Part 23 (2/2)
There is something human in the touch of their lives. The poor white man here is the slave of many masters. The negro may lead the life of a farm horse. Your wage slave is a horse that hasn't even a stable. He roams the street in the snows of winter. He is ridden by anybody who wishes a ride. He is cared for by n.o.body. Our rich will do anything for the poor except to get off their backs. The negro has a master in sickness and health. The wage slave is honored with the privilege of slavery only so long as he can work ten hours a day. He is a pauper when he can toil no more.
”Your Abolitionist has fixed his eye on Chattel Slavery in the South. It involves but three million five-hundred thousand negroes. The system of wage slavery involves the lives of twenty-five million white men and women.
”Slavery was not abolished in the North on moral grounds, but because, as a system of labor it was old-fas.h.i.+oned, sentimental, extravagant, inefficient. It was abolished by the masters of men, not by the men.
”The North abolished slavery for economy in production. There was no sentiment in it. Wage slavery has proven itself ten times more cruel, more merciless, more efficient. The Captain of Industry has seen the vision of an empire of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He has seen that the master who cares for the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lame, the halt is a fool who must lag behind in the march of the Juggernaut.
Only a fool stops to build a shelter for his slave when he can kick him out in the cold and find hundreds of fresh men to take his place.
”Two years ago the Chief of Police of the City of New York took the census of the poor who were compelled to live in cellars. He found that eighteen thousand five hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with men, women and children the right to the shelves above the water line.
”There are cellars devoted entirely to lodging where working men and women can find a bed of straw for two cents a night--the bare dirt for one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one dirty ma.s.s. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts are beyond words.
”These are the homes provided by the master who has established 'Free'
Labor as the economic weapon with which he has set out to conquer the world.
”And he is conquering with it. The superior, merciless power of this system as an economic weapon is bound to do in America what it has done throughout the world. The days of Chattel Slavery are numbered. The Abolitionist is wasting his breath, or worse. He is raising a feud that may drench this nation in blood in a senseless war over an issue that is settled before it's raised.
”Long ago the economist discovered that there was no vice under the system of Chattel Slavery that could not be more freely gratified under the new system of wage slavery.
”You weep because the negro slave must serve one master. He has no power to choose a new one. Do not forget that the power to _choose_ a new master carries with it power to discharge the wage slave and hire a new one. This power to discharge is the most merciless and cruel tyranny ever developed in the struggle of man from savagery to civilization.
This awful right places in the hand of the master the power of life and death. He can deprive his wage slave of fuel, food, clothes, shelter.
Life is the only right worth having if its exercise is put into question. A starving man has no liberty. The word can have no meaning.
He must live first or he cannot be a man.
”The wage slave is producing more than the chattel slaves ever produced, man for man, and is receiving less than the negro slave of the South is getting for his labor to-day.
”Your system of wage slavery is the cunning trick by which the cruel master finds that he can deny to the worker all rights he ever had as a slave.
”If you doubt its power, look at this bundle of rags in my hands and remember that there are five thousand half-starved children homeless and abandoned in the streets of this city to-night.
”Find for me one ragged, freezing, starving, black baby in the South and I will buy a musket to equip an army for its invasion--”
He paused a moment, turned and gazed at the men on the platform and then faced the crowd in a final burst of triumphant scorn.
”Fools, liars, hypocrites, clean your own filthy house before you weep over the woes of negroes who are singing while they toil--”
A man on an end seat of the middle aisle suddenly sprang to his feet and yelled:
”Put him out!”
Before Gerrit Smith could reach Evans with a gift of five dollars for the sick child which he still held in his arms the crowd had become a mob.
They hustled the labor leader into the street and told him to go back to h.e.l.l where he came from.
Through it all John Brown sat on the platform with his blue-gray eyes fixed in s.p.a.ce. He had seen, heard or realized nothing that had pa.s.sed.
His mind was brooding over the plains of Kansas.
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