Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1886 — KNIGHTS OF LABOR. [ARTICLE]

KNIGHTS OF LABOR.

An Appeal to Laboring Men—Jay Gould Denounced in Strong Language. The Joint Executive Board of District Assemblies 101, 93, and 17 of the Knights of Labor have issued at St. Louis an earnest appeal to their brother-laborers for support in their contest with Jay’ Gould. The text of the address is as follows: To the Workingmen of the World: Friends and brothers, hear us, for we plead for our rights ! Men of equity, look upon us, for we struggle against giants of wrong! Mad witli the frenzy of pride and self-adulation,begotten as it is of the success of outrage and infamy, there stands before us a giant of aggre ated and incorporated wealth, every dollar of which is built upon blood, injustice, and outrage. That giant of corporate wealth has centralized its power in and is impersonated by the eager fiend who gloats as he grinds the life out of bis fellowmen, and grimaces and dances as they writhe upon his instruments of torture. Oh, ye working men of America, who love your liberty and your native laud : ye great creators of wealth, who stand as the foundation of all national good, look upon your brothers to-day. Gould, the giant fiend, Gould, the money monarch, is dancing, as he claims, over the grave of our order—over the ruin of our homes and the blight of our lives. Before him the world has smiled in beauty, but his wake is a graveyard of hopes, a cyclone’s path of devastation and death. Our strong arms have grown weary in building ths tower of strength, and yet he bids us build on or die. Our young lives have grown gray too soon beneath the strain of unrequited, constant toil. Our loved ones at home are hollow-cheeked and pale with long and weary waiting for better days to come. Nay, more than this, the graveyards are hiding his victims from our longing eyes. Brother workmen, this monster fiend has compelled some of us to toil in cold and rain for five and fifty cents a day. Others have been compelled to yield their time to him for seventeen and thirty-six weary hours for the pittance of nine hours’ pay. Others who have dared to assert their manhood and rebel against his tyranny are black-listed and boycotted all overtho land. He has made solemn compacts with the highest authority in our order, and then has basely refused to fulfill his pledge. He lives under and enjoys all the benefits of our republican form of government, and yet advocates and perpetuates tho most debasing form of white slavery. He robs the rich and poor, the high and low, with ruthless hand, and then appeals to corrupt and purchased courts to help him take our little hemes away. He breaks our limbs and maims our bodies and then demands that we shall release him from every claim for damages or be black-listed forever. He goes to our grocers and persuades them not to give us credit, because we refuse to be ground in his human mill. He turns upon us a horde of lawless thugs, who shoot among our wives and children with deady intent, and then he howls for Government help when he gets his pay in like coin. Fellow workmen, Gould must be overthrown. IJis giant power must be broken, or you and I nfust be slaves forever. The Knights of Labor alone have dared to be a David to this Goliath. The battle is not for to-day—tho battle is not for to-morrow—but for the trooping generations in the coming agos of the world, f■ r our children, and our children’s children. 'Tis the great question of the age. Shall we, in the coming ages, be a nation of freemen or a nation of slaves? The question must be decided now. The chains are already forged that are to bind us. Shall wo wait until they are ru’eted upon our limbs? Nay, God forbid. Workmen cf the world, marshal yourselves upon the battlefield! Workmen of every trade and films, on to the fray! Gould and , his m nopolies must go down, or your children must be slaves. Think of the little olive plants around your hearthstones that will bo blighted by his curse. Think of the little home he is seeking to rob you of. Think of the wife from whose eyes he has wrung floods of tears, and from whoso heart ho has tortured drops of blood. Who can look calmly upon his perfidy, his outrage, and his crime? For he has sought to incite felony among our rank and file; he has bought the perfidy of vile men to entrap tho unwary that he might stain our fair name and gloat over cur misfortunes. Once for all, fellow-workmen, arouse. Let every hand that toils bo lifted to Heaven and swear by Hirn that liveth forever that these outrages must cease. Let every heart and brow be turned toward our common foe, and let <no man grow weary until, like Goliath, our giant is dead at our feet. Executive Boaiids D. a. 101, 93,17. Mr. Sydney Dillon, of New York, has been elected President of the Grant Monument Association, in place of Chester A. Arthur, resigned. Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold will both visit America again at a near date. Each announces that he will not lecture.