People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1896 — POWER OF WEALTH. [ARTICLE]

POWER OF WEALTH.

HOW IT IS CRUELLY ENSLAVING THE RACE. Bat the Parent, Competition, Will Be Overthrown to Make Room for a Cooperative Commonweath Plutocracy Is on Its Last Legs. A feature of the New York World of Sunday, April 26, was a page devoted to a symposium by nineprominenteconomic agitators giving their views of she nation’s ills, presenting at the head of the page pictures in group of the writers. Senator Stewart wrote about free silver and the goldbugs; Mrs. Mary E. Lease advocated populism; Dennis Kearney, of “sand-lot fame,” played upon the old anti-Chinese string; Jacob S. Coxey talked good roads and non-in-terest-bearing bonds; Lucien Sanial, socialism; Samuel Gompers, trades unionism; Senator Peffer, more populism; “Coin” Harvey, more silver. The following broad survey of the industrial problem is from the pen of Eugene V. Debs:

In answer to your interrogatory as to what I consider to be “the greatest evil of the time, and what is the remedy for the complaints of the discontented masses, ” I have to say that I agree entirely with Senator Tillman in his terrific indictment of the money power in the Sunday World of March in declaring that power to be the monumental evil of this age, in which all others have their source and compared to which all others dwarf to insignificance. The widespread poverty, misery, wretchedness, squalor, degradation, vice and crime in all their multifarious forms, not omitting the venality, corruption and rascality among what a perverted civilization is pleased to call the “upper classes,” are directly or indirectly traceable to this money power. This power, the outgrowth of aggregated and centralized wealth extorted from the producing masses by processes no less reprehensible than those employed by Captain Kidd, Jesse James and v Bill” Dalton on an incomparably small scale, makes congress and legislatures, dictates national and state legislation, appoints federal and state judges, nominates and elects the president of the United States and compels all its spineless vassals to do its bidding. This money power has reduced the high office of the president to a marketable commodity, the supreme court to a nest of venality and the United S-ates. congress to a den of treason. Only a few days ago Prof. George D. Herron, the eminent Christian scholar, d-dared that Christ had no more reason to scourge the money-changers fro n the temple at Jerusalem that the American ■people have to dean out the United. States senate. This money powrr, omnipotent and omnipresent, has even entered the church of Christ, touched the robed minister at the altar, blordied his soul and frozen his heart and sent him forth a traitor to his consecrated vows. This power grows more and more arrogant and despotic as it plunders, crushes and enslaves th? people, while it builds its fortifications of the bones of its victims and its palaces cut of its piracies, until purple and fine linen on the one side and rags and wretchedness upon the oth r side define social conditions as mountain ranges or rivers define the boundaries of nations —palaces on the hills, with music and dancing and the luxuries of all climes—-huts in the valleys, dark and dismal, where the victim's of “mail’s inhumanity to man” crouch and shiver, and where the only music is the dolorous “song of the shirt” and the luxurious rags and crusts. This money power, this insatiate, remorseless, abnormal development of a barbarous civilization, has polluted every fountain and stream designed to bless the world.

Senator Tillman seems to believe that the money power can be dislodged, and that the vices, crimes and iniquities which It has spawned can be remedied by a change in our monetary system. In this I do not agree with him. His remedy is, in my opinion, totally inadequate. It is a vastly larger question, and involves infinitely more than a change in our system of finance, radical and sweeping as they may be. I; is a question of industrial revolution and social regeneration. The whole capitalistic system, which has its foundation in wage-slavery, must be destroyed, root and branch. The competitive principle as applied to production and distribution must give way to the co-op-erative principle. The one fosters greed, avarice, cunning, cupidity, selfishness, brutality and the whole brood of vices that make men monsters and fill the world with agony and woe. The other engenders love, kindness, sympathy, mutual help; in a word, the brotherhood of man, with which earth is transformed into paradise, and the sons of God may again shout for joy. The basic political reform is, in my opinion, embodied in direct legislation, proportional representation and the imperative mandate, and social industrial regeneration will come through the inauguration of the co-c.perative commonwealth. The evolutionary processes are in operation, and the change will come on certain as the stars shine, either on peace lines or through the fiercest revolution that ever shocked the world.