E«OMEM 
 
Entered, according to act of Congress, August, 1894, by The American 
 Engraving Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at 
 Washington, D. C. All rights reserved. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 BY 
 
 ONE OF THEM. 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 THE AMERICAN ENGRAVING COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 1894. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 g With the great Emancipation Proclamation of 
 Abraham Lincoln finally ratified by the smoke that 
 drifted away from the last gun fired in the Civil War, 
 £ it was hoped and believed that slavery was ended for- 
 ever in the United States. But the twenty-nine years 
 of peace that have followed — years musical with the 
 hum of machinery, knit together with the threads of 
 ■1 countless industries, wreathed with the sooty breaths of 
 'i tireless factories, and garlanded with the fruits and 
 — grains of prolific harvests — these years of thrift and 
 prosperity have been false to humanity in their re- 
 £ suits and traitors to the lives that made them bounti- 
 ^ ful. 
 
 T These years have, in their combinations of diverse 
 ~ but profitable industries, created out of the Ameri- 
 I can Workman — the^American Slave; and to-day he 
 ' * stands up before the world in the disguise of a free- 
 \ man, but in reality a pitiable, helpless creature, held 
 in degrading captivity by strong but invisible fetters, 
 and subjugated by the very powers he assisted in 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 creating and maintaining. The American workman is j 
 only in theory a freeman. As a matter of fact, while 
 he is permitted to walk and talk as he pleases, the i'- 
 present and future value of his labors are hypothecated 
 by himself, his body is in pawn, or mortgaged as a 
 chattel for the redemption of his bonds, and the vol- \ 
 untary physical and mental servitude that succeeds ' 
 ends in most cases only with death. ' 
 
 This bondage is not, as labor agitators assert, the ; 
 result of the enmity of capital, but only an incident 
 of its exercise. Natural laws require that the rich ! 
 should scheme to be richer. The Political Scientists of 
 to-day, in direct contrast to those of the ancients, 
 argue, in the words of Dugald Stewart, that “far 
 from considering poverty as an advantage to a State, 
 their great aim is to open new sources of national 
 opulence, and to animate the activity of all classes 
 of the people by a taste for the comforts and accom- 
 modations of life.” 
 
 The Duke of Argyle in his book, “The Reign of 
 Law” writes: “In all that wide circle of operations 
 which have for their immediate result the getting of 
 wealth, there is a sagacity and cunning in the in- 
 stincts of labor, and in the love of gain, compared 
 with which all legislative wisdom is ignorance and 
 folly. But the instincts of labor, having for their 
 conscious purpose the acquisition of wealth, are in- 
 stincts which, under the stimulus and necessities of 
 
AMERICAN SLAR'ES 
 
 5 
 
 modern society, are blind to all other results whatever. 
 They override even the love of life; they silence even 
 the fear of death.” 
 
 We may reasonably conclude from the operation of 
 Natural Laws that every workman is ambitious and 
 schemes to be richer and to become even a hated 
 capitalist, and that the present detestation of the 
 capitalist as a so-called oppressor is a result of envy 
 as well as proofs of the palpable failure of the work- 
 ingman to succeed in his own ambitions and contri- 
 vances to acquire wealth. 
 
 The fundamental trouble of the workman is with 
 himself and not with the Capitalist, and results in 
 producing a combination of forces that being origi- 
 nally intended as protections, speedily are trans- 
 formed into uncompromising enemies, exacting 
 every penalty attached to failure and defeat.' 
 
 In declaring the American workman to be the 
 American Slave we base the assertion on the fact that 
 however boisterously and defiantly the agitators and 
 leaders may talk, and regardless of all manifestations 
 of aggregated power concentrated in a few irrespon- 
 sible men, the rank and file of this great army of 
 laborers are bondsmen — slaves of money lenders and 
 politicians; unprotected by the State, uncared for by 
 the church, fought against by woman, half-heartedly 
 befriended by the press, but sympathized with by mil- 
 lions of people who detest slavery in whatever form 
 
6 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 it may appear; and if an indictment were to be pre- 
 pared against the people of this country, it would in- 
 clude these active and passive enemies as principals 
 and accessories to this treason against humanity, 
 this crime against civilization, represented by the 
 enslavement of those who exist by manual labor. 
 
IL 
 
 By what right do we dare assert that the work- 
 man is the American Slave, and arraign Church, 
 State and Woman as guilty parties in maintaining 
 this condition of servitude? By the right of fact. 
 
 Webster defines a slave as— “one who has lost the 
 power of resistance;’’ and of slavery as— “It may 
 proceed from crimes, captivity, or from debt^ Of 
 debt, Benjamin Franklin, that philosopher for mod- 
 ern times and modern people, declared: “When you 
 run in debt you give to another power over your 
 liberty.” 
 
 We do not believe it to be an exaggerated state- 
 ment that of every one thousand workmen at least 
 seventy-five per cent owe more than they could pay 
 if immediate payment were requested, and that sixty 
 per cent cannot meet obligations as they come due un- 
 less by borrowing to obliterate the first. These obliga- 
 tions may be reasonable in every respect. They may 
 be created for a hundred purposes legitimately aris- 
 ing from personal or family needs. Or they may 
 form part and parcel of modest speculative enter- 
 prises, and be entered into with the belief, hope and 
 
 7 
 
8 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 faith that no trouble will be met in making a prompt 
 settlement. Sincerity of purpose and firmness of 
 resolve are more distinctive characteristics in the 
 workman than in men of professional or mercantile 
 callings. Their sense or honor is not blunted by 
 constant study of how to overreach or undermine 
 their fellow men. They are keenly susceptible to 
 imputations of unfairness or dishonesty and like other 
 good citizens, are influenced not alone by moral 
 considerations but also by fear of the pitiless enforce- 
 ment of legal penalties against which business men 
 are prepared with infinite resources. There is 
 nothing disgraceful in the workingman being a moral 
 coward where the business man is imperturbable if 
 not brave. 
 
 But with this assumption of liabilities, this shoul- 
 dering of indebtedness, great or small, begins the ser- 
 vitude of the workman, ike birth of the American 
 Slave. The public may, in anticipation of national 
 disgrace, blindfold its eyes; and the slave himself may 
 deny his condition with all the vehemence of which 
 the American language is capable (and it is an ener- 
 getic tongue in the employment of adjectives and 
 adverbs), yet, from the moment of the consummation 
 of his borrowing, he becomes a slave, leading, as the 
 days go on, a life of apprehension, and feeling a 
 creeping paralysis of the hopes and expectations that 
 animated him at the beginning. 
 
AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 9 
 
 The workman in debt — and for workman we take 
 the definition of Webster, “any man employed in 
 labor, whether tillage or manufacture” — held down 
 to a limited and precarious income, and soon realiz- 
 ing the uncertainty of his savings, recognizes the ten- 
 ure of his creditor upon his time, his energies, his 
 actions and, almost, his thoughts, and is forced into 
 shaping his labors for the benefit of his master rather 
 than confining them to the natural requirements of 
 himself or his family. Environed and hampered by 
 money obligation, oftentimes too lightly assumed, and 
 at the outset oblivious of the gravity of his new con- 
 dition^ the workman soon finds that his liberty has 
 stealthily ebbed away, that his time, and the work it 
 enables him to produce are not absolutely his; that 
 another and strange party has an interest in and a 
 pecuniary attachment upon his life, and its fruits. 
 
 Once this quiet bondage is recognized the bond- 
 man begins to undergo a silent revolution of charac- 
 ter. Where he was light hearted he grows moody, 
 despondent, morose, and given to brooding over the 
 contingencies of failure, and to study with bitter feel- 
 ings any unexpected drain upon his resources. 
 Starting out with an honest purpose, only the man 
 who is or has been in debt knows the gradually in- 
 creasing and, finally, the tremendous strain upon the 
 mind of one unused to financial liabilities. Let us 
 suppose a workman undertakes to own his own home 
 
iO AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 and runs in debt for^e few hundred dollars necessary 
 to finish his dwelling. He does this when times are 
 good, work plenty, wages remunerative and sickness 
 an unknown and an almost unconsidered element of 
 chance. 
 
 Reverse this condition in whole or in part. Sud- 
 denly the outgo exceeds the income. How quickly 
 credit draws its purse-strings, and a frown takes the 
 place of a smile on the face of the creditor! Then 
 the food in the house grows less and the slave to 
 debt rubs against Starvation, Sickness may come 
 and parental love be constantly tortured with 
 the dread of suffering and loss. The savings 
 for interest and the little surplus put aside for 
 such comforts as befit a man in his station in 
 life, swiftly disappear. Perhaps this period of 
 tribulation brings death, and its dreadful signal flut- 
 ters at the door while the curious children of the 
 neighborhood stand around and wait, in stupid 
 amazement, for the coming and the going of the form 
 he held so dear as mother or child. It costs money 
 to live; to die is also an enforced extravagance. As 
 with death so with birth — another mouth to feed, an- 
 other form to clothe, another life to be nourished and 
 cherished and fought for. The income that never 
 increases is thus burdened with the requirements of 
 new existences, until the sorely buffeted struggler be- 
 gins to wonder whether disease, or debt, or despair, 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 11 
 
 is to play the tyrant in this tragic masquerade of life* 
 
 Is a man so held down and restrained by obligations 
 to others, so entangled in a web of financial indebt- 
 edness, bound, as a spider binds a fly, with tiny 
 threads spun from formidable misfortunes, is such a 
 man bond or free? Can he, dare he do as he pleases? 
 Is he the arbiter of his own destiny? No. It is the 
 debt first, self last. Two penalties are always in his 
 mind — guards over his will — Conscience and Ruin. 
 Conscience is the underlying nettle of human life. 
 Ruin is the bitter fruit of debt. The honest work- 
 man knows of no more dreadful scourges than these 
 two compendiums of existence, these two subjugators 
 of ambition and pride. 
 
 What is more pitiable in this republican life of ours, 
 supposedly full of Arcadian ease and simplicity, than 
 the unbulletined battles of the debt-burdened work- 
 man for an absolute liberty? What more cheerless 
 for human nature than these continual struggles of 
 sanguine men and women to better their condition 
 by discounting the rosy possibilities of the future and 
 pawning for a home, or for the necessities of exist- 
 ence, their right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of 
 happiness,” transferring to money-lenders and land- 
 speculators their little circle of earth and the fruit- 
 fulness thereof? 
 
 In these cases, and their numbers are hundreds 
 of thousands, we have the survival of the misfits 
 
12 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 in human nature, in the shape of workmen prac- 
 tically in pawn for little city lots, not much larger 
 than a giant's grave, or broad acres over which 
 floats the miasma of failure. In every community 
 these bondsmen to debt live, move and have a 
 being. They live because, while poverty may be 
 looked upon by the wealthy as a crime, it is not, un- 
 der present laws, a penal offense. That they exist 
 under the constant strain and pressure incident to 
 prolonged mental torture is due, mainly, to the ob- 
 stinate tenacity of human life in workingmen’s 
 bodies rather than to an economical husbanding, by 
 the state, of his available vitality. That he is recog- 
 nized as a being, a human being, something a little 
 more useful than a horse or a cow, is almost entirely 
 due to the business philanthropy of the sagacious 
 politician who stolidly computes the value of votes 
 deposited by men who would otherwise be market- 
 able only as bundles of bones. A constituency of 
 men without hopes is more important to the office^ 
 holder than a constituency of hopes without men is 
 to the office seeker. Let us therefore praise with 
 all our might those astute developers of the political 
 economy of 1894 who protect the American Slave, 
 when he votes the right way, with all the thunders 
 of the vocabulary of a ward politician. Let it be 
 understood that no workman is so deeply in debt, so 
 thoroughly a slave, but that he has a value — at elec- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 13 
 
 tion time. He is then quotable in political marts; 
 his existence is recognized, and his misfortunes em- 
 broidered into those appeals for the rights of work- 
 men which blaze like fireworks until after the count 
 is concluded, and than fall into convenient oblivion, 
 which is the fate of all pyrotechnical works. Perhaps 
 the American Slave, bonded to his eyes with leech- 
 like debts, ought to be grateful for these occasional 
 spasms of hope which for a very little time strength- 
 en his soul, if they do not feed his stomach. 
 
 But when these illusions are over and the slave 
 feels once more the fetters of the money-lender, 
 whose croak of “interest” succeeds the cajoling 
 carol of the unwashed diplomat of primaries and 
 polling booths, the slave becomes, or thinks he really 
 is again only a shriveled grain of the industrial har- 
 vest, crunched between the upper mill-stone of capi- 
 tal and the under stone of labor, to be pulverized so 
 fine that neither church nor devil have use for him, 
 and the parental state tolerates him only as a neces- 
 sary evil. Does he weep ? His tears fall on sand. Does 
 he pray for aid? His appeals are smothered in a 
 hostile air. His work feels the bitterness of his 
 thoughts and is unconsciously moved to some expres- 
 sion of sorrow or hate. He is honest in his belief 
 that detested capital is fertilizing its enterprises with 
 his energies, and that politicians assiduously poultice 
 him, as an industrial carbuncle, with elastic pledges 
 
14 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 of redemption from bondage and with seductive 
 visions of a land and a life whose very worst is the 
 very best of the present. Still he goes on with a 
 hopeless heroism, living through long days of petty 
 miseries and feverishly dreaming and waking through 
 nights of despair. Of course he is only undergoing 
 the grinding process to which all men are subjected 
 who have borrowed money and unexpectedly find 
 that their outgo exceeds their income. But the work- 
 man has not the variety of resources nor the elastic- 
 ity of temperament possessed by those who are termed 
 business men, and, as a result, he soon reaches a 
 condition of mind which makes him honestly believe 
 that the legal rights of others are the wrongs of him- 
 self and his co-workers; and as human nature is 
 malevolent, this mentally tortured slave becomes, 
 like all other kinds of slaves, ready for any conspiracy 
 that will give him again the freedom he has bartered 
 away, and secure that revenge against his oppressors 
 to which he thinks his wrongs entitle him. Debt has 
 made him reckless as well as hopeless, and he adds to 
 his burden of life the entanglements of a labor union 
 and gives away about all that is left him of will 
 power and individuality. He becomes only one of a 
 diverse aggregate, and absolutely powerless to help 
 himself in the disposition of his labor. He increases 
 the drain upon his income by assuming the obli- 
 gations of dues, assessments, strikes and boycotts, 
 
AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 15 
 
 Other men become his masters and direct him when, 
 where and how he shall work; and if he has the 
 temerity to show resistance to commands he at once 
 finds raised against him, in violence even to murder, 
 the hands he has clasped in the brotherhood of a de- 
 fensive and protective union, that, originating in 
 Philanthropy, has become an adjunct of politics and 
 the plaything or tool of ambitious leaders. 
 
 Here, in brief, is given the evolution of the Amer- 
 ican Slave. No man in chains was ever more tightly 
 bound. This servitude voluntarily undertaken is 
 dangerously widespread and may require an armed 
 insurrection to break it. President Debs, of the 
 American Railway Union, figures that the produc- 
 tive industry of the country is being drained of its 
 profits by the payment of over $5,000,000 a day in 
 interest, of which over $200,000,000 per year goes to 
 Europe on account of Debt. “Capital,” reasons Mr. 
 Debs, with this tremendous outgo of wealth, and 
 the means of its production in his mind, “Capital 
 insists upon looking upon labor as it did on slavery — 
 that it has no right, like capital, to exact or ask for 
 terms. The principle of slavery is what capital is now 
 insisting on.” To which might be added the testimony 
 of the latest government census as to what Debt is do- 
 ing for people. The figures are for the State of Ohio, 
 and show that there are 27 cities having a popu- 
 lation of 8,000 to 100,000, and in these cities 55*95 
 
16 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 per cent of the home families hire and 44.05 per 
 cent own their homes. Of the home-owning fami- 
 lies 36.26 per cent own with incumbrances, and 63.74 
 per cent own free of incumbrance. The average rate 
 of interest is 6.85 per cent; average value of each 
 owned and incumbered home, $2, 595 ; average lien 
 on the same, $968, and average yearly interest 
 charged on each home, $66. If these figures show 
 proportionately throughout the Union, the workman 
 has every reason for discontent at his lot, and every 
 motive to free himself. 
 
III. 
 
 In most of the discussions of labor troubles and in 
 all the vindictive assaults on capital as the alleged 
 cause of them, and in all the speeches of commis- 
 eration evoked by the disturbed condition of 
 the country scarcely a word has been spoken about 
 that portion of the laboring classes called the Farmer. 
 As resonant a note as has been uttered came from 
 the lips of Senator Davis, of Minnesota, when, in a 
 discussion of the Chicago strike, he remarked that 
 5,000,000 of the people of the United States, or forty- 
 five per cent of the producing population, are 
 farmers. 
 
 “If. any one class of the community have the right 
 to call themselves, distinctively, ‘the people of the 
 United States, remarked /the Senator, “it is the 
 farmers. Have the farmers asked for the strike? Do 
 they sympathize with it? No. It is the farmer who 
 suffers every day by it. The farmer may always be 
 looked for on the side of law and order, and the per- 
 petuity of popular institutions as against every force 
 of anarchy and oppression.” With this speech the 
 Farmer came out of his agricultural obscurity, and 
 
 17 
 
18 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 the public suddenly recognized an element in the 
 national affairs which had escaped general attention 
 since the last Presidential election. It is strange that 
 in labor troubles the Farmer is not considered as a 
 workman; yet Webster’s definition of the word work- 
 man includes “a tiller of the soil.” It is a singular 
 omission of so important a factor in public affairs. 
 He enjoys no consideration in large cities and towns 
 where only organized wageworkers are regarded as 
 workmen, and as being the victims of capitalists; and 
 yet his occupation is so important that were his kind 
 of labor to suddenly cease throughout the world, 
 starvation and death would immediately follow such 
 a strike. Will the cessation of any other industry 
 culminate in such disaster.? The world has lived and 
 in many countries now lives and will continue to live 
 without houses, and clothes, and other means of loco- 
 motion than those derived from animals or by the use 
 of the feet; but without agriculture, and the men who 
 follow it, there would be famine. Yet with all his 
 power as a producer of the absolute necessities of 
 life he has been, as a workman, one of the most pow- 
 erless creatures on the face of the earth. He is now 
 trying the effect of combination; but, like his brother 
 slave of the manufactory, he has been in the hands of 
 Shylock; yet now, though guilty of no crimes, he has 
 fallen into the net of the Politician. Between the 
 two his moral, legal and industrial identity will be in 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 19 
 
 all likelihood, squeezed out of him, as cider is pressed 
 from the apple. 
 
 For centuries, yes, back to Bible times, poets have, 
 with sensuous delight, portrayed the farmer in such 
 a way as to give him the attributes of a mythical 
 god. His acres have been invoiced as a sort of Para- 
 dise. In his outlining hedges have warbled the 
 prima-donna birds of nature; his trees were bril- 
 liant with the plumage of others that wanted to but 
 could not sing; in the fruits of his orchards were en- 
 closed the cordials of sengual nature; his meadows 
 were carpeted with flowers of gorgeous hues and ex- 
 hilarating perfumes; his fields of grain were sung of as 
 golden crowns under the amorous glare of August suns ; 
 through his silken tasseled corn-fields breathed, in 
 tuneful whispers, voluptuous winds, laden with songs 
 of abundant harvests; his roof was the star-jeweled 
 sky, his walls the horizons; and his life was depicted 
 as one uninterrupted round of festivities with the 
 elements. Nature was the mistress of this epicure 
 of the ideal. Her kisses were fruits; her embraces 
 became great flocks and bountiful harvests. She 
 wedded her lover with fields and forests, uplands and 
 meadows, with the glory of their verdure, the harmo- 
 nies of their bird orchestras, the solemn murmurs 
 of their insect life. She whispered in his ear and he 
 heard but laughing brooks and humming streams. 
 She touched his eyes, and he saw the royal panoplies 
 
20 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 of ever shifting skies. His days were halcyon and his 
 nights, bridge-ways to heaven. For the old time poet 
 nothing was too good for the farmer, from the days 
 when “Joseph fed his father’s flocks” down to a 
 period, not very remote, when poets were plowmen 
 and furrowed thistles instead of rose leaves. 
 
 The ideal maybe good for the poets; but the prac- 
 tical disillusionizes those whose views of nature are 
 confined to city flower-pots, and their knowledge of 
 farmers to illustrated weeklies and the caricatures on 
 the stage. The realist knows that a thundering 
 knock on the bed-room door, or a spiteful alarm 
 clock, instead of a nightingale, awakens the husband- 
 man in the early morning. To milk the sweet 
 breathed cow no dainty maid goes forth with coquet- 
 tish eyes, pinky white arms and cheeks, and jauntily 
 tucked up skirts, picturesque with embroideries; her 
 face in smiles and her hair in curls; slippered her 
 tiny feet and clocked her silken hose; ribboned and 
 furbelowed like the typical Chloes and Daphnes on a 
 Dresden vase; her lip puckered with a trill and an 
 arm, set like a bit of coral, in the polished concavity 
 of a milk pail; the grass bending in adoration as she 
 comes, and rising in benediction as she goes, and all 
 nature tremulous with joy at sight of such a beatific 
 vision. No! No! This is not the actual in the 
 farmer’s life. Such a belle of the barn-yard could 
 not exist if she would. Instead we have, in the grey, 
 
American slaves 
 
 21 
 
 dull light of morning, Hans, or Peterson or Mike, 
 splashing in great cowhide boots, through grass wet 
 enough to swim in, carrying in one hand a pail of 
 bran mash, in the other a banged-up old pail and 
 under an arm a three legged stool. There is no poesy 
 in his appearance and action; and the milkmaid of 
 song would look, beside him, like a wax doll in a 
 coal mine. The birds do not sing in the orchards, 
 for there is a scarecrow and a gun awaiting their 
 comings; the flowers do not bloom in the hedge 
 rows, and the fruits are not spontaneous eruptions of 
 nature. Grasshoppers poach in the grain fields, and 
 the potato-bugs shimmer in the hot sunshine and 
 carve their way to early graves through showers of 
 sticks and Paris green. 
 
