THE GOVERNMENT AN ENGINE OF TYRANNY.
The grievances and protests of the workers aroused no response save the ever-active one of contumely, coercion and violent reprisals. The treasury of Nation, States and cities, raised by a compulsory taxation falling heavily upon the workers, was at all times at the complete disposal of the propertied interests, who emptied it as fast as it was filled. The propertiless and jobless were left to starve; to them no helping arm was outstretched, and if they complained, no quarter given. The State as an institution, while supported by the toil of the producers, was wholly a capitalist State with the capitalists in complete supremacy to fashion and use it as they chose. They used the State political machinery to plunder the masses, and then, at the slightest tendency on the part of the workers to resist these crushing injustices and burdens, called upon the State to hurry out its armed forces to repress this dangerous discontent.
In Buffalo, in 1890-1891, thirty-one in every hundred destitutes were impoverished because of unemployment, and in New York City twenty- nine in every hundred. [Footnote: "Encyclopedia of Social Reform," Edition of 1897: 1073.] Hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds were given outright to the capitalists, but not a cent appropriated to provide work for the unemployed. In the panic of 1893, when millions of men, women and children were out of work, the machinery of government, National, State and municipal, proffered not the least aid, but, on the contrary, sought to suppress agitation and prohibit meetings by flinging the leaders into jail. Basing his conclusions upon the (Aldrich) United States Senate Report of 1893—a report highly favorable to capitalist interests, and not unexpectedly so, since Senator Aldrich was the recognized Senatorial mouthpiece of the great vested interests—Spahr found that the highest daily wage for all earners, taken in a mass, was $2.O4 [Footnote: "The Present Distribution of Wealth in The United States.">[
More than three-quarters of all the railroad employees in the United States received less than two dollars a day. Large numbers of railroad employees were forced to work from twelve to fourteen hours a day, and their efficiency and stamina thus lowered. Periodically many were laid off in enforced idleness; and appalling numbers were maimed or killed in the course of duty. [Footnote: The report of the Wisconsin Railway Commissioners for 1894, Vol. xiii., says: "In a recent year more railway employees were killed in this country than three times the number of Union men slain at the battle of Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge and Orchard Knob combined. … In the bloody Crimean War, the British lost 21,000 in killed and wounded— not as many as are slain, maimed and mangled among the railroad men injured [Footnote: of the country in a single year." Various reports of the Interstate Commerce Commission state the same facts.] or slain largely because the railroad corporations refused to expend money in the introduction of improved automatic coupling devices, these workers or their heirs were next confronted by what? The unjust and oppressive provisions of worthless employers' liability laws drafted by corporation attorneys in such a form that the worker or his family generally had almost no claim. The very judges deciding these suits were, as a rule, put on the bench by the railroad corporations.