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Title: The New Democracy
A handbook for Democratic speakers and workers
Author: Walter Vrooman
Release Date: September 26, 2020 [EBook #63298]
Language: English
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THE
NEW DEMOCRACY.
_A Handbook for Democratic Speakers
and Workers._
An Outline of the Methods of the National Volunteers of
Democracy and of the Volunteer Speakers Bureau.
BY
WALTER VROOMAN.
Price: Cloth, 75 cents; Paper, 25 cents.
Copyright
BY WALTER VROOMAN,
Wainwright Building,
ST. LOUIS, MO.
Witt Printing Co.
THE NEW DEMOCRACY.
PREFACE.
Upon the close of the 1896 national campaign, it was decided at an
informal conference of several of the leaders of the Democratic
party, to establish a bureau of speakers for the continuous
propaganda of Democratic principles by new and young men, while the
acknowledged leaders of the party were busy in the Senate and House of
Representatives. In December, 1896, headquarters were opened at St.
Louis.
Several hundred speakers soon became attached to this bureau, and it
was decided to form a permanent organization, that would bring together
not only the speakers but all the workers of the party. The outcome of
this has been the organization of the National Volunteers of Democracy,
with the Speakers' Bureau and Training School as a special department.
Each volunteer is expected to assist in forming regular Democratic
clubs, except where for special reasons it is found advisable to
organize Silver or Populist clubs, and also to build up and strengthen
clubs now in existence.
Heretofore, the handbooks for Democratic speakers and workers, have
been so stuffed with statistics and figures as to burden and confuse
the minds of their readers, consequently there is a demand for
something simpler, for something that will give a bird's eye view of
the political situation, with suggestions as to best methods of work
and speech.
It is to supply such a handbook to Democratic speakers and workers, and
to outline the plans of the Democratic Volunteers, that this little
book has been written.
St. Louis, Mo., June 1, 1897.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The New Democracy is the Old Democracy. It is likewise the only
Democracy, and in July, 1896, after years of suppression, it became the
Regular Democracy.
The Democracy taught by Jefferson and Jackson is the Democracy of
Bryan, Stone and the Chicago platform. But the victory at Chicago of
true Democracy over the counterfeit that for years fraudulently used
its name was not however a finality; it was a beginning, and what was
there accomplished nationally is yet to be accomplished locally in
many states and cities. We have not only to push on to new and local
victories after taking the central citadel, but what is of greater
importance, must hold the positions already taken.
It was said that at the Chicago Convention we not only "raised the
dead" but "cast out devils." We must remember, however, that there are
other devils, which in many places still possess the party locally, and
the miracle of casting them out can only be performed by the power that
comes of unselfish patriotism.
It is noble to fight for a righteous cause, but it is glorious to WIN
in a righteous fight. The exposure of Republican lies, the betrayal
of their every promise made prior to the last general election, the
perfidy back of their pre-election threats, have made Democratic
victory reasonably certain in 1900. When the country has been cursed
four years more by the infamous gold standard and monopoly rule, the
majority of the people will favor a radical change. WE CAN BE DEFEATED
ONLY IN ONE WAY. Let us repeat this. There is but one possible way by
which the producing classes can be defeated at the polls in 1900; that
is by the same old trick used by tyrants in all ages, the placing of
their own lieutenants as the leaders of the people.
The plutocrats fully appreciate this. They know that the people, weary
of Republican misrule, will vote another party into power, hence their
only salvation is to guide and control. They can do this in but one
way, by having the opposing army officered by generals of their own
choosing. It makes no difference how big the army, if the enemy chooses
its officers, it is doomed.
This was the trick by which monopoly defeated Democracy in several
states during the recent campaign. The forces of the people were
hastily organized. The recruits were strangers to one another. By a
bold move on the part of plutocracy, backed by ample corruption funds,
the willing tools of the money power were in many places made leaders
of the very army formed to destroy the money power. As a consequence,
we, the people, CAST the votes, while in many places the gold standard
representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties COUNTED them;
and incidentally failed to count MANY.
In 1900 the people may poll any number of votes, but, if we fail to
stamp out such traitors as David Bennett Hill, Calvin S. Brice, Wm.
C. Whitney and John G. Carlisle, who use the Democratic name only to
defeat Democratic principles, and who claim friendship for the poor
man only to add his product to the fortunes of the rich; unless we
expel these conspirators and hypocrites from the Democratic party, with
all their abbettors and partners in fraud, we will be defeated in spite
of our overwhelming advantage in numbers.
Democracy now means the people against the organized money power. It
is simply insanity for us to prepare for battle and select as drill
masters, men whose salaries are paid by the very money power against
which we fight.
Suppose a million American soldier boys were to march with flying flags
and beating drums, against an invading army of Cossacks and Turks,
and that by some trick the wily Czar and Sultan should secure the
appointment of Russian and Turkish officers over our troops. Should
we be surprised if thousands of our brave boys were led headlong into
ditches and slaughtered like rats in a trap and our magnificent army
cut in pieces by half as many European king worshippers?
We should not be surprised. And no man who knows anything about
war could have been surprised when such fate befell the magnificent
army of raw recruits led last year by Bryan against the invasion
of the European moneyed despots. We were cut to pieces, ambushed,
scattered and defeated solely by the treachery of subordinate leaders
whom our great champion and the people trusted, who, by sympathies,
self-interest and custom, were bound to the very money power that we
were fighting to overthrow. And now the very men who sold out the
people, who defeated the cause of American independence and fastened
upon our nation the rule of the European money power for four more
years--these same men, led by that adept in low cunning, that master
of political knavery and arch enemy of popular rights, David Bennett
Hill, are trying to get a foothold again in the party they have just
defeated, are again trying to gain the confidence of the millions whose
liberties they sold, and whose children they are now trying to betray
into perpetual slavery.
Some may say that it is impossible for these conspirators ever again
to get a hold on the Democratic party. Such over-confidence is always
a fatal weakness in war. When we know that the only possible way
for plutocracy to continue to rule our country is by corrupting the
Democratic party and placing its own agents in Democracy's counsels,
and that the united money power of the world, will during the next
four years (aided by the best talent that can be bought by unlimited
funds), attempt to man Democracy's army with plutocracy's hirelings.