 The farmer’s plow may glint and gleam through 
 verdant soils, like a running brook of steel; but a 
 farmer’s legs grow vveary, and his brown and wrinkled 
 face is wet with the dew of honest toil as he guides his 
 flashing bayonet of labor against the rebellious earth. 
 Nature is, for him, only an enemy to be conquered 
 and held in subjection; not a mistress to be wooed 
 and won by whistling, and songs and smiles. There 
 is no poetry in his soul, and the facts that he daily 
 confronts are disheartening enough to make the ordi- 
 nary workman strike against the Great Spirit that 
 made the earth, and the elements that influence it. 
 The farmer’s seeds do not sow themselves; nor does 
 
22 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 the Stubborn soil unroll itself in ribbony furrows, 
 ready for the dropping of the grain, or the combing 
 of the harrow. If his live-stock is ailing he must 
 know what to do and be able to do it quickly. Prac- 
 tical chemistry is part of his study in husbandry, for 
 he must have a knowledge of fertilizers and of the 
 kinds that must be given to different soils. He must 
 know something of machinery, that he may intelli- 
 gently use the mechanical aids placed at his disposal 
 by inventive minds. He must be prepared to read 
 the weather signs of nature, and be ready to meet their 
 requirements as to his crops and his stock. He must 
 keep the run of the markets, and be prepared to ship 
 his harvests, or buy cattle from a neighbor, guided 
 by information as to quotations and values. It is 
 expected that he will be up in church work and down 
 in politics, be intelligent enough not to lose his head 
 in the county town, or his person at a county fair. 
 His existence is made up of the sternest of realities. 
 He travels in a tread-mill, hubbed and felloed with 
 agricultural necessities. From sunup to sundown, 
 day after day, week in and week out, he struggles 
 stubbornly against all the adverse elements of earth 
 and air. His head grows bare, his eyes lose their 
 fire ; his face becomes seamy and brown, and a stony 
 fixity gets around the corners of his mouth ; the 
 hands widen and harden. Under the rigor of his 
 toiling there comes a stoop to his shoulders, a shuf- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 23 
 
 fling to his feet and a sway to his body that tells, more 
 eloquently than words, of the struggle he has made 
 and is making in the battle for life. But when the 
 sons abandon their prospective heritage of farm life 
 and seek the cities; and the daughters leave for 
 homes that promise more of culture and ease, and 
 father and mother, grey haired and tottering, are left 
 to bear, alone, the burden of their miseries, then and 
 then only, perhaps the iron will begins to falter and 
 the tough frame to weaken. Then, possibly for the 
 first time, the grandest type of the American work- 
 man despairs, seeing nothing ahead of him but the 
 grey shadows of death, while behind him is stretched 
 the panorama of a life sparcely flecked by the sun- 
 light of good fortune. 
 
 The agitators of this country, both political and in- 
 dustrial, are fluent in their denunciations of the 
 money power as the oppressor and slave-maker of 
 the workman; but the workman they mean is the 
 laborer of the city, the trade unionist, and those with- 
 out the union. The hardest worker of all workers, 
 the least protected and by the nature of his employ- 
 ment and his comparative isolation, shut off from 
 combinations, is the farmer. And of all the Ameri- 
 can Slaves his condition has been the most hopeless 
 and promises soon to be the most abject. We charge 
 that he is a slave because he is always in the grip of 
 the money lender, always in debt for land, or ma- 
 
24 
 
 AMBRICAN SLAVES 
 
 chinery, or live-stock, and continually in mental tor- 
 ments on account of unpaid principal and past due 
 interest. He is so owned by and subject to monop- 
 olists and grain speculators, that he cannot truthfully 
 call his soul his own. To add to the burden of his 
 miserable condition, he is the sport of the elements 
 and the confidence men. Within the last four years 
 he has been used as the cat’s-paw of the politician. 
 Let him deny it as strongly as he may, the professional 
 agitator has him by his two ears, and into them, drop 
 by drop, fall the sugared words of hope, the vows of 
 faith, the seductive promises of that Mephistopheles 
 of America, that genius of apostasy, the politician. 
 The farmer has been an honest man in his religious 
 faith and his party creeds; but he is being bid for 
 and bought by the mulleins, the dandelions and the 
 pig-weeds of all parties, and between Debt and the 
 Devil he is retrograding, not advancing. Is he in debt, 
 as a class.? Read what the Democrats declared in their 
 national platform of 1892: 
 
 “We call' the attention of thoughtful Americans to 
 the fact that after thirty years of restrictive taxes 
 against the importation of foreign wealth in exchange 
 for our agricultural surplus, the homes and farms of 
 the country have become burdened with a real estate 
 mortgage debt of over $2,500,000,000, exclusive 
 of all other form of indebtedness; that in one of the 
 chief agricultural states of the West there appears a 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 25 
 
 real estate mortgage debt averaging $165 per capita 
 of the total population, and that similar conditions 
 and tendencies are shown to exist in other agricul- 
 tural exporting states.” 
 
 Census statistics of the farm debts of Ohio show 
 that among 100 farm families 27 hire their farms, 21 
 own them with and 52 without incumbrances. On the 
 owned farms there are liens amounting to $70,744, 
 771, or 34.29 per cent of their value; and this debt 
 bears interest at the average rate of 6.68 per cent, 
 or an average interest charge to each family of $88, 
 Each owned and incumbered farm on the average is 
 worth $3,829, and is subject to a debt of $1,313. 
 Corresponding facts for homes are that 54.64 per cent 
 hire and 45.36 own their homes. Of the home 
 owning families 71.02 per cent own free of incum- 
 brance and 28.98 per cent with incumbrance. On 
 owned homes the debt aggregates $61, 145,301, or 
 37. 16 per cent, and bears interest at the rate of 6.63 
 per cent, so that the annual amount of interest to 
 each home averages $58. An average debt of $879 
 incumbers each home, which has the average value 
 of $2,366. A gloomy picture is drawn, by a news- 
 paper correspondent, of the New Hampshire farmer 
 in the hill country. He writes that there is no large 
 area of land anywhere under cultivation, and only 
 small herds of cattle. The scattered houses are sur- 
 rounded by a garden patch, a few acres of corn, a 
 
26 
 
 AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 pasture, with dense woodlands encircling all. “There 
 is no real farming. Each man has his own mouth and 
 a smaller or larger circle of dependent mouths to 
 fill, and he goes at it in a way that lies nearest to his 
 hand; in the way that his father went at it before 
 him, and his grandfather, and his father. The com- 
 mercial idea of accounting for outgoes and incomings 
 is no part of their mental make-up; they live from 
 field to mouth, and their horizon is bounded by the 
 store which takes their butter and eggs in trade, and 
 the town house where they exercise the rights and 
 functions of American citizens.” Debts he must have, 
 but such ways of farming fertilize the money lender if 
 not the land; and when we read that he attends to 
 politics, no difficulty need be experienced in rating 
 him one of the American Slaves whose hide has over- 
 grown his manacles. 
 
 Notwithstanding “the demnition, horrid grind” of 
 farm-life, a “grind” beside which the work of the 
 city workman is sport, and in defiance of that incu- 
 bus, Debt, which fastens itself, like “the old man of 
 the sea,” upon the backs of the sturdiest of farmers, 
 there is an incursion of city laborers into the country 
 to engage in agriculture. In Maryland and Maine this 
 sort of a revolution is said to be going on, the adven- 
 turers being those who are disgusted with their failure 
 to obtain steady and remunerative employment. These 
 city-tired workers are, presumably, not burdened with 
 
AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 27 
 
 money, and their enterprises in farm life must neces- 
 sarily be based to a large extent on borrowed money, 
 and the result will be that they, too, will come under 
 the pitiless squeeze of Debt. The trade unionist 
 may declaim against his condition until the world is 
 deafened, but he may always find the farmer just a 
 little worse off than himself as to personal rights. 
 The farmer is swimming in a sea of debt. He is 
 drowning in it; and every labor strike that interferes 
 with the gathering and transportation of his crops 
 and the marketing of his cattle has the same effect 
 as shoving his head under water. Yet he is a good, 
 sturdy, honest workman, a credit to humanity and 
 an honor to the state, slave though he is to money 
 lenders, corporations, monopolists and politicians. 
 
 Is the farmer’s moral and political strength bid for.? 
 Take the latest platforms of the Democratic, Repub- 
 lican, People’s and Prohibition parties. Almost every 
 line of them, and “the words between the lines,” are 
 promises to pay for his support when delivered. All 
 the chicanery of dishonest intellects is being employ- 
 ed to still further enmesh him by pledges that cannot 
 be redeemed, and by pictures of liberty and prosper- 
 ity that, under present conditions, cannot be realized. 
 What this farmer slave will do for himself remains 
 to be proven. 
 
IV. 
 
 In intimating that labor combinations, or unions 
 as they are generally termed, are slave makers and 
 slave holders, we have no intention of assailing the 
 original purpose, or decrying the possible benefits 
 of these organizations. We know, as the Duke of 
 Argyle puts it, that ‘‘when the working class com- 
 bine for the protection of their own labor against the 
 effects of unrestricted competition, they are simply 
 taking that course which is recommended alike by 
 reason and by experience.’^ Again, he writes: “Nor 
 can there be any greater mistake than to suppose 
 that this course involves necessarily any rebellion 
 against the laws of economic science. Combination 
 is an appeal to the most fundamental of all natural 
 laws — to the law oi contrivance — to the power of ad- 
 justment — wielding, through Reason and Conscience, 
 the elementary forces of Human Character.” But 
 while, theoretically, Combination may promise an 
 approximate adjustment of industrial differences, it 
 has, so far, succeeded in making only initial efforts 
 which were frustrated in their incipiency by the im- 
 becile management of the leaders, who, instead of 
 
 28 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 29 
 
 being judicial in their workings and proceeding with 
 diplomatic slowness and gravity, slapped society in 
 the face with the gauntlet of war, and tried to accom- 
 plish by sudden violence results that could only come 
 through slow and tedious legislation. The Duke of 
 Argyle in his Law in Politics says that — “all the 
 sources of error which have so long perverted legis- 
 lation are equally powerful in perverting the aims and 
 in misdirecting the efforts of Voluntary Association. 
 If the upper classes, with all the advantages of leisure, 
 and of culture, and of learning, have been so unable, 
 as we have seen them to be, to measure the effects 
 of the laws they made, how much more must we ex- 
 pect errors and misconceptions of the most griev- 
 ous kind to beset the actions of those who — through 
 poverty and ignorance, and often through much 
 suffering — have been able to do little more than strike 
 blindly against evils whose pressure they could feel, 
 but whose root and remedy they could neither see 
 nor understand! Accordingly, the history of com- 
 bination among the working class has, until a very 
 recent period, been a sad history of misdirected effort 
 — of strength put forth only in violence and disorder, 
 and of the virtues of Brotherhood lost in tyrannical 
 suppression of all individual freedom.” 
 
 The lax enforcement of laws in America, together 
 with a personal license of action of individuals, per- 
 missible in no other country, makes the Duke’s dec- 
 
30 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 laration an emphatic verdict of slavery against mem- 
 bers of American Combinations, The English work- 
 man knows that he has a government and a firm one; 
 but the workman of America considers, and some- 
 what reasonably as affairs go, that he is the govern- 
 ment; but when he assigns to a leader his individuality 
 and his will power in labor matters he is twice as 
 much a slave as the Englishman; for he abandons 
 much more liberty and accepts a master less saga- 
 cious and less consistent, because he is more virulent 
 and less legislative in his methods, and plans for a 
 dictatorship over serfs rather than studies for a gen- 
 eralship with and for equals. The industrial revolts of 
 the last ten years verify the assertion that while the 
 workman has gained some important advantages dur- 
 ing that time, the results have come, not as a source 
 of skillful leadership, for none has been shown, but 
 from the sense of justice in the hearts of the masses, 
 a justice requiring justice; while the leaders in such 
 futile displays have been dropped into an ignomini- 
 ous oblivion. Experience has not, however, taught 
 the combinations any lessons in strategy, for they 
 proceed to repeat the actions that made them in- 
 glorious in their victories. Perhaps the American 
 workman, if allowed to think and act for himself 
 outside of the decrees of the leaders of combinations, 
 might do well to consider these words of Professor 
 Rogers, a writer on work and wages, who says: 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 31 
 
 “The English workman has his future now very 
 largely in his own hands. He has only to remember 
 that progress for him lies not in revolution, or even 
 in general strikes, but in persistent insistence; not 
 on paternal but on democratic fraternal legislation, 
 the people becoming the government and obtaining 
 their rights through it.’^ But it should be kept clearly 
 in mind that in this country such “fraternal legis- 
 lation’^ cannot be obtained when the people are at- 
 tacked, even though indirectly, through capital. Pub- 
 lic sentiment may be with the spirit of the unions; 
 but it will never countenance or forgive any act in- 
 fringing upon the rights of property or person. If 
 the members of such combinations choose to aban- 
 don their rights as individuals and allow them to be 
 capitalized for the use and behoof of one man, they 
 should not forget that in so doing they also abandon 
 claims to public sympathy, and weaken by acts of 
 violence the amity that is evinced, as a natural law, 
 for the weaker party in any struggle. 
 
V. 
 
 When the Lord created man He could not, in His 
 infinite tenderness and mercy, sinful though we might 
 be, have contemplated the evolution of that scourge 
 of civilization, the professional politician. If his pro- 
 genitor got into the ark it could only have been be- 
 cause Noah was a candidate for some office not 
 named in history, and took this ancestral passenger 
 on trust. If he is an afterthought, a hybrid of the 
 creator, it is not surprising that he has no genealog- 
 ical record. We know that he exists everywhere, and 
 that while we are trying to make the best of him he 
 is certainly successful in making the worst of us. 
 Honorable businesses we have by the score. The men 
 who conduct them grow in public esteem because 
 they deal uprightly with communities. The dis- 
 honest are under the taboo of decent society. When 
 this generation was young, toddling along on legs 
 scarcely strong enough to carry it, the counselors 
 and guides were straightforward, honest men. They 
 schemed, and fought, and died to secure liberty of 
 thought and action. They were animated by no 
 greed of public plunder. Public offices were public 
 
 33 
 
AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 33 
 
 honors; and the men who occupied them possessed 
 such ideal and idyllic patriotism that their virtues 
 were, until a few years ago, transmitted to succeeding 
 -generations in spelling books and readers, as well as in 
 the histories of their period. To-day, statesmen in 
 this country are curios, and the memories of old-time 
 patriots survive only in threadbare legends and stale 
 epics. If Washington and his contemporaries were 
 alive, but could not vote, they would be the most 
 friendless lot of antiquities of which it is possible for 
 the mind of man to conceive. Upon the tombstones 
 of all statesmen of the revolutionary era, yes, even 
 down to thirty years ago, ought to be chiseled, as a 
 bitter truism, “Only a back number.” 
 
 Our miraculous increase in population, the diverse 
 people coming to our shores as paupers or as crea- 
 tures to be fed by the quasi charity of public work; 
 the multiplication of offices embellished with large 
 salaries; the legislative creation of grants, trusts, 
 subsidies, syndicates, and monopolies; the ac- 
 couchement of huge corporations, and the awarding 
 of momentous pubjjc contracts, with hundreds of little 
 leeches fastening themselves on public bodies and 
 public laws, producing a fermentation of iniquities 
 impossible in other countries, all have resulted in pro- 
 ducing a school that is sarcastically termed the school 
 of politics. Man is born, but the politician just hap- 
 pens, being an evolution from the country or city loafer 
 
34 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 (an identity but little higher than that of a tadpole), 
 and graduating into a composite so full of the chica- 
 neries of public life as to be inimical to the people 
 and a curse to the country. It is absurd for the 
 workman to denounce the capitalist when at his ear 
 whispers continually the politician, who is more 
 powerful, more dangerous to the masses, more shame- 
 less in his capitalizations of votes, then the most 
 bloated bond-holder of the land. You can track the 
 man of wealth. He is too big to be hidden; but the 
 professional politician works, like the burglar, in the 
 dark. Pursuing the nefarious and inscrutable tricks 
 of his trade, he buys, sells and givfes away votes. 
 Whose votes.? The workman’s and nobody else’s; 
 for the rich either does not go to the polls, or going, 
 quickly retires from a mart in which, if he has any 
 interest and is working at all, is through brokers. 
 The ballot of the laborer is used, and, with its con- 
 solidated power, obtains the controlling influence in 
 the public affairs of wards, villages, towns, counties, 
 states and finally, the nation itself. The pivot on 
 which turns the machinery of our systems of govern- 
 ment is suffrage. Votes delivered and to be de- 
 livered at primaries, at conventions, and at the polls 
 have now become staple and quoted goods in the 
 political market, and pass current for offices of 
 honor, trust and emolument. The citizen surren- 
 ders his ballot and the politician takes the benefit of 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 85 
 
 it in public office. It is hard to bring an honest man 
 down to a belief in this debauchery of the people’s 
 confidence; and no language is vigorous enough to 
 properly express the condemnation that should be 
 given to these hucksters of ballots. 
 
 What have the people to say as to public officers? 
 Theoretically a good deal, but practically nothing. 
 They vote at the primaries, but do the primaries se- 
 lect the candidates? What are conventions but com- 
 binations of office holders or office-seekers. Nomi- 
 nations are not by the people. Presidents are not 
 created by the masses but by delegates who are in 
 touch with the people only up to a certain point. 
 ^‘Dark horses” in conventions are not the people’s 
 candidates. The Senate of the nation is made up of 
 men who are in no sense from the people, and who 
 do not voice the wishes of the public. A large pro- 
 portion of court judges are lawyers who move heaven 
 and earth, in a political sense, doing all sorts of 
 doubtful work, to secure a place on the bench. The 
 Supreme Court of the land is filled by appointment 
 as a reward, directly or remotely, for political services 
 rendered by somebody. No public place is so high 
 that the mark of the political trickster is not seen on 
 the lintel of the office doorway. Even the army is 
 smirched by the party gifts of positions of honor and 
 pay. 
 
 Besides these ever-growing disgraces, the country is 
 
36 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 subjected, every four years, to months of unrest, 
 consequent upon party fights for the Presidency. 
 Business is seriously interfered with by the bitter 
 struggle. The news of the daily and weekly jour- 
 nals is made up of at least thirty per cent of untruths 
 about candidates for office, and the platforms on 
 which their claims for the people’s ballot are based. 
 We live in a continual and irrepressible insurrec- 
 tion of lies; we are participators in the most gigantic 
 confidence games that ever disgraced humanity; we 
 are unnecessary falsehoods from the day we cast our 
 first vote until the time the last one is dropped into 
 the ballot box; and all this disgrace is incurred in or- 
 der that men who cannot earn an honest living as 
 other men earn it may grow fat, imperious and inso- 
 lent by the grace of God, the sufferance of man, and 
 the taxes of millions. It is constantly quoted, as a 
 compliment to our Republican form of government, 
 that we are governed too little. Figure it out once 
 in your own mind how extensive and intricate are 
 the ways of our rulers. Begin with the saloon keeper, 
 end with the President, and compute the intervening 
 rulers who influence the lives and fortunes of citizens. 
 
 The more political parties there are the more com- 
 plicated are the systems for manipulating the public, 
 and the more onerous the penalty we pay for the 
 privilege of citizenship and suffrage. Every party 
 platform breeds discontent in the people, because it 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 37 
 
 tells them what evils and wrongs they suffer under 
 existing administrations, and 'demonstrates how 
 a change would benefit the country. If any one con- 
 siders that our indignation is too hot for this abomina- 
 ble subject and that it is childish to even hint at 
 the prevalent dishonesty and corruption pervading 
 every party, why not take the words of the parties 
 themselves, as solemly proclaimed in their national 
 platforms of 1892? Let us begin with the declaration 
 of the People’s Party, it being, presumably, an ex- 
 pression of the beliefs of a large number of the labor 
 class. This document asserts that — “corruption 
 dominates the ballot box, the legislature, the congress, 
 and touches even the ermine of the bench. The 
 people are demoralized; most of the states have been 
 compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places 
 to prevent universal intimidation or bribery.” 
 
 If the writers of this plank in the platform did not 
 believe their assertion, then they are liars. If they 
 did believe it, and if the people for whom it was issued 
 believe the charges, and if those to whom it appeals 
 recognize the truthfulness of the statement, then the 
 indictment confirms proportionately the position we 
 have taken. 
 
 But there is another new party — the Prohibition — 
 that, having dropped its swaddling clothes, and found 
 its voice, proclaims that — “We arraign the Republi- 
 can and Democratic parties as false to the standards 
 
38 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 reared by their founders; as faithless to the principles 
 of the illustrious leaders of the past to whom they 
 do homage with the lips; as recreant to the higher 
 law, which is as inflexible in political affairs as in 
 personal life, and as no longer embodying the aspira- 
 tions of the American people, or inviting the confidence 
 of enlightened, progressive patriotism,’’ and concludes 
 with, “The competition of both these parties (Demo- 
 cratic and Republican) for the vote of the slums, and 
 their assiduous courting of the liquor power, and 
 subserviency to the money power, have resulted in 
 placing those powers in the position of practical 
 arbiters of the destinies of the nation.” 
 
 Meanwhile the old topers of straight orthodox 
 drinks line themselves up before the people, and the 
 Republicans chant that “the free and honest popu- 
 lar ballot, the just and equal representation of all 
 the people, as well as their just and equal protection 
 under the laws, are the foundation of our republican 
 institution.” 
 
 To this the Democrats retort: “We warn the people 
 of our common country, jealous for the preservation 
 of their free institutions, that the policy of the fed- 
 eral control of elections, to which the Republican 
 party has commended itself, is fraught with the 
 gravest dangers, scarcely less momentous than 
 would result from a revolution practically establish- 
 ing monarchy on the ruins of the Republic. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 39 
 
 ‘‘Such a policy, if sanctioned by law, would mean 
 the dominance of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of 
 office holders, and the party first intrusted with its 
 machinery could be dislodged from power only by an 
 appeal to the reserved right of the people to resist 
 oppression, which is inherent in all self-governing com- 
 munities.” 
 
 What is an honest man to believe in politics when 
 each party accuses the rest of rascality of the worst 
 kind? Are these carpenters of political consciences, 
 these manufacturers of convention morals, these 
 creators and expounders of dogmas in political 
 creeds, to be accepted as leaders? Strip these pa- 
 triots of their bunting and you have the lean and 
 hungry politicians, smiling oilily in their nakedness, 
 true angle-worms of morality and vile beggars in 
 persistency. They are after votes — nothing else — the 
 votes of workmen. It is strange that the laborer 
 never sees how he is fooled by this clumsy trickery. 
 It is a disgrace to his manhood that instead of think- 
 ing for himself he allows these schemers to think 
 and act for him. 
 
 When Jones or Smith or Brown promises a can- 
 didate one hundred or five hundred or one thousand 
 votes, as is done all the time, and everywhere, what 
 does he mean? He can vote but once as matters are 
 now arranged; therefore it follows that he has secured 
 by purchase, or by promises of gifts of a public or 
 
40 
 
 AMERlCAh! SLARES 
 
 personal character, the balance of his guaranteed 
 support. In other words, he has tied up for deliv- 
 ery just so many votes of workmen. He has bought 
 those votes. There is a price or a pledge given for 
 each. To get them he has inflamed their passions; he 
 has craftily made them dissatisfied with governments 
 as they are, and allures them with pictures of the ad- 
 ministrations as they will be under this new order of 
 things. Unreasoning and inconsiderate, the dissatis- 
 fied workman forswears his manly individuality, 
 pledges his influence under the rainbow promises of 
 his tempter, becomes a slave to this insatiable plot- 
 ter and plunderer, to find, at the end, that he has 
 bartered for professional lies that nobility of a true 
 manhood, that grandest attribute of human existence, 
 an irreproachable conscience. 
 
VI. 
 
