The exploiters, constituting 1 per cent. of the population, elect 99 per cent. of the national legislators. The workers, constituting 70 per cent. of the population, elect nobody at all. What would you naturally expect under such conditions? The legislators naturally work for those that put them into office. A man elected by the exploiting class and chosen from its ranks can no more represent labor or the masses than the King of Siam can represent the State of Iowa. This was always true, but it is now truer than ever, and infinitely more important, as you will see at once if you will stop to reflect on the great changes that have occurred in the nature of public problems in the last twenty years. Here is something you never see discussed in your newspaper and yet it is the most significant fact of the times. It is literally true that nine in ten of the topics now debated in Congress are not of the least importance to this nation. Nine-tenths of the time of Congress is frittered away. The eminent legislators might much better be employed in making mud pies or tatting. Nothing is of any real importance to this nation except the one question whether we are longer to continue the process under which the cost of living increases and increases but there is no corresponding increase of wages, and that question you never hear mentioned in Congress. Yet if that process shall continue much longer, we shall, in effect, have no nation worth bothering about. For two things will have happened. First, the great Groups of capitalists that at present have absorbed the control of almost half of the nation's wealth will have absorbed the rest of it so that all others will be merely the hired men of these, subject to a power the most colossal and irresponsible that ever existed on this earth. Second, the standard of living among the workers, now steadily declining under the present system, will have reached a level that no thoughtful man can contemplate without the gravest alarm. For the simple fact is that the strength of any nation lies solely in the physical welfare of its producers, the working class. There is not a particle of national strength nor public advantage in the accumulation of much money in the hands of any individual. Physical, mental and moral strength springs exclusively from the masses and does not exist where the masses are ill-fed and hopeless. enormous wealth in the For a nation to have possession of a few means not one thing that is good and everything that is ruinous. What is at hand for this nation, therefore, is obvious when we contemplate the fact that just as the masses grow poorer the few that are the beneficiaries of the present system grow richer. While for the masses the cost of living always increases and there is no corresponding increase in wages, this process is a pump that gathers the wealth of the land into the coffers of the men constituting the Two Groups, already representing by far the greatest private fortunes ever possessed in this world. Also the greatest power. It is obviously true, therefore, as I said in the beginning of this chapter, that the life of the nation lies in the hands of the working class, and the workers can solve all these problems and remove all these perils if they will. The one thing needful is that they should unite and begin to vote for themselves instead of voting for the Parasites. If the country were in danger from a more obvious foe they would not hesitate. Suppose some other nation were to land troops upon our soil practically the whole working class would rally to the defense of our country. It would do so instinctively and without counting the cost. Workers in every corner of the country would hasten to the recruiting offices to offer their lives, if need be, for the national defense. They would leave their homes and their families for this exalted purpose and feel that in so doing they were but making a sacrifice absolutely demanded by their duty as citizens. Even if the outcome of the war was from the beginning a certainty and they knew that their country was really in no danger of destruction, they would still be willing to make for it so great a sacrifice. Every man that observed the rush to enlist at the time of the Spanish-American war knows how true this is. But here is the country threatened by an enemy far worse than any that could possibly land a hostile force upon our shores. Here is a prospect of destruction far greater than could be wrought with cannon or an enemy's fleet. Not only is the national welfare and safety menaced but the future of the worker and of his children. As in the case of the other kind of war, the one source of defenders is in the working class. The sacrifice required is not of lives but simply and only this, that the workers should lay aside every difference that now divides them and ceasing to vote for |