Our business is not to lull ourselves into a false belief of security,
but to work by day and watch by night to defeat the enemy. It is not
for us to proudly boast that there is no danger, for there is danger,
GRAVE DANGER, SOLEMN AND AWFUL DANGER, THAT WITH AN UNLIMITED USE OF
MONEY AND THE PURCHASE OF THE BEST POLITICAL GENIUS AND CUNNING OF OUR
COUNTRY BY MONOPOLY, WE MAY AGAIN BE BETRAYED ON THE EVE OF BATTLE.
When the outcome of our struggle is a world to be gained or lost,
civilization to go forward or be derailed, all that is dear to us, all
that is most sacred in life saved to us or snatched from us, we cannot
be too alert, too eager, or too anxious; cannot prepare or organize
too thoroughly for the primaries that are to decide the leadership and
control of Democracy in the contest of 1900. We should, each of us,
swear in the name of God and man, that all the power and influence we
possess shall be earnestly exerted from now until 1900 in ridding our
party of these parasites who are in it only to destroy it. We should
bitterly oppose the selection of any man for election judge, precinct
captain, ward committeeman, city committeeman, county committeeman,
state committeeman, national committeeman, or any other place of trust
in our party, who is known to be in sympathy with, or friendly to, the
gold standard, or to any one of the giant trusts now helping destroy
our Republic.
If we would destroy the trusts, we must be led only by known enemies
of the trusts. If we would be victorious in this conflict against
plutocracy, we must follow only leaders whose records prove clearly
that they are absolutely free from entangling alliances with plutocracy.
Some say we must harmonize all elements. We cannot harmonize the
interests of the man who steals and the man who is stolen from, any
more than we can harmonize fire and water. We only weaken our cause by
trying to get the men against whom we are fighting to join us.
Some one exclaims we must have the gold Democrats with us, or we are
lost. THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING AS A GOLD DEMOCRAT. The Democratic
party stands for the abolition of the gold standard and every other
monopoly by means of which scheming monopolies rob the public. A
gold Democrat is as much an impossibility as a round square, white
lamp-black or a red-hot icicle. The plutocrats who left the Democratic
party and enlisted under the banner of Mark Hanna, will never join us
except for the purpose of defeating our plans. They will never work for
the success of the Democratic banner, unless they themselves carry that
banner, and lead us, its followers, into their own traps, wherein we
shall be despoiled. For the vote of every traitor and deserter, gained
by such cowardly attempts at compromise, we shall lose a hundred loyal
votes through sheer despair.
We do not need the gold bugs. If they are honest in their professed
change of heart, they will vote for honest, fearless candidates as
well as for those of the milk and water brand, or who have no definite
programme except their secret pledges to moneyed constituents. If they
have not experienced a change of heart, we do not want them, for it is
better that they remain open enemies than that they become professed
friends, seeking an opportunity again to betray us.
We do not object to receiving in the ranks the man who comes back to
the Democratic party and says: "I deserted you, but I wish now to
return to the fold; I was a traitor during the last campaign, but I am
willing to vote with you hereafter." But the manhood, the self-respect,
the enthusiasm of Democracy do object and register a vigorous protest
to permitting these deserters to assume places of responsibility with
power to sell the people out again.
No one objects to the gold-bugs returning to our fold any more than we
should to the blind regaining their sight or to sinners desiring to
wash away their sins, but we do object to these sinners returning at
the price of giving our party organization over into their hands.
A PERTINENT ILLUSTRATION.
An ominous example of the methods being used to capture Democracy by
the money power was afforded by the lawless militarism brought into
play by the gold bugs at the recent municipal Democratic convention
of St. Louis, when, their fraud being discovered, and legitimately
defeated by the people at the primaries and at the convention, they
appealed to the last resort of despotism everywhere, the force of arms.
For many years a clique of unscrupulous politicians controlled St.
Louis Democratic conventions. Early in the April campaign, Mr.
Hugh Brady, for many years Chairman of the Democratic City Central
Committee, stated in an interview published in the St. Louis papers
that a clique of "machine" politicians had "fixed the machine" to
nominate Mr. Edwin Harrison for Mayor. The street railway managers,
who last fall knifed Bryan and the Chicago platform, came to the front
as Mr. Harrison's supporters. Mr. C. C. Maffitt, who bolted the party
last fall, headed his delegation, and in several other wards the
Harrison delegations were led by gold boltocrats. The "machine" was for
Harrison, and Hugh Brady declared the "machine" could nominate any man
it wanted.
The men who supported Mr. Lee Meriwether for Mayor were all aggressive
Bryan Democrats and opposed not only the gold standard, but also
opposed street car domination in city affairs. They appealed from the
"machine" to the people. They pointed out how the leading supporters
of the "machine" candidate were gold boltocrats and street railway
managers, who use their political influence to escape paying hundreds
of thousands of dollars of taxes legally due the City Treasury. They
insisted that franchises to monopolize the public's streets ought to
be sold, not given away, to private corporations. And on this platform
they secured enough delegates to control the convention.
On the morning following the primary election, even the Republic,
the organ of the "machine," admitted that Mr. Harrison had but 134
delegates, while the opposition had 153[1].
[1] See Republic, March 20, 1897.
When the delegates opposed to Mr. Harrison united in supporting Mr.
Meriwether, it was apparent that nothing short of fraud and force could
prevent the defeat of the machine. Accordingly, Mr. Ed Devoy, Chairman
of the Central Committee, called the convention to order and hurriedly
announced as its governing officers Messrs. Lutz, Barrett and Wand, the
three campaign managers of the "machine" candidate.
Scarcely was the announcement made when ex-Governor Norman J. Colman
rose and protested against the attempt to muzzle the convention, and
nominated for chairman Mr. Sterling P. Bond. Upon Devoy's refusing
to put this motion, one of the delegates, R. T. Brownrigg, made the
motion which was duly seconded, and Gov. Colman put the question to
the convention and it was carried by a majority of the delegates. In
a similar way secretaries and sergeants-at-arms were elected, the
convention refusing to accept the slate prepared by the machine.
