People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1893 — Our Pica. [ARTICLE]

Our Pica.

We cl®sed our previous number by a statement of the good effects of the previous age on the welfare of our people, which we will now summarize: “The people were out of debt,” had fire in their houses every day in the year when necessary,” “meat on their tables three times a day,” “better employed, better paid, better fed, better clothed and better housed than before,” and sixty seven per cent, of the nation’s wealth in the hands of the farmers. With less than forty years of the reign of capitalism, we find all reversed. 'According to Ex-senator John J. Ingall’s statement, we have ten millions of Americans that are not full fed one day out of three hundred and sixty-five. The state board of charities, of New York, report that ten thousand children perish annually of hunger in that state. The late Joe Howard is authority for the statement that one hundred thousand persons in Chicago and three hundred thousand in New York arise each morning without the means or knowing where they will get a breakfast. Census reports show nine millions of mortgages. John J, Ingalls says tiiat thirty-one thousand

persons own over half of the nation’s wealth, and that we have many thousands of millionaires. Dr. Joseph Cook, the eminent Boston divine, says, that two hundred and fifty thousand persons own seventy-five per cent, of all our wealth. In 1865 we had five hundred and twenty failures, in 1892 we had over fourteen thousand. In 1889, we had 3568 murders; in 1890, 4290; in 1891, 5998, and in 1892, 6791, an increase of over three thous' and in three years. Crimes of every character have had a like increase, so have the suicide and divorce records. The last census reports show that the inhabitants of Indiana, Illinois, lowa, Kansas, Nebraska. Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, by far the richest and most favored region of the continent, the region where is raised and grown nearly all our cattle, hogs, sheep and horses, -wheat, corn, oats, rye and barley, cotton and hemp, and where is manufactured ail our butter and cheese, are poorer by two per cent, than they were ten years ago, notwithstanding that the wealth increase of the nation has been enormous. Now what is it in our economic system that produces such inequalities and such disastrous results. It is the result of doing that which Lincoln warned his countrymen not tb do, ‘-the placing of capital above labor in the Structtfre of the government. Now see how it is done. Labor can earn only about two per cent., while the government grants to corporations the exercise of public functions or control of public necessities, with power to fix their own earnings, so that we find in a government that is founded on the principles of equal rights to all and special privileges to none, that the great body of the people earn nothing to two per cent, while the favored few gather in from eight to fifty per cent. Let us explain, furnishing money, a medium of exchange, is a function of government, and ought to be exercised by the government for the good of the whole people, but it is not. The government has farmed it out to corporations that have manipulated legislation that money loaned, earns from eight to twelve per cent while labor earns two or less. The transfer from point to point of persons, and property is a public necessity, and this has been turned over by the government to the transportation companies, with power to fix their earnings, which is about four per cent on their capitalization, and twelve per cent on actual investment, giving money invested in the transportation service a six fold advantage over labor. The transmission of intelligence is another public necessity, and the government wisely took charge of the postal service and gives us the most efficient service at cost, but it has unwisely turned over the telegraphic and telephone service to corporations, to be used as sources of profit, giving them power to fix rates, and they have made them so burdensome that money invested in these corporations have an earning power of from twenty to fifty fold greater than labor. These abstractors of the people’s earnings are known to our laws, have a legal existence, work in open day, steal openly, boldly, and in the face of all the people. In these we have hundreds of other impersonal things, which have no legal existence, which work in the dark, and are manipulated by the shrewdest men in our midst, they are the trust family. These combinations, though unknown to and unrecognized by our laws, are just as potent factors in abstracting wealth from the people as those established by law. Here is “capital above labor in the structure of the government,”

the reign of capitalism, and as a result, millionaires and paupers, great wealth and great poverty, failures in business as never before, all kinds of crimes on the increase, divorces and sub cides as never before, men and women going craiy and children starving as never before, and all this during a period in which our statistics show thefs was thirty per cent less war, twenty per cent less pestilence* and farm crops is twelve per cent above the general average. We have how reached the interesting part of our subject, the point that will bring out the measures of the different parties that they propose for the correction of these evils, and we ask the special attention of our Democratic and Republican friends at this point. (To bo continued.)