 We have accused Politics of being the debaser, 
 the enslaver, a detestable factor of discontent among 
 the industrial classes. We have no longer states- 
 men to guide the ignorant or the undecided, but pro- 
 fessional politicians, tricksters, who make a business 
 of moulding public sentiment in hundreds of sinister 
 ways and of utilizing the people’s resources and 
 remedies for their personal gain. It is idle to urge 
 the dissatisfied to right their Wrongs at the polls. 
 They will not or cannot do it. Party leaders have 
 prearranged affairs, as generals plan battles, and 
 ward heelers whip in their followers. Party before 
 manliness is the keystone in the arch of party 
 strength. A party victory means not so much a 
 change of principles as a retention or a change of plun- 
 derers. The criminal indifference and political ser- 
 vility of the citizen has much to answer for as to the 
 prevailing corruption in office and the usurpation of 
 public powers for private purposes. Once in a while 
 a dignitary of the Church is moved to remonstrance. 
 Archbishop Ireland, commenting on the disturbed 
 condition of this country, is reported to have said: 
 
 41 
 
42 
 
 AMERICAN SLAySS 
 
 “The difficulty is that state and city officials are some- 
 times so solicitous of political interests and party 
 considerations that they fear to offend, and allow 
 social troubles to grow until repression seems impos- 
 sible. The need of this country, is lofty, disinter- 
 ested patriotism which forgets all minor allegiances 
 in presence of the general welfare, and has the cour- 
 age to make all sacrifices that may be needed to up- 
 hold this welfare.” This is a delicately conservative 
 view of the evil, but entitled to serious consider- 
 ation when we remember how little the Catholic or 
 any church meddles with politics. The Rev. John 
 H. Barrows, a prominent minister in Chicago, in a 
 sermon on the strike remarked; 
 
 “Upon the people is thrust the responsibility of 
 choosing representatives who will make righteous 
 laws and who will righteously execute those laws. 
 This is a duty to our fellow men, to society and to 
 God, who thus calls us into cooperation with himself. 
 When we come to look at the tacts we must be ready 
 to acknowledge our personal guilt. Taking our duties 
 to our city as an example of all our political duties, it 
 is grotesque when we come to consider how they are 
 discharged. The prevailing facts with the citizens 
 are indifference and ignorance.” 
 
 Theoretically the power of the citizen is great; 
 but in practice the politician is the dictator. The 
 citizen does not make the laws nor does he select 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 43 
 
 the man who does make them. The construction is 
 the mosaic work of the trained school-men of politics, 
 who take great care that the legislators they send 
 shall construct laws which will be so flexible and so 
 porous as to be available for both saint and sinner. 
 The citizen has little or nothing to do with legislation 
 in any shape, or even with selecting his representa- 
 tives in legislative or judicial bodies. He takes his 
 medicine like a man, and does his spitting afterwards. 
 President Debs, of the American Railway Union, in 
 one of his addresses says: “The ballot box is where 
 we have to unify and strike off the shackles which en- 
 slave us all.” Mr. Debs did not mean by this to do 
 what must be done to ensure freedom — amputate the 
 politician from the workman; but he did mean to 
 vote at the polls for a new set of task masters, se- 
 cured, as all others have been obtained, by the per- 
 fected machinery of politics. 
 
 Who suffers more than the American Slave by this 
 expanding conspiracy of the politician, whose power 
 has become so great as to make him the autocrat of 
 suffrage and the selector of public authorities from 
 a village constable to the chief magistrate of the 
 nation .■• If the politics of the present day were pure 
 or patriotic in their tendencies, or conserving a good 
 and substantial government, there would be no good 
 cause for this outcry of despair by the New York 
 Tribune in its comments on recent congressional 
 
44 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 scandals and municipal rascalities: “No reader can 
 rise from these daily disclosures without heaviness of 
 heart. Whatever may be his partisan bias, he must 
 have a sense of humiliation when he reflects upon 
 these evidences of a temporary failure of American 
 ideas and a corresponding discrediting of republican 
 institutions and democratic government. What is there 
 in all these recitals to convince impartial readers that 
 American civilization has not gone wrong and proved 
 to be very much of a failure.^ We know of no re- 
 deeming features except the candor and honesty of 
 the press and the increasing signs of public indig- 
 nation and revolt against corruption, dishonor and 
 immorality in politics.’^ 
 
 The Northwesterit Christian Advocate says: 
 “Strikes are but one result of privileged monopoly 
 purchased from legislators.” Henry George, the 
 single tax advocate and communist, is reported to 
 have said in a Cooper Union speech, that “million- 
 aires made their money by robbery and debauchery, 
 by the purchase of judges and legislators, and now 
 they wanted to preserve it by the bayonets and the 
 arms of the federal troops.” The News of Indianap- 
 olis, Ind., flashes out in an editorial salute to the 
 effect that the United States Senate “no longer rep- 
 resents the people of the United States. It no 
 longer represents the various states of the Union. It 
 is purely an industrial body. There are sugar trust 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 45 
 
 Senators, planter Senators, silver Senators, coal Sena- 
 tors, iron Senators, collar and cuff Senators, pottery 
 Senators, etc., and they all stand together. The re- 
 sult is that legislation has come to be a sort of com- 
 promise between conflicting interests, agreed to by 
 their representatives in Congress. There is no 
 thought of the needs or wishes of the country at 
 large.” To the accumulation of such degradations, 
 born in innumerable litters by all parties, new and 
 old, might be added a public measure enacted by the 
 legislature of New York, to prevent vote-buying by 
 making it a penal offense to induce voters not to 
 register or vote. The burden of purchasing votes 
 was a heavy tax on parties; but when they were 
 forced, in addition, to buy men not to vote, the capi- 
 talists in suffrage wealth thought it time to begin 
 their strike. 
 
 Has it been forgotten, so soon, that the great civil 
 war of 1 86 1 was brought on by the politicians — poli- 
 ticians of the old school, it is true, but modern 
 enough in their tendencies to see, with prophetic 
 eyes, the offices and emoluments of the new confed- 
 eracy, and diplomatic enough to make treason pala- 
 table in the North.? The strikes of to-day are the re- 
 sults of the political plottings of party men who rec- 
 ognize in every jolt and jar of industrial labor a 
 chance for party gain and an extension of party 
 power. A greater field of operations is wanted, and a 
 
46 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 government ownership of the railroads and telegraph 
 is one of the reforms demanded by the nurses of 
 baby parties and wall-eyed agitators. Allowing that 
 the government could satisfy the public in the 
 management of these complex systems of transit, it 
 would simply place several hundred thousand more 
 offices at the disposal of the politicians. There is 
 danger enough already to the republic in this burden 
 of public patronage, or, to put it more accurately, 
 “party spoils.” In 1891 the total number of govern- 
 ment employees was 173,435. This included con- 
 gress, the members of which are wage getters if not 
 wage earners. In 1817 there were only 5,008 office 
 holders, of which 3,056 were in the postal service. 
 From 1883 to 1891 the increase of this class of em- 
 ployees was 39. 1 per cent. Let us add the present 
 force at a moderate estimate of 500,000 men Fbr 
 railway and telegraph service, or nearly 700,000 em- 
 ployees. It is not exaggerating their influence to 
 credit each of such employees with the power, on the 
 average, to influencce ten men not office holders. 
 This would place at the control of the party leaders 
 seven million of active workers, or more votes by 
 nearly one half than were cast in 1892 by either the 
 Republican or Democratic factions, the Democrats 
 having 5,534,267 and the Republicans 5,175,201 
 votes. With such an omnivorous horde of office 
 holders, by what possible plan could an adminis- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 47 
 
 tration be changed? How could the public be rid 
 of a vampire party with as many mouths as that? • 
 The country would be threatened continually with 
 an unlimited monarchy, as no President could have a 
 successor unless he chose, and no ambitious man 
 would so choose. 
 
 To support such a retinue of insatiable officials 
 would tax to an extreme all the resources of the gen- 
 eral government. The cost for maintaining this gov- 
 ernment for 1890 was $352,218,674. The support 
 of state, county and city governments and of public 
 common schools for 1 890 drew from public treas- 
 uries $563,736,441, or a per capita tax of $13.65. 
 The sapient law makers and tax assessors, with a due 
 regard to the wealth of the people, made them pay 
 $125,000,000 more than the amount needed, and of 
 course drew interest on this overplus. The burden 
 of this taxation, as of all others, fell upon real estate, 
 which composes about 60 per cent of the wealth of 
 the country. As the farmer counts in this computa- 
 tion he can, as an American Slave, comprehend why, 
 under the manipulations of politicians, he gets poorer 
 the richer he grows, and be convinced that, as a 
 heavily burdened workingman, he ought to have 
 more to say about labor agitation and labor laws 
 than the man who, owning nothing, dictates to the 
 law-makers or tries his own hand at law-making. 
 
 From this superficial consideration of dominant 
 
48 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 power under our form of government, it is astonish- 
 ing that the laboring man, constantly tricked, threat- 
 ened or cajoled, by professional politicians, should 
 tamely submit to their rule, and in politics, as in 
 finance, voluntarily enslave himself by an absolute 
 surrender to them of his will and his ballot. It is in- 
 conceivable that intelligent men should calmly surren- 
 der to a political party their right to think and act 
 for themselves, knowing, as they must, that all meas- 
 ures obnoxious to their interests are conceived and 
 enacted by hostile capital, and nursed to a lusty 
 fruition by the very politicians whom they, the work- 
 men, put in power and keep there. Next to Debt, 
 the American Slave has no more insidious enemy or 
 intolerant task-master than this Mephistopheles of 
 politics, to whom he assigns his freedom of the bal- 
 lot and for whose benefit placidly waves his right of 
 sturdy rebellion against unprincipled measures and 
 irresponsible men. 
 
VII. 
 
 It is generally admitted that the industrial classes 
 of this country have, in immigration, one of the worst 
 evils which labor has to encounter. Political econ- 
 omists, workmen, ministers of the gospel, embryo 
 statesmen, party warriors dented with the raps of 
 scores of battles, all admit the debilitating effect of 
 this influx of foreign labor and foreign idlers. In a 
 recent letter, Mr. George A. Shufeldt, known as a 
 close student of labor questions, writes: “For the 
 last thirty or forty years the policy of our country has 
 been such that labor has been at a higher and better 
 rate than in any other country in the world. Here 
 every man could get double the money he could earn 
 at home. Here were free schools for his children, 
 and homes and bits of land for himself and his family. 
 Here he had no military duty to perform. His time 
 was his own for labor and for profit. Here he be- 
 came a citizen, a voter, and a politician.? He could 
 now open a saloon and become an alderman or a 
 member of the legislature. These great and manifest 
 advantages attracted the surplus population of the 
 whole world. In every family in the old countries in 
 
 49 
 
50 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 which a boy grew up, provision was made for sending 
 him to America. With some good we got lots of 
 bad; with the paupers of Ireland we got also the 
 beggars and assassins of Italy, the anarchists of 
 Germany and Bohemia, the Jews of Russia, and, 
 generally, the thugs of Europe. Well, the result 
 was this: We got more labor than we could em- 
 ploy. Those already here wanted to keep the places 
 and the pay, the new comers wanted work and offered 
 to sell their labor cheaper, and so competition was 
 produced. The fact, then, is this: We have taken 
 these people in faster than we could find employment 
 for them and faster than we could educate and as- 
 similate them.” 
 
 This sort of overfeeding with immigrants has been 
 going on for years. Last year (1893) there was an 
 extraordinary decrease of immigration, principally 
 owing to the cholera in Europe, and the quarantine 
 regulations in connection with this plague. Never- 
 theless, 439,730 people came to America. Of this 
 horde of mixed races'the women amounted to 159,- 
 386; 89, 577 were under 15 years of age; 311,531 
 were over 15 and under 40 years old; and 47,622 were 
 over 40. Assuming that they told the truth about their 
 occupations, there were 1 14,295 who were laborers, 
 presumably men who knew nothing more than how 
 to use their muscles; 209,767 had no occupation; 
 89,598 had alleged trades and professions; and 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 51 
 
 34,070 were farmers, presumably peasant laborers. 
 There were returned, under the law, 1,630 people 
 who were convicts, lunatics, paupers, etc., — 2,801 be- 
 ing sent back in 1892, when the total immigration 
 footed up 623,084. Of the immigrants of 1893, 
 57,897 could not read, 59,582 could not write, and 
 61,038 could neither read nor write; 10,406 brought 
 $1.00 over with them and 246,565 brought less than 
 $100 each. Since 1820 foreign countries have 
 sent to the United States 12,874,876. 
 
 These few figures are sufficient to excite ominous 
 apprehensions as to the future of the country under 
 such an influx of undesirable humanity. Note the 
 small number of skilled workmen, and of workmen 
 with professions. Naturally these people would 
 come into immediate competition with those al- 
 ready here; and, of course, by increasing the supply 
 of labor they weaken the price it has been receiving. 
 The 209, 767 immigrants without trade or profession 
 came into an overstocked market, and, as a result, 
 contractors were able to secure foreign labor for a 
 much less sum than they had been paying for work 
 in large cities, on railroads, and in mining regions. 
 This difference of competition was very marked, and, 
 of course, greatly to the disadvantage of men who 
 had been in this country for years, and had acquired, 
 by the right of citizenship, the right to remunerative 
 pay. 
 
53 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 Foreign farmers we would accept without a mur- 
 mur if they at once went upon farms and became 
 productive factors of labor. The wealth brought by 
 these people did not make them desirable additions 
 to the country, over a quarter of a million of them 
 bringing less than $ioo each. It is reasonable to 
 assume that the last named class at once sought oc- 
 cupations in large cities, and entered into that bitter 
 conflict for bread and butter which prevails in all 
 municipalities where labor is cheap and the necessi- 
 ties of life dear. This class of labor soon finds out 
 what the prevailing wages are, and they are insanely 
 willing to underbid for employment on a basis of 
 wages that, compared with the wages in their old 
 country, is a princely stipend. They do not have to 
 change their habits of life immediately, and are, on 
 landing, equipped for a hearty fight with men whose 
 mode of living has become through years of industri- 
 ous citizenship one of comparative luxury. The 
 struggle of these people for employment, being prin- 
 cipally in large towns, develops at once a bitter an-, 
 tagonism, a class and race hatred, the immigrant not 
 only turning against his wage-competitor, but, 
 through the politician, who gets him in hand almost 
 as soon as he is landed, there is planted the seeds of 
 a bitter animosity against the men through whose 
 wealth he gains the means of living. 
 
 If these shuckings of poverty from the old world 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 53 
 
 had, immediately after their arrival, been forced to 
 the woods or the prairies, and compelled to assist in 
 tilling some of the unoccupied millions of acres the 
 government holds in waiting for tenants, the results 
 would be of a natural and permanent character. But 
 these adventurers will do nothing of the kind. They 
 come to attack the sources of living of men already 
 here. They gather, like flies, in great labor centers, 
 and, in the market of unskilled labor, present a for- 
 midable front, and of their services the employer, a 
 man usually without sentiment, quickly avails himself. 
 
 Here we have a labor competition that cannot be 
 adjusted; nor can it adjust itself so long as this great 
 current of human life is turned upon these shores to 
 the detriment of society in general, and the workmen 
 already here in particular. Politicians, shrewd as they 
 are in schemes, and dishonest in pledge and perfor- 
 mance as they generally prove to be, are unable to 
 regulate this feature of the labor contest. They want 
 to keep the clay already moulded, but fear to manip- 
 ulate the new material when it is opposed to what 
 they have, as an enemy to the creature already under 
 their manipulations. 
 
 The appeals of intelligent labor, the protests of 
 men lessened in their opportunities of work by these 
 continued and menacing incursions of foreign cheap 
 labor, and the assaults of an alarmed press upon an 
 evil that is overlapping the country with an element 
 
54 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 that foments discords and breeds insurrections, at 
 last forced the sentiment-makers of the different 
 political parties to embody in their national platforms 
 expressions against the wholesale admission of foreign 
 labor. The Republicans, in their creed of 1892, dis- 
 pose of the matter in this one sentence: “We favor 
 the enactment of more stringent laws and regulations 
 for the restriction of criminal, pauper and contract 
 immigration.” 
 
 In this the party showed its cowardice, for the 
 labor people of the country care very little for the 
 forbidden classes referred to, but do care when over 
 a quarter of a million of the cheapest kind of work- 
 men are annually thrown upon a market in which 
 labor is already overstocked with home material. 
 If there is not work enough for all at fair wages, why 
 do party factions pauperize the industry of the 
 country with an unceasing inflow of raw material to 
 increase that supply and diminish the wages.^ 
 
 The Democratic party is as tenderfooted in this 
 matter as the Republicans. Neither of them has 
 yet dared to come boldly forward and demand a 
 reasonable protection for American labor by re- 
 stricting that from abroad; both seem fascinated by 
 that glittering tinsel of a sentiment of early times 
 that this country should be the asylum of “exiles for 
 conscience* sake.” They know, in their hearts, that 
 all they, the politicians, need of these new comers. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 55 
 
 are their votes, and ^‘exiles for conscience’ sake” now 
 means anarchists and the breeders of revolutions in- 
 imical to the great country in which they find refuge, 
 and where they are not wanted. The Democrats 
 declared in their national convention of 1892, the 
 following: 
 
 “We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to pre- 
 vent the United States from being used as a dump- 
 ing ground for the known criminals and professional 
 paupers of Europe, and we demand the rigid enforce- 
 ment of the laws against Chinese immigration or the 
 importation of foreign workmen under contract to 
 degrade American labor and lessen its wages; but we 
 condemn and denounce any and all attempts to re- 
 strict the immigration of the industrious and worthy 
 of foreign lands.” 
 
 This position is incomprehensible. Many danger- 
 ous criminals from Europe, paying their way like 
 regular passengers, are landed every week in New 
 York or some other seaport. Unrecognized anarch- 
 ists, murderers, robbers and even well-to-do profes- 
 sional paupers have no difficulty in effecting a landing. 
 Those who were found out, from their poverty, and 
 sent back, only amounted to a trifle over 2,000. 
 
 What danger is there to American laborers from 
 2,000 people who do not work.? None. But there is 
 incalculable wrong to the industrial classes in allow- 
 ing a quarter of a million of men and women to 
 
56 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 come from abroad, and contest with the forces already 
 here, for that subsistence the means of obtaining 
 which are being annually lessened. Why oppose 
 Chinese immigration, when Italy contributed over 
 72,000 immigrants in 1894 — immigrants who come 
 here to work for less money than the native workman 
 demands; who live on bananas and foul air, and who 
 send out of the country all they can earn.? Is such 
 a foreigner better or worse than the Chinaman.? Is 
 it consistency to exclude one race on account of the 
 slant of their eyes, and admit another because a 
 Caesar and his Brutus made its progenitors famous.? 
 
 But the Prohibition party, ambitious to reform the 
 country by attempting to drain the pools of politics 
 without first disinfecting them, has, in its platform 
 for 1892, this idea of reform: — “Foreign immigration 
 has become a burden upon industry, one of the fac- 
 tors in depressing wages and causing discontent; 
 therefore our immigration laws should be revised and 
 strictly enforced. The time of residence for natural- 
 ization should be extended, and no naturalized per- 
 son should be allowed to vote until one year after 
 he becomes a citizen.”, 
 
 Here is the key-note to an absolutely needed re- 
 generation. One of the intolerable causes which 
 lead to the slavery of the American workman is 
 pricked by the lancet of this reform party. The 
 thing to be inferred and feared is, that like all new 
 
American slaves 
 
 5 ^ 
 
 reform organizations, having an ambition to better 
 the condition of humanity, this one may grow weak 
 in its purpose, and, as it attains power, bury its initial 
 effort to benefit the workman in the cesspools of its 
 victories. 
 
 Whatever happens, this utterance of the Prohi- 
 bitionists was louder and more to the real issue be- 
 tween home and foreign labor than the resolution 
 adopted by the People’s party convention— a reso- 
 lution not incorporated, however, in the platform. 
 It was to this effect: — ‘‘That we condemn the fallacy 
 of protecting American labor under the present sys- 
 tem, which opens our ports to the pauper and crimi- 
 nal classes of the world, and crowds out our wage- 
 earners; and we denounce the present ineffective 
 laws against contract labor, and demand the further 
 restriction of undesirable immigration.” 
 
 Here we have what is supposed to have been the 
 serious expression of the remedial ideas of the four 
 great political divisions of this country. The problem 
 to which they allude is not so perplexing as their lead- 
 ers would have a person believe. It can be summed 
 up in one question: Do the workmen of this country 
 want two men at half-wages to do the work of one 
 man at full wages? If immigration labor added ma- 
 terially to the productive resources of the country, 
 its unobstructed inflow might be stoically accepted 
 as permitting the existence of an evil that good might 
 
58 
 
 AMERICAN SLAyBS 
 
 come; but when it weakens the wage-earning possi- 
 bilities of men already in the field, it would seem to 
 be the duty of Congress to act quickly and energetic- 
 ally in enacting laws which, if not prohibitory, will, 
 in any event, make every foreigner of some real value 
 to the nation. But, as the Cincinnati Tribune says, 
 — “Now that the harm has, in a large measure, been 
 wrought, the American people are beginning tardily 
 to recognize the evils that the ‘scum of the earth’ 
 have brought among them, and the sentiment in 
 favor of rigid restriction of immigration grows apace. 
 But, in the meantime, the poison is at work. The 
 vicious, the ignorant, the depraved, the dangerous 
 imported members of society are with us and are 
 manifesting their presence yearly with more frequency 
 and boldness.” 
 
 That these immigrants have no strong ties to bind 
 them to the United States, and that they do not hon- 
 estly renounce their allegiance to iheir mother land, 
 is shown by their willingness and financial ability to 
 leave the country when it is agitated by labor dis- 
 sensions. Immediately following the strike of 1894, 
 the foreign steamship companies made their passage 
 rates to Europe ridiculously small, and, as one re- 
 sult, thousands of unemployed foreigners took pas- 
 sage for Europe because, with their savings, they 
 could pay their fares and live there for a time more 
 cheaply than in America. During the month of July 
 
AMERICA>i SLAVES 
 
 69 
 
 the emigrants from the port of New York alone num- 
 bered 19,963, steerage passengers only. Coming 
 into the country, during the same month, were only 
 11,549 immigrants, from the following countries: 
 1,928 came from Germany, 2,011 from Russia, 
 1,727 from Italy, 1,031 from Ireland, 922 from En- 
 gland, 157 from Scotland, 760 from Sweden, 308 from 
 Denmark, 420 from Norway, 790 from Austria, 423 
 from Hungary, 176 from France, 105 from Portugal, 
 135 from Finland, and the remainder in small num- 
 bers from other countries. No wonder that Mr. Debs, 
 in denouncing the unborn tariff of his party, declared 
 that ‘‘while they put a tariff on what it would benefit 
 you to have come in free, they opened the ports and 
 welcomed the riffraff of Europe. They put no tariff on 
 Poles and Dagos. They send to Europe for the foreign 
 element that has pushed American workmen from 
 their once happy homes.’’ When, if ever, quiet is re- 
 stored here, and they find their money nearly exhaust- 
 ed, these people will once more return to contest with 
 domestic labor for the means of subsistence. If the 
 American workman is in doubt as to the great causes 
 which contribute to the continuance of his bondage, 
 let him give a careful study to immigration statistics 
 and foreign labor puzzles. Then he can compre- 
 hend why the fifty-cent a day man of Europe and 
 Asia is in such a hurry to become the dollar and a 
 half a day man of the United States; and how, when 
 
60 
 
 AMERICAN SLAFES 
 
 hard times come, the thrifty foreigner, of a few years 
 residence, is able to abandon his temporary home 
 in America and return to his birth-place to excite the 
 envy of friends by his little wealth, and perhaps 
 spend the rest of his life in their midst in the proud 
 position of a retired capitalist. 
 
VIII. 
 
 It may be unchivalrous to condemn the participa- 
 tion of woman in the enslavement of the workman; 
 nevertheless she has become a formidable accessory 
 to the creation and maintenance of this bondage, 
 and as such accessory must submit to a discussion of 
 her attitude — which is hostile — and of her acts — 
 which are attacks upon workmen in particular, and 
 upon all men workers in general. There is an un- 
 pleasant logic about facts from which shrink even 
 the most callous of natures; and it is not a matter of 
 surprise that sensitive woman repels with abhorrence 
 the slightest intimation that she is in any way to be 
 harshly judged for the part she has been playing, of 
 late, in the drama of existence. 
 
 Until within twenty-five or thirty years certain 
 avocations were allotted, almost without opposi- 
 tion, to the fair sex, and men regarded what was left 
 as being theirs by the natural laws of existence; and 
 it was conceded that women should not be com- 
 pelled to labor in the fields, toil in shops, or perform 
 any of the acts of drudgery which custom had allotted, 
 and rightfully, to men. Woman, poor or rich, had a 
 
 61 
 
62 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 special sphere in the world — a round of domestic 
 duties and labors, for which she was fitted by her sex, 
 and which immemorial usage had made, in a manner, 
 sacred. Wife and mother were words and positions in 
 life that made woman a creature to be regarded with 
 pure love, and treated with a loyalty and an adoration 
 which the present generation, from its experience, 
 fails to comprehend. 
 
 Why this change, this revolution.? Simply be- 
 cause woipan has, in business life, forced herself into 
 various occupations, and brought herself down to 
 the vulgar level of vulgar men; because she has 
 stripped herself of the characteristics of love and 
 tenderness which are universally regarded as and con- 
 ceded to be the insignia of womanhood; because an 
 inappeasable appetite for notoriety, a craze for sensa- 
 tions, and consuming vanity and envy, have metamor- 
 phosed her, unsexed her, wrenched her from the 
 pedestal where men had adoringly placed her, 
 and upon which they had fixed their eyes with 
 devotion that has filled the pages of history with 
 stories of chivalrous deeds. Once idols whom man 
 worshiped, they have abandoned their realms and 
 rule and descended to the highways of life to fight 
 against men whose chief object in living is to provide 
 a home and subsistence for their families. It has been 
 a silent but an irresistible and deplorable revolution 
 of sex; and man, not yet absolutely a savage in his 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 63 
 
 treatment of woman, has had the worst of the fight. 
 He discovers that in all but the most brutal of em- 
 ployments, or in those requiring great strength, he 
 is being forced to contend with the cheap and un- 
 satisfactory labor of women. He recognizes that from 
 the harvest field to the highest grades of the mechani- 
 cal arts woman, not more skillful in work but much 
 cheaper m wages, is his implacable competitor. Let 
 us scan the list of occupations which women are fol- 
 lowing. We find them as workers in fields and market 
 gardens; in factories and printing offices; as tailors, 
 in shops, stores, business offices, cigar stands, tele- 
 phone and telegraph operating rooms, as typewriters 
 and saleswomen, and even in barber and butcher- 
 shops. We note them as lawyers, doctors, archi- 
 tects, ministers, dentists, lecturers, promoters of 
 syndicates and monopolies, board of trade specula- 
 tors, dabblers in stocks and bonds, corporation officials, 
 and other occupations not strictly pertaining to those 
 of the workingman, but which are, at the same time, 
 evidences of the encroaching selfishness of women 
 and her indifference to and disregard of the absolute 
 necessities of men. 
 
 Every woman who enters upon a business that, not 
 many years ago, was accorded to men by right of 
 sex or the heritage of usage, keeps one man out of 
 that sort of work, lessens his field of opportunities, 
 
64 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 forces him into the overcrowded ranKS of other pur- 
 suits, while at the same time she removes herself 
 from the peculiar social position to which nature and 
 custom has assigned her. This industrial conflict of 
 sexes would not be so censurable, nor so adverse to the 
 humanities of life, if women made this incursion a 
 permanent condition of their labor calling. The 
 contrary is, however, the truth. In the majority of 
 cases these usurpations of the avocations of men 
 are caused by an inordinate vanity that stops at 
 nothing in the effort to obtain attractive clothing, 
 fine jewelry, luxuries in food for the body, or the 
 brain, or the eyes, or, more important than all, the 
 attentions of men carried, with dogged pertinacity, 
 to a point that secures a husband. This last ambition 
 gratified, the woman usually retires to the amenities 
 of domestic life, revolutionized as to all the softer at- 
 tributes of her sex, giving to social and maternal 
 duties the asperities of her business career, and mak- 
 ing way for successors who follow a similar round in 
 life with the same purpose, and, generally, with the 
 same results. 
 
 It is from such causes that man’s fields of labor 
 are being gradually restricted and redistributed, and 
 the value of his compensation reduced by the super- 
 abundant and voracious labor of women; and woman 
 herself loses the soft and delicate points of refine- 
 ment that come with her birth, and becomes an 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 65 
 
 avaricious, scheming, mercenary creature, hardened 
 to and imitating men’s ways and forms of speech, 
 and accepting, with but little shrinking of soul, but 
 with great shrinking of character, a levity of atten- 
 tion that borders too often on looseness. 
 
 The position is a perilous one for reputations, no 
 matter how fearlessly it may be met, or how purely, 
 on the woman’s part, it may be sustained. She is on 
 territory where she does not rightfully belong; she has 
 appropriated employments that have been originated 
 for and by men, and she holds these acquisitions not 
 so much by ability or qualification as by that cheap- 
 ness of labor that is, in itself, one of the most de- 
 moralizing evils inflicted upon industry. Woman is 
 claiming and seizing upon what she is pleased to 
 term her rights, regardless of the fact that, with her 
 encroachments in the labor fields, for temporary pur- 
 poses, she opens the way for her sisters, and crowds 
 out of line a family-supporting father or brother. It is 
 true that woman should have employments by which 
 to earn a living when she has neither father, brother 
 nor husband to earn it for her; but they should be 
 womanly means and not the avocations of men; and 
 all the sacredness and refinements of home life should 
 not be abandoned so that, a few years hence, they 
 will be considered as subjects only suitable for the 
 madrigals of poets and the legends of the compilers 
 of histories of the unique and disused habits of society. 
 
66 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 This is an age of queer revolutions and grotesque 
 revenges; but it is not the age when women should 
 conspire, and succeed in their conspiracies, to ex- 
 tirpate man because Adam ate the apple given him 
 by seductive Eve. Cheap labor is not confined to 
 the Chinese only. If women would not work unless 
 for the same compensation given to men, then they 
 would not get work. Women consider housework 
 degrading; but is not the degradation of office and 
 shop life worse.? Why be the slave of a floorwalker 
 or forewoman rather than the menial, if such must 
 be the term, of “the lady of the house?” In fact, 
 why abandon womanly callings and still try to be a 
 woman ? 
 
 More women than men are born, and under the 
 present labor conditions the workman’s slavery, creat- 
 ed by Debt and the politician, is not softened by the 
 cheap labor of woman; and his future certainly does 
 not seem to be stocked with alluring hopefulness; for 
 if to this increase, by natural laws, of these filchers 
 of man labor from a population already on the soil, 
 there is the continual addition of a grosser and 
 more selfish material of the same sex, by immigra- 
 tion, then woman’s as well as man’s difficulties in 
 the struggle for a livelihood are wofully augmented, 
 and the pangs of her political weakness intensified. 
 What is called the “old world” has been inordinately 
 generous with its useless surplus population, getting 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 67 
 
 rid of the poorest in order that the best might remain 
 and survive; and transferring to the United States 
 the fundamental evils of labor, the surplusage, to 
 Europe's gain or our detriment. The census of 1890 
 showed that 30,554,370 women helped to make the 
 total of 62,622,250 souls. Sinc^ 1820 and up to 1890 
 we have had from abroad 2,040,702 women immi- 
 grants, of which number 1,724,454 were without 
 trade, profession or occupation. In 1892, 38 per cent 
 of the total incoming, or 236,771 were women; and 
 for 1893, of the total arrivals (439, 730), 159,386 
 were women. They do not journey over the sea on 
 a picnic, for a ^‘constitutional,'^ or for any other pur- 
 pose than to get a living. And they do get it. But 
 for every winner among this class there is a corre- 
 sponding loser, male or female, among the workers 
 already here; and as they rise from lower to higher 
 grades of labor new comers from abroad fill the va- 
 cant places, and are new materials in the wall that 
 is being built upon the territory of the man-worker. 
 Worse than this, the country has, during recent 
 strikes, been treated to repeated exhibitions of the 
 anti-law-and-order tendencies of many of these for- 
 eign women, who have raised their hands in violence 
 against workmen, and shrieked the vilest anathemas 
 upon the law, its officers and those whom these 
 officers were commissioned to protect. Hell may 
 have its finished furies; but in that line this “free 
 and glorious repu blic" surpasses it. 
 
68 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 In this brief consideration of woman in the ranks 
 of labor we have omitted any discussion of her in- 
 terference in political affairs. Party contests affect the 
 workman more by their enmity to his true interests 
 than by any honest effort t o befriend him; and to in- 
 crease the scope and elements of political aggran- 
 dizement is only to add to what we insist are the 
 slavemaking powers of the time. The saddest phase in 
 this self-dethronement of woman from that position 
 of love and reverence in which, for ages, she has 
 been held in all civilized communities, is her partici- 
 pation in matters of suffrage. The greed for power, 
 the lust for office, the itch for notoriety, are begin- 
 ning the debasement of the womanhood of the nine- 
 teenth century. No language has been severe enough 
 in denouncing the abominations of what we are 
 pleased, in this country, to call politics, but which is, 
 in reality,the perpetual perpetration of unpunishable 
 crimes by means of the ballot box. The political 
 history of this country is a record of unpardonable 
 and ineffaceable disgraces, running from the crimes 
 of electoral colleges down to the petty rascalities of 
 township elections; yet, with such a shameful line- 
 age for the ballot box and its patrons, American wom- 
 en come out of the golden glory that has surrounded 
 them and demand a participation in the contests and 
 a share of the spoils. Where is the man so lost to 
 inherent self respect as to advocate the cooperation 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 69 
 
 of mother, sister, sweetheart or wife with the crea- 
 tures whose chicaneries allot the simple citizen little 
 else than the privilege of voting ? Where women 
 have everything to gain but nothing to lose, in the 
 strife of politics they must take the medicine that 
 men take; but matters are radically different when 
 they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. In 
 Kansas, where pernicious fads are on bills of fare for 
 political meals, the woman suffragists have imitated 
 the men by making a deal for power, offering and 
 promising to support the Populists if the Populists 
 would, in their convention, declare for woman suf- 
 frage. A pretty picture, this, for the study of reform- 
 ers and — women! At the very outset there is bargain, 
 and sale — just like men’s ways — and dishonest ones 
 at that. 
 
 In commenting on this trade the Woman's Journal 
 offers this silly bub argument that “women as well as 
 men, are affiliated with the respective parties by 
 convictions on other questions of public importance. 
 Woman-Suffrage is not the sole question and cannot 
 be made such. Thousands of Democrats and tens 
 of thousands of Republicans are in sympathy with 
 Woman-Suffrage. It would be folly to alienate 
 them.” 
 
 Kate Field’s Washington smoothes out the creases 
 in this alliance, with the flatiron of an opinion that 
 these promisers swallowed free coinage of silver, non- 
 
70 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 interest-paying bonds, etc., for the sake of getting 
 what should have been obtained without any bargain 
 whatever. They entered that convention as leaders 
 of a non-political cause, and came out of it com- 
 mitted to a third party, in which a majority of Ameri- 
 cans have no faith. 
 
 The Boston Journal touches the subject with a 
 drop of sulphuric acid in saying: 
 
 “Perhaps it would seem extreme to describe such 
 bartering of votes as immoral, but at least it throws 
 some light on the character of the reformator}' in- 
 fluences which would become operative in our politics 
 with the entrance of women.” 
 
 But this disease may not spread. Woman is likely 
 to be a queen for this generation, though mighty 
 near an exile. Not quite yet is she a victim of the 
 insanity of political power; and yet there is so much 
 in the old couplet. 
 
 When a woman will, she will, depend on’t; 
 
 But when she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end on't, 
 
 that one must needs wait until she performs that 
 momentous act of “making up her mind.” 
 
 Outside of this debasing struggle for place and 
 power, which time and politicians will settle for 
 them, we recapitulate these salient points in her eco- 
 nomic position — that woman has silently and insidi- 
 ously usurped many a man’s bread-winning occupa- 
 tions, narrowed his line of labor, reduced his possibil- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 71 
 
 ities of production and competition, wantonly robbed 
 him of the natural rights of his sex as the head and 
 supporter of a family, and by all these infringements 
 of established rights weakened the state by impairing 
 the working value of an essential component. If there 
 were a scarcity of laborers in the country no ob- 
 jection could reasonably be held against this antago- 
 nism of sexes in the various industries; but as our 
 population affords a superabundance of man-labor 
 for all work, light or severe, and as woman is taking 
 away such work from men who have or will have 
 families to support, we declare that the women of 
 this country are, next to the politicians, the worst 
 enemies, thoughtlessly perhaps, of the male workers; 
 and that they are among the slave makers of the 
 United States. 
 
 We hold that it is criminally wrong for woman to 
 usurp, on the plea of sex, those sources of livelihood 
 and domestic existence which are man’s by right of 
 birth, by usage for thousands of years, by sex adap- 
 tation and by the understood law of the State that 
 men shall be considered as the heads, protectors and 
 supporters of families. In contemplating the future 
 for individuals and communities, we are forced to 
 consider the enervating results of creating in young 
 women an insatiable taste for display; an almost 
 shameless craving for notoriety; a demoralizing ten- 
 dency to an extravagance that may be difficult for a 
 
AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 n 
 
 husband to gratify; a dislike for any of the restraints 
 necessary for a happy domesticity and the judicious 
 conduct of a family; a tireless scheming to marry 
 above her station in life; a flippancy in action; a fool- 
 ishness in ambition; and, in all, a license in words 
 and manners not at all in consonance with the ex- 
 amples of those ardent, devoted mothers who blessed 
 the homes of olden times and gave as legacies to the 
 world the wisest and best of men as models of what 
 good women can do if they will. But, on the other 
 hand, fill the veins of the coming population of this 
 republic witbthe composite blood of scores of foreign 
 nations — blood tainted with the corruption incident to 
 centuries of misrule and degradation; transmit to new 
 generations, through the bisexual woman of to-day, 
 and the coming morrows, the idiosyncrasies of her sex 
 and her times, combined with those of men embitter- 
 ed by a sullen hatred of the social economy which 
 they are unconsciously aiding to make detestable, 
 and what sort of people will possess the country a 
 hundred years hence? We shall have an anarchy 
 that will be the real and not the ideal embodi- 
 ment of all that is horrible, repugnant and atrocious 
 in human nature. We shall then have, not the 
 preparations for the crime, as now, but the crime 
 itself. 
 
IX. 
 
 The cause of the origin of the trade union was the 
 purpose of self-protection. The motives were purely 
 philanthropic. As such no man could have good 
 reasons for opposing it. Aggregation of power could 
 accomplish reforms impossible to the individual; 
 but in becoming members of such combinations men 
 did not, except in a legislative way, abandon their 
 personal rights. Is such the case to-day ? Are not 
 unions aggressive rather than conservative ? Have 
 not the leaders arrogated to themselves a sort of pro- 
 prietary right in the individual. This will probably 
 be denied, on the ground that the majority rules. 
 But how is it with the large minority? Have they 
 no rights left when the question is a sacrifice of the 
 means of living? Must they become participants in 
 unlawful procedures because a majority decrees oppo- 
 sition to law? Are not such majorities obtained, in 
 general, through the conspiracies of ambitious lead- 
 ers,^ rather than by a spontaneous uprising of the 
 members? We do not believe that strikes are in gen- 
 eral the result of calm, dispassionate consideration by 
 the members of a federation of labor legislators. 
 
 73 
 
74 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 Strikes, as now conducted, are, in principle, acts of 
 war, and, as such, entitled to that profound consider- 
 ation always given to such grave questions. Some 
 unions will not strike except as a last resort in secur- 
 ing the righting of a wrong for which courts of equity 
 afford no redress; other unions fight at the snap of 
 a walking delegate’s thumb and finger, and the mem- 
 bers abandon their work without knowing the cause. 
 In such cases who is the tyrant and who is the slave? 
 
 Workmen talk glibly about strikes and the good 
 they accomplish. On questions of vital principles of 
 manhood they may and do secure permanent results. 
 Ordinarily they are failures. In England labor is 
 better organized than in this country, and it is or- 
 ganized for self-protection and not for the political 
 advancement of its leaders. Yet the English work- 
 man has found out that strikes are failures. Ac- 
 cording do a communication in the Westminster 
 Gazette, there were in Great Britain, in 1892, 692 
 strikes and eight lockouts, affecting 371.799 persons. 
 Of the 692 strikes 345 were settled either by mutual 
 conciliation or by mediation, 1 1 5 by submission of 
 work-people, seventy-nine by the hands being re- 
 placed, thirty-three by conciliation and submission, 
 thirteen by conciliation and hands being replaced, 
 twenty-two by submission and hands being replaced, 
 and sixteen by arbitration. 
 
 The cost of these struggles to both employers and 
 
- AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 75 
 
 employees was enormous. The amount of wages not 
 paid during the period of stoppage is variously esti- 
 mated at from ^^485,000 to £^9S,ooo per week. The 
 capital laid idle in 511 establishments making returns 
 was very nearly 1 9, 000, 000, The cost of restart- 
 ing works in the case of forty-five firms was £16^^- 
 000, and i^S5,ooo was spent by employers in resist- 
 ing strikes. In 235 strikes the contributions from 
 trades unions to men on strike reached ;^i63,ooo, 
 this, of course, being only a fraction of the total 
 sum expended in this way. In conclusion the statis- 
 tician who supplied these says that the general bal- 
 ance of results was against the workmen, as may al- 
 ways be anticipated during a period of declining trade. 
 But there is, it seems, a growing opinion, expressed 
 year by year, both among employers and workmen, 
 in favor of various forms of arbitration and concili- 
 ation. 
 
 For the cost of the hundreds of silly strikes in 
 this country, those spasmodic attacks of economic 
 colic which are aggravated by an insane idea of giv- 
 ing capital a blow in the face, no approximate figures 
 can be given, and the statistics for such a stupen- 
 dous outbreak as the railway strike of 1894 can not 
 be obtained until after an adjustment of all the dam- 
 ages to the railroads, and even then it is doubtful 
 whether the various unions would care to state the 
 cost to their members. 
 
AMERICANSLAVES 
 
 % 
 
 The Bradstreet agency, which by reason of its 
 agency resources throughout the country, is well 
 equipped with commercial information on the sub- 
 ject, estimates the losses by the railway strike of 1894, 
 which centered in Chicago, as follows: 
 
 United States Government $ 1,000,000 
 
 Loss in earnings of railroads, Chicago 3,000,000 
 
 Loss earnings, other railroads 2,500,000 
 
 Loss, destruction railway property 2,500,000 
 
 Loss, railway employees’ wages 20,000,000 
 
 Loss in exports 2,000,000 
 
 Loss on fruit crops 2,500,000 
 
 Loss to manufacturing companies 7,500,000 
 
 Loss to employees 35,000,000 
 
 Loss to merchants on quick goods 5,000,000 
 
 Total $81, 000, 000 
 
 There were other strikes, notably those of the 
 coal miners, which will increase the total cost of this 
 sort of mischief to over $100,000,000. What the 
 cost has been to trade unions, as unions, and to their 
 individual members, as members, will probably never 
 be known. The only advantage gained is the ap- 
 pointment of a congressional investigating commit- 
 tee to officially formulate public opinion for presen- 
 tation to a Congress that will show itself absolutely 
 indifferent to the necessities of all concerned. Con- 
 gress is by no means a labor union, and has no par- 
 ticular interest in the strifes of organized industries; 
 its authorization of the committee referred to was 
 only a spasmodic exhibit of virtue, or, to use a more 
 pertinent simile, it was gooseberry jam for working- 
 men’s fingers. 
 
/IMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 77 
 
 Regardless of the barren results of this gigantic 
 strike, labor is still defiant. Its wounds are not healed. 
 Its wrongs have not been righted, nor will they ever 
 be righted by any such tactics as have been followed 
 thus far in its campaigns. Why labor should be all 
 the time trying by acts and speeches to ruin capital, 
 is the supreme paradox of this century. It reminds 
 one of the old lady who killed the goose that laid the 
 eggs of gold. Any sane person will agree that capi- 
 tal without labor or labor without capital would ac- 
 complish nothing. What foolishness, then, to cherish 
 the idea that capital is trying to destroy labor and 
 that labor should retaliate by legitimate and illegiti- 
 mate means in efforts to wipe out capita}. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, every man is a capitalist when he makes 
 his income exceed his outgo. The capitalists of 
 France are its peasantry, who loan it money in hours 
 of need and peril. Many of the capitalists of Amer- 
 ica are the descendants of peripatetic peddlers, saga- 
 cious wood sawers, economical truck gardeners, frugal 
 teamsters, and of avaricious workmen who saved 
 when comrades wasted and played the part of the 
 plethoric ant to the emaciated grasshopper. The 
 wealth-makers of to-day are men, generally, who 
 commenced with nothing but a capital of brain, 
 muscles, ambition and indomitable energy. If work- 
 men are to try and down such people, to extirpate 
 these men and their labor-giving enterprises, then 
 
78 
 
 AMERIC/iN SLAVES 
 
 they are plotting for universal ruin. The Chicago 
 Tribune presents the matter in this way: 
 
 “The fact is that the contestants on both sides are 
 men, and the money or its equivalent credit, which 
 constitutes capital, is only a means to an end. Capi- 
 tal is actively used by enterprise to employ labor. 
 The antagonism, when it exists, is between Enter- 
 prise and Labor, between brain ability and muscular 
 effort, the capital used being introduced for the pur- 
 pose of rendering the latter effective, for without it 
 labor cannot be set at work.” 
 
 And again it says: ‘‘It must be remembered that 
 without the man of brains and nerve the capital 
 would not be employed, and no workman would be 
 hired, and no wages paid, and the industry would not 
 be carried on. 
 
 “The capital thus put in use is the profit and sav- 
 ing of past labor that has been conducted by Enter- 
 prise. It is owned by somebody who is willing to 
 take rent for its use without himself actively super- 
 vising the process or taking part in the industrial 
 labor. If a man uses his own money, land, build- 
 ings, raw material or machinery in productive proc- 
 ess it is part of his Enterprise. If he borrows from 
 another the use of part or all of these he bargains 
 for the use of that capital, for which he agrees to 
 pay rent or interest, expecting to do so out of the 
 profits of the business. He does not hire the capi- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 79 
 
 talist, but hires the property or money of the capi- 
 talist. 
 
 “Hence in a strike, lockout, boycott, or other indus- 
 trial disturbance the strife or struggle is not be- 
 tween ‘capital and labor.’ The capitalist is not lift- 
 ing a finger unless as he sometimes may occupy the 
 position of a stock-holder, threatened with loss of 
 some of his capital. The contest is left to the men of 
 enterprise and the men whom they have hired at 
 commercial wages to assist in certain processes of 
 reproduction or transportation. Neither the banker 
 who handles enterprise money nor the owner of the 
 deposits which are loaned out by the banker, goes to 
 work in the shops, bosses the men, or attends to 
 marketing the product. The real combat is, there- 
 fore, between the men with brains, who borrow the 
 capital, and the men with muscle who are hired to 
 work up the raw materials by the aid of machinery 
 into more valuable forms. 
 
