At the time this remarkable paper was written and published in the Appeal to Reason, two years ago, “fool dinner pail” prosperity flourished like a green bay tree.
One there was who, wanting an audience for his voice of warning, yet sounded with his pen a loud alarm. Debs had in the beginning of his life’s labors allowed the railroad companies to coin his brawn and his brain in their service, but had since devoted himself, with an earnestness sublime, to the study of the condition of wage workers in general and railroad employes in particular. From his hard experience and many years of study he was in position to know, and he did know. Whatever else has been said, no detractor has questioned his honesty and the fine fiber of his magnificent manhood.
Yet, his warning went unheeded. The so-called “labor press,” as well as the capitalist papers, decried him as an alarmist and a mischiefmaker.
How swiftly and how accurately has his forecast been verified! We see the system he has arraigned trembling and crashing, we hear the hunger tread of the unemployed, and the tragedy he foretold is in the “rat-tat-tat” on a million kitchen doors.
Industry is confounded and labor is confused. By the statement of the railroad companies themselves a half million railroad workers alone are out of employment.
Choked into despair, it is to be hoped that Debs’ mighty appeal to them, which is here republished, will now be read and assimilated by railroad men and the way of Socialism learned.
BRUCE ROGERS.
Girard, Kansas, March, 1908.
This appeal is made particularly to railway employes, among whom I began my career as a wage-worker, with whom I spent twenty-seven consecutive years—the complete span of my young manhood—as co-employe, labor organizer and union official, and for whom I shall have an affectionate regard of peculiar tenderness that will end only with my days.