vent other labor avocations from accepting the meager wage doled out to labor, is a blow struck at the liberty of contract, which is the only means left them to realize dividends and interest on their fictitious wealth. Noble and sacrificing! These monopolists care nothing for liberty, but everything for the power to contract with competing starving laborers.
Now, your honor, the victims of these wrongs are numbered by the millions in the United states, one million of whom it is officially reported by the Labor Bureau are out of employment.
The Chicago Tribune, about this time, published the following sentiment: The simplest plan probably when one is not a member of the Humane Society is to put arsenic in the supplies of food furnished the unemployed or the tramp. This produces death in a short time, and is a warning to other tramps to keep out of the neighborhood." The unemployed are kept for better uses now—to take the place of strikers. They don't want to kill them off with strychnine now. The Chicago Times used the same advice with reference to the same matter while the great railroad strike of 1877 was pending, and the president of the Pennsylvania Company—Tom Scott—says: "Give them the rifle diet and see how they like that kind of bread." I have spoken here of monopoly conspiracy. Now, to show my words are not extravagant I want to call your attention to the expressions of three senators on the floor of the United States senate in the last session of the American congress. They had a long discussion of the Bland silver bill and the currency question, and during the debate on that question Senator Teller used these words—he said: There is a conspiracy all over the world on the part of capital against labor, a conspiracy which does not exist in the United States alone, but in which this government is an active agent—a conspiracy for the purpose of increasing the value of the dollar and of decreasing the value of man's production everywhere in the world." "It is a conspiracy, as Mr. Teller said, for those who have power to take advantage of, and perpetuate the outrage and the wrong upon those who are helpless and powerless." Mr. Vest, in the discussion upon the floor of the senate, used these words. He said he also preferred the house resolutions. He said that the question was one between gold and silver, between gold and greenbacks; between the man who wanted to make money dear and the man who borrowed the money; and unless this trouble was terminated on equitable and fair grounds it would result in a sectional struggle between the east and the west. That was the plain meaning of the whole thing. It was a conspiracy! Senator Jones, of Nevada, discussing the same thing, said that his belief was "that the shrinking volumes of money had inflicted more evil, more suffering, more penalties upon the American people than they had ever suffered from war, pestilence, or famine. What the people want is money; not gold nor silver, but dollars and what liquidates the debt and keeps the red flag of the sheriff away from the window." Your honor will observe he did not refer to the red flag of the commune in that particular. Now, to the mind of this United States senator, the only red flag that is dangerous in the United States is the sheriff's—the flag of the auctioneer, denoting the death of what? Denoting the financial demise of some business man who has been destroyed by these conspiracies spoken of by Senator Vest, Senator Teller, and Senator Jones, of the United
