“When a man’s right to work is involved, I care not whether the man who hires him makes a profit or not. Life comes before profits. Work comes before life. I am for men.”
Not one word of which Mr. Wilson ever said. Mr. Wilson believes in profits first and life, if at all, afterward. He may not believe he does, but he does. That is what his attitude amounts to. He wants both profits and life if we can get them. But if either must fall, it must be life. Life must always fall when work falls. Mr. Wilson stands for absolutely nothing that will put the worker’s right to work before the capitalist’s greed for profits. Let him or any of his friends point out a word in his platform, or any of his public utterances, to the contrary. There is no such word, because it has never been spoken or written by Mr. Wilson or anybody who is back of him or in front of him.
More astounding do these facts become as we consider them. Here is a great nation, eager to earn its bread. Of the many millions who compose this nation, not one in ten ever has or ever will receive a profit upon anything. More than nine-tenths of our many millions are wage-laborers or farmers. Naturally, they care nothing about profits. If everybody were continuously employed at good wages, and the balance-sheets, at the end of the year, should show not one dollar left for dividends, nobody except the capitalists would shed a tear. So little does the working class really care about profits. So convinced is the working class that the right to work, together with the right to be protected from robbery, should come ahead of everything else. Yet this very working class that cares nothing about profits; that cares and needs to care so much about the continuous right to work; that cares and needs to care so much about the right to be protected from robbery—this very working class gave Mr. Wilson almost every vote he received!
Do the people of America know how to get what they want?
The people of America want the continuous right to work.
Mr. Wilson offers them fine phrases about the “rule of right”—phrases that Wall Street applauds because Wall Street knows such phrases mean the continued rule of wrong.
The people of America want the right to be protected from robbery, and Mr. Wilson offers them an anti-trust plank, in which they are solemnly assured that if they will only wait until Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Morgan and other similar gentlemen are in jail, they will be very happy.
Is it not absurd? Indeed, it is not. It is pitiful. It is pitiful that a people should so long have been kept in ignorance of both the nature of their social malady and its cure. Yet, how could they be otherwise than ignorant? They depend for such information upon their newspapers, magazines, public officials, and public speakers. Until recently, almost all of these sources were poisoned against the people. They were poisoned against the people because they were controlled, in one way or another, by the capitalist class. They are still almost all poisoned in the interest of the capitalist class. The truth about Socialism is carefully suppressed. The false is carefully put forward. Wrongs are admitted, but rights are not recognized. The people are robbed, yes—but who robs them? Why, the trusts and the high-tariff gentlemen, certainly. Therefore, if we lower the tariff and place the trust gentlemen in jail, we shall be happy.
Nobody seems moved to recall whether we were happy when the tariff was low and there were no trusts.
Nobody seems to recall that the working class has never been happy; that it has always been the prey of a master class which has resorted first to one method and then to another to plunder. In fact, nobody but Socialists seems to do any serious thinking until his favorite “radical” President has passed into history without doing the slightest thing to alleviate poverty.