|
will make you answer for it." On every hand the workmen shouted: "It is the truth, and if you harm the speaker it will be you, and not him, that will dangle on a rope from a tree limb."]
After order was restored the speaker continued, and showed that the United States army was now employed in Wyoming Territory against strikers; that the military was employed in East Saginaw, Mich.; in Cleveland, O.; in Lemont, Ill.—in fact, it was employed wherever the capitalists called for it to subjugate their wage-slaves, who were in revolt against oppression and slavery. The speaker said that economy, industry, and sobriety were three virtues that capitalists never practiced; that there could be no overproduction of houses and clothing when the great mass of the people were without homes and clothed in rags. Crime, disease, ignorance, insanity, suicide, and all the ills which afflict the people result from enforced artificial poverty; and this poverty was created by the private ownership of the means of life—capital. It was such a condition of affairs that was absolutely certain to finally create the social revolution. The workers would be driven by necessity to revolt and overthrow the power of those who were growing rich and thriving upon their misery. Voting, strikes, arbitration, etc., were of no use. Those who deprived the workers of the wealth they created, and held them by laws and the bayonet in subjugation, would never heed the logic of anything by force—physical force—the only argument that tyrants ever could or would listen to. The law—the statute of law—the Government, was the creation of the privileged class—a class that lived without working and became rich by depriving the workers. It was the law which had made the land private property; had done the same thing with machinery, the means of transportation and communication. The law—the statute of law—had made private property of all the means of life, dooming the wage-workers to a life of hereditary servitude to the privileged class. Could we, who suffer from it, be expected to uphold "law and order," the instrumentality by which we were deprived of our right to life, to liberty, and to happiness? Workingmen and women of South Bend, prepare for the inevitable. Join your comrades of Chicago and elsewhere. All over the world a similar condi-
|