Ready.
The Roman slave-owners of two thousand years ago with their armed slave-drivers; also the slave-owners of sixty years ago with their hireling slave-drivers, armed with blacksnake whips and pistols, on horseback in the cotton fields of the South—the ancient and the modern chattel slave-owners thus were ready—ready to murder the slave working class.
The lords of serfdom with armed hirelings housed near their castles were also ready—ready to murder the serf working class.
Recently, in 1907, when the number of the unemployed wage-earners in the United States numbered over three millions, it was promptly planned by the War Department serving the Caesars of industry that one machine-gun company with six rapid-fire guns of the Maxim or some similar type should be added to each of the thirty regiments of infantry and fifteen regiments of cavalry now constituting the Army—a total of two hundred and seventy of the most terrible murdering machines ever invented. With these guns, each firing eight hundred shots per minute, eight million six hundred and forty thousand cold steel nuggets of “law-and-order” and “unparalleled prosperity” could be handed out to the unemployed in just forty minutes,—to lovingly show the working class how, under the wage-system-the present class-labor system,—“the interests of the capitalist class and the interests of the working class are practically the same.”
Thus the capitalists of our day are also ready—ready to have wage-paid soldiers, militiamen and policemen murder the wage-earning working class.
“Although the conventions of popular government are preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars. The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the [Roman] legions were a toy—a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or bribe.”—Brooks Adams: The Law of Civilization and Decay, p. 292.