After the committees had been appointed and reported, nominations for
Mayor were made, and on the second ballot Lee Meriwether received 155
votes, eleven more than a majority of all the delegates elected, and he
was accordingly declared the nominee of the Democratic party.
Thereupon ensued a scene more worthy of Russia than of the American
Republic. Foiled in the attempt to carry the primaries; foiled again in
the effort to force their own tools upon the convention as governing
officers, the gold men and the street railway managers who were present
on the floor of the convention, played their last card in the game to
defeat the candidate pledged to make them pay their taxes, and ordered
their servant, Devoy, to do by force what he had failed to do by fraud.
A Board of Police Commissioners lent themselves to this shameful
assault upon American liberty, and ordered three hundred armed police
to drive from the hall the delegates opposed to Mr. Harrison. Sterling
P. Bond, John J. Fitzwilliam and W. A. Brandenburger, the duly elected
chairman and secretaries of the convention, were brutally assaulted by
the police. Mr. Bond was carted away to jail in a patrol wagon. Mr.
Meriwether, who had been called on to address the convention after his
nomination for Mayor, was thrown from the platform by two policemen,
and, in company with a majority of the delegates, was forcibly expelled
from the hall.
Since the 9th of November, 1799, when Napoleon's grenadiers drove
the French deputies out of their convention hall at the point of the
bayonet, history affords no parallel to this outrage by the St. Louis
boltocratic politicians.
That in claiming a convention has no right to elect its own presiding
officers the gold boltocrats were utterly wrong in custom as well
as equity, will be seen by recalling the manner in which last year
the Chicago Convention refused to accept Senator Hill, the National
Democratic Committee's suggestion for chairman, and instead elected
Daniel, a silver Senator from Virginia.
Although the St. Louis papers subsequently supported Mr. Harrison,
whose nomination was only accomplished by the illegal use of three
hundred police, those same papers did not hesitate to say, the morning
after the convention, that the action of the machine was illegal and
tyrannical:[2]
[2] Witness the following extracts:
Police Commissioner Bannerman in Globe-Democrat, March 22,
1897:
"The trouble was all started by Ed. Devoy refusing to allow
Bond's name to go before the convention as chairman. The
whole thing was a scheme on his (Devoy's) part to split the
convention. Of course it was wrong to send Judge Bond to the
Four Courts in a patrol wagon."
Republic editorial, March 21, 1897:
"Committee Chairman Devoy made a mistake in surrendering the
gave before the delegates had elected a temporary chairman.
A convention holds within itself the right to choose its
temporary officers."
Post-Dispatch editorial, March 31, 1897:
"The blundering began with Chairman Devoy. It was his duty to
recognize any delegate who desired to move a substitute for
the committee's report. Devoy failed in his duty and furnished
provocation for all that subsequently occurred."
Post-Dispatch editorial, March 22, 1897:
"Dr. Lutz had no right to a place on the platform until he was
chosen temporary chairman by a vote of the convention. He had
no more right than any casual visitor to himself take the vote
of the convention on himself as temporary chairman. The plain
fact is that the whole of these preliminary proceedings were
in every particular irregular, unparliamentary and void."
Post-Dispatch editorial, March 23, 1897:
"The delegates who asserted their right to choose their
temporary officers were within their right in doing so, and in
fact only did their duty. THE RIGHT IS SACRED."
Globe-Democrat, March 23, 1897:
"The attitude of Assistant Chief Kiely is regarded as
having been strained in the interest of the Harrison crowd
and significant of the Police Commissioners' domination in
Democratic politics."
A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE.
Might never makes right. The candidate whose nomination rests not upon
ballots but upon the clubs and guns of three hundred policemen, cannot
be the rightful nominee of Democracy, which means people's rule, not
police rule. When appeal was made from the outrage of the corrupt
political machine, the Court of Appeals decided that the matter was
beyond its jurisdiction, that no Court has the power to review the
action of the Election Commissioners, even though they certify to the
nomination of a candidate without a shadow of right to such nomination.
Had the Court consented to examine the evidence and gone into the
merits of the case, it could not but have decided that the rightful
nominee for Mayor was Mr. Meriwether, who had the affidavits of a
majority of the delegates showing that they had supported him in the
convention.
This high-handed attempt of the gold boltocrats to tyrannize over the
convention resulted in Democracy's defeat. But despite the stinging
rebuke administered by an outraged people, the machine is again
endeavoring to fasten itself upon the Democratic party of St. Louis.
The same tactics, and even more desperate and lawless ones, will be
used by the gold plutocrats throughout our country. The people must be
prepared to meet them.
What are the best methods of preparation? It is to give some
suggestions as to methods, and to increase, the vigilance of the
patriotic Democrats and friends of humanity in whose hands it may fall
that this little volume has been written.
CHAPTER II.
HOW TO BEGIN WORK.
The immediate purpose of the Democratic Volunteers is to organize and
carry on in the most effective way the campaign for 1900. They seek
to build up and foster the Democracy of Jefferson, Jackson, Bryan and
the Chicago platform by seeing, first, that the common people remain
in control of the Democratic party; and, second, that the Democratic
party, representing the common people, gets control of the country
in 1900. It is further hoped that the Volunteers thus organized and
trained, will become a permanent force in the history of our Nation;
a power in the guidance of the forces behind the nation's progress;
a means of uniting the best intelligence of our race with that faith
and deep religious purpose which permeate the common people, and of
expediting the conscious co-operation of individuals with those giant
forces that are slowly but surely destroying the old, and building
up the new civilization. Our plan appeals principally to young men.
Our methods are new, at least to this generation, and as we believe
that the great battle in which we are engaged must be led by the most
vigorous, active and courageous amongst us, we depend principally upon
young men for leadership and work.
Knowing that our principles are eternal, and that in proclaiming them
we have the support of the great common people of posterity, and of
God, the Volunteers are expected to assume, upon all occasions, an
attitude of absolute confidence.
We are to utilize every force and every means that perception can
discover or ingenuity devise for the forwarding of our movement. We
are to proceed, not only by usual, but by unusual methods, taking
possession of resources never before thought of in political campaigns
or religious crusades. Our principles are to be declared both in public
and in private, and propagated methodically and persistently in every
existing institution, organization or association of men and women.
The church is the center of activity for many. This class can be
reached best by having our truths come to them through the channel
by which they usually receive their opinion and ideals, namely, the
church. There are other hundreds of thousands whose lives center about
the liquor saloons. To reach these our speakers must go to the saloons.
In many agricultural communities, it is customary to hold meetings
in school houses, while in good weather, picnics, barbecues and all
day gatherings take place in the woods. To these various customs our
speakers must adapt themselves. In some sections the camp-meeting lasts
for a week or two, in great tents, or in special woodland resorts,
permanently constructed and kept for that purpose. Our Volunteers will
find here opportunities for effective work.
But for reasons of economy, the greater part of our work will be done
outdoors. Plutocracy can afford to hire a dozen halls where one drawing
speaker can be secured. Our movement has a dozen speakers to every hall
we can afford to hire. We will consider first, therefore, methods of
outdoor speaking.
OUTDOOR MEETINGS.
The easiest, the most economical, the most fruitful of the Volunteer
speaker's work, will consist of unadvertised outdoor meetings. There is
probably not a city, village, or town in America in which a man with
a strong voice, mounting some emergency platform and calling out that
he has something important to say, cannot, in a short time, attract a
considerable crowd. If his message be direct, condensed, sincere and
well delivered, he can hold the crowd in any except the most inclement
weather. Coming as a surprise does not lessen the effect, if the words
are well directed. People who could not be induced to enter a hall to
hear a lecture, people who, if the meeting had been advertised, would
purposely remain away, will stop and listen to an outdoor speaker; they
will be interested, and may even be converted if the truths are well
presented.
Of course, many passersby will listen only for a few minutes and
proceed on their way. An outdoor crowd is always a changing one, but
this merely necessitates a special outdoor method of treatment.
Indoors, an address is expected to be continuous; one point must lead
up to another; a line of thought must be followed so as to produce
interest cumulative to the end. Outdoor speaking, on the other hand,
must be made up of short, concise points, each complete in itself, so
that no person can listen for a single minute without getting something
to carry away with him. Anecdotes should be freely interspersed, but in
condensed form.
As the audience is compelled to stand, often on damp ground, and
in chilly or excessively hot weather, it is necessary that outdoor
speaking should never, under any circumstances, take upon itself the
qualities of a pedagogical lecture. On the other hand, it must be made
up of illustrations, word pictures, and pungent assertion of those
fundamental truths known to be most essential.
HOW TO ARRANGE SUCH MEETINGS.
The speaker arrives in a strange town, having entered afoot, by horse,
or by rail. If he have friends in the town, his work will, of course,
be less difficult, and it will be comparatively easy to procure a
horse and carriage (or a wagon).
The vehicle secured, let him drive to the principal street, stop at
the corner selected as the meeting-place, and, standing on the seat,
let him announce (his voice pitched high, but not strained, dwelling
for at least two seconds upon each word) that a meeting will be held
in a few minutes at which "the people will be told how our country can
be freed from the curse of Hannaism and monopoly" (or some similar
striking expression). Then proceeding to the next corner let him repeat
the announcement, and so over the village, or, if it be a city, over as
large a section as he can conveniently cover. By making a dozen or more
of these announcements he can always gather about him the nucleus of an
audience.
If unable to secure a vehicle he may go afoot, carrying a chair to
serve him as a speaker's platform. As efficient work can be done in
this way as in any other.
In addressing the five or the fifty men, women and boys who compose
this audience, it is requisite that he should begin in the same high
key and the same deliberate manner and tone in which he made his
announcements, addressing himself not to the few in front of him,
but to the listeners in front of their stores half a block away.
After speaking thus for five minutes, more or less, and arousing the
enthusiasm and interest of distant listeners, he should suddenly turn
his eyes and attention from all who are more than fifty feet away, and
proceed in his natural tone of voice. Very often persons standing in
front of stores and shops, lining the streets for two or three squares,
when the speaker changes and lowers his tone and directs his remarks
to his immediate audience, will come near to hear, if possible, the
completion of some interesting point.
In large cities where there is much noise from street cars and wagons,
this work is more laborious, and from start to finish the speech will
require all the energy the speaker possesses to keep his crowd together
and to increase its number. But in smaller places, or in quieter
neighborhoods of large places, after the first announcements, outdoor
speaking can be reduced to a very moderate exercise. The average man,
after a month's practice, can speak outdoors two or three hours a day,
divided into three or four speeches, without any great fatigue, and
keep it up the year round, resting only upon days so rainy, stormy or
bitter cold, that men will not, for any inducement, stand outdoors.
PRE-ARRANGED APPLAUSE ONE-HALF OF ORATORY.
If friends can secure the free service of a drum corps, a brass band,
or a quartette of singers, to help draw the people together, the
speaker's work will, of course, be greatly lessened, and much will
be done toward saving the voice and energies otherwise necessarily
expended in attracting an audience. He will thus be enabled to
concentrate all his powers, convincing and teaching his hearers.
But in the absence of drums or music, there is nothing so helpful
to the speaker in getting a crowd and in holding it after it has
congregated, than a little skilfully pre-arranged applause. If several
men, helped by a dozen boys, take their places around the speaker,
and from the start take off their hats and cheer lustily about every
three sentences, not only does the noise attract attention and draw
listeners, but it impresses deeply those who are present, so that
each word of the speaker has its effectiveness multiplied. A few men,
starting off in this way (if the speaker is bright and forcible), will
be joined by half the audience, and, in outdoor speaking, generous
applause doubles the effect of oratory. It not only adds weight to the
speech, but it strengthens and cheers the speaker, stimulating him to
his highest efficiency. It infuses new blood into his veins and new
breath into his lungs. It quickens his heart beats and helps clear his
voice. It at once establishes a rapport between the talker and the
talked-to, and converts what might otherwise be a number of isolated
units into a sort of organism, the vital principle of which is one
central enthusiasm voiced by the speaker.
