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The master selected under chattel slavery his own slaves. Under the wage slavery system the wage slave selects his master. Formerly the master selected the slave; to-day the slave selects his master, and he has got to find one or else he is carried down here to my friend, the gaoler and occupies a cell alongside of myself. He is compelled to find one. So the change of the industrial system, in the language of Jefferson Davis, ex-president of the Southern Confederacy, in an interview with the New York Herald upon the question of the chattel slave system of the South and that of the so-called "free-laborer," and their wages—Jefferson Davis has acted positively that the change was a decided benefit to the former chattel slave owners, who would not exchange the new system of wage labor at all for the chattel labor, because now the dead had to bury themselves and the sick take care of themselves, and now they don't have to employ overseers to look after them. They give them a task to do—a certain amount to do. They say: "Now, here, perform this piece of work in a certain length of time," and if you don't (under the wage-system, says Mr. Davis), why, when you come around for your pay next Saturday you simply find in the envelope which gives you your money a note which informs you of the fact that you have been discharged. Now, Jefferson Davis admitted in his statement that the leather thong dipped in salt brine, for the chattel slave, had been exchanged under the wage system for the lash of hunger, an empty stomach, and the ragged back of the wage-earner of free-born American sovereign citizens, who, according to the census of the United States for 1880, constitute more than nine-tenths of our entire population. But, you say, the wage slave had advantages over the chattel slave. The chattel slave couldn't get away from it. Well, if we had the statistics, I believe it could be shown that as many chattel slaves escaped from bondage with the bloodhounds of their masters after them as they tracked their way over the snow-beaten rocks of Canada, and via the underground grape-vine road—I believe the statistics would show to-day that as many chattel slaves escaped from their bondage under that system as can, and as many do, to-day from the wage bondage into capitalistic liberty.
I am a Socialist. I am one of those, although myself a wage salve who holds that it was wrong—wrong to myself, wrong to my neigh-
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