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WOODSTOCK, ILL., Aug. 29, 1895.
Mr. Ed H. Evinger,
Labor Day Committee, Terre Haute, Ind.
Dear Sir and Brother: I am in receipt of your esteemed favor of the 19th
inst., in which you say: “We have been unable to get a representative
labor speaker for our Labor Day celebration and the committee ordered me
to ask you to write us a letter to be read on the occasion.”
In responding to your request I am disposed to recite a page of what all
Christendom proclaims “sacred history.”
There existed some twenty-five hundred years ago a king clothed with
absolute power, known as Darius, who ruled over the Medes and the
Persians. He was not a usurper like Wm. A. Woods, the United States
Circuit Judge. Darius was royal spawn. His right to rule was what kings
then, as now, claimed to be a “divine right.” All the people in Darius’
empire were slaves. The will of the king was absolute. What the king
said was law, just as we now find in the United States of America that
what a United States judge says is law. Darius, the Persian despot,
could imprison at will; the same is true of Woods, the despot. There is
absolutely no difference. Do I hear an exception? Allow me to support my
indictment by authority that passes current throughout the Republic.
Only a few days ago the venerable Judge Trumbull, one of the most
eminent jurists and statesmen America has ever produced, wrote these
burning words: “The doctrine announced by the Supreme Court in the Debs
case, carried to its logical conclusion, places every citizen at the
mercy of any prejudiced or malicious federal judge, who may think proper
to imprison him.” This states the case of the officers of the American
Railway Union in a nutshell. They violated no law, they committed no
crime, they have not been charged, nor indicted, nor tried, and yet they
were arbitrarily sentenced and thrust in jail and what has happened to
them will happen to others who dare protest against such inhumanity as
the monster Pullman practiced upon his employes and their families.
More than twenty-five hundred years have passed to join the unnumbered
centuries since Darius lived and reigned, and now in the United States
we have about four score Darius despots, each of whom may at his will,
whim or pleasure, imprison an American citizen—and this grim truth is up
for debate on Labor Day.
It will be remembered that during the reign of Darius there was a
gentleman by the name of Daniel whom the king delighted to honor. The
only fault that could be found with Daniel was that he would not worship
the Persian gods, but would, three times a day, go to his window,
looking toward Jerusalem, and pray. This was his crime. It was enough.
The Persians had a religion of their own. They had their gods of gold,
brass, stone, clay, wood, anything from a mouse to a mountain, and they
would not tolerate any other god. They had, in modern parlance, an
“established church,” and as Daniel, like Christ, would not conform to
the Persian religion, “the presidents of the kingdom, the governors and
the princes, the counselors and the captains,” or as in these later days
the corporations, the trusts, the syndicates and combines, concluded to
get rid of Daniel and they persuaded Darius to issue an injunction that
no man should “ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days save of
thee, O king”—and the king, a la Woods, issued the decree. But Daniel,
who was made of resisting stuff, disregarded the injunction and still
prayed as before to his God. Daniel was a hero. In the desert of
despotism he stands forever:
“As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm:
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”
But the bigots triumph for a time. The king’s decree must stand, and
Daniel, as a penalty for prayer, must be cast into the lion’s den and
the bigots, the plutocratic pirates and parasites of that period,
thought that would be the end of Daniel. They chuckled as in fancy they
heard the lions break his bones and lap his blood. They slept well and
dreamed of victory. Not so with the king. He knew he had been guilty of
an act of monstrous cruelty and in this the old Persian despot was
superior to Woods. The king could not sleep and was so pained over his
act that he forbade all festivities in his palace. In this he showed
that he was not totally depraved. The king had a lurking idea that
somehow Daniel would get out of the lion’s den unharmed and that he
would overcome the intrigues of those who had conspired to destroy him.
Early in the morning he went to the mouth of the den. Daniel was safe.
His God, unlike the Supreme Court, having found Daniel innocent of all
wrongdoing, locked the jaws of the lions and Daniel stood before the
king wearing the redemption of truth, more royal than a princely diadem.
Then the king who had been deceived by the enemies of Daniel, the
sycophants and the vermin of power, gave his wrath free reign and had
them cast into the lion’s den where they were devoured by the ferocious
beasts.
