People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1895 — A STOP-THIEF CRY. [ARTICLE]

A STOP-THIEF CRY.

“WE MUST GOSLOW,” SAY THE CONSERVATIVES. Yes, Let America Go to the Auction Block —Her Children Starve. Her Strong Men Commit Suicide, and Her Young Women Go to Worse Than Death. Put yourself in the place of the sufferers; go into the slums and sweatshops; learn and see what is going on around you. Behold the battle for bread, and look coolly upon the scene of miserable poverty on the one side and arrogant hoggishness on the other —yes, look coolly if you can —you can not, if you have the least vestige of a soul in your anatomy. It is a field of slaughter—and for what are they fighting? “Oh!” you say, "go slow; they are not fighting.” Not lighting! Then why does this man cut the throats of his wife and children are these dying of hunger; what means this riot, this calling out of troops; why all this robbery, suicide, murder; these bodies buried in the potter’s field; what means all this new machinery for killing men? You say, Oh! no, they are not fighting, they are only engaged in legitimate competition in the groat economy of supply and demand. They are not fighting, they are only arguing the best policy to pursue. Go slow! Don’t do anything to disturb commerce.

Those people are not starving; thoso men aro not dead, they have only decided to go a little slow In striking. Bless you! there is no quarrel between capital and labor; the country has hired the money loaners to stop depleting tho treasury; there’s no trouble, these men you call unemployed are only tourists In search of recreation; there is no opfression; there Is no crime nor desperaion; no beggary nor selling of virtue; money is plenty. There Is only a lull in business, people are taking a rest. Go slow; don’t disturb them; everything will work out all right in tho end. No use to try any experiments; things have always been this way, and they always will. There’s no use to try to change them. Let us stop and learn to be content with the station In life to which it has pleased God to call us. And this is the way many people would have us talk reform. Continue the system of uncivilization, crime, dissipation, disorder and distress, because the men who profit by it don’t want any better conditions. They are doing well. Who cares what becomes of the balance of humanity? They control the government and have a right, to do as they please. Let the rabble starve and kill each other if they will. But go slow about changing established Institutions. You might make things worse, and you might make them better, but, anyway, you would alarm “foreign investors” by tinkering. This talk about oppression is all sentiment; trade must not ho disturbed by a lot of calamity howlers and follows that don’t know anything about “finance.” Government lias no business Interfering with “financiers.”