abundant ever produced, that there is no market for the almost sixteen
million bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the same time
there are millions of unemployed in the land who are without food and
without clothing and who, with their wives and children, are doomed to
indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn and indisputable fact it
would seem that there could be but one opinion among students and
thinkers as to the one great, vital and essential thing to do for the
relief of our common humanity and for the promotion of the world's
progress and civilization, and that that one thing is the one to be
emphasized with all the power at our command.
A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based
upon warring classes cannot stand.
Such a world is a world of strife and hate and such a society can exist
only by means of militarism and physical force.
* * * * *
The education of the people, not the few alone, but the entire mass in
the principles of industrial democracy and along the lines of social
development is the task of the people to be emphasized and that
task--let it be impressed upon them--can be performed only by
themselves.
The cultured few can never educate the uncultured many. All history
attests the fact that all the few have ever done for the many is to keep
them in ignorance and servitude and live out of their labor.
To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set
them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of
mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to
render real service to the cause of humanity.
To quote Herron once more:
"Socialism is a deliberate proposal to lay the will of man upon the
unfolding processes and ends of nature and history. It invokes the faith
that shall be equal to the acceptance of its proposal--of its supreme
challenge to the universe."
A MESSAGE TO THE CHILDREN.
Campaign Leaflet, National Campaign, 1912.
The Socialist party is the only party that has the children at heart;
the only party that takes them into its confidence; the only party that
has a message for them in a campaign year.
In my travels about the country I have met many thousands of little
children and their fresh and eager faces have always given me joy and
their merry voices have filled me with delight and made me stronger for
my work.
These children are not yet old enough to join the Socialist party and
have an active part in its great work, but they are old enough to
understand why their parents belong to it, and why they are proud of
their card of membership, and of the red button they wear, to show that
they are socialists and that as socialists they are working hand in hand
with thousands and thousands of others to change things so that this
world may be a better, kinder and sweeter world for us all to live in.
Now let me talk directly as I may to the more than thirty millions of
children and young folks in our country who are less than eighteen years
of age. I fancy I can see them all spread out in all directions, far as
the eye can reach, and farther and farther still to the very shores of
the seas and lakes and gulf that bound our western continent.
What a wonderful audience I am about to address! Not a grown person in
it. Only children. Millions of them and all eager to hear the message
that socialism has to offer to the child-world.
My dear little children, I am sure you will understand me when I say
that in speaking to you of socialism I feel very near to all of you and
I know you will believe me when I tell you that I would if I could make
you all happy and keep you sweet and loving toward each other all your
lives. Most of you are the children of the poor, some of the well-to-do,
and a few of the rich, but all of you are the children of the same
Father and all of you are sisters and brothers in the same great family
of humankind.
If any of you feel that you are better than others because you wear
better clothes or live in better houses or go in what you think is
"better society," it is because your young minds and hearts have been
tainted by wrong example and wrong education. It is this wicked feeling
that corrupts the conscience and hardens the heart and begets the envy
and hate of our fellow-beings, instead of their love and good will.
When that best friend the children ever had on earth said, "Suffer
little children and forbid them not, to come unto me; for such is the
kingdom of heaven" he meant all children, poor and rich, but especially
the poor. He loved and pitied them because of their poverty and
suffering.
He himself had been born in a manger and when he was grown up he said
sorrowfully that "he had not where to lay his head." He did not despise
little children because they were poor and neglected and shabbily
dressed but he loved them all the more; and as he looked down upon them
his heart melted with compassion and the tears of tenderness filled his
eyes; and then he became grave and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as
he thought of those who sat in rich church pews and piously thanked the
Lord that they were not as other people. He denounced them as hypocrites
for pretending to be religious while they robbed the poor and turned the
little children into the street to suffer hunger and fall into evil
ways.
Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the suffering poor heard with
gladness the message of the Lowly Nazarene and since he was moved to
tears by the sight of the little children of the street, but the world
has not yet learned the meaning of his tender and touching words,
"Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of
such is the kingdom of heaven." If he were to walk the streets of New
York or Chicago, or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities where
the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves--as he once walked
the streets of Jerusalem--he would grow sick at heart as he saw the
little ones he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to monstrous
machines and slowly put to death to swell the profits of the greedy mill
owners who sit in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the pharisees
he scourged without mercy twenty centuries ago.
The children of the working people have always been poor because the
world has never been just. For ages and ages those who have builded the
houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun the wool, woven
the cloth, supplied the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and
furnished the homes we live in, have been the poor and despised, while
those who profited by their labor and consumed the good things they
produced, have been the rich and respectable.
Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered the poverty of his
class and when he grew up it was not the rich and respectable, but the
poor and despised who loved him, and opened their arms to receive him,
and heard gladly his tender and comforting ministrations. He was one of
them in poverty and suffering and in all his loving and self-denying
life he never forgot them. Had he deserted the poor from whom he sprang,
had he gone over to the rich as their preacher, or their judge, or their
lawyer or teacher or scribe--as so many of his pretended followers have
done and are still doing--he never would have been crucified, nor would
the world today know that he had ever lived.
It was because, and only because, Jesus loved and served the poor and
rebuked the rich who robbed them, and threatened to array them against
their rich despoilers, that he was condemned to die and that the cruel
nails were driven into his hands and feet on the cross at Calvary.
Jesus taught that the earth and the air and the sea and sky and all the
beauty and fulness thereof were for all the children of men; that they
should all equally enjoy the riches of nature and dwell together in
peace, bear one another's burdens and love one another, and that is what
socialism teaches and why the rich thieves who have laid hold of the
earth and its bounties would crucify the socialists as those other
robbers of the poor crucified Jesus two thousand years ago.
Now let us see what message the Socialist party has for the children and
why all children should be socialists and help to speed the day when the
brotherhood of socialism shall prevail throughout the earth.
But first let me say that the Socialist party has reason to know that
the children have great influence when they become interested in a given
work and set their hearts on doing that work. The Socialist party knows
better than to ignore the children as if they were china dolls or
stuffed teddy bears, as all the other parties do, for it knows by what
they have already done that when once they get fairly started they will
make the air hum like swarms of bees with the glad tidings of
socialism.
The little boys and girls who have already become socialists are among
the busiest workers for our party and they love so well to work for
socialism that it is play to them and fills their hearts with joy. They
wear the red button and they know why it is red and what its meaning is;
they tack up bills and distribute dodgers advertising our meetings; they
sell tickets, take up collections, act as ushers, provide the soap-box
for the corner speaker, carry chairs for the women so they may sit in
comfort after their day's work, go around among the neighbors and remind
them of the meeting and not to forget to attend, sell socialist books,
papers and pamphlets, and do a score of other things which are just as
useful in their way as the speech of the orator that wins the applause
of the people.
Now the Socialist party is the only party in the world that wants to put
an end once and forever to all kinds of child labor and to have it so
that all children, white and black, without a single exception, shall be
allowed to grow up in the free air, with plenty of time for mirth and
play; that they shall all have decent homes to live in, comfortable beds
to sleep in, plenty of good food to eat, plenty of good clothes to wear
and that when they reach the proper age they shall go to school and
college and continue their course until they have obtained a sound and
practical education. Then they will have strong, healthy bodies, trained
minds and skilled hands, and not only enter cheerfully upon the duties
of life, but be certain of making it a success.
If you listen to the old fogies who still belong to the parties their
grandfathers did and who have not moved an inch from their grandfathers'
graves, they will tell you that socialists are foolish people and that
what they propose never can be done. That is what the fogies of every
age have always said. They are the "wise" people who do things in the
same way that their dead grandparents did before them, who never change
their minds, never accept a new idea, never grow, and who are always
dead long before they are buried and forgotten the day after the
funeral. Whatever you may be I beg of you not to be a fogy, nor to
follow a fogy's solemn advice. His brain has ceased to work--if it ever
did work. He is mentally stagnant and moss-covered and votes the same
old ticket with no more idea of what he is voting for than a wooden
Indian.
The Socialist party says there have got to be some changes and has set
about making them, or at least getting ready to make them. It says that
the world is big enough for all the people that are in it, with plenty
of room to spare for groves and parks and playgrounds; that there is
land enough to go around without crowding; that there are farms enough,
or can be easily provided, to raise all we can eat, so that no child in
all the world need to go hungry; that there is plenty of coal and iron,
oil and gas, gold and silver and other minerals and metals, stored in
the earth; that there are forests and mountains and water courses
galore; that there are mills and mines and factories and ships and
railways and telegraphs, and the power supplied free by nature to run
them all; that there are millions of men and women ready to do all the
work that may be required to build homes, raise crops, bake bread--and
cake too--weave cloth, make clothes and everything else that is
necessary for everybody, and have time enough besides to build schools
and provide playgrounds for every last one of the children, with plenty
of toys thrown in to make this earth a children's paradise.
Now why should not just these things come to pass and why should not you
children help us speed the day when they _shall_ come to pass?
Everything you can possibly think of to make this earth sweet and
beautiful and to make life a blessed joy for us all is within our reach.
The raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion them into forms
of beauty and use are at our finger tips. We have but to put ourselves
in harmony with nature and with one another to spread far and wide the
gospel of life and love and once more hear "the sons of God shout for
joy."
Socialists not only dream of the good day coming when the world shall
know that men are brothers and that women are sisters to each other, but
they are at work with all their hearts and all their heads and hands to
make that dream come true.
If you want to know what the plans of the socialists are in detail read
their platform, attend their lectures and study their literature.
Socialism is the greatest thing in all the world today and the boys and
girls of this generation who will be remembered in the next are those
who are clear-eyed enough to see that socialism is coming and are at the
battle-front fighting bravely to overcome the prejudice against it and
to pave the way for it so that it may come soon and in peace and order.
Many of us who have been long in service will not be here when the bells
peal forth the joyous tidings that socialism has triumphed and that the
people are free, but the children that now are will live to see it and
in the day of their rejoicing they will not forget those who toiled
without recompense that they might live without dread of poverty or fear
of want.
As we look about us today we see that the world is filled with suffering
and despair and when we come to look into the cause of it we find that
it is a reproach to us all. As I write the news comes of the fierce
battle that is being fought between ten thousand hungry miners in West
Virginia and the thugs and ex-convicts and murderers armed by the coal
corporations to force the strikers back into their dismal and hopeless
pits. The battle has already lasted two days. Many on both sides have
been killed, but the capitalist papers are doing all they can to hush it
up.
Long ago the miners were evicted from the company's wretched hovels.
They and their wives and children live in tented fields and the brutal
guards have even driven the women and children from there into the
wilderness to starve that the strike may be broken and the miners
compelled to go back to work at the terms of their greedy and heartless
masters.
And why is this awful battle raging and human beings murdering each
other as if they were wild beasts? Because a few gluttonous slave owners
like Henry Gassaway Davis and the Watsons and Elkinses who dwell in
gorgeous palaces on vast estates occupying whole mountain ranges,
privately own the mines and minerals which were intended for all, and
consequently the thousands of miners and their wives and children are at
their mercy, and when they meekly asked for five per cent more wages so
their families would not suffer for bread the brutal lords of the mines
sent out their private army of assassins to hunt them down and kill them
as if they were mad dogs.
The Socialist party says that those mines should be owned by all the
people and that is what will come to pass when the socialists get into
power, and then the green hills of West Virginia and other states will
no longer echo with the rifle shots of corporation assassins, nor run
red with the blood of honest workingmen slain to appease the greed of
their soulless masters.
In February last, four boys were hanged in Chicago. The oldest was
twenty-one, the youngest barely out of his childhood. They had held up
and robbed and murdered a poor truck farmer for the little money he had
on his person. Not one of these boys ever had a decent home. They were
born in poverty, reared in ignorance, and surrounded by vice and filth.
This is cultivating crime and reaping the harvest. We socialists weep as
we think of the cruel fate of those four poor, friendless boys who died
on the gallows while they were still in their childhood, because the
world has not yet learned that there is greater profit in raising
children than there is in raising hogs.
The frightful stories of the little children in the mills of Lawrence
and the cruel suffering they endured is still fresh in the public
memory. When the poor and despairing mothers, their hearts wrung with
agony and their eyes blinded with tears, attempted to save their
children from starvation by placing them in the keeping of sympathizing
friends, they were beaten, insulted, and with babies at their breasts
thrown into jail, bleeding and stunned, by the brutal police acting
under orders from the far more brutal mill owners.
The world will never know the suffering and terror these poor working
people--especially the women and children--had to endure for daring to
ask the millionaire mill owners for a pittance more in return for their
labor to keep the wolf of hunger from their gloomy hovels.
When the Socialist party gets into power those mills at Lawrence and all
others like them will be taken over by the people and operated for the
good of all, and then the workers will keep the wealth they produce for
themselves, instead of turning it over to the greedy mill bosses; they
will have decent homes to live in, food in plenty on their tables, and
their children will go to school to be properly educated instead of to
the mills to be ground into profits to gorge their idle owners.
In March last, Mrs. L. F. Jellson of Salem, Oregon, gave poison to each
of her four little children, her own offspring, because they were
starving and she was poor and had no way to get them bread. She then
poisoned herself and all she asked in the note she left was that she and
her darling children be buried together. This poor heart-broken soul was
driven to destroy herself and her precious babes because the world as it
now is would not allow them to live.
Think for just a moment of all the food there is in the world and all
there might be and then tell me if socialists are wrong and foolish and
wicked for saying that the self-murder of this poor woman and the murder
of her children is a terrible crime of which society is guilty and for
which there is no excuse on earth or in heaven.
