regiment, and the First will do excellent service in the streets in case of necessity. Opportunities, however, are needed for rifle practice, and Colonel Knox is anxious to have a range established as soon as possible. Instead of 400 members, the regiment should have 800 members on its rolls. Business men should take more interest in the organization and help put it in the best possible condition to cope with a mob, for there may be need for its service at no distant day." That article appeared either in the Times or Tribune of the next day. I don't know which. The speaker says: "What must be the thought of the oppressed in foreign lands when they hear the tramp of the militia beneath the folds of the stars and stripes? They who first hung this flag to the breeze, proclaimed that beneath its folds the oppressed of all lands would find, a refuge and a haven and protection against the despotism of all lands. Is this the case today when the counter-tramp of two millions of homeless wanderers is heard throughout the land of America; men strong and able and anxious and willing to work, that they may purchase for themselves and their families food; when the cry of discontent is heard from the working classes everywhere, and they refuse longer to starve, and peaceably accept a rifle diet and die in misery according to law, and order is enforced by this military drill? Is this military drill for the purpose of sweeping them down as a mob with grape and canister upon the street?" This is the language of the speaker at the meeting: "We working people hear these ominous rumblings, which create inquiry as to their origin. A few years ago we heard nothing of this kind; but great changes have taken place during the past generation. Charles Dickens, who visited America forty years ago, said that what surprised him most was the general prosperity and equality of all people, and that a beggar upon the streets of Boston would create as much consternation as an angel with a flaming sword. What of Boston today? Last winter, said a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, writing from that city, 30,000 persons were destitute, and there were whole streets of tenement houses where the possession of a cooking stove was regarded as a badge of aristocracy, the holes of which were rented to other less wealthy neighbors for a few pennies per hour.
"So, too, with New York, Chicago and every other industrial center in this broad land. Why is this? Have we had a famine? Has nature refused to yield her harvest? These are grave and serious questions for us, the producers and sufferers, to consider, at least. Take a glance at the wealth of this country. In the past twenty years it has increased over twenty billions of dollars. Into whose hands has this wealth found its way? Certainly not the hands of the producers, for if it had there would be no need for street-riot drills. This country has a population of 55,000,000, and a statistical compilation shows that there are in the cities of New York, Philadelphia and Boston twenty men who own as their private property over $750,000,000, or about one-twenty-sixth of the entire increase which was produced by the labor of the working class, these twenty individuals being as one in three millions. In twenty years these profit-mongers have fleeced the people of the enormous sum of $750,000,000, and only three cities and twenty robbers heard from. A government that protects this plundering of the people, a government which permits the people to be degraded and brought to misery in this manner is a
