People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 October 1895 — A HORRIBLE OUTRAGE [ARTICLE]

A HORRIBLE OUTRAGE

LESS THAN 1.500.000 PEOPLE PAY $13,000,000 TAXES. • A Call to Arma —Great Excitement — Civil War Probable! Arm! Arm! and Defend Your Righto—Who Will Voltanteer? We heard the other day of a nation to which the foregoing figures fully apply. Less than 1,500,000 people, men, women and children, are taxed for >13,000,000 annually, and no one can tell what they get in return! It must be Russia.! Can we stand idly by and see our fellow beings, even though they know no more of English than John Norrish does of French, robbed, plundered, impoverished in that terrible fashion? They are human and, after their own way, Christians. It is our duty to defend them. Recruiting quarters will be opened in the office of The Representative, and volunteers enrolled to march on Moscow and put an end to this tyranny. “Hold on, Mr. Donnelly,” cried our foreman, “you have got the wrong pig by the ear. It isn’t Russia at all. It is true that Russia collects her taxes with the cat-o’-nine tails, applied to the soles of the farmers’ bare feet; and we have not quite got to that yet; but we’re getting there! Now we simply take away the farm for one-tenth its value.” “Well, what country is it? I certainly saw those statistics somewhere.” “Certainly; you saw them in our state auditor’s report. The country referred to is Minnesota! Only thirty of forty years ago immigrants swarmed over our fat fields, lying broad and open, the magnificent gift of God; and they took them as a free gift; and now threefourths of them are mortgaged, and the value of their products has decreased one-half; and in the midst of an unexampled abundance, which neither bin nor cellar nor crib can hold, the people are in sore straits of sorrow, excepting the money-lenders and the few who are out of debt. They have tried everything. They tried the Republican party for thirty years, and the Democratic party for eight years; and they followed the Howling Dervishes —the dancing Judases —into the mud of the Dismal Swamp, and they can’t go any further in that direction!” “Well, foreman,” said a typo, “will we print that call for volunteers?” “Call for volunteers! The very men you are trying to help would be the first to hang you. The theory of this Republic is: ‘Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost!’ And the devil seems to have coralled the whole nation.” No; no; they will gather around the shores of the Dismal Swamp and howl for the macadamized highway that ought to cross its dreadful depths:— howl for promises, howl for lies, howl for disappointments, howl for destruction, howl for shame and poverty and misery.”—Representative.