A recent investigation showed that in the City of St. Louis there are
16,000 young women who receive as wage-earners less than $8 per week and
over 3,000 who receive from $3 to $4 per week.
It is easy to see from this why so many little girls and younger women
are forced to enter upon the path which leads to shame and sorrow and
which seldom bears the impress of returning footsteps.
When the giant Titanic met her fate, fifty little bellboys went down
with her to the bottom of the sea. They were ordered, according to the
account, to their regular posts in the main cabin and warned by their
captain not to get into the way of the escaping passengers. James
Humphries, as quartermaster and eye witness said, "throughout the first
hour of confusion and terror these lads sat quietly on their benches.
Not one of them attempted to enter a lifeboat. Not one of them was
saved."
Can you read this without being moved to tears? Brave, noble little
lads! I almost feel as if it had been a privilege to go down with these
great little souls to their watery grave.
The little boys who perished here were poor boys, many of them without
fathers, and others obliged to support widowed mothers and little
brothers and sisters younger than themselves.
What a lesson this touching, deeply pathetic incident teaches and what a
world of meaning there is in the sad circumstances of their tragic
death!
Had they not been poor children, little waifs, they would not have been
locked in the cabin to perish like rats. They would not, in fact, have
been there at all, and had it not been for the pride and pomp, the greed
and luxury that paraded the upper deck, the Titanic never would have
gone to the bottom of the sea.
And now, my children, I must come to a close. I have taken up much of
your time, but I have only been able to trace in barest outline what the
Socialist party is organized for, what it aims to do, and will do, and
why the children, above all, should vie with each other in helping it
to grow and speeding the happy day of its success.
When that day comes the rejoicing people will realize that the kingdom
of heaven, so long prayed for, has been set up here on earth in the
social brotherhood of all mankind.
SOCIAL REFORM.
While there is a lower class I am in it;
While there is a criminal class I am of it;
While there is a soul in prison I am not free.
DANGER AHEAD.
International Socialist Review, January, 1911.
The large increase in the Socialist vote in the late national and state
elections is quite naturally hailed with elation and rejoicing by party
members, but I feel prompted to remark, in the light of some personal
observations made during the campaign, that it is not entirely a matter
of jubilation. I am not given to pessimism, or captious criticism, and
yet I cannot but feel that some of the votes placed to our credit this
year were obtained by methods not consistent with the principles of a
revolutionary party, and in the long run will do more harm than good.
I yield to no one in my desire to see the party grow and the vote
increase, but in my zeal I do not lose sight of the fact that healthy
growth and a substantial vote depend upon efficient organization, the
self-education and self-discipline of the membership, and that where
these are lacking, an inflated vote secured by compromising methods, can
only be hurtful to the movement.
The danger I see ahead is that the Socialist party at this stage, and
under existing conditions, is apt to attract elements which it cannot
assimilate, and that it may be either weighted down, or torn asunder
with internal strife, or that it may become permeated and corrupted with
the spirit of bourgeois reform to an extent that will practically
destroy its virility and efficiency as a revolutionary organization.
To my mind the working class character and the revolutionary integrity
of the Socialist party are of first importance. All the votes of the
people would do us no good if our party ceased to be a revolutionary
party, or came to be only incidentally so, while yielding more and more
to the pressure to modify the principles and program of the party for
the sake of swelling the vote and hastening the day of its expected
triumph.
It is precisely this policy and the alluring promise it holds out to new
members with more zeal than knowledge of working class economics, that
constitutes the danger we should guard against in preparing for the
next campaign. The truth is that we have not a few members who regard
vote-getting as of supreme importance, no matter by what method the
votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements and
make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and
uncompromising principles of a revolutionary party. They seek to make
the Socialist propaganda so attractive--eliminating whatever may give
offense to bourgeois sensibilities--that it serves as a bait for votes
rather than as a means of education, and votes thus secured do not
properly belong to us and do injustice to our party as well as to those
who cast them.
These votes do not express socialism and in the next ensuing election
are quite as apt to be turned against us, and it is better that they be
not cast for the Socialist party, registering a degree of progress the
party is not entitled to and indicating a political position the party
is unable to sustain.
Socialism is a matter of growth, of evolution, which can be advanced by
wise methods, but never by obtaining for it a fictitious vote. We should
seek only to register the actual vote of socialism, no more and no less.
In our propaganda we should state our principles clearly, speak the
truth fearlessly, seeking neither to flatter nor to offend, but only to
convince those who should be with us and win them to our cause through
an intelligent understanding of its mission.