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of strong, healthy men are kept in enforced idleness and receive aid in one form or another from churches, clubs, friends, neighbors, etc.
Allowing five persons to a family, we find that canton, with its 20,000 inhabitants, has 3,5000 human beings who have been made mendicants and paupers and are being driven into vagabondage and crime, prostitution and suicide by means of our industrial system. Let me give one or two detailed facts with which the writer is personally acquainted. At the iron and steel works in canton the man who fires six boilers and regulates the steam in them tells me that he s kept spinning like a top for ten to twelve hours each day, doing t his work in person, and that the least oversight on his part would cause an explosion of the boilers that would kill at least forty or fifty of the 200 men employed in the mill. For the performance of this exhaustive labor and grave responsibility he receives the sum of the 12 ½ cents per hour!
In the midst of the terrible blizzards and snows I saw little 4 and 5-year-old girls, clad in thin and tattered garments, scraping the snow with their fingers among the railroad tracks where engines are constantly switching to and fro, hunting for nuggets of coal which may have dropped from passing trains! While here I read in the capitalistic press of the town that an unemployed workman, driven to desperation, dashed a stone through a plate-glass window in a store on a principal business street, and, waiting till an officer of the law arrested him, he gave a reason that he was out of work, money, and friends, and adopted this plan to keep from freezing and starving to death! But enough. I might add much more, but space forbids.
Two very large mass-meetings were held here. The first one was addressed by myself; the second by comrades Louis Kirchner, of Canton, and Christ. Saam, of Cleveland, in German, and myself in English. The utterances of the speakers were loudly applauded. Several new members of the America and German Groups were obtained, besides ,many subscribers to the Alarm, Vorbote, Freiheit, and Parole.
From Canton I went to Massillon, a manufacturing and mining town of about 12,000 population. Here I found one-half of the working people in compulsory idleness, and one-third of the whole
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