PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL.
PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL.
PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL.
PAPERS ON LABOR AND CAPITAL.
In our last the attempt was made to show how important the laborer should consider the choice of representatives to be, and also what class of persons should be chosen. The task of making these selections cannot be begun too soon. In every district in the Union the laborers should be made alive to this question. Some who fully appreciate its importance should take it upon themselves to begin the work; they should converse with the few they come in contact with, and these, becoming interested, should be induced to extend the agitation; and finally, all over the country, primary labor meetings would come to be held for the full and complete discussion of the whole subject.
It is the most complete evidence of supineness on the part of the laboring classes that they are not now represented as they should be. Being so vastly in the majority, every office should be filled by them. The difficulty has been—and we fear will be—that while the laborer has been busy at his regular task, others have managed the incipient stages that produce the candidates, in such a manner that the interests of the majority have been entirely ignored. Finally, when the regular party ticket is presented, the least objectionable one receives the support; and thus it comes that the real interests and wishes of the people are seldom represented, and as seldom is the elected candidate the real choice of the people.
Unless our laboring classes arouse themselves to the real importance of this matter, and become willing to devote sufficient time to preparing their candidates, they should cease blaming others for results; for they now complain of things they have it in their power to remedy, but which they cannot expect others, whose interests seem to be at variance with theirs, to correct for them. Those who declaim so loudly and profusely about the wrongs labor suffers at the instance of capital, should be strictly guarded against, lest they, unwittingly, become your leaders and advisers.
There are at all times numbers of persons standing waiting and ready to step forward to take advantage of any favorable movement among the people which seems to offer inducements. It matters not to them in what, or where the movement may originate; they have no principles to crush out or control in order that they may fall into the current. It is almost impossible to escape the curse of these ever-ready tools. The safest and surest remedy against them is to select those who have never mingled in politics, and who will come direct from the shop or the field. It does not matter so much if they are not able advocates, if they only understand the work to be done and are devoted and true. Let this course be pursued a few years, and the enormous proportion of lawyer-legislators would be diminished by one-half. Many of these have no sympathies in common with you, most of them are, by all their controlling influences, drawn from the consideration even of your condition. What does it matter to them if the few articles you must purchase to render yourselves and families comfortable, cost you ten, twenty or fifty per cent. more than the actual cost of their production, if corporations for which they are attorneys become still more corpulent upon this that is indirectly filched from you! For, do you not know that capital under such rule does not pay the taxes of the country, but that your labor does? In this way, the common laborer, who should not be compelled to pay any levy at all, is taxed on almost everything he eats, drinks and wears, and thus labor is compelled not only to produce what makes wealth possible, but also to sustain it after having produced it. This is a vast inequality in favor of capital and against labor, and still it is the laborer’s fault; and it lies just where we pointed, in the selection of proper candidates as representatives, State and national.
There are but a very few newspapers that do notprofessto be the advocates of the rights of labor. Let them be called upon to take hold of this matter, and take hold of it at just that point where the remedy must be applied. Let them lay before the people a plain exposition of the matter, and certainly aim to make the people understand it. Let them urge the people to assemble and concert plans and devise means to carry them out, and to warn them to no longer intrust the most vital parts of the “necessary course” to the care of hereditary members of the caucus, whom money buys or whisky controls. It has become proverbial that he who would be elected to any important position must dispense both these “powers” with a lavish hand; and he who can do this the most profusely is pretty sure to “be elected.” You may rest perfectlyassured that if he spend ten thousand dollars to secure his election by your votes, he intends at least to double his venture during his official term. You should know by this time that “the purity of the ballot box” is simply a “play upon words,” and that elections are but farces to approve what is previously determined.
The people, then, must look on every side for treachery to their interests and dishonesty of purpose, not forgetting that a large portion of the press that profess your interests so warmly, that you almost know their truth, are open to the influence of at least one of the abovementioned powers, and that to go counter to thecommandsof those who “back them” is to go to certain destruction. Nevertheless, demand of the press a course that cannot be denominated hypocritical, and if it does not respond, withdraw your patronage, and give it where it will contribute to your interests.
These introductory details cannot be dwelt upon too long nor insisted upon too earnestly. To begin a work right, is to have it half accomplished; and most powerfully does this apply in the matter of determining who shall be your representatives.