cost of machinery, the rent of buildings, the interest on money, and the wages paid to employees. It went into different lines of production, and, summing up, the result was this: That in a year's time each man working as a wage laborer in the city of Chicago had added to the wealth of this city—by whomsoever it was possessed makes no difference—$2,764. The average wages paid for that average product of each worker was $457—a little more than one-sixth. And yet the political economists of the free trade and the protective schools were asking: "Why is it that we have overproduction?" You compel a man to work and produce $2,764 worth of goods and you give him $457 to buy them with, and you ask: "Why is it that we have overproduction, and why is it that our warehouses are full of goods, and our workshops have to shut up, and our workmen are turned out on the highway because there is nothing to do?" What is this tending to? Let me show the change of conditions as shown in Boston in forty years. Charles Dickens a man of acute perceptions, visited this country forty years ago, and he said that the sight of a beggar in the streets of Boston at that time would have created as much consternation as the sight of an angel with a drawn sword. A Boston paper in the winter of 1884–5 stated that there were some quarters in Boston where to own a stove was to be a comparative aristocrat. The poor people who lived in the neighborhood paid a certain sum of money to rent the holes on the top of the stove that belonged to the aristocrats. You see the change, and there is this comparative change in the working classes of that city and in every large city m the union. It is a noted fact that within the last twenty or thirty years the farms of this country have been gradually going out of the possession of the actual cultivators until today there is a little more than a quarter of the actual cultivators of farms in this country who are renters; and within twenty years in the states of Iowa and Illinois the mortgages on farms have increased thirty-three per cent, of the actual value of the arms. Is it not enough to make any thinking man ask if there is not something wrong somewhere? Possibly it would be answered "Yes, a man has a right to inquire whether there is something wrong or not but for God's sake, don't think that Socialism will do it any good, or if you do we will hang you! It is all right to think, but we win punish you for your conclusions!"
Parsons, in his testimony, repeated what he had said at the Haymarket on the night of May 4, when he stated that this was an American question, because the patriotic tricksters who have been telling the people to worship the American flag, while they quietly put their hands in their pockets and robbed them—they have said that this merely a European question. It is an American question and the close contact of nations cemented by the facilities of civilization, is bringing all the question, that affect one to affect all people equally all over the world. What affects the European laborer and his employer affects the American laborer and his American employer, and the relationship is the same between the two classes.
In the winter of 1884–5 one hundred and twenty American girls of fourteen and sixteen years of age were driven from their homes by their shutting down of the Merrimac mills in Connecticut, and they were compelled to walk through the bleak New England hills and find refuge in out-houses and haystacks, and numbers of them undoubtedly found their way to lives of shame.