To convince the friends of the movement of the necessity for loud
cheering from the start by pre-arranged, conscious effort, is often
quite difficult, although it is important. Much tact and skill are
required to select a dozen young men before the meeting, and train them
in a few minutes so that they will follow the cue of the man who is to
lead the applause and cheer when he gives the word.
A very important point, where young boys are concerned, is to stop
their cheering when the leader stops. Unless you have a confederate
of tact and personality there is danger that the boys, once started
yelling, will enjoy it so hugely that they will keep it up in a
disorderly way, and injure the meeting much more than they help it.
But properly drilled, a dozen young boys are worth almost as much as a
drum corps. Under proper leadership, they will stop instantly at the
pre-arranged signal, and enjoy the military precision. Ten minutes
training by an experienced man will suffice to complete their education
in this regard.
REPETITION NECESSARY.
The outdoor campaigner should never fear repetition. The average
outdoor listener is not averse to hearing something that he has heard
before, but is averse to anything dull, statistical or requiring
laborious mental effort. In fact, from the standpoint of economy, three
or five addresses made on the same street corner for three or five
successive days, will accomplish much more for the cause than the same
number of addresses delivered each one in a different town or locality.
The apostle of the New Democracy, traveling from place to place, should
stop at least two or three days in each village, even if he has only
one speech and must repeat it over with variations each time. If he is
resourceful and has a few anecdotes and illustrations for each day, it
will pay him to stay a week in each town, as it takes two or three days
for new hearers to become familiar with his objects, aims and attitude
of thought. The writer has often found that more real, direct converts
are made to the people's cause on the sixth or seventh day in a town,
than during all of the previous days combined.
Thought is like seed. Whatever be the soil, like all vegetable life,
it must undergo three stages, planting, developing and fruit bearing.
With the majority each stage of development requires a season; one
speaker sows, another waters, and another gathers the ripe fruit. But a
brain adjacent to an empty stomach, idle arms or a bankrupt business,
offers a more fertile soil for new ideas, and there are some such minds
in every town wherein all these processes can be carried on under the
tutelage of one man; some such persons in despair at the beginning of
the week, who can, by the close of the week, be brought to the light,
their gloom dispelled, and a nobler civilization ever after clearly
pictured before their eyes, the object of their life's endeavor. There
are many persons who, by one series of meetings, are actually converted
from ignorant participants in existing injustice to active workers for
the true state yet to be. The whole tenor and ideals of their lives are
transformed by knowledge vitalized by faith.
When a week's meetings are contemplated in country towns, experience
suggests that the best time to start is on Monday and that the meetings
all week should lead up to one or two grand demonstrations on Sunday,
when the largest crowd of the week can be gotten together, and when,
by the aid of a Scripture lesson, a prayer and a couple of patriotic
songs, the enthusiasm can be carried highest.[3]
[3] Special suggestions for Sunday work see chapter IX.
LITERATURE THE BASIS OF THE MOVEMENT.
No outdoor meeting can fill its mission nor make use of half its
opportunities, without the sale of literature, which enlarges and
completes the points touched on by the speaker. The object of an
outdoor speech is to interest, to stir the emotions of men, dispel
their lethargy and despair, plant in them hope and faith, and prepare
them to think out, read out and study out the great National problem.
The attention of men, that is, the real, serious concentration of their
minds upon great things, is so rare that when you once have it the
opportunity should be utilized fully. Those who are interested by the
outdoor speech should be urged to develop that interest into knowledge,
conviction and action. This can only be done by inducing them to read
some book or pamphlet, explaining in detail the points suggested by you
and backing up your assertions by careful arguments. Ten pamphlets, or
books, sold at a meeting where men's hearts have been opened and their
prejudices melted by enthusiasm, are worth more to the cause than ten
thousand books and circulars distributed from door to door. The sale
of ten small ten-cent pamphlets at a meeting is at least half the value
of the meeting. In this movement one chicken raised is worth more than
a whole brood hatched; one fighting rooster is worth three dozen eggs.
One campaigner, armed with facts and possessing contagious faith in our
creed, necessarily becomes a permanent, creative force in the community
in which he lives.
Literature is one element in the production of such centers of power,
not literature scattered wildly, but literature placed carefully in
the hands of those who have been prepared by the personal appeal of
a sincere advocate to see and understand the points enunciated. So
bountiful has free literature become and so ocean-like is the flood
upon political subjects, that it is difficult to get men to open a
pamphlet on political or social subjects when distributed to them in
their normal condition. But first arouse them by a stirring address,
and they will willingly study what otherwise they could not be induced
to consider even superficially.
Not only should the speaker try to sell as many books and pamphlets as
possible at the meetings, but he should try to leave in every community
or section of a great city covered by him, some worker who will get a
stock of such literature and continue its sale until another impulse is
given the movement by the visit of another Volunteer.
ADVERTISED OUTDOOR MEETINGS.
Very often a little coterie of enthusiasts will think that with the
aid of a few handbills they can get a great crowd of their stupefied,
over-worked and discouraged fellow beings to give up their other
engagements and walk to some out-of-the-way place or corner of the town
to listen to their speaker. Our friendly promoters do not know that
to the eye of the multitude the bills suggest only an uninteresting
harangue or the visionary proclamations of a dreamer that in no way
concern them. The result is that very often instead of a thousand
greeting the speaker, all eager for information and ready for a change
of heart, as anticipated, there are a dozen or so already familiar
with his teachings and sharing his opinion on all important subjects
and half as many idle curiosity seekers without influence in the
community. The speaker is discouraged and the ardent reformers are
chilled to the bone and despairingly admit to each other that the
citizens of their particular community are more perverse and hardened
against new ideas and reforms than the residents of any other locality
under the sun.
If, instead of the preparation for an out-of-the-way meeting and the
laborious provision of seats for people who never came, a few circulars
announcing the meeting and containing two or three gems of thought had
been distributed and the speaker had mounted a wagon or box in the
center of town as heretofore suggested, the meeting would probably have
been a success.
Except on occasions of great excitement, when men are drawn together
by some celebrated orator, or on holidays, when they expect, under any
circumstances, to leave their homes and work and betake themselves with
their families to the woods and fields, it is important to hold outdoor
meetings where an audience can be gathered largely from passersby.
THE NEWSPAPER.
A speaker talks to one hundred, one thousand or more hearers, but
by proper co-operation on the part of the press his words are often
carried to tens of thousands more. Where the press is not absolutely
united for the purpose of maliciously misrepresenting or suppressing
the speaker's words, at least half of his work consists in the silent
appeal to auditors he never sees, those who read his words as reported
in the papers. A few suggestions may, in this connection, be found of
value.
First, have printed, typewritten, or copied by hand, all the
essential points of your speech, ready to be handed to the newspaper
representative. Properly prepared manuscript, written on one side of
the paper only, will often be published in full. It may be thrown into
the waste basket. But any paper will publish more of a man's speech, if
he has neatly prepared his manuscript beforehand than otherwise.
Next, get personally acquainted with each editor, entering into a
pleasant conversation with him and trying to make him your personal
friend. By this means a Volunteer can often use the press of the
opposite party to propagate his views. The original purpose of a
newspaper was to give news, and very often, even in these degenerate
days, the instinct of a newspaper man to give news, if encouraged and
stimulated a little, will become strong enough temporarily to overcome
his prejudice, and possibly overcome his appreciation of the plate
matter supplied by Mr. Hanna's agents free of charge. He may even give
a column or a half-column, describing the meeting of the New Democracy,
quoting freely the words of the speaker.
In dealing with Democratic, Populist and other friendly papers, there
is a secondary opportunity for useful work. It is to show the editors
how they can force the plate matter and ready-print establishments
to furnish news concerning the Democratic Volunteers to all their
customers, by simply demanding information on that subject. Even
request the editor to write a letter, telling of the intense interest
of his constituents in the Volunteers, and urging that his ready-print
matter contain something weekly from the Volunteer's National office.
A sufficient number of such letters cannot fail to have the desired
effect. Let every Volunteer aim to secure the co-operation of a few
editors, and the work is done. The ready-print establishments that
remain stubborn should lose their patronage.
CHAPTER III.
SPEECHES AND MEETINGS.
The Volunteers are organized, not to do the easy things that have been
done in the past and are now being very satisfactorily done by others,
but rather to do what others have left, and are leaving, undone. In
communities where the New Democracy is strong and the people are
already in the habit of gathering periodically and during political
campaigns nightly, it requires no organization of Volunteers to
provide men to instruct and amuse them to their entire satisfaction.
Our work is to do what others have not done and cannot do; to gather
crowds where others have failed; to create interest where there is
no interest; to make friends where we have no friends, and, WHERE WE
ARE ALREADY STRONG AND DOMINANT IN A COMMUNITY, TO TEACH OUR FRIENDS
AND BROTHERS TO SO SYSTEMATIZE THEIR EFFORTS AND ENTHUSIASM AS TO
BE MOST USEFUL IN EDUCATING AND GAINING THE SUPPORT OF LESS ADVANCED
COMMUNITIES ELSEWHERE.
In arranging indoor meetings, it is essential, in order that our work
may be fruitful, to get out other than what is known as "the same old
crowd." There are a few people of both parties in every community who
are always interested in politics, and who attend nearly all party
meetings. On such, ammunition is largely wasted. A speaker should never
be satisfied to address a small crowd, the majority of whom are already
in accord with his principles. His object should be to bring in new
men, to get in fresh blood. The motto of each of us should be, "I came
not to bring the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."
To secure the attendance of the non-political class, it is, therefore,
expedient, in addition to the regular speeches, to provide some form
of entertainment, such as vocal and instrumental music, a dramatic
rendition, or a children's performance.
When an audience is assembled particularly to enjoy the entertainment
and incidentally from curiosity to see and hear the strange speaker,
it is well for the speech to be built from materials furnished by
the local performers. If children have participated, there is no
happier way to begin than by telling how enjoyable were their songs
and recitations, how thrilling the thoughts born of their happy faces
and hearts throbbing with youthful hopes. The speaker might tell
how, looking into their bright eyes, his thoughts turned toward the
future, where he saw the obstacles against which these children will
have to contend, the difficulties they will meet in getting started
in life, the unfair advantages over them possessed by the children of
special privilege. By taking the children who participate as a text and
riveting the attention of the audience upon them instead of considering
the rights of men in general, he can gain at once, not only the
attention, but the sympathy and the very hearts of those who listen.
If the entertainment is a musical one, the speaker might begin by
describing the state of mind produced by the sweet harmonies just
listened to. By recalling the difference between the discord produced
by ten men tuning their musical instruments and the harmony resulting
when they play the same instruments together, he has an illustration
applicable in several ways: suggesting the harmony and orderliness
of the state that we are fighting for, the economy of concert in our
political methods, and numerous other points, which, if given in a
conversational way, will arrest the attention of even the women and the
children. Let him then proceed with simple axiomatic truths that can be
grasped by every hearer, abundantly illustrated, and the crowd will be
induced to attend future meetings.
There are a thousand cues given and illustrations suggested by
a preliminary entertainment that can be made the gateway to the
sympathies, affections and intelligence of those who listen. Convince
the audience that the questions treated are neither abstract nor
incomprehensible, but simple and tangible, and concern their personal
welfare and the future of their families, and self-interest will impel
them to listen to specific arguments backed by facts and figures.
The Volunteer who aspires to attract vast audiences and transplant
the hopes and thoughts that flourish in his own mind to the fertile
soil of other minds, must first learn that the passion to instruct,
though a noble instinct, must be curbed ruthlessly, else instead of an
orator the "would-be" will find himself a bore. The passion to impart
knowledge, like the other human passions, when given free rein to
exercise itself unrestrained, defeats its own ends and at last destroys
itself.
How many old speakers we know who long ago looked forward, as hundreds
of young men now look forward, to becoming orators, with power to sway
the multitudes, to guide and lead them to higher things. But instead of
orators we call them fossils. Instead of attracting they repel. They
begin whenever permitted and never stop until so commanded. They are
brought out and used in emergencies when no one else can be obtained,
but never otherwise. They are common hacks. Why is this? Not always
because such men do not possess ability. Some of them have followed the
world's greatest thinkers throughout their intricate reasonings and
profound solutions of life's most serious problems. But at the very
start they conceived wrong notions concerning the function of a public
speaker, an erroneous impression as to the utility and object of a
speech or popular address.