 “If the workers cripple or break down the enterpris- 
 ing man who employs them by the aid of borrowed 
 capital, in what way do they benefit themselves by 
 killing his business.? If the enterprising man whose 
 brains have directed their efforts becomes discour- 
 aged, even without being badly crippled, he turns 
 over the capital on hand to the capitalist from whom 
 he hired it, discharges the men who have struck 
 against him, and steps back into inactivity. If he 
 
80 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 has lost a part of the capital before giving up to the 
 strikers, he hands over the remainder to those to 
 whom it belongs, the machinery, buildings, and land 
 become unproductive, the concern is closed up, and 
 the 500 or 1,000 men who had been getting wages 
 from the man with enterprising brains are turned 
 adrift, having knocked themselves out of their jobs 
 by their folly.” 
 
 From such a presentation of the attitude of enter- 
 prise, not capital, and labor, one would reasonably 
 infer that by a strike as against capital the workman 
 was simply trying to kick off his own head. But the 
 English anarchist, Mr. Charles Wilfred Mowbray, 
 who has come to this country to sprinkle our insti- 
 tutions with the gasoline of his ideas and then set 
 fire to the results, in a speech in New York city just 
 after his arrival changed the war-cry just a little, 
 declaring, among other things: “It has been said that 
 we want to do away with capital. That’s ridiculous, 
 false. Capital is the result of labor. It does not 
 grow in a garden; it is not rained from heaven as it 
 is said was the manna to the children of Israel. 
 What we do want is not to do away with capital, 
 
 but to do away with the capitalist. 
 ******* 
 
 “I mean by doing away with the capitalist, putting 
 them to the severest punishment they could endure, 
 making them work for an honest living. Labor 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 81 
 
 unions of to-day are gradually being forced into the 
 ranks of Anarchist Communists, A strike cannot 
 any more be used to better the condition of the work- 
 men. Consequently while organizing they are study- 
 ing the doctrine that the Socialists, the Communists, 
 and the Anarchists lay before them. It will be im- 
 possible for those men not to fight, not to take a 
 rifle, a knife, or a bomb, to revolutionize society by 
 folding their arms.” 
 
 It is well to know what the anarchists are hoping, 
 working, but not praying for, prayer being, presum- 
 ably, not of their arsenal of weapons. Perhaps it is 
 not fair to assert this, because we are told by the 
 Associated Press that a prominent minister of the gos- 
 pel, of Denver, Col,, delivered an address before a 
 large audience of railway men in which he said: 
 “Jesus Christ was not only an Anarchist, but was 
 killed by the representatives of the law, the church, 
 and state for daring to practice humanity, Jesus 
 Christ was an Anarchist and a Socialist, but I never 
 read of his being a Deputy Sheriff,” 
 
 This sentiment being received with “cheers,” the 
 reverend gentleman ought to have urged his hearers 
 to enlist with the devil, because his Satanic majesty 
 had boycotted the Creator. But he omitted that 
 natural sequence to his blasphemy, and concluded 
 his oration by remarking: 
 
 “I also say that a man who does not belong to a 
 
83 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 union and stands ready to take another man’s place 
 at less wages is an enemy, a spy, and an obstructer, 
 and ought in some peaceable way to be removed,” 
 
 Forgetting that “peaceable removals” have cost 
 many human lives. 
 
 Have the laborers of the country forgotten the 
 words of wisdom embodied in President Lincoln’s 
 message to Congress in December, i86i, and repeat- 
 ed by him to a committee of workmen who had called 
 upon him? His message contained many great 
 things, but among them were ideas more pertinent 
 now than then. He said; 
 
 “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. 
 Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have 
 existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the 
 superior of capital and deserves much the higher con- 
 sideration. Capital has its rights which are as worthy 
 of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied 
 that there is and probably always will be a relation 
 between capital and labor producing mutual benefits. 
 The error is in assuming that the whole labor of a 
 community exists within that relation. A few men 
 own capital and that few avoid labor themselves, and 
 with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for 
 them. A large majority belong to neither class; 
 neither work for others nor have others working for 
 them. In the most of the Southern States a majority 
 of the whole people, of all colors, are neither slaves 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 83 
 
 nor masters; while in the Northern a large majority 
 are neither hirers nor hired. Men with their families 
 — wives, sons, and daughters — work for themselves 
 on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, 
 taking the whole product to themselves, and asking 
 no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hired 
 laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten 
 that a considerable number of persons mingle their 
 own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their 
 own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for 
 them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct 
 class. No principle stated is disturbed by the ex- 
 istence of this mixed class. 
 
 “Again, as has already been said, there is not of 
 necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being 
 fixed to that condition for life. Many independent 
 men everywhere in these States a few years back 
 in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent pen- 
 niless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, 
 saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for 
 himself, then labors on his own account another 
 while, and at length hires another new beginner to 
 help him. This is the just and generous and pros- 
 perous system which opens the way to all — gives hope 
 to all, and consequent energy and progress, and im- 
 provement of condition to all. No men living are 
 more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up 
 from poverty — none less inclined to touch or take 
 
84 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 aught which they have not honestly earned. Let 
 them beware of surrendering a political power they 
 already possess, and which, if surrendered, will 
 surely be used to close the door of advancement 
 against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and 
 burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.” 
 
 To the committee he added that: “The strongest 
 bond of human sympathy, outside of the family rela- 
 tion, should be one uniting all working people of all na- 
 tions, and tongues and kindreds. Nor should this lead 
 to a war upon property or the owners of property. 
 Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is 
 a positive good in the world. That some should be 
 rich shows that others may become rich, and hence 
 is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. 
 Let not him who is houseless pull down the house 
 of another, but let him labor diligently and build one 
 for himself, thus by example assuring that his own 
 shall be safe from violence when built.” 
 
 Have men, labor, capital, the enterprise which 
 uses it, changed greatly within thirty-three years.? 
 Is not Mr. Lincoln’s sermon as timely and as true 
 now as then.? 
 
 But if the pernicious agitators who help to create 
 and maintain the present system of American slavery 
 are determined to hold capitalists and not monopo- 
 lists to an accountability for labor servitude, let them 
 read what Mr. Joseph Gruenhut, a noted student of 
 
AMERICAN slaved 
 
 85 
 
 industrial problems, has to say about capital and 
 labor: ‘‘Capitalists, under our present conditions, ap- 
 propriate the greater proportion of the productive 
 wealth of the business community, and are secured 
 by law and public sentiment in their means and op- 
 portunities of further acquisition. Capital is needed 
 for the employment and compensation of the workers; 
 its increase under control of able managers is therefore 
 a gain to the whole people. Capitalists lead indus- 
 trial progress at their own individual risk, losing by 
 obsolete machinery, and depreciated stock, while 
 supporting the working people during the industrial 
 transformation. Consolidated capital is an inter- 
 national leveler,and overcomes all sorts of prejudices 
 which in former times obstructed the course of trade. 
 Industrial pioneers in the extension of trade and la- 
 bor, earn the gratitude of mankind, while they hardly 
 ever gain a profit from the start of a new industrial 
 departure. The capitalist employer is the ally of the 
 workers; by his management inventions are turned 
 to the best account, industry is made more produc- 
 tive, and the best markets are reached. 
 
 “Capitalists, on the whole, are cheapening goods 
 and increasing the purchasing powers of wages, and 
 thus improving the common average standard of liv- 
 ing. They are cooperating in such numbers and 
 with such massed financial strength as to enable 
 them to undertake vast international enterprises to 
 
86 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 equalize the bounties of civilization among all people. 
 Labor is dependent for its efficiency on capital employ- 
 ed in production, and earns more compensation with 
 increased investments of capital in business of all 
 sorts. The wage-workers benefit not only by any 
 cause which renders their own labor more efficient in 
 producing commodities, but by whatever makes that 
 labor more efficient which produces any and all 
 necessary articles for use and consumption. 
 
 “The demand for any particular kind of labor de- 
 pends (i) on its value in use, (2) on the purchaser’s 
 power to pay for it. New articles are continually 
 brought to market and introduced for consumption; 
 the diversity of employment continually increases. 
 A rising standard of living is the result of improved 
 methods of production and fair system of exchanges. 
 Sound public policy requires that no trade should be 
 underpaid or overpaid, and that the mere necessaries 
 of life should not be raised in price by indirect tax- 
 ation. Social progress tends to fairly distribute labor 
 and leisure and the means of living among an ever- 
 increasing proportion of the whole people. Any 
 destructive, obstructive, or extortionate and plunder- 
 ing practices in business affairs should be remediable 
 by legal regulations, and reliable statistics on trade 
 and labor should be gathered for public information.” 
 
 Enough has been written to show that as between 
 plain capital, as used in business, and plain labor as 
 
AMERICA}^ SLAVES 
 
 87 
 
 employed by capital, there should be no hostility, 
 because they are inter-dependent. Any individual 
 oppression is not a cause for general antagonism. 
 Wealth consolidated in a monopoly, in a robber- 
 syndicate, in a trust that is against public policy, in 
 any combination that takes everything and gives 
 nothing — these are the enemies that workmen should 
 attack and eradicate. They are the enemies of hu- 
 man comfort, peace and happiness. The slave of 
 unions must emancipate himself not only from his 
 slavery to unwisely given bonds and promises, but 
 from the rule of unwise leaders.^ He must change his 
 ideas and his plan of action if he would be free. As 
 it is, with every strike he adds a link to his chains, 
 and with every boycott he commits a crime against 
 himself and against the society in which he lives and 
 under whose laws he finds protection. And right 
 here it is well to disabuse many vociferous orators, 
 and even a large number of workmen, of the opinion 
 that, because a man has joined a trade union, and 
 gets wages, he thereby acquires an exclusive franchise 
 to the title of “workman.” The claim is an absurd 
 one. It is as the Louisville Courier Journal — 
 “Every man who works for a living is a workingman. 
 Yet there are undoubtedly degrees among working- 
 men. There is the workingman who by his capacity 
 and application has lifted himself out of weekly wages 
 into an annual salary. There is the workingman 
 
8B 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 who hopes to do this and is striving to do it. Then 
 there is the man who neither hopes nor cares to do 
 it, but who glories in being a poor devil, preferring 
 to drag down others than to try to raise himself.’’ 
 
 The right of way for individual lives is not survey- 
 ed and charted by political and labor agitators, but 
 by the alleged representatives of the people. These 
 representatives are not patriots except by implica- 
 tion. The patriot has become a rare if not an ex- 
 tinct bird. In peace he is an incident, as the hero 
 is an accident, of the time. Self is the adjusting 
 weight of the public as well as the private acts of 
 individuals. Patriotism and three-dollars-a-day 
 wages are in harmony, just as despair and ten dol- 
 lars a month in the army are compatible. Between 
 law makers and law breakers the only difference is 
 the law. The good citizen takes his medicine, no 
 matter what the label says, because it is prescribed 
 for him; but he changes doctors as soon as he can if 
 the medicine harms him. If laws are made for 
 monopolists and corporations the workman can 
 change matters in a legitimate way by acting for him- 
 self and by himself, instead of by a proxy of dubious 
 reputation. We believe that labor unions are for 
 enforcing justice, and not for inflicting injustice. 
 Strikes right no wrongs, but wrong many rights. 
 Look at the question in the light thrown upon it by 
 the Louisville Courier Journal: 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 89 
 
 “Fifty millions of Americans are neither rich nor 
 poor. Fifty millions work to earn their bread, some 
 for high wages and some for low wages, some in one 
 way and some in another way, but all do actually 
 work for a living. Are these plain, honest people, 
 who go hand in hand through life as neighbors and 
 friends, whose children attend the same schools, whose 
 families pray together and play together, who salute 
 the same flag and serve the same God, are they to 
 be rent asunder, instructed in divergent interests, 
 and taught to hate one another at the bidding of 
 some chance leader or upstart agitator seeking to ex- 
 ploit himself.?” 
 
 Bad leadership is infinitely worse than no leader- 
 ship, in peace as in war. The Evening Post, of New 
 York City, puts a finger on a rot spot when it asserts 
 
 that — “Laboring men are proving the economists to 
 be correct in magnifying the importance of the man- 
 ager in all large enterprises. A man who can win 
 success for a corporation is worthy of a larger share 
 in the common rewards. It is rare to find among 
 the trades-union leaders that executive ability which 
 takes particular note of general trade conditions as 
 well as of local requirements. The conspicuous lack 
 in the labor combinations from a business point of 
 view is good leadership. Workingmen could better 
 afford to pay some real leader — ’Who need not be a 
 laboring man — a large salary than go on a strike for 
 
DO 
 
 yiMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 six weeks and face starvation only to find defeat in- 
 evitable at the end.” 
 
 And the Springfield (Mass.) Republican asks; “If 
 we admit that the strike is doomed to annihilation, 
 as it seems to be, are we prepared to grant to the 
 wage-earners something in its place.? If we are op- 
 timistic, we must be content with the faith that the 
 forces now working so mysteriously will lead to a 
 higher industrial state where there will be no strikes.” 
 
 Of strikes and their effects Archbishop Ireland of 
 St. Paul, Minn., one of the most distinguished prel- 
 ates of the Roman Catholic Church, in commenting 
 on labor troubles, said that — “The fatal mistake which 
 has been made in connection with this strike is that 
 property has been destroyed, the liberty of citizens 
 interfered with, human lives endangered, social order 
 menaced, and the institutions and freedom of the 
 country put in most serious jeopardy. The mo- 
 ment such things happen, all possible questions as to 
 the rights and grievances of labor must be dropped 
 out of sight and all efforts of law-abiding citizens and 
 of public officials made to serve in maintaining pub- 
 lic order and guarding at all costs the public weal. 
 Labor must learn that, however sacred its rights be, 
 there is something above them and absolutely su- 
 preme — social order and the laws of public justice. 
 There is no civil crime as hideous and as pregnant 
 of evil results as resistance to law and the constitu- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 91 
 
 tional authorities of the country. This resistance is 
 revolution; it begets chaos; it is anajchy; it disrupts 
 the whole social fabric which insures life and safety to 
 the poor as well as to the rich, to the employee as 
 well as to the employer. 
 
 “There can be no hesitation to bring in the help 
 of the repressive powers of society when property is 
 menaced. Only savages, or men who for the time 
 being are turned into savages, will burn or destroy 
 property, whether it be the factory of the rich man 
 or the poor man’s cottage, a railroad car or a national 
 building. More criminal and more inexcusable yet 
 is the act of murdering human beings or of endan- 
 gering their lives. Labor, too, must learn the les- 
 son that the liberty of the citizen is to be respected. 
 One man has the right to cease from work, but he 
 has no right to drive another man from work. He 
 who respects not the liberty of others shows himself 
 unworthy of his own liberty and incapable of citizen- 
 ship in a free country. Never can riots and mob rule 
 and lawless depredation be tolerated. The country 
 that permits them signs its death warrant.” 
 
 And in the same interview he added; “As to 
 strikes, I repeat the words of a labor leader, T. V. 
 Powderly, ‘they are nearly always failures, and should 
 scarcely ever be resorted to, even when most securely 
 •guarded from wrong doing.’ The workman, even 
 when he apparently gains his purpose, finds on com- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 putation that he has suffered severe financial losses, 
 and has weakened his chances for future employ- 
 ment. Besides, strikes affect the great public of 
 America as well as the employer, and workmen should 
 consider the rights of this public, whose moral sup- 
 port, moreover, the cause of labor sorely needs. 
 
 ‘‘For my own part, I believe the large number of 
 men who join strikes are more to be pitied than 
 blamed. They are led on by irresponsible and tyr- 
 annous chiefs. Labor unions have great value, but 
 one marked evil in them is that they put the liber- 
 ties of tens of thousands in the keeping of one man, 
 or of a few who become their absolute masters, their 
 despotic czars.” 
 
 As for that most insane of crazy acts, the “sym- 
 pathetic strike,” resorted to by leaders more to show 
 their power than to express or win sympathy, 
 Governor Jones, of Alabama, in his official procla- 
 mation declared that — “Railways are but public high- 
 ways, and those who own and those who operate them 
 are trustees to keep them open for the public good. 
 They have become the great arteries of our prosper- 
 ity, are essential to our very existence, and enter 
 into the daily life of the citizen and influence his wel- 
 fare and destiny in innumerable ways. Any class of 
 men who can sit astride of these great highways and 
 arbitrarily determine when they shall be closed to 
 the public becomes the master of the citizen, and 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 93 
 
 the citizen in turn becomes their slave. They can 
 practically dictate what he shall eat and what he 
 shall wear, when he shall not labor, and the reward 
 when it is permitted him to work, and where he may 
 go, and hold his liberties in a vise. No brave or free 
 people have ever permitted any class to exercise such 
 despotism over themselves, their pursuits, and their 
 prosperity, and it is trifling with the peace and happi- 
 ness of the people for any set of men to attempt it.’’ 
 
 Ex-Governor Horace Boies, of Iowa, spoke out 
 loudVhen he asserted that — “The sympathetic strike 
 must go or the unions that engage in it will be des- 
 troyed, and with it must go forever the scenes of riot 
 and carnage that have characterized so many recent 
 strikes, or the organizations responsible for them 
 will be ground into dust under the iron heel of an 
 awakened public sentiment that will never consent to 
 see the laws that are absolutely essential for the pro- 
 tection of life and liberty openly and flagrantly vio- 
 lated, and thereby the existence of our institutions 
 put in jeopardy.” 
 
 Strikes are the great problems of the day. We 
 have given the opinions of eminent people and of 
 recognized exponents of the law-abiding public; but 
 no solution is given of these problems, which are, in 
 effect, tests of the republic’s form of government, 
 and of its ability to meet great forces of its citizens 
 practically arrayed against it in the form of war. 
 
94 
 
 /IMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 This insurrectionary attitude brought from Herbert 
 Spencer this opinion: “My faith in free institutions, 
 originally strong (though always joined with the 
 belief that the maintenance and success of them is 
 a question of popular character), has in these later 
 years been greatly decreased by the conviction that 
 the fit character is not possessed by any people, nor 
 is likely to be possessed for ages to come. A nation 
 of which the legislators vote as they are bid,, and of 
 which the workers surrender their rights of selling 
 their labor as they please, has neither the ideas nor 
 the sentiments needed for the maintenance of liberty. 
 Lacking them, we are on the way back to the rule 
 of the strong hand in the shape of the bureaucratic 
 despotism of a socialistic organization, and then of the 
 military despotism which must follow it; if, indeed, 
 some social crash does not bring this last upon us 
 more quickly.” 
 
 Hut whatever reforms may follow these hostile 
 demonstrations,and whatever harmonious amity may 
 be established between the poor and the rich where- 
 by the lion may safely lie down beside the lamb, there 
 will probably still remain undelivered the American 
 Slave, whose liberty is not in the enactment and en- 
 forcement of laws, but in the exercise oi his own 
 will-power for self-emancipation from hostile con- 
 ditions legally originated and lawfully maintained. 
 
X. 
 
 If an indictment were to be framed against the 
 Church it would be to hold it, not as a principal, but 
 as an accessory to the crime (for it is a crime against 
 humanity if not against the law) of maintaining by 
 example, by doctrine and by prayer, that system of 
 American Slavery which is originated in Debt, fos- 
 tered by politics, and utilized by those tyrants of 
 wealth who, by their abuse of fortune, inflame the 
 passions of workmen and endanger the stability of 
 the Republic. This may lock like a serious accu- 
 sation to bring against a mass of people — millions of 
 them — who, during a few hours of one day in each 
 week conform to their manuals of creeds and are 
 drilled in the tactics of saints for conflicts with sin; 
 but dogmas, no matter how eloquently propounded, 
 fail to supply the stomach with food and the dis- 
 heartened with hope. It is the real, more than the 
 spiritual, which perplexes the ordinary man, be- 
 cause he is constantly contending with the grim, un- 
 mistakable facts of the present, while the hereafter 
 is an insoluble mystery; and in this real life he wants 
 only advice and solace for the actual dangers with 
 
 05 
 
96 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 which his peace of mind and the welfare of his famili- 
 are menaced. 
 
 Can the American Slave, envious of the wealth of 
 others, with his actual liberty imperiled by the ra- 
 pacity of monopolies and the arrogance of corpo- 
 rations, and with his mind always in a condition of 
 apprehension of ambuscades and surprises, can this 
 man appeal to the Church for that tender and in- 
 vigorating consolation which comes from the unsin- 
 ning in deed and the just in purpose? Why, the 
 Church is, in itself, the most eloquent and extraor- 
 dinary example in human history of the pernicious 
 power and degrading effect of enormous wealth in 
 the toils of a still more enormous debt. America 
 bristles, like the “fretful porcupine,” with the cross- 
 tipped domes, spires, steeples, and towers of buildings 
 wherein the pulpit is for the Lord and the mortgagor 
 holds the rest What warning againts Debt is given 
 to Labor by the sanctuaries of Jehovah, temples that 
 should be as unsoiled by lust and lucre as the solemn 
 sky to which they point; edifices upon the lintels of 
 whose doors there should show no grimy finger-marks 
 of the money lender, and whose altar cloths should 
 not be fringed with the colored seals of notary pub- 
 lics? Can the debt-driven slave stand in the grand 
 Tiisles of such buildings and seek, in his misery, for 
 guidance, when the very air about him is pungent with 
 the taint of the trader in amalgamated ducats and 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 ' 97 
 
 doxologies, who schedules in his asSets the Lord’s 
 own, from the gilded tip of the spire down to the 
 tiniest screw in the tabernacle? What succor for the 
 weary can be extracted from such a compendium of 
 unliquidated extravagancies? Shall the man of labor 
 seek the Church for advice, when that very advice 
 must be contrary to its practice? 
 
 The Church in this countryis of tremendous strength 
 and influence. It is made up of over 41 de- 
 nominations. These 41 denominations comprise 
 164,805 organizations whose members amount, in 
 round numbers, to 20,000,000 people. To accommo- 
 date this immense gathering of human beings there 
 have been erected about 149, 193j)uildings, with seats 
 for 43,500,000 persons,or over two sittings for every 
 member. These are, from a religious point of view, 
 very inspiring statistics, showing that, of the entire 
 population of the land, nearly one out of three is a 
 member of some denomination: free thought, free 
 speech, free action and a free devil take care, we in- 
 fer, of the other two thirds. 
 
 But there is a point in this tremendous aggrega- 
 tion of religious elements to which workingmen may 
 advantageously give their attention. If capital is, 
 as is charged, the enemy of labor; if it oppresses 
 the industrial elasses, and if it must be fought until, 
 as radical agitators demand, there shall be an equal- 
 ization if not an extinction of wealth; if these and 
 
98 
 
 AMERICAN SLAyE 
 
 other evils endure to the peril of industry, what shall 
 be said of the Church which, in the United States, is 
 possessed of property to the amount of $68i, 541,085, 
 (over $10 for each man, woman and child, of the 
 country), and which property is exempt, we believe, 
 from taxation in every state in the Union? Have rabid 
 capital-haters taken into account, in their denunci- 
 ation of wealth-acquirers, that the Church is the one 
 great money power that is favored by special legis- 
 lation? That it owns income-producing property 
 that is exempt from the impost of taxes levied upon 
 the hard working citizen; that it carries on vast 
 commercial undertakings based in part upon such 
 exemptions? Do these reformers ever contemplate 
 the financial power of the Church, and realize that 
 it exceeds that of any individual state, and approxi- 
 mates to, if it does not exceed, that of the general 
 government, in property holdings, and in the means 
 employed in its executive and administrative depart- 
 ments? 
 
