We believe in the eight-hour day for labor in Government works, in factories, workshops and mines.
We believe in the regulation of child labor in factories, workshops and mines, to the end that children of tender age shall not be made to slave out their lives in order that corporations shall have cheap labor and large dividends.
Saturn, the old fable tells us, devoured his own children: Christian civilization does the same thing.
As long as we permit children of ten and twelve years to labor from eight to fourteen hours per day in our mills and workshops modern civilization is another Saturn. We are devouring our own children.
We believe that the land, the common heritage of all the people, should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, or by alien ownership, but that legislation should be so shaped as to encourage to its full extent the right of every man born into this world to till the soil and make a living out of it.
And one of the principal reasons why we favor a graduated income tax, which increases by geometrical progression as the income increases, is that it automatically keeps the wealth of the country in a constant sort of redistribution, and acts as a check upon that excessive accumulation which is recognized by all intelligent thinkers as one of the most serious perils and intolerable evils of our present era of class legislation.
These are the most important articles of our faith. It is for these principles that we have struggled ever since 1891—with never a doubt that they were sound, that they would constantly gain converts, that they would ultimately win.
When I founded the People’s Party Paper in Atlanta, Ga., in 1891 (which paper lived and toiled for these principles until the fusion movement of 1896 killed it, as it killed twelve hundred other Populist papers), I announced the same purpose which I announced in the prospectus of this magazine.
My faith was as firm in 1891 as it is today, and I had as little doubt then as I have now that Populism is just as sure to triumph as the sun is to continue to warm the world.