We have often noticed that superior minds are overlooked on popular
occasions and some man with less capacity and knowledge, far less
endowed with mental treasures, is called upon to do the honors of
the occasion. Why? Because he has the faculty of addressing himself
directly to the listeners and of adapting himself to their frame of
mind.
TEN COMMANDMENTS.
To those who would become speakers and avoid the mistakes that cause
the majority of failures, the following rules will be found valuable:
1. Do not try to tell all you know at any one time.
2. Do not try to appear deep, learned or poetical.
3. Do not try to prove every statement you make.
4. Use statistics sparingly.
5. Address yourself, not to the kind of men and women you would have
made had you been the Creator, but to the actual men and women who have
been created, who fill your halls and make up your audiences.
6. Make your talk personal and apply every point to the wants, woes and
sentiments of your listeners.
7. Never regret the half hour or the hour occupied by the music,
recitations, drama, or other entertainment preceding your speech.
8. Do not manifest impatience at the time consumed in short talks by
local speakers.
9. Remember that generally all the good that it is possible for you to
accomplish if your audience by preliminary exercises is brought into
rapport and sympathy with you, can be accomplished in half an hour.
If you can get the complete attention of your audience for half an
hour, they will have sufficient matter to fully occupy their thoughts
the rest of the day and night, and not only this, if your talk is
interesting and they go away hungry instead of satiated, they will
gladly attend the next meeting.
10. Be satisfied if you interest your hearers and be not greedy
to instruct. For those really interested by oratory will instruct
themselves by means of literature which is the only source of real
instruction. Oratory should win sentiment and stir interest; literature
performs the work of education. The speech fulfils its mission if it
persuades men to read aright.
ENTERTAINMENT.
A meeting that is half entertainment or if illustrations, anecdotes
and stories be included under the head of entertainment, a meeting
that is nine-tenths entertainment and one-tenth direct statement
of fact and reasoning therefrom, is of far more value than a three
hours' bombardment with facts, figures, arguments and the soundest
reasoning, directed by a master. The average human mind, as God made
it and as our present unsocial life has unmade it, will become wearied
by such an effort and leave the meeting with the firm resolve not to
attend another. Such meetings cannot be held often and do not win the
sympathies and co-operation of men nearly so much as a meeting planned
and arranged on the basis of adaptation to the capacities of the
average listener and his multiform emotions and mental wants. This is
the secret of the success of the popular churches. They do not try to
teach the people too much. They do not strain that organ, very weak in
the average human mind, known as the logical faculty.
Far more progress can be made in any community by instituting a
successful series of meetings, wherein serious reasoning occupies a
minor portion of the time, the rest filled in by entertainment, than
can be gained by meetings that furnish a perfect mine of wealth in the
way of food for thought and intellectual feasting for the few who have
the power to appreciate such things.[4]
[4] Of course the most effective methods of presenting our
cause can only be hinted at in a text-book. A month or several
months of personal training is requisite to give the student
a real understanding of the difference between the old method
and the new. It is, therefore, urged that as many of the
younger speakers as possible attend and take direct, personal
instruction from the Faculty of the Volunteers' School in St.
Louis.
LIFE IS SHORT.
The length of the man's speech should be measured, not by his own
physical endurance nor the time that his breath lasts, not by the
amount that he has to say nor even by the capacity of his audience
to listen or to remain in the room, but in every case it should be
measured by the capacity of his hearers to enjoy.
Most political meetings are too long. Very often two or three speakers
are engaged, each harboring the erroneous opinion that duty requires
him to talk an hour. Now, any speaker who cannot say something good,
useful and inspiring in fifteen minutes, is incapable of saying
anything good, useful or inspiring at all.
Except in times of great excitement or in out-of-the-way country
districts where meetings are few and the hearers, like savages in a
forest, must gorge themselves when they have a chance, the speaking
should never, on any occasion, last more than an hour and a half.
Where there are three speakers, not only should each be limited to
half an hour but the chair should be filled by a man with pluck and
personality sufficiently great to tap the speaker on the shoulder when
his time is up.
I have seen more hoggishness displayed at political meetings than ever
at a dinner table. The man who sits down at a table and eats everything
in sight before his friends arrive, is a gentleman compared with the
fellow who occupies the time of his colleagues at a public meeting;
because, if by one man's greed all the food on the table is eaten,
other food can be obtained, but when some oratorical hog monopolizes
the opportunity of his fellow-speakers, he takes from his colleagues
what can never be replaced.
Our volunteers will accomplish a great work for humanity indeed if one
of their number succeeds in inventing a method to stiffen the backbones
of presiding officers sufficiently to enable them to sit down on that
species of "bore" who push themselves to the front, ask to speak first
by pledging to quit at a specified time and then talk on until the
audience begins to disperse. Few people appreciate the great loss
caused to a party or movement by the vacillating weakness of presiding
officers and the greedy instincts of men who like to be heard and, in
order to satisfy this instinct, "hog everything in sight."
One mission of the volunteer speaker is to teach etiquette to the
political speakers of our own party and when "Ex-Governor So-and-So"
and "Prosecuting Attorney Other-man" and "Judge Dry-Bones" and
"Ex-Judge Old Fogy" and "The Honorables" and "The Colonels" and "The
Generals" and the bulldozing youthful speakers assume to occupy time
not intended for them, to take the chairman by the arm and stand by his
side until he redeems the pledge made before the meeting and stops the
mouth of the insolent fellow who has not sense enough to regard the
rights of his fellow-workers.
AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION.
If a prominent man, known to be long-winded and lacking in this one
requisite of a gentleman, is present and it is uncertain that the
presiding officer has the courage necessary to call him down at the
right time, our voluble celebrity should be told that the position of
honor being the last on the program, it has been POSITIVELY given to
him. Thus the other speakers will have a chance to plant a few ideas
in the minds of their auditors before they are hopelessly wearied.
