured them all alike in the damage suit.
Some of you white victims of the capitalist system, who vote a capitalist ticket because you are afraid of "nigger equality," ought to sit up and take notice.
Your "equality" has petered out away below the "nigger" of the old chattel slave days.
He used to be worth from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars, with board and clothes thrown in.
You have slumped the market down to a measly $500, without any board and clothes, and have to get killed to collect, at that.
You had better cross yourselves with a jack and be mules.
Mules keep along about the same old price and get their fodder to boot.
Anyway, you know now where you stand. The difference between a workingman and a mule is $350; when you see a workingman voting a republican or a democratic ticket you will hardly think there is that much difference.
******
A Wave of Horror—do you know anything about the manufacturing of our common lighting matches?
Do you know that the manufacturers use deadly white phosphorous, because it is cheaper, which causes a horrible, lingering and fatal disease of the bones of the jaw, torturing the lives and killing multitudes every year?
This disease, "Phossy Jaw," is incurable, the manufacturers know that the white phosphorous will kill the workers, but profit is profit under capitalism, and workingmen and women and children are cheap and plenty.
Dr. E. Harlan Wells, expert on tuberculosis, recently said: "Medical scientists have discovered that the factors concerned in the perpetuation and propagation of this disease (consumption) are overwork, child labor, poverty and want." And he goes on to say: "When the wealth of the nation is so distributed that each man receives enough and no man too much—then only may we hope to see tuberculosis eradicated."
Disease is but another form of the wanton murder that an abnormal social system creates.
Every well-informed person is aware of this fact, and yet no Wave of Horror seems to bother anybody—unless they chance to catch the deadly germs themselves.
The sweatshops of any of our great cities, where your coat or your wife's cloak likely came from, commit more murder with filth-bred tuberculosis germs every year than James McNamara could commit the rest of his life by his coarse methods.
"What are you Americans going to do," writes Lincoln Steffens, "about conditions which are breeding up healthy, good-tempered boys like these McNamara boys, really to believe, as they most sincerely do—they and a growing group of labor—that the only recourse they have for improving the conditions of the wage worker is the use of dynamite against property and life?"
Well, I can answer for the Socialist Americans, Mr. Steffens. We propose to tear up root and branch of the accursed "conditions" that you yourself admit are breeding war into the hearts of any men—be they robbed workers, or the robbers themselves. This is the sad part of it all—that you and others cannot or will not discover the Socialist way of production and distribution of wealth.
Jesus saw the thing to do, and taught the brotherhood of man as his social message to the race.
Marx and Engels disclosed the same message, and made it so plain that "the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err therein."
They taught brotherhood and equal opportunity of use in all the tools that produce and distribute the things we all require.
These tools comprise the land, machinery, mills, mines, factories, railroads, steamships and other means of public transportation, the telegraph and telephone systems—they comprise everything we all need to use in order to provide food, clothing, shelter, education and all the essentials of life.
This is Brotherhood and Salvation in the only sense of the words that amount to anything at all.
Anything else is sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
This is the only thing that puts an Otis out of commission and makes the deed of a McNamara unheard of.
How?
That's not hard to answer.
Under the present system of class rule, Otis and his class own the tools and own the jobs.
McNamara and his class own nothing but their labor power and hungry stomachs.
The class that owns the tools loans them—gives the jobs—to those who are willing to use them for the least returns—the lowest wages.
The lower the wages, the higher the profits.
The game is to force the wages of the working class down, so as to send the profits of the capitalist class up.
This isn't conducive to brotherhood and peace; this is out-and-out fratricide and class war.
This is war at home; turn back and read what Chauncey Depew said brought on war abroad. War abroad is to force more markets wherein to sell the stolen products of labor—the products that labor should have had for its own use—so as to create more profits for the useless class.
The devil himself couldn’t have arranged anything more abominable than our social system.
It is a system of legalized robbery maintained by legalized murder.