 We say nothing of its debts, which though 
 enormous, and beyond immediate statistical compu- 
 tation, are in themselves elements of strength and 
 not weakness, compelling all possible leniencies, in 
 direct contrast to the treatment given to ordinary 
 business transactions. Millionaires sink out of sight 
 in the sea of bankruptcy every day, but seldom does 
 the Church suffer such a fate for any of its compo- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 99 
 
 nent parts. It is not difficult, in view of its temporal 
 aggrandizements and its spiritual purposes, to under- 
 stand why the Church is a very disheartening study 
 for the industrial classes. 
 
 But is this great reforming and regenerating force 
 doing its worldly duty by the workmen? In what 
 way are its ameliorating influences exerted for his 
 benefit in the matter of softening the hardships of 
 his position, or in educating him in a knowledge of 
 how to obtain a release from his bondage of debt 
 and to stay released, of a way to counter the diffi- 
 culties of a struggle for life, difficulties that are puz- 
 zling the intellectual forces of the most profound 
 thinkers of the world ? The Church is not consistent 
 in its treatment of mankind. It will spend thousands 
 of dollars to convert a Jew in Jerusalem, to baptize a 
 Hindu child in India, or to hide the nakedness of an 
 African woman with a text-embroidered apron; but 
 in the great cities are hived countless thousands of 
 cheerless, almost hopeless workers, for whom a guid- 
 ance through worldly troubles, a little solace from 
 spiritual sources, a touch of the hand, an inspiriting 
 word from the lips, would come as the manna came 
 from heaven, and work more good for the cause of 
 human salvation than the conversion of an entire 
 continent of heathens. If the Church were practical 
 it would make a business of glorifying the lives, and 
 brightening the homes, and evangelizing the souls of 
 
! 
 
 100 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 the American Slaves. It would employ its millions \ 
 of dollars and the physical and mental strength of 
 the rank and file of its armies of workers, in saving 
 the bodies as well as the souls of the multitudes who 
 cannot rescue themselves. Men want material aid 
 first ; the spiritual will surely follow. Can a starving 
 man appease his hunger by listening to texts and 
 homilies from a well-fed man.? Will faith and an 
 orthodox sermon buy food for the family, or pay back 
 rent, or settle any of the financial obstacles of life.? 
 
 If the workman keeps away from church, it is not 
 so much because he is a cowardly sinner as it is be- 
 cause he has a manly pride in not taking “that back 
 seat” that has become an apothegm of church attend- 
 ance; it is because he wants the roast beef, and not 
 the entrees, of a Sabbath discourse. If Christ were 
 once more preaching on earth, would he feed the multi- 
 tude with theories rather than with facts.? Would 
 his sermons be according to the wisdom of his lis- 
 teners, or would they be keyed up to the under- 
 standing of logicians and philosophers.? Would he 
 talk of the natural, which everybody may compre- 
 hend, or of the supernatural, which the hardest of 
 theological training fails to penetrate.? The A B C’s 
 of life, plain or colored, are the needs of the hour; 
 sophisms about the hereafter teach nothing and ^ 
 prove nothing. I 
 
 It is not a matter of surprise that the Roman Catholic j 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 101 
 
 Church has become, more than any other denomina- 
 tion, the poor man’s friend. It strives to make life 
 worth living, and under its teachings death becomes 
 something more than a terrible penalty for having 
 lived. It preaches hope. Its temples are free to all. 
 The music of its choirs reaches the heart. The voices 
 of its priests ascend to heaven for rich and poor alike. 
 To its solemn pageantries all are welcomed. By its 
 ministrations sin is softened, and sorrow alleviated. 
 Priest and penitent come together in misery as well 
 as gladness. The wicked confess, and their lives 
 are whitened. The poor seek counsel reverently and 
 hopefully, and their appeals are not to deaf ears 
 and dumb lips. There is companionship, and trust, 
 and faithias between the humble souls and the church 
 which ministers to them. In its relation to men and 
 the government Archbishop Ireland has declared 
 that — “The position of the Catholic Church is easily 
 defined. She stands for rights and duties, for labor 
 and for capital so long as both follow duties and the 
 one allows the right of the other. But always and 
 everywhere and above all the civil and social interest 
 or considerations, she stands for public justice and 
 social order. She abhors and forbids all approach 
 to lawlessness and anarchy; she commands obedience 
 to law, and stern loyalty to country and its institu- 
 tions.” 
 
 Why discriminate Let it be considered that ail de- 
 
102 
 
 /IMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 nominations are animated by the same spirit, have the 
 same object in view and cherish the same theories of 
 public welfare. But we ask why the beautiful flow- 
 ers of human nature, as we have it, are not developed 
 to a glorious fruition? Why have such a sedulous cul- 
 tivation of the thistles and nettles of abstract religious 
 polemics? We are writing about Church and Churches 
 as if they were what they ought to be — temples of the 
 Lord. We do not mean a minister’s church — the 
 church of Talmage, or Spurgeon, or Swing. The 
 worldly and the devout have come, in many cases, 
 to classify congregations by the name of the divine 
 who leads them, and who, in many minds, takes pre- 
 cedence of the Christ whose teachings he professes 
 to follow. We refer to the Church as a church for 
 all, where English is spoken, where Orientalism in 
 subject and language has given way to comprehen- 
 sible lessons as to temporal and spiritual duties. 
 Put thoughts for workmen in workmen’s clothes and 
 not in a broadcloth-and-linen vocabulary, and then 
 they will understand much that is now, for them, 
 enigmas. 
 
 Christ preached for the poor rather than the rich. 
 He was understood. To-day the poor are given bal- 
 loon ideas instead of bread-and-meat thoughts. The 
 average churches are capitalistic, because, from an 
 utilitarian point of view, a rich sinner is more valu- 
 able than a needy saint. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES lOS 
 
 The railway workers* strike of 1894 temporarily 
 aroused, if it did not alarm the orators of the pul- 
 pit. If there were slaves on the back seats they - 
 heard the detonations of the toy torpedoes of modern 
 defenders of the faith. Rip Van Winkles of religions 
 woke up all over the country, and discovered that 
 the American workman was not torpid but dangerous- 
 ly alive. One Chicago divine, feeling that a sermon for 
 the poor might not be inappropriate, suggested that — 
 ‘‘The people who feel the hard times most severely are 
 God’s people. They are the workingmen, the men 
 with moderate income and thought for something 
 besides wealth. The wealthy are not, as a rule, 
 God’s people. Faith must be put in the words of 
 the apostle. In hard times the one who feels it most 
 needs not so much gold and silver as comfort and 
 inspiration. No poor man should be turned away 
 without kind words, however little money can be 
 spared, even though he be known to be a rascal and 
 a hypocrite. He should be shown there is an aid be- 
 yond that of finance. ” 
 
 Another minister treated his people to a disser- 
 tation on “hard times.” The American Slave may 
 have been in that congregation. He may have under- 
 stood that— “All good men believe in about the same 
 essentials. But when we come to formulating our 
 creeds, differences arise. These, however, are largely 
 conflicts of forms rather than of principles, of opin- 
 
104 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 ions rather than of convictions, of the letter rather 
 than of the spirit. When our deeds are our creeds 
 and our lives are our liturgies, how well do all good 
 men agree! Orthodox theology is of little value un- 
 less it inspires one to do his orthodox duties. We 
 cannot believe that God loves orthodox theology as 
 he loves orthodox purity, orthodox honesty, orthodox 
 kindness, orthodox manliness. Nor can we think 
 that the divine Being hates the infidelity of men’s 
 philosophies as he hates the infidelity of men’s mean- 
 ness, pride, selfishness and dishonesty. There is no 
 religion that can save a man except the religion that 
 makes him a good man.” 
 
 But what comfort did he derive from a lesson that 
 ended with this sort of consolation: ‘‘There is 
 philosophy as well as Christianity and we must take 
 things as they come. The shortsightedness of be- 
 grudging one’s neighbor is shown in the ignorance of 
 that neighbor’s actual condition. With elegant 
 mansion and large income, apparent happiness and 
 prosperity, are the family skeletons, the endangered 
 wealth, the cancer that is eating away the vitals of 
 domestic happiness, the mortgages which threaten 
 to take away the wealth-laden home. The man 
 whose prosperity is envied by his neighbor may be 
 praying for death as a relief.” 
 
 It would be useless to quote others. The occasion 
 brought out hesitations and hedgings between the 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 105 
 
 teachings of Christ on the side of the poor, and the 
 income of the Church on the side of the rich — be- 
 tween the soul under blue jeans-and the soul under 
 black broadcloth. The minister is more politic than 
 the editors of religious weeklies. The Christian at 
 Work of New York city said that — “Allowing for all 
 misconceptions, the ill-advised conduct, the outrages 
 and indefensible brutalities marking the course of 
 the strikers in this struggle, it cannot be denied that 
 there is a measure of right and justice in their cause. 
 That great wrongs exist in the industrial world, 
 wrongs against the workers that need to be righted, 
 is a truth which must be recognized. That the 
 strikers have resorted to criminal methods to right 
 these wrongs does not alter the fact of their exist- 
 ence. For these crimes they should be punished as 
 other criminals are punished. There can be no jus- 
 tification for the fiendish deeds which are being 
 committed in the name of Labor. But back of all 
 the strife and struggles are the conditions which have 
 produced it; to these the minds of all who desire the 
 peace and prosperity of the country must be turned. 
 Shotguns, prisons, courts of law and boards of arbi- 
 tration will not heal this social disease. We must 
 get at the sources of it, or our industrial fabric will 
 perish.” 
 
 Nearly all agree that, underneath the wrongs done 
 by workmen, there are deeper wrongs done to them 
 
i 
 
 106 AMERICAN SL/iyES 
 
 for which there must be redress. With the law no 
 longer a protector of their condition, and the courts 
 becoming inaccessible through the expense attending 
 upon any appeal for justice, the workman finds himself 
 isolated in matters of personal rights. The time 
 has been, and still is, for the Church to become the 
 guide and champion of the poor in temporal as in 
 spiritual affairs, if humanity is to be equalized on earth 
 as in heaven, and until the Church becomes a more 
 active factor in the regeneration of the flesh and blood 
 of the human race, regardless of creeds, caste and 
 color, and apart from all schemes for soul insurance, 
 then the wonderful teachings of that wonderful 
 Christ teacher, the revolutionizer of human kind, will 
 lose their vitality and their value. With its fabulous 
 wealth, its immeasurable power, and its aggregation 
 of the grandest intellectual forces of the world, it be- 
 longs to the Church to do the heavy work in the 
 emancipation of “all who are weary and heavy laden.” 
 
XL 
 
 Insensibly, surely, and universally labor agitation 
 has produced labor caste. It is the inevitable result 
 of the co-operation of the many labor organizations 
 that there should be developed a pronounced senti- 
 ment as to the degrees of merit or excellence of each 
 different class of industry. Trades do not admit 
 that socially or intellectually, or in occupations of 
 skill, or where scientific attainments are requisite, 
 or where a knowledge of mechanics is imperatively 
 necessary, that all are upon one dead level. La- 
 bor, which has perfected itself only by the hard ex- 
 perience and untiring trials of many years, naturally 
 regards itself as of a higher order than that avo- 
 cation which needs but little judgment, is quickly 
 acquired, and susceptible of immediate replacement. 
 The diamond cutter is rated above the cutter of mar- 
 ble and granite; the goldsmith is on a higher plane 
 than the chain forger; the mason is superior to the 
 hod-carrier, and the machinist must possess more 
 ability than the horse-shoer. Will the typesetter 
 admit that he is of no more importance and value to 
 the world than the teamster, and will the practical 
 electrician range himself in the same grade as the 
 
 107 
 
108 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 gas maker? Yet these necessary and inevitable class 
 divisions of labor are insurpassable barriers to that 
 communism which a certain kind of society reform- 
 ers are scheming to establish in the world of industry. 
 The employees of certain railroads recently made 
 an exhibit of power that, for a brief but chaotic time, 
 suppressed trade, commerce and manufactures. This 
 very caste condition to which we have referred was 
 prominent among the unions. Wise leadership de- 
 veloped class antagonisms and drew dividing lines 
 so broad as to make absolute co-operation impossi- 
 ble. Many classes of railroad employees would not 
 strike. It was not mutiny, but a sagacious refusal 
 to enlist and chance a struggle in which everything 
 might be lost and nothing practical gained. It was 
 not human nature for the workmen with knowledge 
 and skill, the drilled trooper of labor, to submit, 
 voluntarily, to a sacrifice of his interests for the 
 benefit of those whose employment was beneath him, 
 because it was not so valuable to his em- 
 ployer or the country. Yet to a certain extent these 
 very outbreaks brought certain castes into compact 
 order under a flush of enthusiasm as evanescent as the 
 puff of smoke from a cannon. 
 
 Col. Clark E. Carr, in a speech at a regimental 
 reunion, said he saw symptoms of caste in the labor 
 agitation of the day; but, as may be seen, his ap- 
 prehensions were based upon a distinction between 
 labor and capital. He said: 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 109 
 
 “I do not like the idea that there is a distinctive 
 laboring class in this country, as distinguished from 
 other citizens. It tends to permanently set apart 
 one portion of our citizens to the drudgeries of man- 
 ual labor— that is, it establishes caste, I have no 
 patience with the idea that because a man is a me- 
 chanic, a clerk, engineer, conductor, brakeman, or 
 common laborer or farm hand to-day he must per- 
 manently remain in what is known as the laboring 
 class. Marshall Field has been his whole life a la- 
 boring man; so have Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, 
 C, B. Farwell, Joseph Medill, Franklin MacVeagh, 
 and nearly every prominent man in Chicago. C. 
 H. Chappell, A. N, Towne, John D. Besler, and the 
 late James T. Clark were railroad workers. The 
 laborer may be the employer to-morrow. Arbitra- 
 tion recognizes caste, assuming that there is a capi- 
 tal caste and a laboring class, and cannot remedy 
 the evil, I can see no way out of the difficulties 
 save by co-operation.” 
 
 But the establishment of such a grading could not 
 be enduring, for the reason that there would be a 
 constant changing of the component parts, the cease- 
 less and successful rising to a higher social plane, and 
 vigorous contestants taking their places — just such 
 quite revolutions as have been going on for thousands 
 of years, and such as will continue as long as nature 
 and men are what they are. 
 
ito 
 
 AMBRICAh! SLAVES 
 
 I 
 
 There must be an aristocracy in all things; for | 
 birth, mental endowments, physical developments 
 and social and personal surroundings are different for 
 each man, woman and child. If all persons were 
 equal in all things, existence would be stagnation and 
 stagnation a living death. The desire to excel and 
 the ambition to acquire raise men out of the quag- 
 mire of inaction. Mr. Charles E. Banks fears that 
 the recognition of an aristocracy of and in labor is 
 inviting the world to become muscle worshipers. 
 
 He has written: “Let us look first at the trades or 
 callings represented by the present labor agitators. 
 Miners, railroad firemen, switchmen and brakeman 
 form the nucleus of the army, led by their self-ap- 
 pointed General Debs. To these are added unions of 
 every description from teamsters down to bar-tenders. 
 
 In the long published list of organizations which con- 
 template going on a strike for the purpose of starv- 
 ing the remainder of humanity into sympathy with 
 them, there was no labor represented other than 
 muscle labor. No cunning artificer or clever ac- 
 countant, no task in which study, practice, skill, is 
 required was represented in any of the so-called 
 ‘labor unions’ that proclaimed their superior right to 
 set the standard of wages and then enforce idleness 
 for themselves and their fellows while more intelli- 
 gent workers labored to feed them. The plan was 
 evidently this: workers with fine tools on costly sub' 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 111 
 
 stances — workers who were required not only to 
 bring to their tasks trained fingers and clear eyes but 
 educated brains and patience, energy and care, should 
 continue to work and contribute of their earnings to 
 those self-same idlers. 
 
 “Have we come to be a nation of muscle worshipers? 
 Is coal-heaving and wood-sawing the only labor 
 worthy of respect? Must we emulate the action of 
 the steamboat ‘roustabout' rather than that of the 
 weaver of laces or the writer of history? God forbid! 
 The task which requires the least preparation for its 
 execution has always been the poorest paid. The 
 farmer cannot hope to succeed in his calling without 
 systematic training. The merchant must serve a 
 number of years as errand-boy, under'-clerk, book- 
 keeper, buyer and seller of the goods of others be- 
 fore he can hope to successfully open an establish- 
 ment of his own. But against these and similar vo- 
 cations the muscle laborers have the dictum, ‘Sym- 
 pathize with us, contribute or starve.' There might 
 be some show of justice in this if it were proved that 
 the muscle laborer had a monopoly in his field of 
 work. But, on the contrary, the late railroad strike 
 demonstrated the general manager's ability to run an 
 engine, the bookkeeper's willingness and strength to 
 fire it, and the porter's intelligence to handle a switch 
 for its passage. And all these without an hour's 
 preparation. 
 
113 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 “Suppose the men employed in the offices, the pro- 
 fessions and the arts were to sit down, fold their 
 hands, and say to the muscle workers: ‘Get along 
 without us. We are tired of working for your bene- 
 fit. ’ How long would the members of these boasted 
 labor unions exist? Just so long as they could riot 
 on the savings of these more skillful toilers and no 
 longer. It is time labor should be respected for what 
 it accomplishes and not for its name alone. No man 
 has a more enduring sympathy for the toilers of the 
 world than have the writers and thinkers of modern 
 times. But because these men have a clear vision that 
 covers a wide range, because they recognize the right 
 to respect of all labor that is productive, the muscle- 
 worker cries out against the man, turns to applaud 
 the few who utter vicious thoughts, who counsel an- 
 archy and chaos. 
 
 “Let us be fair, O fellow workmen. There are 
 many vineyards and the fruit of each requires differ- 
 ent handling Out of the lower, the heavier, we 
 may advance to the higher, the lighter labor. But 
 strikes will not help to do it. Better wages we all 
 desire, but better wages come only with better work. 
 Coercing by starvation is a false theory and false- 
 hood never yet accomplished good.” 
 
 Mr. Banks is right, theoretically, but all danger 
 of muscle worship exceeding the bounds of sanity 
 might be quickly and easily avoided by organizing 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 113 
 
 unions of brain workers and finger workers. When 
 you begin to classify avocations you lay a foun- 
 dation for caste and sow the seeds of an aristocracy, 
 not of wealth or blood, but of the conquering attri- 
 butes of industry. Aristocracy, as we know it to-day, 
 in fact and fiction, is the tail end of generations 
 which thrived on robbery, rapine, lust, piracy and 
 omnivorous crimes without names. Aristocracy, as it 
 might be, and may be, can emanate from muscle and 
 mind, and in the centuries to come no man, tracing 
 out his genealogy, would have need to blush in dis- 
 covering that his streak of blue blood began its trick- 
 ling in the heart of one who honestly labored with 
 hand or head. The goldsmiths of ancient Troy and 
 mediaeval London, the silver workers of prehistoric 
 India, and the sword-makers of biblical Damascus, 
 have worked their achievements into living events, 
 and we know them as castes of labor so high, and so 
 distinctive, that history has made their trades im- 
 mortal. 
 
 Society is in no danger from these minor divisions 
 of life, which are really only stimulants to perfection. 
 Any attempt to amalgamate castes, any conspiracy 
 to unify diverse social and industrial elements, is 
 sure to be defeated by the hostile selfishness and the 
 belligerent pride of the people who compose such 
 classes. This is the fate that overtakes such aris- 
 tocratical combinations, or in current phrase, such 
 
114 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 “capitalistic syndicates,’^ Labor is just as jealous, 
 just as sensitive, just as powerful as capital; and as 
 capital has its castes and its degrees of worth, so 
 will labor follow natural laws, and rate its clansmen 
 as to their financial and intellectual assets. As 
 capital has its class hates and prejudices, and is con- 
 tinually at war within its lines, or scheming for the 
 ruin or disgrace of its members, labor will do the 
 same; for by what process can it eradicate from hu- 
 man nature those evils of existence implanted by the 
 Creator in man, and the absence of which would make 
 him a god? 
 
 Caste will not help the American Slave; it will 
 hurt him. The more skillful his hands, the more ac- 
 tive his brains, the greater his ambition, the more un- 
 controllable his desire for rising in life, the less care- 
 ful he will become in his means of reaching higher 
 places and the more easily he will, in his needs, fall 
 a prey to the credit caste and that vulture of industry, 
 that scavenger of suffrage scraps, the Politician. 
 
XII. 
 
 The French have always been fine fellows in shout- 
 ing “down” with this, that and the other thing, rang- 
 ing from a placard on a wall to a king’s head on a 
 throne. Unhappily for the personal security of the 
 people threatened, this fateful cry is generally an- 
 swered in the affirmative. In this country the gen- 
 tlemen who are permitted to do the workmen’s talk- 
 ing have been vociferous at public meetings in crying 
 out, “down with the press,” “down with the capital- 
 istic newspapers,” “down with the robber-journals,” 
 and so forth. And they are so earnest about this 
 particular subject for demolition, and there is such 
 uniformity in the outcry, as to awaken a suspicion that 
 the orators have in the matter a personal hate caused, 
 possibly, by newspaper criticisms. At the same time 
 it is the fashion and the fancy of the day for the 
 journalists to write about what they term the “pure 
 press,” and to affirm, in substance, that newspapers 
 exist as barriers between Law and Anarchy, uphold- 
 ing the one and opposing the other, and by their 
 broad diffusion of unbiased information becoming a 
 sort of balance-wheel in governmental affairs. 
 
 115 
 
116 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 Let US consider whether either party is right! How 
 long a time is it since a certain line of newspapers, 
 meaning weeklies as well as dailies, amused their 
 readers with editorials and with cartoons that in- 
 cited the rage or the ridicule, or both, of the wage- 
 earners against employers ? The same papers had 
 no hesitation in pictorially degrading the President, 
 Congress, Supreme Court Judges, anybody and every- 
 thing, in an effort to curry favor w’ith workmen. 
 Going still lower, these papers told the laborers that 
 they were serfs, slaves, valets, vassals, and in all 
 menial conditions possible, to capital and capitalists. 
 The English language was exhausted in finding terms 
 of opprobrium for men who had money, and new 
 catchwords of insult were invented. Cartoons were 
 concocted for men who could not read, and were ser- 
 mons of sedition so far as effects were concerned. 
 In fact, little more could have been done to create 
 hatred between the labor-hirers and the men hired, 
 and to plant the seeds of an insurrection. The papers 
 which did this were not capitalist papers, neither 
 were they pure or unprejudiced; on the contrary, 
 they were mercenary and venal — wantons in journal- 
 ism and the pariahs of society. They helped to lay 
 the groundwork of strikes, boycotts, riots and mur- 
 der, not in a campaign of principle, but as ambus- 
 cades for plunder. The law was made contemptible, 
 and the officers of the law, from President down to 
 
American slaves 
 
 li7 
 
 village constable, become ridiculous and detestable. 
 Was this true journalism? Have such assaults 
 helped the cause of labor? The satire of incendiar- 
 ism, the petition of a bludgeon, the conclusion of dead 
 workmen slaughtered as a result of the logic of cob- 
 ble stones, are certainly not arguments in behalf of 
 industrial reforms. 
 
