This delusion cannot last, the time is now ripe for action. The masses must protect their interests if they would be free to enjoy the rights awarded them by the constitution.
The American Railway Union has proven the greatest blessing to the working people of this country. It has torn the mask of hypocrisy from these plutocratic professional politicians and revealed them in their true character.
The working people can no longer afford to be deluded by these old parties. They must unite and arise in one grand body and assert their independence as freemen and intelligent American citizens, and by their ballot take possession of this government of the capitalist, by the capitalist, and for the capitalist, and again make it a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
President Debs struck the keynote when he said that it was better for the government to own the railroads than for the railroads to own the government. Our only chance to succeed in obtaining our constitutional rights is by legislation and this we must create ourselves. We never can obtain it through either of the old parties and therefore must ally ourselves to a new party.
It is time that every intelligent workingman would think and act for himself. All semblance to aristocracy in labor must be eliminated, the skillful artisan has no more guarantee of just treatment than has the common laborer.
Every workingman should endorse the Peoples party. They must unite as one, in one common cause and strike for their rights with the only effective weapon left to them, "the ballot."
This strike has proven beyond doubt that the protective features in railroad organizations, and other organizations as well, is a dead letter as long as the federal courts are controlled by capital. Unless this is remedied, all labor organizations might just as well send in their charters and cease to exist.
I cannot believe that the American people will allow this state of affairs to continue. There are many men in public life to-day whose motives are pure and unselfish. Such men as Governors Altgeld, Waite, Penoyer; Congressmen Kyle, Pfeffer, McGann, Pence, Goldgier; Mayor Hopkins of Chicago, Sydney M. Owens, Clarence S. Darrow, Judge Tully, Gen. Weaver, W. W. Erwin and hosts of others, who publicly espoused the cause of the strikers.
The subsidized press, the most dangerous enemy of labor, and next to the courts, the most effective weapon in the hands of the railroad corporations in destroying the rights of labor and defeating the strikers, has again fallen in line as the champions of the laboring classes. With hypocritical pretensions to sympathy for the workingman, the organs of the two great political parties have begun to knife each other, and unite in denouncing the People's party, all for the benefit of the poor farmer, railroader, mechanic and laborer. They are loud in their denunciation of trusts, combines and corporations of all kinds that have a tendency to crush the poor working people. Their great and generous hearts are overflowing with sympathy for the poor oppressed toiler.
The question is, can the American workingman be again deluded by these organs of organized capital?