A protest had been made to the New York Assembly claiming that "the fundamental principles of representative government" would be violated in refusing to seat the five suspended Socialist Assemblymen. But it is plain that men controlled in office by such a secret device would not really represent their districts, nor those who voted for them, but only the members of the dues-paying locals or the executive committee holding their resignations; and in cases of some of the suspended Socialists it was said that of the votes they received not one in ten nor even one in twenty had been cast by a dues-paying Socialist. At the trial Morris Hillquit, of counsel for the defense, tried to break the force of this damaging evidence by getting in testimony "that this provision of the State Constitution has been a dead letter since its inception." (New York "Evening Sun," January 22, 1920.) But this hypocrisy was thoroughly exposed by the testimony given on January 28, 1920, by George R. Lunn, Democratic Mayor of Schenectady, who had been a candidate for that office three times as a Socialist. The following summary of his testimony is from the "New York Sun" of January 29, 1920:
"The outstanding features of Mayor's Lunn's testimony were his statements that on the night before election in 1911, when he was running for Mayor on the Socialist ticket, two members of the party went to his home and presented a blank resignation for his signature. This, he said, he signed in order to 'avoid a squabble,' although he considered it 'child's play and illegal.' He refused, he said, in 1913 to sign the required resignation before the election. This time he was defeated. In 1915, he testified, he was again nominated and elected, after repudiating that part of the Socialist Constitution which bound him to follow the dictates of his party leaders. The result, he said, was that the State organization revoked the charter of the entire Schenectady local in order to discipline him."
In a ninety-page brief, submitted to members of the New York Assembly on February 12, 1920, by counsel of the Judiciary Committee, after five weeks of investigating the qualifications of the suspended Socialist Assemblymen, Attorney-General Charles D. Newton and the other signers said that the five Socialists by "their promise ... to place their resignations in the hands of the dues-paying members ... abdicated their functions as Assemblymen and disqualified themselves from taking the oath of office and rendered their oath false." ("New York Times," February 13, 1920.)
The same brief, according to the "Times" of above date, says:
"A decent regard for the Assembly as the popular representative house of the State requires that these five Assemblymen be excluded from their seats. They have taken a false oath to secure seats which they cannot occupy as gentlemen, patriots, loyal citizens or Assemblymen. They come here under the false pretense of being loyal to their Government, when in fact they are really citizens of the Internationale, and desire above all things the destruction of this Government."
The Socialist Party of America is also denounced by the same brief on three other counts, which the "New York Times" of February 13, 1920, thus summarizes:
"The Socialist Party is a revolutionary party, having the single purpose of destroying our institutions and Government, which they abhor, and substituting the Russian Soviet Government or the proletariat Government instead to be controlled by themselves. This appears from their platforms and propaganda.
"The Socialist Party is not a national party, like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, whose aim is to conserve and preserve the nation. The Socialist Party is an anti-national party whose allegiance is given to the Internationale and not to the United States, whose Government and institutions it would destroy.
"'Mass action' and the 'general strike' are advocated and urged by the Socialist Party as a part of the plan to bring about conditions favorable to revolution, and as instruments of revolution, and not to remedy industrial evils. The revolutionary purpose and non-political character of such acts make them treasonable, and, whether criminal or not in the absence of such purpose, treasonable with it."
This last point, the attitude of the Socialist Party of America toward "mass action" and the "general strike," is of the utmost importance as evidence that the Socialist Party stands for seizure of the Government of the United States by revolutionary violence; for the reader will recall abundant proof in this book that it is precisely by means of "mass action" and the "general strike" that both of the Communist parties in this country expect to destroy our existing Government, these "instruments of revolution" being also the very ones recommended by the Communist manifesto of the Third (Moscow) International, and the ones employed by the I. W. W. in its industrial battles.
The Moscow Manifesto, as cited from the copy of it in the "New York Call" of July 24, 1919, gives the Third International's plan of action for world revolution in a nutshell:
"The revolutionary epoch demands that the proletariat should employ such fighting methods as will concentrate its entire energy, viz., the method of mass action, and lead to its logical consequence--the direct collision with the capitalist state machine in an open combat. All other methods, e.g., revolutionary use of bourgeois parliamentarism will in the revolution have only a subordinate value."