|
aire club-houses in this city which are used for conspiracy against the liberties of the people. There are miles and miles of fashionable avenues lined from end to end with palaces wherein the enslavers and robbers or labor licentiously and riotously carouse upon the wealth filched from the workers.
Shall we be thankful for this infamy, crime, and murder of the innocents? But the "stars-and-stripes" overshadows and smiles upon and protects it all. Behold the American army, with gleaming bayonets, in long serried line, the American flag at its head leading the column, marching under the orders of the President of the United States to protect -- what?* To protect the rights and liberties and welfare of the people? No. To protect the propertied class in their constitutional right to buy cheap labor-- the Chinese coolie slave-- and thus reduce the American laborer to the coolie standard of living. The flag of America has thus become the ensign of privilege and the guardian of property, the defender of monopoly. Wage-slaves of Chicago, turn your eyes from that ensign of property and fix them upon the emblem of liberty, fraternity, equality --the red flag-- that flag which now and ever has waved, and ever will remain the oriflamme of liberty, denoting emancipated labor, the redemption of humanity, and the equality of rights of all.
Let us be thankful, then, that there is a large and increasing number of workingmen and women who have acquired a knowledge of their rights and dare to defend them. Let us be thankful for the dawn which is even now breaking, which is to usher in the new era; thankful for the near approach of that period in human affairs when man will no longer govern or exploit his fellow-man: the time when the earth and all it contains will be held for the free use of all nature's children.
Let us prepare for the recovery of our stolen right to our inheritance of this earth, and let us express the devout and earnest hope that ere many Thanksgiving days come round the workers of the world may, by their devotion to liberty and the best interest of
*This was being done at the time in the Territories.
|