Your common sense will tell you that you have a right to live, whether anybody be thereby made richer.
And, when that time comes, you will be in no mood to listen to the remedies of “radical” gentlemen like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson.
You will no longer want wage slavery “regulated”—you will want it destroyed.
You will call for another Lincoln to destroy wage slavery as the first Lincoln destroyed chattel slavery.
And your call will be answered, because you will answer it yourself.
You will place in office not only a man but men who will work your will. You will know what you want and you will get it, because you will know how to get it.
The reason you have never gotten what you want is because you have never known how to get it. You want the right to work without being robbed. You do not seem to realize that it is the existence of the capitalist system that causes you to be robbed. In an indefinite sort of way you seem to believe that it is possible for a small class of bondholders and share-holders to live in luxury without working and, at the same time, take nothing from the product of your labor. If dividends grew upon one tree and wages upon another, your belief would be justified. But, inasmuch as dividends and wages grow upon the same tree, your belief is not justified. Both are the products of your labor. If the bondholders were to take everything you produce, you would have nothing. If you were to take everything you produce, the bondholders and other capitalists would have nothing.
Such being the fact, what possible benefit can come to the American people through the election to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson? Mr. Wilson is not opposed to the capitalist system. He believes one class should own all of the great industries of the country while another class toils in them. Believing thus, he necessarily believes no man has a right to work, however sore may be his need, unless some other man thinks he can see a profit in hiring him. If he did not so believe, he would not have stood for the Presidency upon the Democratic platform. The importance of securing to each individual the right to work would have prevented him from so standing. He would have proclaimed to the country an amendment to the platform in some such words as these:
“If you elect me President, I will urge the passage of a law that will make it a felony for any capitalist to refuse work at wages representing the market price of the product, except at such times as his steel plants, railroads, or other industries, are running at full capacity.”
He would also have added: