ARRAIGNMENT OF AMERICAN 
 WEALTH KINGS. 
 
 TO JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER. J. P. MORGAN. OGDEN ARMOUR, AND OTHER 
 PLUTOCRAT WRECKERS OF THE NATION. 
 
 You have made us slaves, by treachery and seduction are debauching us 
 into a race of cowards , and by commission of the highest 
 crimes you own and are the United States. 
 
 I will name your crimes. 
 
 You have confiscated the nation’s wealth. 
 
 Thereby you have changed a free people into a population of serfs, wiping 
 out the achievements of ages. 
 
 You are incarnate Greed, vultures in form of men, arrogant, shameless, 
 inhuman. Among the worst characters of all time there has not lived 
 a more besottedly rapacious crew. 
 
 Brutal as beasts of prey, you have pitilessly wrecked what was highest in 
 America. You have trampled out Liberty, Opportunity, Equality, 
 Justice, Intelligence, Manhood, Character. Whoever would live and 
 work in this country now must be your groom. 
 
 You are Enemies of Law. No laws are holy to you but those you have 
 bought to shelter your riotous raids on the people's wealth. By Swindle, 
 Fraud, Corruption, Brutality and Robbery, you have broken or nullified 
 every man you could not bribe. 
 
 You are owners and slave-drivers of venal United States senators, an aggreg¬ 
 ation nearly all of obsequious flunkies; you are whippers and suborners 
 of Legislatures; you are steerers of judges, from the perfidious supreme 
 court to the suppliant petty courts. The willowy men in these offices 
 lick your feet and quake under your scowl. Whom you cannot drive 
 you wheedle and fool with your army of traitor lawyers. 
 
 You are Common Robbers, far more contemptible and accursed than the 
 meanest pickpocket. But for the hysterical fear you have bred you 
 would be in felons’ cells or already hanged. You have executed a 
 Revolution of Confiscation, with Misery, Madness, and Death in its 
 train. 
 
 You have carried Monopoly, which is nothing but criminal piracy, to the 
 highest pitch. It is a cannibalistic, anti-human force, the dastard’s and 
 bully’s instrument for grinding, yes, and butchering the weak. To 
 wrench needed bread out of men’s mouths is to slaughter them. 
 
 You have foully assaulted every American home. You have impoverished 
 families, depraved their standard of life, filched their food, starved their 
 children of health, joy, intelligence, and so poisoned the deepest 
 
fountains of race growth. This you have done that you may guzzle 
 and swill wealth and lord over man. Every babe in an American 
 cradle is tributary to the suction of your vampire wills, condemned to 
 be warped, distorted, and dwarfed by you for life. You drink its 
 strength, you amputate its faculties, you kill its soul. The whole 
 human breed in the land is pigmyized to fatten you. And what are 
 you when fattened? Still more insatiable swine ! 
 
 Already you have pauperized millions. Multitudes cry helplessly for bread 
 while you gorge, annihilating the people’s wealth in cancerous luxury. 
 Haggard, sunken-eyed women with skeleton children at their dry breasts 
 moan in frenzy and desolation, dying inch by inch, withered victims of 
 your damnable gain-greed. And with the gangrene Want eating out the 
 life of mankind through your hellish acts, you frolic in hideous excess. 
 This is America. American patriots died for the country that you might 
 tear it from their children and drive them to toil as your while slaves 
 under the Lash of Need. You have dragged the nation's ideals in mud 
 and spewed on them. Where will your insolence stop? Soon thirty 
 million paupers will swell your gloating pomp, cursing us with national 
 shipwreck or the bloodliest revolution in human annals. You are near 
 the abyss. Torture your kind a little longer and crazed man will glut 
 his vengeance on you until none of you are left to die. 
 
 I arraign you as Murderers. Men are not killed alone by blows, but by the 
 infamous pressure on their lives from the rich You kill that way. 
 You are assassins of the poor. 
 
 Hypocrites, you perpetrate these crimes in the name of Right and Religion. 
 You trick men with vulgar petty bribes of unclean gifts to universities, 
 churches, libraries and science, making them all servile partners in your 
 iniquities, so that your potency in corruption was never paralleled. 
 
 You buy huge-feed counsel to pilot you through the slumbering laws and 
 paint over the stains of your guilt that men may not tear you to pieces. 
 Yet even the wretches who kiss the earth where you step know your 
 blackness. There are your mountains of wealth. Where did you get 
 them? Out of the people , vilely. And you posture as innocents! 
 
 Think what you have done, Rockefeller, Morgan, and your felon 
 brood of conspirators, to crush life, ruin happiness, and slay hope ! Think 
 of the hell you have kindled in innocent lives ! And you dare still hug your 
 foully-got gold, with the perdition you have lighted raging to explosion*! 
 
 Devilishly greedy, reptiles in perfidy, subtle in dodging the cell and 
 hangman, you have broken men’s hearts, smiled, and broken other men’s 
 hearts. You have mangled the nation’s vitals, and mocked. If you are the 
 most powerful men in the hemisphere, you are also the most terribly hated. 
 And justly. The Czar inherited criminal despotism, you seized it. You 
 are our Hated Czars. The curse of all men shall fall on you. 
 
