Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs

by Eugene V. Debs

If any of you feel that you are better than others because you wear better clothes or live in better houses or go in what you think is "better society," it is because your young minds and hearts have been tainted by wrong example and wrong education. It is this wicked feeling that corrupts the conscience and hardens the heart and begets the envy and hate of our fellow-beings, instead of their love and good will.

When that best friend the children ever had on earth said, "Suffer little children and forbid them not, to come unto me; for such is the kingdom of heaven" he meant all children, poor and rich, but especially the poor. He loved and pitied them because of their poverty and suffering.

He himself had been born in a manger and when he was grown up he said sorrowfully that "he had not where to lay his head." He did not despise little children because they were poor and neglected and shabbily dressed but he loved them all the more; and as he looked down upon them his heart melted with compassion and the tears of tenderness filled his eyes; and then he became grave and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as he thought of those who sat in rich church pews and piously thanked the Lord that they were not as other people. He denounced them as hypocrites for pretending to be religious while they robbed the poor and turned the little children into the street to suffer hunger and fall into evil ways.

Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the suffering poor heard with gladness the message of the Lowly Nazarene and since he was moved to tears by the sight of the little children of the street, but the world has not yet learned the meaning of his tender and touching words, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." If he were to walk the streets of New York or Chicago, or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities where the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves—as he once walked the streets of Jerusalem—he would grow sick at heart as he saw the little ones he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to monstrous machines and slowly put to death to swell the profits of the greedy mill owners who sit in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the pharisees he scourged without mercy twenty centuries ago.

The children of the working people have always been poor because the world has never been just. For ages and ages those who have builded the houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun the wool, woven the cloth, supplied the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and furnished the homes we live in, have been the poor and despised, while those who profited by their labor and consumed the good things they produced, have been the rich and respectable.

Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered the poverty of his class and when he grew up it was not the rich and respectable, but the poor and despised who loved him, and opened their arms to receive him, and heard gladly his tender and comforting ministrations. He was one of them in poverty and suffering and in all his loving and self-denying life he never forgot them. Had he deserted the poor from whom he sprang, had he gone over to the rich as their preacher, or their judge, or their lawyer or teacher or scribe—as so many of his pretended followers have done and are still doing—he never would have been crucified, nor would the world today know that he had ever lived.

It was because, and only because, Jesus loved and served the poor and rebuked the rich who robbed them, and threatened to array them against their rich despoilers, that he was condemned to die and that the cruel nails were driven into his hands and feet on the cross at Calvary.

Jesus taught that the earth and the air and the sea and sky and all the beauty and fulness thereof were for all the children of men; that they should all equally enjoy the riches of nature and dwell together in peace, bear one another's burdens and love one another, and that is what socialism teaches and why the rich thieves who have laid hold of the earth and its bounties would crucify the socialists as those other robbers of the poor crucified Jesus two thousand years ago.

Now let us see what message the Socialist party has for the children and why all children should be socialists and help to speed the day when the brotherhood of socialism shall prevail throughout the earth.

But first let me say that the Socialist party has reason to know that the children have great influence when they become interested in a given work and set their hearts on doing that work. The Socialist party knows better than to ignore the children as if they were china dolls or stuffed teddy bears, as all the other parties do, for it knows by what they have already done that when once they get fairly started they will make the air hum like swarms of bees with the glad tidings of socialism.