The jury found Eugene Debs guilty and on Saturday morning the judge
pronounced sentence. Before the sentence was given, Debs had another
opportunity to tell someone about Socialism--this time it was the judge.
Debs never loses a chance. When the clerk asked him whether he had
anything to say he made another Socialist speech. Said he:
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings,
and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest of
earth. I said then, I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am
in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a
soul in prison, I am not free....
"If the law under which I have been convicted is a good law, then there
is no reason why sentence should not be pronounced upon me. I listened
to all that was said in this court in support and justification of this
law, but my mind remains unchanged. I look upon it as a despotic
enactment in flagrant conflict with democratic principles and with the
spirit of free institutions.
"Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form
of our present Government; that I am opposed to the social system in
which we live; that I believed in the change of both--but by perfectly
peaceable and orderly means.
"Let me call your attention to the fact this morning that in this system
five per cent. of our people own and control two-thirds of our wealth,
sixty-five per cent. of the people, embracing the working class who
produce all wealth, have but five per cent. to show for it.
"Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen, I went to
work in the railroad shops; at sixteen, I was firing a freight engine on
a railroad. I remember all the hardships, all the privations, of that
earlier day, and from that time until now, my heart has been with the
working class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred
to go to prison. The choice has been deliberately made. I could not have
done otherwise. I have no regret.
"In the struggle--the unceasing struggle--between the toilers and
producers and their exploiters, I have tried, as best I might, to serve
those among whom I was born, with whom I expect to share my lot until
the end of my days.
"I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am
thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out
their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of
their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the
remorseless grasp of mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons,
there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body
and soul. I can see them dwarfed, diseased, stunted, their little lives
broken, and their hopes blasted, because in this high noon of our
twentieth century civilization, money is still so much more important
than human life. Gold is god and rules in the affairs of men. The little
girls, and there are a million of them in this country--this, the most
favored land beneath the bending skies, a land in which we have vast
areas of rich and fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible
abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, millions of
eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce an
abundance for every man, woman and child--and if there are still many
millions of our people who are the victims of poverty, whose life is a
ceaseless struggle all the way from youth to age, until at last death
comes to their rescue and stills the aching heart, and lulls the victim
to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty, it can't be
charged to nature; it is due entirely to an outgrown social system that
ought to be abolished, not only in the interest of the working class,
but in a higher interest of all humanity.
"I think of these little children--the girls that are in the textile
mills of all description in the East, in the cotton factories of the
South--I think of them at work in a vitiated atmosphere. I think of them
at work when they ought to be at play or at school; I think that when
they do grow up, if they live long enough to approach the marriage
state, they are unfit for it. Their nerves are worn out, their tissue is
exhausted, their vitality is spent. They have been fed to industry.
Their lives have been coined into gold. Their offspring are born tired.
That is why there are so many failures in our modern life.
"Your Honor, the five per cent. of the people that I have made reference
to, constitute that element that absolutely rules our country. They
privately own all our public necessities. They wear no crowns; they
wield no sceptres, they sit upon no thrones; and yet they are our
economic masters and our political rulers. They control this Government
and all of its institutions. They control the courts.
"The five per cent. of our people who own and control all of the sources
of wealth, all of the nation's industries, all of the means of our
common life--it is they who declare war; it is they who make peace; it
is they who control our industry. And so long as this is true, we can
make no just claim to being a democratic government--a self-governing
people.
"I believe, your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation
ought to own and control its industries. I believe, as all Socialists
do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought to be jointly
owned--that industry, the basis of life, instead of being the private
property of the few and operated for their enrichment, ought to be the
common property of all, democratically administered in the interest of
all.
"John D. Rockefeller has today an income of sixty million dollars a
year, five million dollars a month, two hundred thousand dollars a day.
He does not produce a penny of it. I make no attack upon Mr. Rockefeller
personally. I do not in the least dislike him. If he were in need, and
it were in my power to serve him, I should serve him as gladly as I
would any other human being, I have no quarrel with Mr. Rockefeller
personally, nor with any other capitalist. I am simply opposing a social
order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing
that is useful, to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars,
while millions of men and women who work all of the days of their lives
secure barely enough for existence.
"This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but fortunately I
am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself,
have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of
civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and
co-operative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic
and political movement that is spread over the face of all the earth.
"There are today upwards of sixty million Socialists, loyal, devoted,
adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color
or sex. They are all making common cause. They are all spreading the
propaganda of the new social order. They are waiting, watching and
working through all the weary hours of the day and night. They are still
in the minority. They have learned how to be patient and abide their
time. They feel--they know indeed--that the time is coming in spite of
all opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will
spread among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the
triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest
change in history.
"In that day we will have the universal commonwealth--not the
destruction of the nation, but, on the contrary, the harmonious
co-operation of every nation on earth. In that day war will curse this
earth no more.
"Your Honor, I ask no mercy. I plead for no immunity. I realize that
finally the right must prevail. I never more clearly comprehended than
now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and
upon the other the rising hosts of freedom.
"I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are
awakening. In due course of time they will come to their own.
"When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his
weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning
luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the
southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their
places, and with starry fingerpoints the Almighty marks the passage of
time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad
tidings, the look-out knows that the midnight is passing--that relief
and rest are close at hand.
"Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is
bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning....
"Your Honor, I thank you, and I thank all of this court for their
courtesy, for their kindness, which I shall remember always.
"I am prepared to receive your sentence."
Whereupon the judge sentenced Eugene Debs to ten years in the West
Virginia Penitentiary--the penitentiary at Atlanta being too crowded to
receive him.