 By these foul deeds you have lifted yourselves into Kings of the United 
 States. Where is Government of the people, by the people, for the people? 
 Dead. You killed it. And so have you cowed this vast Commonwealth 
 by your craft that So million souls grovel in wormlike fear of you. Like 
 
tyrant potentates of old you ravish billions, toss back the rabble a sop of 
 
 cents, and think you can throttle man forever. 
 
 John Hampden was assessed a paltry 20 shillings unjustly by an 
 English King, and that King’s head fell on the block. A small arbitrary tax 
 on ”ea cost England America. Do you then, profligately robbing every 
 citizen through every pore, impudently seizing all men have, fancy that 
 none will revolt to unsceptre you ? 
 
 Fools, not all Americans are faithless poltroons under your heel. The 
 time is here when all decent men, stung by your abhorrent selfishness, will 
 brand you as the vilest human enemies. They will treat you as social lepers, 
 which you are. They will set their faces against you like steel. They will 
 refuse to work for you, traffic with you, feed you, house you, clothe you, 
 endure you, ostrasizing you to burning contempt and making your names a 
 hissing. They will discrown and depose you, and if your madness com¬ 
 pels, destroy you. 
 
 I as one citizen repudiate your sovereignty. I denounce you and your 
 infamous tax on me and every motion of my life. I cancel your tax on my 
 soul. Where is your title? Who made you deities over man? Who gave 
 you right to mow an endless swath of death, rating men cattle? 
 
 / denounce you as traitors. It is treason to tear the country from its 
 owners and conduct it as a private plantation for your bloated enrichment 
 and their ruin. It is treason to imbrute your countrymen by smashing them 
 between the millstones of low pay and high charge for the things of life. 
 It is treason to poison them with polluted food which you sell at a profit of 
 beetling billions. 
 
 Were a stranger to do these fiendish works the whole nation would 
 rise and grind him to dust. Is a domestic Judas, masked as a friend, sweeter 
 than a foreign enemy? What words can depict your guilt or tell the mag¬ 
 nitude of your treason? If the iniquity of your sullied lives could stir your 
 shame you would go and hang yourselves. 
 
 But when the people understand they will make you sensible of the 
 blot you are on the nation. They will treat you as a cancerous growth to 
 be extirpated. For either you will kill the nation or the nation will remove 
 you. A handful of resolute citizens can destroy your villainous fabric built 
 on the nation’s stupid fear. 
 
 By a few declaring that your robber rights are rescinded, by their 
 refusal in act to admit your false ownership pi wealth or observe a truce 
 with you, by their treating your wealth as contraband and you as outlaws, 
 by the edict of restoration as the slave was restored to himself, the whole 
 people will recover manhood, and ceasing to grovel to you as gods will 
 proceed toward you as the basest reprobates. 
 
 It is now war with you to the end. It shall be war without com¬ 
 promise. You are utterly venomous and deadly; you have proved that your 
 type cannot exist with safety to mankind. Your caste must go. 
 
 In this war you will lose. Your predatory Kingdom and Slavery 
 bar Industrial Equality and Liberty. Autocracy of Wealth now manacles 
 us, we shall have Democracy of Wealth. You wrung from the whole 
 
people, restore your stealings to the whole people. We cannot return to 
 divided industry. Unity is the inodern idea, but unity under all, not under 
 a horde of Vandals. Transfer the title of your wealth to the public. 
 
 You will not? Then it shall be taken from you. If like wild beasts 
 you cling to your stolen billions, they shall be wrested back. The eternal 
 war for freedom will break on your heads, who are the last and meanest 
 slave-makers. For while all white men here grew in liberty as their supreme 
 right, you have beaten them down into a worse than chattel servitude. A 
 tocsin will ring through the land thundering your extinction. You shall 
 be forced to disgorge. What strength have you except this senseless 
 popular fear? 
 
 The fear will pass. You will be hauled from your thrones, your 
 stolen booty restored to its creators, and if you end your lives free it will be 
 through the magnanimity of a continent of victims. 
 
 Insane that you are, filling men’s hearts with passions that terribly 
 explode, rushing headlong to doom, Down with your power! Enemies 
 of Humanity, of Progress, of everything worthy on the planet, heap no more 
 insults on the nation of one-time freemen, now flayed by your merciless tolls 
 and fleeced to the bone by your frantic avarice. 
 
 People, Rise and throw these extortioners off. Be free. Reconquer 
 Liberty. Confiscate the wealth they have torn from you. Defy the brazen 
 despots and their spiderweb bonds. 
 
 If you cravenly palter a second civil war will be the only blade that 
 can cut out the tumor of their dynasty. Daily and hourly they entrench 
 themselves. It is better for the crisis to come now than for these brigands 
 to be suffered to lay another stone on the bastile of our liberties. 
 
 Remember the cause dedicated to us by our fathers, to brighten, 
 renew, and hand on increased the Flame of Freedom. 
 
 Strike! Deeds only count! Take back your own ! 
 
 New York City Morrison I. Swift. 
 
 June 1906. 
 
 Reader, you are requested to reprint and circulate this Arraignment in your district. A copy 
 will be sent upon application. 
 
 SEUGMAN Ua*ARV