People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 February 1897 — Page 2 Advertisements Column 1 [ADVERTISEMENT]

Put your money in the hanks, if you have any—and lose it. The comptroller don’t seem to be controlling the banks much. Free homes and fair wages constitute the strength of a nation. The greatest anarchists in the counBtate and national governments. Deny men justice and they become listless slaves or dangerous fiends. Now is the time to push the demand for government ownership of railroads. Whoever does not work is a droneconsuming the products of another’s labor. The Loud bill is a blow at our postal system; every Populist should oppose it. Fools learn only in the school of experience, and some are too big fools to learn there. Interest has cost more dollars and more human suffering than war, pestilence and famine. And now it is the Nicaragua Canal company that wants $100,000,000; a very modest request. As long as laboring men are divided against themselves capital will take undue advantage of them. What the government can do better and cheaper to the people than the individual, that it should do. The people pay more unnecessary and unjust taxes to the railroads than the aggregate of their taxes to the Improved methods of production should lessen the hours of labor instead of throwing men out of employment. Capital is but the child of labor, but It seems to have taken possession of the ranch and orders its parents around without ceremony.

The government should foreclose its mortgages on the Pacific roads, but it should see that there is no dead African in the wood-pile when the sale is made. Why follow a precedent that was made when conditions were entirely different? We should progress in the science of government as well as in the arts. If you can’t legislate a man rich or poor, why do the corporations want legislation in their interests? Legislation has much to do with the prosperity of the people. Why should people be poor when there is plenty? And why should they be idle when there is so much to do? These are questions that involve the problems of the present situation. Enforced idleness results In crime and dishonesty. In this land of great natural resources no man should be denied the right to live by honest toil, yet our system robs men of that right. The Standard Oil trust has taken more from the people unjustly—that is over and above a fair profit—than all the plain robberies that have been committed in the country since the adoption of the constitution would amount to, yet this is civilization.

The declaration of independence states as an evident truth that “all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” yet our system robs men of all of these. Surely, there is something wrong with the declaration or the system. The word “Socialism” is like the word “Democratic.” There are “grades” of democratic government. A pure democracy is where the people vote on the laws themselves and not through representatives. There are socialists and socialists, and most people in this country are socialists to some extent. A pure ballot is indispensable to the preservation of a republic. When you tamper with the ballot you tamper with the liberties of the people. The man who steals your ballot is much more of a criminal than the man who steals your house. Both the man who buys and the man who sells his vote should be disfranchised forever.

If all the so-called surplus shoes and clothing and food was distributed among the needy there would not be enough to go round and make them comfortable. Yet there are millions of people who are idle, and the men who “know all about it” say it is because there is an over-production. It is one of the devil’s lies which centuries of experience have been unable to explode. Populists are not in favor of “dividing up," as is often charged. That is Just what they are kicking against—they object to giving the lion’s share to corporations, trusts and syndicates that produce nothing. They believe that every man is entitled to and should have what ho produces, and that “if any will not work, neither shall he eat."