Some gentlemen are satisfied with these facts, but Socialists are not. They are preaching discontent. Should we not be worthy of your scorn and contempt if we did not preach discontent? If such discontent is wrong, contentment with the facts against which Socialists cry out must be right. Who has both the candor and the effrontery to say that contentment with such facts is right? Should we be contented with the woolen mill owners of New England who, fattening upon high Republican tariffs, starve men, women and little children with low wages? Should we be contented with the cotton-mill owners of the South, who, under the protection of Democratic state administrations, fill both their mills and the graveyards with little children? Should we be contented with a world in which a few own everything and the rest do everything—a world in which the worker is but a fleeing fugitive from inevitable fate, owning neither his job, nor the roof over his head?
The cry of this wronged worker has come down through the ages, but never was his hold upon the means of life so slight as it is to-day.
“Every creature has a home home—
But thou, oh workingman, hast none.”
So Shelley sang before machinery came. And, oh, the truth of it—the truth of it still! And the pity of it! In these days the inexcusability of it! Yet when we Socialists cry out against it—when we try to awaken the workingman to a realization that a new world was born when the steam engine was born, and that this new world may be and should be for him—we are rebuked by the capitalists because we are “preaching discontent.”
Of course we are preaching discontent. We are going to preach it, if present conditions persist, so long as we have breath with which to preach. We respectfully decline to permit capitalists, as such, to tell us what we may or may not preach. We preach what we please without their leave. They preach what they please without our leave. At intervals, they preach a good deal, through some of the magazines, about religion. Big capital is behind the “Men and Religion Forward” movement, and some other similar movements. These gentlemen who are living in luxury off what they take from us tell us to take religion from them in the magazines and be happy. “In the sweet by and by” we are to get our own, while they get their own now. Socialists are willing to stand in on all of the sweet by and by they can get by and by, but they are also determined to make a prodigious fight for the sweet here and now.
Socialists regard poverty, in this day, as nothing less than a scandal. Before the age of machinery there was reason for some poverty. Now there is none. We can make all the wealth we need and more. We could cut our workday in two and still make all we need. Yet poverty is scourging the world as wars never scourged it. In Germany, England, the United States—wherever capitalism has reached a high state of development—men, women and children are pursued to the grave by poverty or the fear of poverty.
Some gentlemen believe this is all right. They believe this is as it should be. With such gentlemen Socialists do not hope to make headway. With such gentlemen Socialists do not seek to make headway. They belong to the rich class who are grafting off the working class. From them Socialists expect no quarter, nor will they give any. The conflict must go to a finish. There will be no surrender upon the part of the Socialists. The Socialist party will never fuse with any of their parties. If the Socialist party were standing still, instead of going ahead, it would stand still alone for a thousand years before it would go a foot with any capitalist party.
Make no mistake. This is all true. You saw the Greenback party wither and blow away. You saw the Populist party swallowed by the Democratic party. But you will never see the Socialist party wither, nor will you ever see it swallowed. Its members are not composed of material that withers or fuses. Right or wrong, they are actuated by the highest ideal that can move a human being—the ideal of human justice. And they are going down the line on their ideal, regardless of the length of the line or of the obstructions that may be placed in their way. After a man has seen Socialism, he can never thereafter defend capitalism. That is to say, he cannot if he is honest. Two or three out of a million are not. Such persons, not infrequently, are hired by capitalists to “expose” Socialism.
But while Socialists do not hope to make any progress among the rich, they do hope to make progress among the working class. Again, I must explain that Socialists do not consider the working class to be exclusively composed of those who wear overalls. Socialists include in the working class all of those who do useful labor. It matters not whether such labor be done by the digger in the ditch or by the general superintendent of a railroad. Socialists place all of those who do useful labor in the working class. Workers are creators of wealth. Creators of wealth differ from capitalists in this: workers make; capitalists take. Capitalists are profit-seekers. The small merchant takes a profit, but it is not the kind of a profit that the big capitalist takes. The small merchant’s profit represents only his labor, and is, therefore, really wages. The big capitalist’s profits represent no sort of labor. It is such profits that set capitalists and workers at war, because the profits come out of the workers. Socialists call this war the class struggle.