Socialism proposes to establish a fraternal government of the working class, the chief purpose of which government shall be to operate the great industries of the nation and return to the workers the full product of their toil.
Socialism is not vindictive, nor does it ask of the capitalist class amends for past wrongs to the workers.
On the contrary, Socialism is generous to the limit—it invites the predatory class to join the working class and become part of the working class, that there may finally be but one class—all comrades.
After all, there are not many of the capitalist class. They are few in number. The great majority, the workers, can soon absorb them.
The savage owned the earth and its products in common—and shall not we, with our vastly improved machinery and methods for producing wealth, be as wise as he?
Socialism does not propose to own private wealth in common. It only proposes to own the great wealth-producing tools in common.
Your home and all its surroundings shall be your private property. And you shall have a home—not a rented tenement.
What could be more hateful, more abnormal, than this condition wherein the class that owns the tools of production does not use them, and the class that uses them does not own them?
Can you imagine on earth peace, good will toward men under such a master and slave arrangement?
Can anything but war exist under such a state of affairs?
******
I have enumerated only a few of the crimes of capitalist class rule. I have not begun to tell them all. Their name is legion.
What I have tried to do is to make you have a Wave of Horror at every kind of murder and outrage, and not wait until another McNamara commits some crime out of the ordinary.
This whole social fabric of ours is built on hate, and strife and war.
Socialism comes with a message of love, and harmony and peace.
The McNamara ease will roll into the annals of the past and the particular Wave of Horror it produced will be no more.
But never mind, just make it your business and duty to become horrified at every form of murder and rank injustice you can discover—and it will amaze you at the awful multitude that will be disclosed to your view.
When the scales fall from your eyes, and as you are human and not demon, you will shudder at this thing we call civilized society. You will see the old serpent that trails around the globe and leaves its deadly venom in every home. It carries the creed of hell itself, and men fall down and worship.
Listen—this creed tells you that one class in this world was destined to do all the toil, and another class to live in idleness and ease.
It tells you that murder is right in order to keep this privileged class in power and the other class in servitude.
This serpent rules supreme, and spreads foul pestilence in its track.
Poverty, Misery, Disease, Insanity and War are blazed in yellow letters on its black scales.
The name of this serpent is Capitalist Rule.
Can we destroy this monster?
Shall we destroy it?
Yes, we can and will, else there be no God in the Universe and no Soul in Man; else every hope and desire of the human heart is a delusion; else every promise of the past and every righteous demand of the present is a lie.
The McNamara tragedy is but a passing incident in the awful war of capitalist rule.
It is only one of the countless murders done along the Serpent's deadly trail.
If it had been done by your capitalist rulers to protect them in their game of exploitation, no Wave of Horror would have swept the land.
These men were not Socialists—they belonged to one of the old exploiting political parties and had learned their lesson from their masters.
This does not absolve the McNamaras, but it shows that the Socialist way is the only way to end war and murder.
The capitalists boast that the McNamara confession defeated the Socialists in the Los Angeles election. With 53,000 Socialist votes in that city, the Socialists can well afford to laugh at such a defeat. The McNamara case will help our cause. It demolishes for all time the utility of such tactics.
The rank and file of the labor unions will follow the example of their brothers of Europe and go into politics. They will find their political home where they belong, in the International Socialist Organization.
The longer they delay this, the more galling will be the chains that bind them.
Everything these good days works for Socialism—for the glad time coming when Waves of Horror will not sweep over the land any more, when the desert shall blossom as the rose and peace shall flow as a river; when the seed of the woman shall bruise the Serpent's head, and swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.
It is written that War shall be no more.
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- ↑ The Irish famine was a potato famine, English landlords take the grain and most of the hogs for rent, leaving the Irish tenants to subsist mostly on potatoes. A good crop of grain was raised the famine year, but the potatoes had rotted in the ground. The grain was taken for rent and the Irish starved.