You and I and all of us are comrades; we are brothers and sisters. Let us get into perfect unity with each other and stand upon one common basis of equality with the high aspiration to emancipate ourselves from the degrading thraldoms of past ages. Let us as workers organize industrially so that we may be fitted to take control of all industry. We will then relieve the Rockefellers, the Garys and the Sinclairs of their sinecure jobs; we will give them an opportunity to make an honest living for the first time in their lives. (Applause.) We will take full possession of industry. Every man and woman will have the inalienable right to work with the most improved machinery. The machine will be the only slave—no body to starve, no back to scar, no heart to break, no soul to crush. The machine will work for us and we shall then have leisure time enough to cultivate the graces of life; to know and love and serve each other, and to begin the march to the first real civilization the world has ever known. The liberating hour is soon to strike—and if you are true to yourselves you can speed the day of its coming. Triumphant International Socialism will then proclaim the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind. At last that inspiring vision of Ingersoll will have been realized:
“I can see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth. I can see a world without a slave; man at last is free. Nature’s forces have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame and all the secret, subtle forces of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race. I can see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music’s myriad voices thrilled while lips are rich with words of love and truth. A world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns—upon which the shadow of the cruel gallows no longer falls. I can see a world where Labor reaps its full reward and work and worth go hand in hand. I can see a race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair, the married harmony of form and function, and as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth, while over all in the great dome there shines the eternal star of hope.”
And in that crowning hour men and women can walk the highlands side by side and enjoy the enrapturing vision of a land without a master, a land without a slave; a land radiant and resplendent in the perfect triumph of the brotherhood of all mankind.
And now from my heart I thank you for the patience and the kindly interest with which you have listened to me. I thank you for having been here to-night and for giving me the privilege of appearing upon the platform with these comrades that I know you are going to stand by on Tuesday next—Comrade Lucille Randolph, your candidate, whom I would be so proud to vote for it if I could, and Comrade Ollendorff, who incarnate the true spirit, the high principles and the lofty ideals of the Socialist movement. They are your candidates and my candidates, and if you are true to them as they have been to you, they will be triumphantly elected next week. And now good-night and a thousand thanks and good wishes! (Great and prolonged applause.)
Read The Messenger—the only radical Negro publication in America.
Follow its fearless, scientific, class-struggle interpretation of the Negro Problem, together with other modern economic, political and social questions.
The report of the U. S. Department of Justice to the U. S. Senate says: