representative of the very class that oppressed them all the year round.

"The Emancipation of the Working Classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves, as no other class has any interest in improving their condition. The combined wage-working class represents the great majority of the people. In their hands rests the future of our free institutions, and it is in their destiny to replace the present iniquitous Social System by one based upon equity, morality, and the nobility of all useful Labor.

"We regard it as the sacred duty of every honorable laboring man to sever his affiliations with all political parties of the Capitalists, and to devote his energy and attention to the organization of his Trade or Labor Union, and the concentration of all Unions into one solid body for the purpose of assisting each other in all struggles-Political or Industrial-to resist every attempt of the ruling classes directed against our liberties, and to extend our fraternal hand to the workers of our land and to all nations of the globe that struggle for the same independence.”

The New York Central Labor Federation, which has a like program, is on the road to carry it into effect, by having become an active ally of the Socialist Labor Party. So have some National organizations connected with the American Federation of Labor. The Machinists, for

instance, when they organized an International Union, a month or two ago, followed in the line of the "International Union of Journeymen Bakers and Confectioners," who went so far in National Convention as to pass the following Resolutions :

"WHEREAS, it is becoming more evident every day that the condition of the working class cannot be permanently improved by trades-organizations founded upon an exclusive trade-union basis, the present productive system

swelling the army of the unemployed at an appalling rate, which reserve army threatens ruin to the best organized union; and

"WHEREAS, in order to secure a permanent improvement in the condition of the working class, it is imperatively necessary that the workers should take Political Action, and by the Ballot conquer the Political Power for the purpose of substituting for the present industrial system of exploitation, a Coöperative Productive System; and—

"WHEREAS, the policy of asking concessions from the old parties, advocated by prominent trades-union leaders, will never secure to the workers their full rights; and—

"WHEREAS, furthermore, we see in the realization of the Platform of the Socialist Labor Party, THE ONLY WAY OF SECURING OUR RIGHTS BY LAWFUL MEANS; therefore be it

"RESOLVED, by the Bakers and Confectioners' Journeymen International Union, in Convention assembled at Indianapolis, Ind., on March 2nd, 1891, that we fully endorse the platform of the Socialist Labor Party and urge our members, wherever a section of the Socialist Labor Party exists, to join the same; and

"Be it furthermore Resolved

"That we most strongly condemn the action of Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, at the Convention held at Detroit, Michigan, from December 8th to 13th, 1890, in reference to the rejection of the Central Labor Federation of New York-for no other reason than that a section of the Socialist Labor Party is represented in said central body."

It is to be hoped that such great labor organizations, instead of taking "a crab step," will wake up the Conservative Trades Unionists and force them to make a similar forward move. There is no doubt about it, but that the

condition of Labor in the United States to-day is something appalling. According to the National Census of 1880 and the statistics therein furnished by employers, we find that the 2,800,000 Industrial Workers in this country only received an average wage of $6.50 per week, whereas the 254,000 Factory Lords made a profit of $1,026,000,000. This was only a portion of the profit made by Capitalism, which to-day owns or controls through a few Plutocrats the entire wealth of the United States, estimated at some $60,000,000,000.

The horrors of what the New York Sun calls "Siberia in Tennessee,❞—and the condition of the miners in half a dozen States of the Union is equally miserable-would seem to surpass belief, were they not corroborated by antiproletarian newspapers. These monstrous conditions most certainly demand immediate and active measures for their suppression. Let any one read Henry D. Lloyd's work A Strike of Millionaires against Miners, or the Story of Spring Valley, and it is hardly possible to imagine but that even the most stony-hearted of human beings would be won over to the cause of these unfortunate children of Humanity, now kept in degraded servitude by Capitalists Chauncey M. Depew, Albert Keep, N. K. Fairbank, William K. Vanderbilt, F. W. Vanderbilt, John I. Blair, William L. Scott, Marvin Hughitt, Horace Williams, John M. Burke, H. M. Twombley, D. O. Mills, Samuel F. Barger, Percy R. Pyne, A. G. Dulman, M. L. Sykes, D. P. Kimball, W. M. Scott, E. N. Saunders, D. C. Shepard, and other railroad magnates.

The arraignment of the Plutocratic Class was made years and years ago by Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, Parke Godwin, and the American Fourierist Socialists. And it seems to the author of these pages hardly necessary to enter into the present crimes of Capitalism, when not a

single day passes but that the morning newspaper brings to the breakfast table of nearly every one in the land, not only the record of the warfare between Organized Capital and Organized Labor, but of the fearful effects of Strikes and Lock-outs and their general results in sufferings added to the miseries of the poor. Let those who wish to know what is going on around them,—at least those who pretend to be ignorant-read the official Labor Reports of New York State compiled by Commissioner Peck, and there will be found described things quite as heartrending and awful as Dante told in his Inferno, or as the most lurid imagination could evolve out of a diseased brain.

Yet worse for future generations is the physical and mental "Slaughter of the Innocents," in factories and shops, and no wonder that Bishop Henry C. Potter in his righteous indignation against child labor exclaimed :

:

"The Herods are not all dead, nor are the Murdered Innocents all buried."

There is also another phase of the savagery of the present war between Capitalism and Labor,-and that is the perpetual succession of murders committed by the Pinkerton "thugs" and the other armed mercenaries employed by the monopolizers of the wealth they did not produce. The blood of these martyrs cries aloud. If on

the one hand such crimes are treasured up against the Plutocrats by the Proletariat, on the other hand, the Wages Slaves can console themselves with the thought of Byron in Marino Faliero:

"They never fail who die

In a great cause; the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs

Be strung to city gates and castle walls-
But still their spirit walks abroad."

“T

CHAPTER X.

SOCIALISM'S PRESENT AND FUTURE.

HE time has passed when Socialism can be dismissed with curses, or threats, or sneers, or interjections.

So wrote Washington Gladden, who is one of the apologists of the present competitive system, in the pages of the ultra-respectable Century, not so very long ago. Then Mr. Gladden discusses a few books written "pro" and "con" the great Labor Movement, without apparently having the least information about the historic evolution of Modern American Socialism through the Communities; Owenism; the indigenous movement in the thirties in New York State; the later Fourierist development in the forties in Massachusetts, at Brook Farm, and in New York and elsewhere through Greeley and the Tribune, which, by the pens of Brisbane, Godwin, Dana, Curtis and numerous others, laid the foundation for various agricultural, and industrial economic and political movements.

Such writers as Mr. Gladden see certain effects, and never care to pursue them scientifically to their causes. They observe symptoms and believe they are the disease itself, then they give the world the dubious benefit of their alleged diagnosis, with the result of making confusion worse confounded. These politico-economic empirics are regarded by the masses as "Sir Oracles" when they open wide their hyper-critical mouths," and the result is, that the misanthropic public accepts "the sponsorial and patro