History repeats itself. I am not a Daniel but I am in jail by the decree
of the autocrat. I appealed from one despot to a whole bench for
justice, and the appeal was unheeded. I and my associates were innocent.
There was no stain of crime upon our record but neither innocence nor
constitution was of any avail. To placate the corporations, the money
power, the implacable enemies of labor, we were sent to prison and here
alone, contemplating the foul wrong inflicted upon me and my associate
officials of the American Railway Union, with head and heart and hand
nerved for the task, I write this letter to be read on Labor Day to
friends and neighbors in the city of my birth.
It is not a wail of despondency nor of despair. The cause for which I
have been deprived of my liberty was just and I am thrice armed against
all my enemies. To bear punishment for one’s honest convictions is a
glorious privilege and requires no high order of courage.
No judicial tyrant comes to my prison to inquire as to my health or my
hopes, but one sovereign does come by night and by day, with words of
cheer. It is the sovereign people—the uncrowned but sceptered ruler of
the realm. No day of my imprisonment has passed that the bars and bolts
and doors of the Woodstock Jail have not been bombarded by messages
breathing devotion to the cause of liberty and justice, and as I read
and ponder these messages and as I grasp the hands of friends and catch
the gleam of wrath in their defiant eyes and listen to their words of
heroic courage, I find it no task to see the wrath of the sovereign
people aroused and all opposition to the triumphant march of labor
consigned to oblivion, and as an earnest of this from every quarter come
announcements that the American Railway Union is growing in membership
and strength, destined at an early day to be, as it deserves to be, an
organization, which by precept, example and principle will ultimately
unify railroad labor in the United States and make it invincible. There
is a mighty mustering of all the forces of labor throughout the country.
Labor is uniting in one solid phalanx to secure justice for labor. When
this time comes, and coming it is, peacefully, I hope no judicial despot
will dare to imprison an American citizen to please corporations. When
this time comes, and coming it is as certain as rivers flow to the sea,
Bullion and Boodle will not rule in Congress, in legislatures and in
courts, and legislators and judges and other public officers will not be
controlled, as many of them are, by the money power. There is to come a
day, aye, a labor day, when from the center to the circumference of our
mighty Republic, from blooming groves of orange to waving fields of
grain, from pinelands of Maine to the Pacific Coast, the people shall be
free and it will come by the unified voice and vote of the farmer, the
mechanic, and the laborer in every department of the country’s
industries.
I notice in your letter that you say: “We have been unable to get a
representative labor speaker for our Labor Day celebration,” and here
let me say that on Labor Day all men who wear the badge of labor are
“representative speakers”—not “orators,” perhaps, as the term is
accepted to mean, and yet orators in fact, from whose lips fall
“thoughts that breathe and words that burn;” coming warm from the heart,
they reach the heart and fan zeal in a great cause into a flame that
sweeps along like a prairie fire. It has been the good fortune of labor
to produce from its ranks men who, though unlearned in the arts or
oratory, were yet orators of the highest order, if effect instead of
fluency is considered. It is the occasion that makes the orator as it is
the battle that makes the veteran. Mark Antony said, “I am no orator
like Brutus,” but when he showed Caesar’s mantle to the populists of
Rome and pointed out where the conspirators’ daggers had stabbed Caesar,
the oratory of Brutus paled before his burning words. And every man,
however humble he may esteem himself, may on Labor Day hold up the
Constitution of the United States and point to where the judicial dagger
stabbed liberty to death, and make the people cry out for the
re-enthronement of the constitution—and Terre Haute has a hundred such
orators.
I write in the hurry and press of business. Before me are a hundred
letters demanding replies. I pass them by to respond to an appeal from
my home, and in fancy, as I write, I am with you. I am at home again. My
father bending beneath the weight of many years salutes me. My mother,
whose lullaby songs nestle and coo in the inner temple of my memory,
caresses me—her kiss baptizes me with joy and as if by enchantment:
“Years and sin and folly flee,
And leave me at my mother’s knee.”
In this mood I write with the hope that the celebration at Terre Haute
will inspire renewed devotion to the interests of labor, and with a
heart full of good wishes, I subscribe myself,
Yours fraternally,
E. V. DEBS.
Dict. E.V.D.