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cept the station of a menial as an act of divine providence? No, perish the thought. Shall the plundered workers return thanks to their despoilers, who give charity to hide their blushes when they look into the faces of their victims? Shall the disinherited, who have by legal enactments been debarred their natural right to an equal and free use of all natural and social forces, return thanks for the soup-houses, poor-houses, wood-yards, and other charitable institutions? Shall the workers five thanks because they receive two hours' pay for ten hours' work? Are they to be thankful for the compulsory idleness of over 2,000,000 of their fellow-workingmen? Thankful for an employer, a "boss" whose "business" it is to take something for nothing, and force them to accept the terms or starve? Thankful for a republican form of Government which guarantees free speech, free ballot, free press, and free action to the properties class; a Government with its declaration of independence, constitution, and stars-and-stripes to defend and protect the robbers of labor, while it imprisons, shoots, and hangs the disloyal, rebellious wage-slave? The First regiment, Illinois State Guards, is at this moment practicing the evolutions of the "street riot drill" in another part of the city for the purpose of murdering in an expeditious and scientific manner the men and women whom the present system has turned adrift to starve. Shall the workers be thankful for that? Shall they be thankful that capitalists the past year have employed the Pinkerton thugs, the police, and the military to subjugate the workers in revolt against starvation wages? Shall thanks be returned that the Almighty God blesses the wrong-doer with riches, making paradise for them out of the hells of the poor? Shall we be thankful for the privation, for slavery, for poverty? No. Curses bitter and deep are hereby and now returned to the author of our woes, be that God of man!
Referring to Chicago, the speaker drew attention to the fact that last winter of 30,000 persons were kept from starvation by the hand of charity. With elevators bursting with food, warehouses groaning with clothing, and houses vacant everywhere, they who produced by their labor these things were made to feel the pangs of hunger and the biting frosts of winter. Beneath the shadow of
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