THE TRUSTS AND THE UNEMPLOYED.
With this newer organization and centralization of industry the number of unemployed tremendously increased. In the panic of 1893 it reached about 3,000,000; in that of 1908 perhaps 6,000,000, certainly 5,000,000. To the appalling suffering on every hand the Government remained indifferent. The reasons were two-fold: Government was administered by the capitalist class whose interest it was not to allow any measure to be passed which might strengthen the workers, or decrease the volume of surplus labor; the second was that Government was basically the apotheosis of the current commercial idea that the claims of property were superior to those of human life.
It can be said without exaggeration that high functionary after high functionary in the legislative or executive branches of the Government, and magnate after magnate had committed not only one violation, but constant violations, of the criminal law. They were unmolested; having the power to prevent it they assuredly would not suffer themselves to undergo even the farce of prosecution. Such few prosecutions as were started with suspicious bluster by the Government against the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust and other trusts proved to be absolutely harmless, and have had no result except to strengthen the position of the trusts. The great magnates reaped their wealth by an innumerable succession of frauds and thefts. But the moment that wealth or the basis of that wealth were threatened in the remotest by any law or movement, the whole body of Government, executive, legislative and judicial, promptly stepped in to protect it intact.
The workers, however, from whom the wealth was robbed, were regarded in law as criminals the moment they became impoverished. If homeless and without visible means of support, they were subject to arrest as vagabonds. Numbers of them were constantly sent to prison or, in some States, to the chain-gang. If they ventured to hold mass meetings to urge the Government to start a series of public works to relieve the unemployed, their meetings were broken up and the assembled brutally clubbed, as happened in Tompkins square in New York City in the panic of 1873, in Washington in 1892, and in Chicago and in Union square, New York City, in the panic of 1908. The newspapers represented these meetings as those of irresponsible agitators, inciting the "mob" to violence. The clubbing of the unemployed and the judicial murder of their spokesman, has long been a favorite repression method of the authorities. But as for allowing them freedom of speech, considering the grievances, putting forth every effort to relieve their condition,—these do not seem to have come within the scope of that Government whose every move has been one of intense hostility—now open, again covert—to the working class.
This running sketch, which is to be supplemented by the most specific details, gives a sufficient insight into the debasement and despoiling of the working class while the capitalists were using the Government as an expropriating machine. Meanwhile, how was the great farming class faring? What were the consequences to this large body of the seizure by a few of the greater part of the public domain?