Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 August 1877 — THE LABOR QUESTION. [ARTICLE]

THE LABOR QUESTION.

The Coming Revolution—Confessions of a Communist. An “ Internationalist ” has addressed the following communication to the Philadelphia Times: “Your recent articles on the labor question show that you are utterly ignorant of the great movement—world-wide —which labor is making to emancipate itself, and you are no prophet and entirely deaf to the sullen murmur of the masses when you say that labor strikes are over in this land. The labor movement is communistic, but it must not be confounded with the uprising in Paris in 1871. That was a struggle simply for local self-government; it was Paris against Versailles, republicanism against absolutism, and it necessarily attracted to its ranks the flower of France, its brain and sinew, the men who have made that nation prosperous and enabled it to wipe out its crushing load of debt to Germany. That movement for local selfgovernment did assume genuine communistic phases, and in doing so gave the world the grandest example since ’93, when Paris and a mob and Danton, Marat and Robespierre took up the cause of civilization and of freedom. It abolished all aristocracy in Paris ; it eradicated the blighting evil of prostitution, legalized under your stable Government, the empire which was * peaceit made the streets of Paris as safe at midnight as midday; it destroyed priestcraft and replaced religion with morals, and had it not been crushed it would have revolutionized France, and, to paraphrase Bulwer, from the decrepit and feudal ashes <>f the past would have risen a structure,dedicated to liberty and progress, which would have been the fairest the sun ever shone on. Look at its last victims, and, from their character, moral and religious, judge its purposes. Rossel, the Scotch Presbyterian, who died with the Lord’s prayer on his lips; Cremieux, the Jew, and Arnault, the free-thinker, who coolly walked to death smoking a cigarette. These men were heroes, martyrs in a cause which is not lost, but forever gaining ground. “ And now for what the labor movement intends to do. All through the world there is a secret, all-powerful, ceaseless organization, which cannot be suppressed. Two Emperors and any number of Kings have tried to stifle it, but, like Banquo’s ghost (and it represents the ghost of starving millions), it will not down. It is pledged t<»the abolitibn of wealth, to the elevation of the lowly. It wars against the strong and would protect the weak. Starting twenty years ago in Germany, the creation of Karl Marx, it now numbers 4,000,000 members, as large as all the standing armies of the world, and it is resolved to see justice done even though the heavens fall.”