 But there is caste in journalism as in other profes- 
 sions. There are good, bad and indifferent news- 
 papers. We doubt whether there are pure ones, A 
 “pure press” is, in the nature of things, an impossi- 
 ble press, because in journalism, as in all other kinds 
 of business, selfishness is the dominant power; and 
 where selfishness exists, purity of thought, purpose 
 and action at once become unmixable elements. 
 Sentiments and Sunday school texts have but little 
 influence in business transactions. Newspapers are 
 business enterprises, conducted for certain money- 
 making purposes; and to carry out those purposes, all 
 legitimate, if not exactly creditable, means are em- 
 ployed. They try to impart news and give advice; 
 the first is what is given them, the second is what 
 they give away in the shape of personal opinions. 
 Both may be biased by party affiliations, by personal 
 ignorance, by religious warpings, or by a greed for 
 wealth or power that goes for everything and stops 
 at nothing. 
 
 It is a waste of words for labor agitators to denounce 
 
118 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 the press as being capitalistic. It takes a good deal of 
 money to conduct the cheapest of newspapers, and 
 a large proportion of the journals of this country 
 are owned or managed by ex-workmen, retired wage- 
 earners, men with level heads and long pockets* If 
 their owners are rich the attitude of the paper is 
 naturally capitalistic, that of self-defense, — just as 
 the laborer will fight in defense of the wallet con- 
 taining his weeks’ wages without inquiring of the 
 robber whether he is for or against capital. As a 
 party or political paper deriving power and support 
 from one of the great parties, it must, necessarily, be 
 subservient to and controlled by the creed of that 
 organization, preach its doctrines, whether they are 
 right or wrong, and so secure as a portion of its reward, 
 an agreed upon share of the spoils of victory. 
 Such journals seldom break away from their tethers 
 and act in hostility to the plans outlined by the high 
 officials of their party. As its faction goes, so goes 
 the party newspaper; and as all the parties, hungry 
 for the votes of the laborer, are anti-capitalistic, 
 so ought to be the newspaper organs which help 
 to speak for them. Whether there can be honesty 
 of purpose or sincerity of opinion in this sort of 
 combination is a question which the workman is as 
 well able as anybody else to decide. 
 
 As for the religious press, quote it as a hybrid — 
 part saint and part sinner — but necessarily, with 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 119 
 
 more than enough of the latter to so pepper and 
 salt the former as to give it a palatable flavor. It 
 mixes business with religion, religion with politics, 
 politics with domestic affairs, and domestic affairs 
 with affairs of state, until sane heads grow heavy 
 with the multiplicity of creeds, dogmas, fanatical 
 theories and hyperborean sentiments, all turned out 
 with a stony indifference to the needs of mankind 
 for something enlivening. Primarily the offspring of 
 capital, else they could not exist, they inflate them- 
 selves continually with the dried apples and water of 
 such theories as appear to be most conducive to the 
 success, first of themselves, then of the Church, and, 
 lastly, of the public in general. How can such 
 journalism be what is termed pure, with such eccen- 
 tricities of purpose and such contrarieties of opin- 
 ions and results? Is it consistent to denounce man, 
 on one page, as a sinner, and on another to paint 
 him as a saint, because the editorial end of the con- 
 cern must sermonize and the business end cajole? 
 Still, whatever the attitude of the paper, it must 
 always be remembered that the religious press tries 
 to be a business press; and every hardened man of 
 the world knows that the business man deals in ideas 
 that range from old junk up to jewels. The religious 
 papers have not done their duty by the workman. 
 The railroad boycott brought out from them criti- 
 cisms, comments and advice; but, like the coadjutors 
 
120 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 of the pulpit in the conspiracy times of peace, they 
 ran in their editorial columns ethical disquisitions, 
 and salvation recipes, but mighty little of intellec- 
 tual hard tack for men of muscle. The journalism 
 of the church is not the press by which industry is 
 benefited, sorely as it may need its alliance. » 
 
 As for what is termed the “independent” press, it 
 exists only as an ideal. It cannot exist as a real. 
 Publishers and editors are ordinary mortals so far as 
 resources are concerned and, in matters of business, 
 consider self first and the people afterwards. When- 
 ever they take a stand in political or social affairs, it 
 is taken for money, or power, or both. As a market- 
 able commodity their influence and that of their pa- 
 per is for sale, just as other men sell their time, their 
 goods, or the product of their brains. Editors and 
 publishers are poor, weak mortals and, as the saying 
 runs, they are not getting out newspapers for love 
 or for their health. If, in this taken-for-granted in- 
 dependence, they tell you one thing to-day as being 
 the truth and to-morrow assert as the truth some- 
 thing diametrically opposite, they are not so much 
 liars as they are dealers in expedients permissible 
 in journalism. When, in political matters, they lead 
 you to a precipice of principle, and then, in the 
 dark, abandon you, you will find, if you escape the 
 peril, that your guides are not traitors but philoso- 
 phers. If, when you are absolutely starving for truth, 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 121 
 
 they fill you full of alluvial errors and jingling false- 
 hoods, don’t call them clowns but credit them with 
 being tillers of a too willing soil. In general the “in- 
 dependent” promises everything, gives nothing and 
 does business on the margins. With its butterfly 
 strategies, its starveling ideas rattling against each 
 other like autumn leaves, with a consistency that’s 
 inconsistent in advocating social heresies and politi- 
 cal suicides, this style of newspaper, like the little 
 cricket by the way-side, chirps its valorous notes, and 
 believes the whole world deafened with its noise. 
 
 But there are newspapers which do a world of good. 
 If they are managed by brave, sagacious, fair-minded 
 men, they are almost always to be found advocating 
 reforms to benefit the poor, the wretched, the home- 
 less and the hopeless. They show an indefatigable 
 philanthropy in behalf of great charities and vast 
 public enterprises, and aim to conserve, with jealous 
 care, the interests of the people of commonwealths. 
 In political matters they are, unfortunately, domi- 
 nated by party platforms and are compelled to travel, 
 tender-footed, over roads paved with vexing problems 
 not down in the charts. They are watchful, to a 
 fighting point, of state sovereignty, and generous in 
 the support of the church. Their ideas of Political 
 Economy are as diverse as the specifics of physicians, 
 and their prescriptions for the cure of political evils 
 are equally as uncertain as those of doctors for the 
 
122 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 human body. Day by day they give the public a 
 diagnosis of the world for the previous twenty-four 
 hours, and night by night that world goes to bed 
 with more knowledge of itself than the greatest prophet 
 or wildest statesman has ever dreamed of obtaining. 
 
 The Press is such a composite creation of wit and 
 wisdom, purity and impurity, crankiness and caprices, 
 inconsistency and firmness,enthusiasm and fanaticism, 
 weakness and stability, vigor and vapidity, generosity 
 and meanness, and illumined by such a ceaseless dis- 
 play of the thunder and lightning of a great heaven of 
 intellect, as to be the wonder of the present and a 
 possible puzzle for the future. 
 
XIIL 
 
 It is admitted by the ablest of economic doctors 
 that society is seriously ill. There is an insanity of 
 labor that is believed to be curable; there is a high 
 fever, breaking into delirium, that is dangerous; and 
 there is a condition of melancholia that is the germi- 
 nating bed of crime. We have shown an indifferent 
 public the American Slave as the victim of evils 
 created, fostered and endorsed by the government, 
 by the Church and by society. To free the slave 
 we must eradicate the disease and right the wrongs 
 of the industrial classes. . They have wrongs, and 
 serious ones — wrongs the causes of which are not to 
 be removed by the sophistries of statesmen, the ve- 
 neered philanthropy of congressmen, the bass drum 
 prayers of the Church, or the charity hops of the 
 wealthy. The question before the people is not Why? 
 but How? That question must be answered quickly 
 and effectively. Religion has had its Reformation, 
 and its title deed to Liberty is written in blood. 
 Let us not wait until labor is forced to secure its 
 manumission through a similar prdeal! 
 
 But the best of our noted men are puzzled as to 
 
 123 
 
124 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 what the means shall be. Workmen should under- 
 stand that the formation of or the amalgamation with 
 political parties will increase and not decrease the 
 economic evils of their condition, because the politi- 
 cian has not a grain of philanthropy in his compo- 
 sition and, acting entirely from self-interest, con- 
 siders the wage-working elements as worth only that 
 complaisant attention which will secure their ballot. 
 That ballot once obtained, the confiding voter must 
 wait until the next election for a repetition of the de- 
 ception. 
 
 Avoiding these ambuscades of traitorous friends, 
 the industrial classes may be relieved through 
 less pernicious and dangerous methods than strikes 
 and boycotts, Archbishop Ireland has said that these 
 “strikes read a lesson to capital. Capital must for 
 its own sake, as well as for humanity’s sake,be mindful 
 of its own duties and of the rights and interests of 
 labor. The solution to the differences between capi- 
 tal and labor is necessarily complex, and no one pre- 
 cise form has been or can be found. A generous 
 sense of justice toward all, a deep love of one’s fel- 
 lows, and attentive listenings to the teachings of 
 Christ will lead on all sides to a better understanding 
 and to happier mutual relations. Certain it is that, so 
 far as possible, the laborer should not lack the means 
 of decent support for himself and his family; he 
 should not be overburdened either in weight or time 
 
AMERICAN SLAI'ES 
 
 125 
 
 of labor; he should be treated as a rational and a 
 moral being, with all respect due his human dignity. 
 His remuneration, if diminishing in periods of de- 
 pression, should increase in periods of business pros- 
 perity. Industries which allow some profit-sharing, 
 which secures the laborer from want in sickness and 
 old age, gain strength to themselves, while com- 
 forting the workingman. And as to some means of 
 prevention of strikes and dangerous disputes between 
 capital and labor, nothing better so far has been sug- 
 gested than arbitration, within all the lines of wis- 
 dom and justice that national legislation can throw 
 around it. Arbitration will have at least moral con- 
 clusions against which neither capital nor labor could 
 well stand out.” 
 
 The noted Chauncey M. Depew, the great railway 
 sovereign, the all-around orator of banquets, the pub- 
 lic man with more gumption than nine out of ten of 
 his kind, insists that in “avoiding strikes and keeping 
 the men in a good frame of mind something more than 
 money is necessary. You must realize that the 
 workingman is a man and that he wants to be treated 
 like a man. In other words, he wants to be treated 
 precisely as you yourself enjoy being treated. If you 
 are in the employ of any man — even in the highest 
 position in his establishment, be it factory or shop — 
 and if the man shows an indifference to your person- 
 ality, you dislike him, and some day you’re going to 
 
126 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 get even, aren’t you? The fire is smoldering. And 
 for each time he grumbles when you are absent a 
 day to go to a funeral, or are late from the bedside 
 of a dying member of the family, or are ill yourself, 
 you’re laying up a grudge that will be repaid in his 
 own coin with interest. Therefore, I say that men 
 who are in the employ of others ask for more than 
 money. More money will not satisfy them — except 
 temporarily. They will take it, but they secretly chafe. 
 When there is a grievance, if they have been paid in 
 money alone, they will be ready to join in with the 
 grieved spirits. Men who treat their employees thus 
 are the men who can never lower their wages a dol- 
 lar nor a cent. Woe be to them if they try to ^come 
 down’ upon the only coin in which the men are paid. 
 But if they have treated their men like men — ^even 
 like gentlemen — they can do a great deal with them. 
 Try this, and see for yourself.” 
 
 Ex-Senator J. R. Doolittle, a noted judge, jurist 
 and statesman, a man who by reason of his profes- 
 sion is expected to profoundly study great public 
 questions from all points, suggested in an open letter 
 to Mr. Gompers, President of the American Feder- 
 ation of Labor, a number of reforms as to industrial 
 troubles, one of them being that- — “a law should be 
 enacted by each State in this Union that in all dis- 
 putes between State corporations and their employees 
 on the subject of lockouts, strikes, and the rate of 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 127 
 
 wages, if the employees, or a majority in any branch 
 thereof, shall be desirous and willing to submit the 
 matter to the decision of coihpetent arbitrators and 
 the corporation shall refuse, then they may apply to 
 the Circuit Court having jurisdiction for the appoint- 
 ment of three impartial and competent persons. If 
 the parties are unable to agree upon them, each shall 
 name one, and the court shall name the third, and 
 their award shall be final and binding for such-period 
 as may be fixed by law.” 
 
 Justice Brewer of the United States Supreme Court 
 is reported as saying in commenting on the connection 
 of trade unions with the railway strike: “Some peo- 
 ple think that it will annihilate them, but I believe that 
 it will, in the end, make labor organizations stronger. 
 They will see the necessity of placing at their head 
 strong, cool, and clear-headed men, like Arthur of the 
 locomotive engineers, and discarding enthusiasts 
 of the Debs order. With such men at their head 
 they will be much more powerful, and great trouble 
 will be avoided.” 
 
 The remedy of profit-sharing, as urged by labor 
 arbitrators, brought out from the Chicago Tribune 
 the following among other objections: “The labor 
 leaders are careful not to explain to the members of 
 the unions that the chances of increased employ- 
 ment being given in shops and factories depend upon 
 the “bosses” having made profits and invested them 
 
128 
 
 AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 in the business, or hoping to make profits had bor- 
 rowed and put in new capital; but these facts are 
 highly important for workmen to know. Every 
 additional $i,ooo of capital on the general average, 
 taking all lines of industrial business together, will 
 furnish employment to one additional workman, and 
 his earnings spent for the supply of his and his 
 family’s wants, will give employment to many kinds 
 of other labor, equal in its functions to the employ- 
 ment of another man. These simple facts in political 
 economy are never told to the workman in the labor 
 lodges by their walking delegates and other salaried 
 agitators.” 
 
 A Southern paper, the News, of Galveston, Texas, 
 denounces all attempts to force compulsory arbitration 
 upon the country, saying it is “foolishness, and the 
 most dangerous kind of foolishness at that. Every 
 laboring man who values his own freedom should 
 hold on to the right of contract in spite of the efforts 
 of his enemies or of his friends to deprive him of it. 
 Without this right he is a slave to some personal 
 or impersonal master, with nothing that he can call 
 his own — neither his time, his labor, nor the form, 
 the application, and the usufruct of it.” 
 
 The doctors disagree, and it is certain that the 
 patient cannot swallow all their prescriptions. The 
 general government, with a good many whereases,has 
 appointed a commission to inquire into the cause of 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 129 
 
 the railway troubles of 1894. That commission has 
 invited railways, labor organizations, and citizens 
 having either a personal or patriotic interest in the 
 right solution of those questions; and those who can 
 not conveniently attend such public hearings, 
 are requested to present their views and sugges- 
 tions in writing to the commission at any time 
 prior to the date of such public hearing. This is 
 certainly very kind and very considerate on the part 
 of the President and Congress; but the probabilities 
 are that by the time this commission is ready to re- 
 port, men now young will be old; and by the time 
 the government is prepared to adopt efficient meas- 
 ures of reform, the millennium or a revolution may 
 have rendered them unnecessary. 
 
 If some of the imperturbable philoso phers of old 
 Greece or Rome were alive, and were revolving in 
 their minds the woes of their fellow men, a practice 
 which gave them more wisdom than was usable, they 
 might pick up the national platform of the Democratic 
 party and read the acccusation that the Republican 
 party, while professing a policy of reserving the pub- 
 lic land for small holdings by actual settlers, has 
 given away the people’s heritage, till now a few 
 railroads and non-resident aliens, individual and cor- 
 porate, possess a larger area than that of all our 
 farms between the two seas. The last Democratic 
 administration reversed the improvident and unwise 
 
130 
 
 AMERICAN SLAyES 
 
 policy of the Republican party touching the public 
 domain, and reclaimed from corporations and syn- 
 dicates, alien and domestic, and restored to the peo- 
 ple, nearly one hundred million acres of valuable 
 land. They would not be surprised by either the 
 donation or the reclamation, for these men were sur- 
 prised at nothing. If they sought the census returns 
 — a very likely action — they would discover that the 
 general government had 567, 586, 783 acres of vacant 
 land — land to be had for a song. They might then 
 gravely stroke their beards and wag their heads and 
 wonder why a republican government, with armies of 
 unemployed men, did not arrange with those men, 
 upon reasonable terms and in a fatherly way, to oc- 
 cupy, improve and reclaim from savage nature this 
 vast acreage. They might regard with alarm a con- 
 dition of society that allowed great cities to be filled 
 up with a reckless, improvident class of people, who 
 were a constant menace to law and order, while the 
 great west was burdened with untilled lands which 
 these people should be made to cultivate either by 
 force or reward, and so relieve the pressure from in- 
 dustry, distribute the fomenting masses of disorderly 
 elements and civilize and utilize them by the influ- 
 ence of nature. 
 
 To the American Slaves these philosophers perti- 
 nently might render this advice: 
 
 “Think for yourselves. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 131 
 
 “Act for yourselves. 
 
 “Trust only yourselves. 
 
 “Keep out of debt. 
 
 “Spend less than you earn. 
 
 “Consider life as a difficult lesson to be learned and 
 arrange to take your vacation in the life to come.” 
 
XIV. 
 
 In the early years of this government lived a gen- 
 tleman named Franklin — Benjamin Franklin. He 
 assisted at the birth of the republic, helped nurse it 
 through all those , infantile miseries that attend 
 the childhood of such a kind of government, and was, 
 besides, a workman and a philosopher. As a type 
 of the last two he left many words of wisdom which 
 succeeding generations either have not known, or 
 have forgotten, or choose to disregard on the plea 
 that his ideas are, according to present social condi- 
 tions, the opinions of an old fogy. A little tract which 
 he wrote and to which he gave the title of “The Way 
 to Wealth,” is so meaty with pertinent truths as to 
 justify its reproduction for the benefit of men of all 
 trades and occupations of the present time. 
 
 The preface to the original London edition of 
 sixty years ago had this explanatory introduction: 
 
 “Dr. Franklin, wishing to collect into one place 
 all the sayings upon the following subjects which he 
 had dropped in the course of publishing the Alma- 
 nac called ‘Poor Richard,’ introduces Father Abra- 
 ham for this purpose. Hence it is that Poor Richard 
 is so often quoted, and that in the present title he is 
 
 133 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 133 
 
 said to be improved. Notwithstanding the stroke of 
 humor in the concluding paragraph of this address, 
 Poor Richard Saunders and Father Abraham have 
 proved, in America, that they are no common 
 preachers.” 
 
 This little document, so wise in its sayings, and 
 with those sayings more valuable to the present work- 
 ing people of the world than anything that the great 
 Solomon uttered, begins in this way: 
 
 “Courteous Reader: — 
 
 “I have heard that nothing gives an author so great 
 pleasure, as to find his works respectfully quoted by 
 others. Judge, then, how much I must have been 
 gratified by an incident I am going to relate to you. 
 I stopped my horse, lately, where a number^ of peo- 
 ple were collected at an auction of merchants’ goods. 
 The hour of the sale not being come, they were con- 
 versing on the badness of the times; and one of the 
 company called to a plain, clean old man, with white 
 locks: 
 
 “‘Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the 
 times.? Will not these heavy taxes quite ruin the 
 country.? How shall we ever be able to pay them.? 
 What would you advise us to do.?’ 
 
 “Father Abraham stood up and replied: 
 
 “‘If you would have my advice, I will give it you 
 in short, for “a word to the wise is enough,” as Poor 
 Richard says.’ 
 
134 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 “They joined in desiring him to speak his mind, 
 and, gathering around him, he proceeded as follows: 
 
 “‘Friends,’ said he, ‘the taxes are indeed very 
 heavy, and if those laid on by the government were 
 the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily 
 discharge them; but we have many others, and much 
 more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice 
 as much by our idleness, three times as much by our 
 pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from 
 these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver 
 us, by allowing an abatement. However, let us 
 harken to good advice, and something may be done 
 for us. “God helps them that help themselves,” as 
 Poor Richard says. 
 
 “‘It. would be thought a hard government that 
 should tax its people one tenth part of their time to 
 be employed in its service; but idleness taxes many 
 of us much more. Sloth, by bringing on disease, 
 absolutely shortens life. “Sloth, like rust, consumes 
 faster than labor wears; while the used key is al- 
 ways bright,” as Poor Richard says. “But dost thou 
 love life? then do not squander time, for that is the 
 stuff life is made of,” as Poor Richard says. How 
 much more than is necessary do we spend in sleep! 
 forgetting that “the sleeping fox catches no poultry, 
 and that there will be sleeping enough in the grave,” 
 as Poor Richard says. 
 
 “‘If time be of all things the most precious, wast- 
 
AMERICAtJ SLAVES 
 
 135 
 
 ing time must be, as Poor Richard says, “the great- 
 est prodigality !” since as he elsewhere tells us, “lost 
 time is never found again; and what we call time 
 enough, always proves little enough.” Let us, then, 
 up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so, by 
 diligence, shall we do more with less perplexity. 
 
 “‘Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all 
 easy ; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and 
 shall scarce overtake his business at night; while 
 laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon over- 
 takes him. Drive thy business, let not that drive 
 thee, and “early to bed and early to rise makes a 
 man healthy, wealthy and wise,” as Poor Richard 
 says. 
 
 ‘“So what signify wishing and hoping for better 
 times? We may make these times better, if we be- 
 stir ourselves. Industry need not wish, and he that 
 lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains 
 without pains; then, help hands, for I have no lands, 
 or, if I have, they are smartly taxed. 
 
 “‘He that hath a trade, hath an estate; and he 
 that hath a calling, hath an office of profit and honor,” 
 as Poor Richard says. But then the trade must be 
 worked at, and the calling well followed, or neither 
 the estate nor the office will enable us to pay our 
 taxes. If we are industrious we shall never starve ; for, 
 at the working man’s house hunger looks in, but 
 does not enter. Nor will the bailiff or constable 
 
136 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 enter; for industry pays debts, while despair in- 
 creases them. 
 
 “‘What though you have found no treasure, nor 
 has any rich relative left you a legacy; diligence is 
 the mother of good luck, and God gives all things 
 to industry. Then plow deep, while sluggards sleep, 
 and you shall have corn to sell and to keep. Work 
 while it is called, ‘to-day,’ for you know not how 
 much you may be hindered to-morrow. “One to- 
 day is worth two to-morrows,” as Poor Richard says; 
 and further, “Never leave that till to-morrow which 
 you can do to-day.” 
 
 (i)‘“Ifyou were a servant, would you not be ashamed 
 that a good master should catch you idle .? Are you, 
 then, your own master.? Be ashamed to catch your- 
 self idle, when there is so much to be done for your- 
 self, your family, your country, and benevolent move- 
 ments. Handle your tools without mittens; remem- 
 ber that “the cat in gloves catches no mice,” as 
 Poor Richard says. It is true, there is much to be 
 done; and, perhaps, you are weak handed; but stick 
 to it steadily, and you will see great effects; for 
 constant dropping wears away stone; and by diligence 
 and patience the mouse ate into the cable; and little 
 strokes fell great oaks. 
 
 “‘Methinks I hear some of you say: “Must a man 
 afford himself no leisure?” I will tell thee, my friend, 
 what Poor Richard says: “Employ thy time well, if 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 m 
 
 thou meanest to gain leisure ; and since thou art 
 not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour.” 
 Leisure is time for doing something useful; this 
 leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man 
 never; for a life of leisure and a life of laziness are 
 two things. Many, without labor, would live by 
 their wits only; but they break for want of stock; 
 whereas, industry gives comfort, and plenty, and 
 respect. Fly pleasures, and they will follow you. 
 The diligent spinner has a large shift; and, now I 
 have a sheep and a cow, everybody bids me good- 
 morrow. 
 
