NO RAILWAY PASSES.
In starting out to destroy plutocracy, the first thing the average weakling does is to approach some senatorial or congressional tool of the very plutocracy that he thinks he is opposing, and ask him to beg plutocracy for a weapon to fight it with, free of charge. In other words, in opposing the trusts and monopolies, among which the railroad monopoly is one of the most tyrannical and corrupt, he asks for a free railway pass.
The railroad pass is the most corrupting instrument in American politics to-day. It buys for a small price our congressmen and senators, our county and state committees of both the Democratic and Republican parties, our bosses in both parties, our editors, Democratic and Republican, our preachers, Democratic, Republican and Prohibition, and many of our Democratic lecturers and speakers. Even many of our labor leaders make themselves impotent in this great struggle by accepting railroad passes. Our labor statisticians, from the National office in Washington to the smallest State branch, aid in smothering facts and giving life to fiction in order to ride on railroad passes.
Our speakers, in accepting the gage of battle laid down by plutocracy in the late campaign, must neither ask nor accept favors of our enemies. We must defy them. Rather than ride on railroad passes we should walk.
We should learn from that venerable Cuban patriot, Maximo Gomez, who, when offered a sop by the brutal despotism against which he was fighting, although it was presented to him by those two eminent yet despicable toadies of European tyranny, Messrs. Cleveland and Olney, refused point blank to consider their degrading propositions and answered: "We do not accept favors of Spain. We hate Spain. Our business is not to ask favors but to fight."