It is by the prejudiced and purchased testimony of such men as these that the monopolies of the country try to prove that empty stomachs are full, bare backs clothed, and that a constantly growing and appreciating dollar is an honest one. It is with such untrustworthy witnesses that they attempt to prove to us that the men who have stolen our property are more honest than we.
The teacher witness for the defense may be more "respectable and learned" than the witnesses of the prosecution, but when we see that the universities are built and professors' salaries paid from the booty wrung from the people—in other words, "that the teacher rides to court on one of the very horses taken from Farmer Hayseed's stable" it does not take us long to decide that this testimony is misleading and false.
Therefore, the workmen, merchants and tax-payers who compose the jury, which is to hand in its verdict in 1900, must refuse to consider the testimony of these collegiate, pulpit and editorial witnesses, who are proven to be sharers in the tribute forced from the people by that gigantic and almost sublime system of world exploitation carried on scientifically and persistently by those powerful "trusts" which have cornered the world's gold and monopolized nearly every necessity and comfort of life.
The pivotal point in this campaign is the question of the reliability of witnesses. Not only do opinions differ, but the history, statistics, and facts, advanced by the defenders of monopoly and the gold standard contradict the history, statistics and facts discovered by the champions of the people. There can be only one truthful history of the crime of seventy-three, and the seventy-three other crimes of the shirkers against the workers. Figures do not lie. Only one set of statistics, as to the rise in the value of the gold dollar, can possibly be correct. Facts do not conflict. When men contradict each other upon a question of fact, one side is wrong.
Whose history and statistics are we to believe in this campaign?
Are we to believe the interested, prejudiced, purchased witnesses of corrupt wealth, or are we to believe the testimony of the witnesses of the people—men who have sacrificed and suffered in order to tell the truth.
It is because the classes who have the advantages of culture and leisure, always care more for their own comforts than for truth and justice, that these problems, my reader, must be worked out, by the millions made of the same identical common mud that you and I are.
As William E. Gladstone has said, all the reforms brought about in England during the last century, and of which all her citizens now boast, "were at first merely impossible ideals in the minds of the ignorant and fanatical poor," and were carried through by the working people "in opposition to the cultured and leisure class."
It is because those who possess the power and the learning to lead mankind aright have always proven recreant to the trust imposed upon them, that God, in directing the course of human history, has invariably swept this class aside and accepted as His instruments the poor, the simple-minded and uncorrupted. From the birth of the primitive church among the poor fishermen of Galilee to the abolition of chattel slavery by an agitation instituted by social and political outcasts, the hand of God moving in the world has invariably brushed aside the rich and powerful with the intellectual parasites that swarm about them, and in building nations, religions, or instituting great reforms, has uniformly chosen the normal, healthy material at the base of society still uncorrupted by luxury.