 (2)“ ‘But with our industry we must likewise be 
 steady, settled and careful, and oversee our own affairs 
 with our own eyes, and not trust too much to 
 others; for as Poor Richard says: 
 
 “I never saw an oft removed tree, 
 
 Nor yet an oft removed family, 
 
 That throve so well as those that settled be.” 
 
 ‘“And again, “Three moves are as bad as a fire;” 
 and again, “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep 
 thee;” and again, “If you would have your business 
 done, go; if not, send.” And again: 
 
 “He that by the plow would thrive, 
 
 Himself must either hold or drive.” 
 
 “‘And again, “The eye of the master will do more 
 work than both his hands;” and again, “Want of 
 care does us more damage than want of knowledge;” 
 
138 
 
 AMERICA}^ SLAyE^ 
 
 and again, “Not to oversee workmen, is to leave 
 them your purse open.” 
 
 ‘“Trusting too much to others’ care is the ruin of 
 many; for, in the affairs of this world, men are saved 
 not by faith, but by the want of it. But a man’s 
 own care is profitable; for, if you would have a faith- 
 ful servant, and one that you like, serve yourself. 
 A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want 
 of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the 
 horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider 
 was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy — 
 all for want of a little care about a horse’s shoe nail. 
 
 (3)“ ‘So much for industry, my friends, and atten- 
 tion to one’s own business; but to these we must add 
 frugality, if we would make our industry more certainly 
 successful. A man may, if he knows not how to 
 save as he gets, keep his nose all his life to the grind- 
 stone, and die not worth a groat at last. A fat 
 kitchen makes a lean will; and — 
 
 Many estates are spent in getting, 
 
 Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting, 
 
 And men for punch forsook hewing and splitting. 
 
 “‘If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well 
 as of getting. The Indies have not made Spain rich, 
 because her outgoes are greater than her incomes. 
 Away, then, with your expensive follies, and you 
 will not then have so much cause to complain of 
 hard times, heavy taxes and chargeable families; for 
 
 Woman and wine, game and deceit 
 Make the wealth small, and the want great. 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 139 
 
 ‘“And further, what maintains one vice would bring 
 up two children. You may think, perhaps, that a lit- 
 tle tea, or a little punch now and then, diet a little 
 more costly, clothes a little finer, and a little enter- 
 tainment now and then, can be no great matter; but 
 remember, many a little makes a mickle. 
 
 “‘Beware of little expenses! “A small leak will 
 sink a big ship,” as Poor Richard says; and again, 
 “Who dainties love, shall beggars prove;” and more- 
 over, “Fools make feasts, and wise men eat them.” 
 Remember what Poor Richard says: “Buy what 
 thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell 
 thy necessaries.” And again, “It is foolish to lay 
 out money in the purchase of a repentance;” many 
 a one, for the sake of finery on the back, has gone 
 with a hungry belly and half starved his family. 
 “Silks and satins, scarlet and velvets, put out the 
 kitchen fire,” as Poor Richard says. These are not 
 the necessaries of life; they can scarcely be called 
 the convenience's; and yet, only because they look 
 pretty, how many want to have them! By these and 
 other extravagances, the genteel are reduced to 
 poverty, and forced to borrow of those whom they 
 formerly despised, but who, through industry and 
 frugality, have maintained their standing; in which 
 case it appears plainly that “a plowman on his legs 
 is higher than a gentleman on his knees,” as Poor 
 Richard says. “Always taking out of the meal-tub. 
 
140 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 and never putting in, soon comes to the bottom,” 
 as Poor Richard says; and then, when the well is 
 dry, they know the worth of water. 
 
 “‘If you would know the value of money, go and 
 try to borrow some; for “he that goes a borrowing, 
 goes a sorrowing,” as Poor Richard says; and, indeed, 
 so does he that lends to such people, when he goes 
 to get it again. Poor Dick further advises, and says: 
 
 Fond pride of dress is sure a very curse: 
 
 Ere fancy you consult, consult your purse. 
 
 ‘“And again, “Pride is as loud a beggar as Want, 
 and a great deal more saucy.” When you have 
 bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that 
 your appearance may be all of a piece; but Poor Dick 
 says, “It is easier to suppress the first desire, than to 
 satisfy all that follow it.” And it is as truly folly for 
 the poor to ape the rich, as for the frog to swell, in 
 order to equal the ox. It is, however, a folly soon 
 punished; for, as Poor Richard says, “Pride that dines 
 on Vanity sups on Contempt. Pride breakfasted with 
 Plenty, dined with Poverty, and supped with Infamy. 
 
 “ ‘After all, what use is this pride of appearance, for 
 which so much is risked, so much is suffered? It 
 cannot promote health, nor ease pain; it makes no 
 increase of merit in the person, it creates envy, it 
 hastens misfortune. But what madness it must be 
 to run in debt for these superfluities! We are offered 
 by the terms of this sale, six months credit, and that, 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 141 
 
 perhaps, has induced some of us to attend it, be- 
 cause we cannot spare the ready money, and hope 
 now to be fine without it. But, ah! think what 
 you do when you run in debt. You give to another 
 power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the 
 time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you 
 will be in fear when you speak to him; you will 
 make poor, pitiful, sneaking excuses; and by de- 
 grees come to lose your veracity, and sink into base 
 downright lying; for “the second vice is lying, the 
 first is running in debt,” as Poor Richard says. Ly- 
 ing rides upon debt’s back; whereas a free-born man 
 ought not to be ashamed or afraid to see or speak to 
 any man living. But poverty often deprives a man 
 of all spirit and virtue. It is hard for an empty bag 
 to stand upright. What would you think of that 
 prince, or of that government, who should issue 
 an edict forbidding you to dress like a gentleman or 
 gentlewoman, on pain of imprisonment or servitude? 
 Would you not say you are free, have a right to 
 dress as you please, and that such an edict would 
 be a breach of your privileges, and such a govern- 
 ment tyrannical? And yet you are about to put your- 
 self under that tyranny, when you run in debt for 
 such dress. Your creditor has authority, at his 
 pleasure, to deprive you of y our liberty, by confining 
 you in jail for life, or by selling you for a servant, if 
 you should not be able to pay him. When you have 
 
142 
 
 yiMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of 
 payment; but, as Poor Richard says, “creditors 
 have better memories than debtors; creditors are 
 a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and 
 times. ” The day comes around before you are aware, 
 and the demand is made before you are prepared to 
 satisfy it; or if you bear your debt in mind, the 
 term, which at first seems so long, will, as it lessens, 
 appear extremely short. Time will seem to have 
 added wings to his hands as well as his shoulders. 
 
 Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever, 
 while you live, expense is constant and certain, and 
 “it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one 
 in fuel,” as Poor Richard says. So rather go to bed 
 supperless than rise in debt. 
 
 Get what you can, and what you get hold; 
 
 ’Tis the stone that will turn all your lead into gold. 
 
 “ 'This doctrine, my friends, is reason and wisdom; 
 but, after all, do not depend too much upon your own 
 industry, and frugality, and prudence, though ex- 
 cellent things; for they may all be blasted without 
 the blessing of heaven; and, therefore, ask that 
 blessing humbly, and be not uncharitable to those 
 that at present seem to want it, but comfort and 
 help them. Remember, Job suffered, and was after- 
 wards prosperous. 
 
 “ ‘And now, to conclude — “Experience keeps a dear 
 school, but fools will learn in no other,” as Poor 
 
yIMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 143 
 
 Richard says, “and scarce in that, for it is true we 
 may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.” How- 
 ever, remember this — “They that will not be coun- 
 seled cannot be helped;” and, further, “If you will 
 not hear Reason, she will surely rap your knuckles,” 
 as Poor Richard says. ’ ” 
 
 “Thus the old gentleman ended his harangue. The 
 people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and im- 
 mediately practiced the contrary, just as if it had 
 been a common sermon; for the auction opened, and 
 they began to buy extravagantly.” 
 
 Times have not changed greatly since this philoso- 
 pher put into their settings these jewels of thought. 
 People have quoted Poor Richard’s wise sayings for 
 over half a century, and admitted their truthfulness 
 without knowing their author; but like the crowd 
 at the auction, they have acted to the contrary. 
 From them we find that the American Slave is not a 
 creature of the industrial conditions of the present 
 day; nor has his estate in society been unfavorably 
 affected by improvements in machinery and labor- 
 saving and labor-creating inventions imperatively 
 demanded by a rapid increase in population and the 
 necessities arising from the wants of the people. But 
 the workman’s extravagances have more than kept 
 pace with the increase in cheapened luxuries, until 
 he has come to indulge in the use of articles which 
 only the wealthy should afford, and to obtain which 
 
144 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 he does not sacrifice his needs, but simply runs in 
 debt either for the necessaries or the luxuries. 
 
 We have added these maxims not simply because 
 they are absolute and practical truths, but because 
 they ought to be embodied in those daily lessons of 
 industrial life which every workman is compelled to 
 study, and for the bitterness of whose tasks these 
 pellets of wisdom may afford either relief or cure. 
 
XV. 
 
 Viewing, as dispassionately as average human 
 nature will permit, the wide-spread and seditious 
 industrial convulsions of the last twenty years, and 
 especially the almost instantaneous strikes of 1894 
 with their political effects, there are furnished suffi- 
 cient truths to justify the prophecy that the republic 
 of the United States is in the incipient stages of 
 dissolution. The disclosures of these happily 
 suppressed rebellions show that the entire construc- 
 tion of the government now rests upon the cones of 
 labor volcanoes. It has been thus revealed that this 
 great federation of mighty states is so underrun by 
 the fires of political, and, as a necessary sequence, of 
 labor conspiracies, and that such unreconcilable sec- 
 tional antagonisms are being developed by unfair 
 legislation, as to justify the assertion that unless 
 there happens a miracle in statesmanship, or a radi- 
 cal revolution of public sentiment and action on 
 economic questions, there will not be, in fifty years, 
 such a government as the Republic of the. United 
 States, 
 
 Revolutions are crimes begotten by crimes. They 
 145 
 
146 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 are the desperate measures of desperate men. They 
 may be lawful in inception and criminal in results; 
 or criminal in birth and philanthropic in effects. It 
 was treason that gave us liberty. History is fruitful 
 with examples as to how often liberty has been mur- 
 dered by treason. Governor McKinley, of Ohio, in 
 a Fourth of July address, began it by the assertion 
 that “we are the freest government on the face of 
 the earth,” and concluded by the announcement, not 
 exactly the coloring expected in a picture of freedom, 
 that — “with industrial armies marching on Wash- 
 ington, and the military of both the States and the 
 United States marching on organized labor; with 
 a coal miners’ strike that cost the country millions of 
 dollars just ended, and a railroad strike that will cost 
 no one yet knows how many millions more, now in 
 progress; with tens of thousands toiling for less than 
 enough to secure the necessary comforts of life, and 
 other tens of thousands in idleness; with unrest and 
 sullen dissatisfaction almost universal, we have a con- 
 dition, not a theory, confronting us, that invites and 
 demands immediate and serious attention.” Do such 
 ominous signs — not in the skies, but on land, tangible 
 signs of insurrection — portend the stability of “the 
 freest government.?” 
 
 The signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
 and the Continental Congress which backed that 
 document, wrote and acted for comparatively few 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 147 
 
 people. Those people made up a nation of slave 
 holders — a nation of white men owning black men 
 as chattels. The Declaration was conceived, endorsed 
 and executed by slaveholders. Until Lincoln’s, eman- 
 cipation proclamation the United States was a para- 
 doxical republic of liberty and slavery. Since the 
 primal statesmen of this land gave us a constitution, 
 one hundred and seven years ago, the conditions of 
 territory, people, thoughts, actions, manners of life, 
 surroundings and governmental contingencies have 
 been wonderfully changed. The people of 1787 were 
 no more like the people of i894than the Puritan of that' 
 day was like the Protestant of to-day. No other 
 revolution ever wrought, in so brief a time, such 
 astounding changes in places, ideas, and customs. It 
 is not, then, a matter of surprise that the constitution 
 which admirably met the wants of the thirteen origi- 
 nal states is a noticeable misfit for the forty-four grand 
 commonwealths of to-day. We are working with 
 the legislative tools of a century ago. We are strug- 
 gling to administer the affairs of a huge empire with the 
 rules and by-laws and penalties originated for the 
 control of a small family of sparsely settled states. 
 From a little community of emaciated rebels we have 
 become a nation of vast resources, of tremendous 
 power, of irresistible people. But, contemplating the 
 present, have we, as federated states, reached the 
 culminating point as to unity, prosperity and amity? 
 
148 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 There have been other commonwealths, other re- 
 publics, other self-governing peoples. History is for- 
 gotten in the rush of every-day life, and national 
 obliteration is recalled principally by history and 
 ruins. These dead governments have tumbled down 
 in times of peace, been shattered by war, or suffered 
 dissolution by political suicide. Our great civil war 
 demonstrated the elemental weakness of the fabric 
 known as the United States. Of the disintegrating 
 forces of that perilous period only one was eliminated 
 — the BlackSlave. But other evils have been growing, 
 with rank luxuriance, and breeding the parasites of 
 such a license of thought, speech and action as to 
 make treason as familiar as the sun by day and the 
 stars by night. In other countries our systems of 
 debt, politics and finance are the subject of more 
 than desultory study; and the stability of the govern- 
 ment is still doubted by the profounder thinkers of 
 the day, who base their conclusions, in part, on the 
 loose administration of the laws, and the indiffer- 
 ence of the people to, if not their defiance of, such 
 laws. As for the laws themselves, sinister legislation 
 secures such flexibility in their construction that the 
 people for whose protection they were enacted are 
 too often made to suffer the penalty intended for the 
 criminal who breaks them. When youngsters sit in 
 judgment on the bench, and veterans, before them, 
 manipulate the laws to suit themselves, taking ad- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 149 
 
 Vantage of ignorance and inexperience as Hindu jug- 
 glers do their tricks, law naturally loses its solemnity 
 and respectability, and the people their hope of jus- 
 tice. Or, going higher, what should a foreigner, let 
 alone a native, think of a federal court that would 
 permit the utterance, during the consideration of a 
 contempt case growing out of the railway strike, of 
 the sentiment that the railroad workers had a right 
 to combine and resist, and that their resistance would 
 “raise the original question — original always in this 
 republic — whether the people are sovereign, or 
 whether they have delegated all their sovereignty 
 to representatives who may sleep upon their trust; 
 whether when the representatives sleep upon their 
 trust, be it court or be it legislature, the inherent 
 sovereignty for redress is not remitted by them 
 back to the sovereign citizen to protest against the 
 usurpation of tyranny by the combination and conspir- 
 acy of wicked men and wicked managers?” 
 
 Little things like these do not puzzle the old world 
 students, though they may be surprised at the judi- 
 cial inanition which characterizes their reception. 
 
 The public events of each hour, day, week, month 
 and year compel us to contemplate, with feelings of 
 shame, congressional bodies^criminally negligent of 
 their sacred duties to the people whom they are 
 expected to represent, whose members are involved 
 in the schemes of syndicates and trusts, and bar- 
 
150 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 nacled with small dishonors when big ones are 
 scarce. Is it not true that legislatures meet, and 
 corrupt themselves, or spoil the honor of their state 
 by enactments for personal or corporate greed, rather 
 than by laws for the public welfare? 
 
 Judges on the bench now and then sully their er- 
 mine with official decrees and unofficial opinions in 
 favor of monopolies and against the people — judges 
 who obtained their preferment to place by tricks of 
 suffrage that were the culmination of dishonest or 
 tricky partisanship. 
 
 States which should be untiringly and forever jeal- 
 ous of the vital rights of the majority, have passed 
 into the possession of the politicians; and from being 
 known as the ‘^mothers of presidents’^ and guardians 
 of the people, have sunk so low as to be little better 
 than ‘‘fences” for the stolen goods of political vic- 
 tories. 
 
 The Church is no longer the sanctuary of the poor, 
 the persecuted and the erring, in whose temples the 
 weary spirit may be at rest for a while, and the 
 wickedness of life be buried in the strains of the 
 organ, or borne heavenwards on the prayers of hon- 
 est priests. Rather is it the caterer to the whims 
 of people dyspeptic with doctrines for the rich only; 
 or, as a resort for invalid souls whose faith circu- 
 lation is feeble and stimulated by sugar-coated doc- 
 trines; or it is the trysting place of grotesque idol- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 151 
 
 atries in fashion; or the waiting-place of worldly 
 envies; or the treasure-house of all the isms and 
 schisms to which religion is being continually sub- 
 jected. 
 
 With Congress recreant to its solemn trusts, a Judi- 
 ciary based upon corrupt suffrage, a State indifferent 
 to the wants of its children, and a Church oblivious 
 to the teachings of the Great Master who created it, 
 what ‘shall be said of the people for whom these ener- 
 gies were originated, and by whom they are permitted 
 to exist? Feel the public pulse and test the people’s 
 tongue and temperature! What is the diagnosis? 
 
 Deep seated disorder. Rebellion, Revolution, An- 
 archy. 
 
 We find the monopolist arrayed against the work- 
 man, and the workman against the capitalist. We 
 have syndicates of wealth on one side; on the other 
 syndicates of labor, monopolies of organized politi- 
 cal elements, weak as individuals but irresistible 
 should they be sagaciously mobilized. A dangerous 
 recklessness has already developed marked symp- 
 toms. Capital and its people have been assaulted on 
 public highways and their property burned or pillaged. 
 The ligatures of commerce have been cut, and its 
 ramified systems of traffic paralyzed by mob vio- 
 lence. Millions of dollars will not make good the 
 value of the property lost and the time wasted. 
 Nothing human can restore to life those who perished 
 in opposing the law. 
 
152 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 But Labor, poorly generaled and with undrilled 
 ranks, has won a victory, though a meager one, for 
 it has made itself heard. Its claimed wrongs have 
 been driven, like thunderbolts, into men’s faces, and 
 fallen, like bombs, into an obnoxious Congress. No 
 matter if they did summon an army and were beaten. 
 The mark of their grip on human events is inefface- 
 able. 
 
 As one result of this glare of organized disorder 
 were revealed the flickerings of tiny flames of treason 
 in high places. Public officials, by criminal sloth- 
 fulness, or by insurrectionary sentiments, have op- 
 posed the general government. They have labored 
 in favor of a paternalism of inaction. They have 
 conspired for ballots while a mobocracy was strug- 
 gling to disrupt the country with a fanaticism that 
 leaped from ocean to ocean. When the chiefs of state 
 and city governments feed sedition with words of sym- 
 pathy, and reenforce it with the alliance of culpable 
 inaction, then the people should look guardedly to- 
 wards the future. 
 
 Had the strikers of 1894 been better drilled for 
 patient waiting; had their unions been of all labors, 
 united by one purpose, and animated, even to star- 
 vation, by one resolve; had there been a calm, clear- 
 headed, dispassionate, far-seeing man at the head of 
 the movement; and had there been unquestioning, 
 unswerving obedience to such a leader — who might 
 
AMERICA}^ SLAVES 
 
 153 
 
 have been a Bonaparte and a Bismarck in one body 
 — then the Republic and its law-abiding people might 
 have had a revolution that could not hav^ been sup- 
 pressed. They might have been strangled into sub- 
 mission to a set of rulers and into an allegiance to a 
 new style of government the like of which, though 
 successful, cannot endure. 
 
 Though this danger be passed, there is yet to come 
 the overthrowing shock, the wrenching and disrupt- 
 ing struggle of sections. Intensely jealous of their 
 sovereignty, states have at critical periods wavered 
 in their loyalty to the general government. But to 
 doubt, to hesitate in implicit fealty to the supreme 
 power, is to weaken ; to weaken is an initial effort in the 
 process of disintegration. The people of geographical 
 sections of the country long ago found a wide diver- 
 gence in their requirements of the general government, 
 which is like a sheep to be sheared, states being the 
 shearers, and wool clipping being as close to the 
 skin as possible, without drawing blood. But the 
 blood will be drawn, some day. 
 
 The states are only held together by strings of 
 mutual interest. Each governs itself; each is a law 
 unto itself. States, as well as individuals, may riot. 
 They are, already, well-organized communities. They 
 have men, arms, money, food — all the materials of 
 war. They have no standing armies, but they have 
 the seeds for them in the militia. Do their people 
 
154 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 want war? In many states the population is already 
 leavened with a hatred of law and of the people 
 who abide by the law. It is claimed by these maU 
 contents that they cannot, under the present one^ 
 rous condition of government, enjoy life, liberty and 
 the pursuit of happiness. There is a spirit of revolt 
 among the laboring classes, a conspiracy of revolution 
 among politicians, and a taint of treasonable independ- 
 ence among chief magistrates. 
 
 Besides these restive components of the governed 
 are the farmers, the manufacturers and the mine 
 owners. For these influential factors of general in- 
 dustry the legislation of federal government has, as 
 to their productions, not only been unwise and un- 
 fair, but has created feelings of dissatisfaction, as yet 
 confined only to murmurs, for which no adequate 
 remedy has been found, every attempt at harmonious 
 action resulting in collisions with the interests of 
 other people, in other businesses, in other states; and 
 he will be a mad statesman who undertakes to effect 
 the reconciliation necessary to permanent and satis- 
 factory adjustments. In these times it is idle to 
 talk of patriotism when the State comes first and 
 the general government last. In business, patriot- 
 ism is only an abstract sentiment ; it is self-interest 
 that makes the compact and enduring unions. 
 
 Fifty years hence, what will be the government of 
 this continent? will soon be a question of predomi- 
 
AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 155 
 
 nant interest. A central government is faintly dis- 
 cussed, but declared impracticable because states 
 will cede no more power. A constitutional monarchy 
 is hinted at; but we are wanting in an aristocracy and 
 cannot, under present laws, import seedlings, and the 
 accretions, by marriage, are dishearteningly slow. 
 
 We have drawn pictures on the lines of existing 
 circumstances. Is it a treasonable prophecy to de- 
 clare, after a consideration of the facts and the con- 
 clusions to be drawn from them, that within a cen- 
 tury, perhaps within half that period, there will be a 
 dissolution of the United States, a bloodless parti- 
 tion of this great continent, and the formation, as 
 one result, of four strong confederations — the East 
 with its capital and its commerce; the South with 
 its sugar, its cotton, its tobacco, and its seaports; a 
 West with its mines and the Pacific Ocean ; and a 
 Central division, composed of agricultural commu- 
 nities, to be the hub of the continent, but at the mercy 
 of all the rest — and to become the future battle field 
 of the millions of struggling people yet to swarm over 
 the land and to fight for the subsistence which men 
 will deny and which nature may be too exhausted to 
 ' afford ? 
 
 The day of absolute freedom for the American 
 Slave is not likely to come until our present political 
 and financial systems are purified as by fire, or until 
 the new continental divisions formed on the ruin of 
 
15 ^ 
 
 AMERICAN SLAVES 
 
 the old regime, give to a later world modernized forms 
 of government, sovereignties cleansed of political 
 tricksters and the spoilage carrion that breeds them, 
 with capital restricted in its vulgar tyranny, and a 
 harmonious working of what are now discordant ele- 
 ments. The American Slave of the year 1900 will 
 not have his kind in the year 2000. If in that year 
 there are governments, they will be the governments 
 either of men absolutely free or absolutely slaves. 
 
 THE END.