“Dozens there are who cannot leave Homestead or its vicinity. They are under heavy bonds to appear in the Allegheny County courts on charges of murder, treason, and riot. To stay means starvation, because here they will find little or no work. To go means to be sent to jail, because bondsmen are fearful and do not relish the idea of forfeiting thousands of dollars.
“Most of the storekeepers in Homestead have ceased to give the locked-out men credit. If they did, it would mean bankruptcy. All of them are already creditors for hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars, with poor prospects of getting any of it back for months, possibly years.
“The last strike benefits that will be paid by the Amalgamated Association have been received by the idle men. Right here be it said that these benefits were by no means as reported during the strike. Not one-half of the men got $4 a week, and the majority received about $2 a week.
“The Homestead steel-workers and their families are in need of almost everything that goes to make life comfortable. All need clothing more or less. One man I met to-day was trying to prevent the biting wind from sweeping a well-ventilated straw hat from his head.
“Then there is fuel. There is hardly a street or roadway in Homestead on which there did not stand a house or several of them in which the cold stoves made the temperature more frigid by contrast. Those families that did burn coal or wood did so through the kindness of the neighbors or the good-will of the fuel merchant.
PLAYING THANKSGIVING.
“In walking through Homestead to-day I passed a vacant lot on Fourth avenue, in which a fire was burning. The fuel consisted of logs dragged from the river. Surrounding the fire were ill-clad boys and girls. They were keeping warm and roasting potatoes. One of the boys told me that ‘Maw hadn’t much for dinner at home, and we are playing Thanksgiving.’
“This was their feast; they were children of the strikers, who lived in a clump of shanties near by.”
Playing Thanksgiving! God of justice! look down upon such a picture. Playing at praying! Absolutely making a game and jest of thanking Thee! So cynical has become the hearts of even these children, caused by the oppression and injustice of the oppressor, that they would make a game, a jest, of giving thanks to the Giver of all good things! because the good things were on the tables of Carnegie, Frick, Webb, and others, while they, somebody’s children—poor, “Common People’s” children, perhaps—were cold, ragged, and hungry; making a feast of half-burned potatoes, veritably, in a spirit of irony. So hard and desolate has become the destiny of the poor of our land that the children cease to be natural, loving, gentle, and sincere, and have become ironical, sarcastic, holding so lightly the respect due to the God of all men, that they make a jest of the day consecrated to rendering thanks to the Giver of all good things of life!
A picture like this, for which the sham aristocrats are absolutely responsible, does more to arouse a feelings of socialism and anarchism in the breasts of even the best citizens, than all the ravings of crazed nihilistic leaders. Stop such scenes now! Socialism and anarchism have no foothold in America. Don’t allow these dangerous “isms” to form an entering wedge. Such scenes as those poor children, playing Thanksgiving, are the greatest allies of the socialists and anarchists.
The gentleman (?) known as Ollie Teall should receive, at the hands of the disciples of anarchy and socialism, a medal for his valuable services in attempting to present a picture to the delectation of the assembled “Four Hundred,” of the children of the poor feeding (as animals, poor creatures!) in Madison Square Garden, last Christmas. This man, Teall, may have no qualities to recommend him other than this, that he is a superlative example of those who would create a state of anarchy in this country.
It was his proposition, so it appears from the newspapers, to make a kind of horse-show at Madison Square Garden, wherein the children of the poor should perform the part of the horses, the animals. It was proposed to sell boxes to the rich, that they might sit around and behold the exhibition of the animals! To the originators of this novel exhibition is due the thanks and praises of the anarchists, who have sought a haven here, for they played into the hands held by the anarchists with wonderful precision.
We must all respect the courage and manliness of one man who, justly conceiving his duty as a teacher of the doctrine of his Master, arose and protested. Yes, and he was worth more than a brigade of soldiers in quieting the wrath of the people, the Rev. Dr. Rainsford, of St. George Episcopal church, in Brooklyn, and let his name be remembered for his courage in denouncing the most damnable exhibition of the tendency of the “Four Hundred” of New York. The name of the Rev. Dr. Rainsford, of the St. George Episcopal Church, will ever be remembered by the poor as that of a man, a Christian, an American, and a gentleman. Vigorous was his denunciation of the spectacular exhibition of the feeding of the poor like so many cattle.
Yes, fair “Four Hundred,” as the nobles of France told the peasants to “eat grass” and were amused at their attempts of the performance, so you would feed a lot of poor children in Madison Square Garden, and take stalls and boxes to look on at the peculiar performances of the hungry eating! You know that each child is but the coming American man or woman. You would make a Roman holiday to exhibit the necessities of the People, who are your rulers. Delightful entertainment for the exclusive “Four Hundred,”—to sit around with their many millions and gaze at the ravenous appetites exhibited by the children of the poor. It was a holiday like the holidays in Rome, when the nobles assembled to see the persecuted Christians torn and mangled by every form of beast that, by research, could be brought to the Roman arena. Dr. Rainsford, thou art “a man for a’ that.”
Do you wonder, millionaires, why the people whose children you would exhibit to create a carnival for you, did not vote with you November 8, 1892? Of the purchasers of the boxes at Madison Square Garden for this unique performance, ninety per cent. were Republicans. Shades of Abraham Lincoln, look down and see the strong oak of thy creation benumbed by this parasite entwined around it! Imagine the creator, the originator, the father of the Republican party, this high priest in the hearts of the “Common People,” Abraham Lincoln, at such a scene. He would have been down with the children. In his loving arms he would have held the children of the poor. And these “Four Hundred,” a little better than the “Common People,” would look on at the feeding of the “common folks,” and, from their assumed exalted position, view the performance gotten up by their money, and would have had a sensation of almost hunger aroused where abundance had produced satiety. The proposition to hold such an exhibition as the feeding of the poor children in Madison Square Garden was in itself an insult to every American citizen. Imagine, fair lady, as you loll in your carriage drawn by your high-priced bays on Fifth avenue, how pleasant it would be to have your little curled and perfumed darling, left at home under the watchful eye of some imported French bonne, exhibited as a freak in a dime museum. Think of the tears that should be shed on a mother’s bosom, being paraded before the public as an object of amusement. A child’s sorrows and its joys are as sacred as the law of God delivered to Moses on Sinai, for a child has more of God in it; and you would make of the children of the poor, and their wants, and needs, and appetites, a spectacle that you may pay so much money and see?
The lisped prayer of the child of the poor ascends to the throne of God as surely, though it proceed from a hovel or the gutter, as that from the downy couch of the ease of luxury in the palace on Fifth avenue. Do not the poor love their children with the same earnestness and fervor as the rich? Have you to learn this lesson anew? Need you wonder, you people who seem astonished at the result of election, why the mighty voice of the people should be raised against you? You who wonder why the party of you, “the respectable,” should have been so overwhelmingly defeated, recall to mind the contemplated carnival you would have held in Madison Square Garden, feeding like pigs, the children of the poor, and thank God that the volcano upon which in seeming security you rested found a vent without tossing you heavenward. There would have been rivers of blood instead of lava; the ballot of 1892 was your salvation.
Slumbering wrath was in the breasts of the people. One Robespierre or Danton would have set aflame this feeling, and the “Common People” only need a leader, an organizer who will teach them under form of law that their mighty voice is paramount, and the sham aristocracy will be crushed and annihilated, as was a better aristocracy in France in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Don’t let history repeat itself.