People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1896 — EAST VS. WEST. [ARTICLE]

EAST VS. WEST.

HERBT. N. CASSON’S STARTLING ADDRESS AT LYNN, MASS. “Beware of the We»t" —“What Englin l la to Ireland, What Spain Is to Cuba the East la to the Weat” —The Farmera Have Not Been Idle. The following startling address was. delivered by Herbert N. Casson in tne Lynn Labor church, of Boston, on M£y 17, on the subject, “Beware of the West.” Mr. Casson introduced his lecture by pointing to two large maps of America that hung in front of the pulpit, one representing the western states as the}* were fifty years ago—uninhabitated and unexplored. He said: “In ten years we may have a third map, on which the western states will appear as an independent republic, having an industrial and financial policy of its own. We can no longer consider the western states as waste and lawless territories; for in a few decades they have developed all the symptoms of eastern or European civilization. Western men can remember When land was free, when money was weighed by the pound, when all were equal in opportunities, and when labor was the only key that opened every door.

“The west was settled largely by the best and bravest young men of the east. Thousands of union soldiers went there and took up land after the war, and we cannot afford to sneer at or belittle the opinions of such men. “It is a momentous and alarming fact that in thousands of pamphlets, papers and books the west is now asserting itself to be wronged and robbed by the east, and that a feeling of bitterness, hatred and enmity to New England has arisen beyond the Mississippi. It points to the fact that from 1880 to 1890 Massachusetts alone gained more wealth than Indiana, lowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, that have seven times the population and fifty-eight times the land. Single individuals in New York city can -buy up entire states in the west. “In 1889 the farm mortgages of west amounted to nearly 83,500,000.000, and during the last thirteen years in Minnesota alone, 33,453 farmers were sold out. The farmers have not been idle or shiftless; they have every year planted and reaped an enormous crop, but prices have been too low to cover expenses. Lately, in a western city, potatoes were sold at 83 cents a ton, and every year immense quantites c.f grain are destroyed or fed to the hogs. The farmers cannot manage their farms without hiring helff, and they have no money to hire with. In the south the truck system is making money a museum curiosity to the planters, and all kinds of crude labor exchanges are being formed to manufacture and circulate money. “What England is to Ireland, what Spain is to Cuba, the east is to the west. Massachusetts has become the American gypsy moth, feeding on the fruitage of the west.

“In some parts of the west it is not safe to say titoat you came from' Massachusetts. Commercial travelers inform us that many 'western merchants will not even look at eastern goods. Before long they will be throwing eastern tea overboard Into the Pacific. They assert that the thirteen colonies have becoipe financially annexed to England, and that nothing now remains of/the American republic but the western states. Much of this accusation is true. The star of empire 120 years ago crossed.the Atlantic, and now it has crossed the continent. The black soul of George 111 is marching on today in Boston and New York. “Instead of Hessians, we have lawyers; instead of royalists, we have republicans; instead of Benedict Arnold, we have John Sherman; instead of Bunker Hill, we have the Chicago strike; instead of Washington, we have men like Tillman, Debs and Pingree. “Lincoln’s prophecy haa been ful-

filled; and tne east has become the home of industrial and financial despots. One hundred and twenty years after Christ, Jerusalem was inhabited only by wolves and jackals; and one hundred and twenty years after Samuel Adams, Boston is inhabited by bulls , and bears and other wild beasts of trade. “The shadow of Bunker Hill monument falls on the dingy tenements, where the hungry fever burns; Faneuil hall is besieged by howling hucksters, scrambling for a beggerly existence; opposite to where the first blood of the revolution was shed there are bankers and brokers, squeezing the life-blood out of their fellow men; the Old South church is surrounded- by throngs of ragged newsboys, robbed of education and childhood; and Boston’s sacred Common is pock-marked with policemen, to keep off the grass. “Boston the Great is fallen, and become an industrial Babylon. Its money kings have only two blanks in their platform—‘There’s nothing to arbitrate’ and ‘The public be d d.’ “It is time for us to know that the west will never submit to a New England president, on a gold and monopoly platform, and I warn those blind financiers that if they continue in their present course for five years more, they will never receive either principal or Interest. “The west cannot be coerced. It is not afraid of ,our tenderfoot militia. Forty'years ago the south insisted upon a fugitive slave law, and the result was an uprising and an emancipation; and a simila: - result will occur if the eastern Shylock Insists upon cutting off his pound of flesh. If the east is merciless today, the west will he mprollAßa Mronrrnw Thp waa'ern giant, like Gulliver, is only bound with threads, and he is every day becoming more awakened and dangerous. “Let us remember that the interests of all honest and industrious men, whether in the east or west, are the same. Let the mechanic and the farmer co-operate and. stretch hands across the Mississippi. Let us take the pitchfork and the hammer as our emblems and form a political party of our own. “For the sake of the Union and the men who died to save it; for the sake of social peace and patriotism, we must speak the sternest words, in spite of prejudice and self-conceit. If there had been an abolition church in Richmond in 1858 and its warnings had been heard when it cried ‘Beware of the north!’ perhaps the civil war might have been averted.”