People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 February 1895 — THE LABOR MOVEMENT. [ARTICLE]

THE LABOR MOVEMENT.

Wendell Phillips Said That the Laborers Demand Immediate Action. Now here I take issue with the best critic the labor movement has met; I refer to the Rev. Samuel Johnson of Salem, one of the thinkers who has spread out before the people his objections to the labor movement of this country. His first objection is that we will hurry into politics. Well’ now our answer to him and to the score of other scholars who have been criticising us’ is this: Gentlemen’ we see the benefit of going into politics. If we had not rushed into politics’ had not taken. Massachusetts by the four corners and shaken her, you would never have written your ‘ criticisms. We rush into politics because politics is the safety valve. We would discuss as Well as you, if you would only give us bread and houses, fair play and leisure, and opportunities to travel. We could sit arid discus the question for fifty years. It’s a very easy thing to discuss, for a gentleman in his study, with no anxiety about to-morrow. Why the. ladies and gentlemen of the reign of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., in France, seated in gilded saloons and on Persian carpets, surrounded with luxury, with the products of India, and the curious manufactures of ingenious Lyons and Rheims, discussed the rights of man, and balanced them in dainty phrases, and expressed them in such quaint generalisations that Jefferson borrowed the Declaration of Independence from their hands. There they sat, balancing and discussing sweetly, making out new theories, and daily erecting a splendid architecture of debate, till the angry crowd broke open the doors, and ended the discussion in blood. They waited too long, discussed about a half a century too long. You see, discussion is very good when a man has bread to eat, and his children all portioned off, and his daughters married, and his home furnished and paid for, and his will made; but discussion is very bad when—“Ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers; Ere the sorrow comes with years;” discussion is bad when a class bends under actual oppression. We want immediate action. We would fain save this issue from an outbreak of actual violence. Therefore we go Into politics.—From a speech of Wendell Phillipa *t Boston, Oct 31. 1»L