Although the last speaker may injure the general effect of the
meeting by his prolonged and drawn-out harangue, the self-assertive
and independent ones among the listeners can, at least, leave the room
when they get fatigued, without missing the opportunity of listening to
those whom they came to hear. This point is purposely emphasized, and
strong language not inadvertently used.
Where more than one speaker participates, there is nothing more
essential for a successful meeting than that each speaker be limited in
time by a pre-arranged plan, and that each be forced by the presiding
officer strictly to observe that limit.
MORE THAN TWO MILLION MEMBERS.
The success of the Christian Endeavor movement in the Protestant
churches is due almost solely to their method. The Christian Endeavor
Societies have no new message to the world; they advocate no reforms;
they do not add anything to the teaching of the church; do not even
take it back to any of those sublime truths of the past largely ignored
and forgotten by the modern church. But there is one simple reform in
the method of carrying on religious meetings to which the Christian
Endeavor Societies owe their success, and by means of which alone they
have gained more than two million members in little more than a decade.
This great and valuable secret is their system of two or three minute
addresses, and their requiring participation in the meeting by every
member.
Some of us are familiar with the old time Protestant prayer-meetings,
composed of five or six old men, from ten to thirty middle-aged and old
women, with a scattering boy or girl forced to attend by parents. The
prayers were long. The talks were dry. The presence of a young man or
woman was always a surprise.
The Christian Endeavor Society with the same theology, the same
message, the same hymns, not even having a new impulse, a new moral
ideal, or a new hope for the betterment of the world, but merely by
requiring each member to say a few words and requiring that they say
no more than a few words, has succeeded in joining together over two
million young people into a prayer meeting society. Young people and
prayer meetings! Always before suspicious of each other! Presto
change! Two million young people organize in fifteen years to attend
prayer meeting. The explanation of this miracle is ENFORCED BREVITY.
Short speeches, the extinction of bores, and the participation in each
meeting in some way by every listener are so far as method goes the
essentials for a great popular movement.
Good manners that have been taught to most of the world as regards
eating and drinking have begun to be introduced into the world of
meetings, religious and political, and when we see a feature, a little
reform of this kind, building up in a few years one of the largest and
most formidable religious organizations in the way of numbers that the
world has ever seen, the organizers and workers of the new Democracy
should profit thereby and at least learn the lesson, "Don't bore the
people." It were better that the long-winded talker were a Republican
or that he were thrown into the sea than that he should be allowed to
destroy our meetings by his prolonged and learned discourses. Flee from
the long-winded man, or else turn on him and make him sit down when
his time is up. Or do with him as you do with the man who displays
swinish proclivities when you invite him to dinner, DON'T INVITE HIM
AGAIN.
THE BUREAU OF VOLUNTEER SPEAKERS.
A community feels that it needs to be awakened, and desires to arrange
a series of meetings.[5] How can suitable speakers be had? So often
a mistake is made. A speaker goes off on a tangent; he carries his
hearers into a labyrinth of statistics and details, from which he
cannot extricate them; he makes one "break" that alienates more votes
than his whole speech wins, or in other ways proves himself incapable
of accomplishing good for the community that he visits.
[5] Advertising methods: Tickets afford the best method of
advertising meetings of all kinds. It is a personal, definite
invitation, and the surest "crowd-gatherer." In large cities
it may be necessary to issue from fifty thousand to one
hundred thousand, and have them carefully distributed, in
order to get out two thousand persons. In smaller places the
percentage of waste is not so great. Get the co-operation of
the press, if possible, but do not rely upon it. To the last
moment there is always danger of its deserting to the money
power, as the latter can bring almost irresistible pressure to
bear upon it. Print on every ticket a short list of the best
books, i. e., Lloyd's "Wealth against Commonwealth," Ely's
"Socialism and Social Reform," "Ten Men of Money Island,"
"Coin's Financial School," etc.
Heretofore such a man, by bulldozing prominent politicians into giving
him letters of recommendation, might impose himself on one community
after another, and continue for years to injure the party. By proper
co-operation of the party with the Bureau of Volunteers Speakers, this
evil, in a large measure, can be avoided, because this Bureau does not
send a man to speak until it is thoroughly acquainted, not only with
his character, but his capacities and judgment, and knows his method
of argument and what he is to advocate. When young and comparatively
inexperienced speakers are sent out, it is known beforehand what is to
be said, as their speeches are prepared and rehearsed in advance. They
must know what they have to say, and not trust to inspiration, which
often results in perspiration for the speaker, and exasperation for the
hearers.
Every speaker sent out will present the great fundamental truths of our
movement and not waste time in arguing details, which only supplies our
enemies with new weapons to use against us. His speech beforehand has
been pruned and criticised; the dead branches lopped off; the twigs and
vines cleared from the trunk of the tree, and he is prepared to do only
such work as will make converts and deepen the convictions of those
already with us.
There exists no other Bureau or Headquarters in America, through which
Democratic organizations can obtain at all times the best talent, and
never fail to get a man who will strengthen their local organization.
Again, when meetings are held regularly in a town and a work of
systematic education is carried on, it often happens that one speaker
following another repeats over again the same statistics, the same
arguments and even the same stories heard before, thereby tiring the
audience. But when a community is supplied regularly by the National
Bureau, each speaker takes up a different phase of the great problem,
recapitulating only the few fundamental truths on which our movement
rests. Each presents also something new, bright and spicy of his
own. By this arrangement every community can enjoy the benefits of a
succession of good speakers every month or week during the whole four
years, and escape the persecution of those unteachable bores, who think
themselves speakers. The crowds at these regular periodical meetings
will increase, because each time they will hear something just as good
as the last time, with added special features, the result of individual
genius.
At present, when a speaker is wanted, anybody is invited who happens to
be available, his abilities being measured by his own recommendation,
or by letters bulldozed from prominent men, who, for reasons of
political prudence dared not offend so energetic a fellow. A community
in this way may secure a good speech occasionally, but often the
speaker is a positive injury to the cause. One poor speech in a series
does more to lessen the general interest and reduce the size of the
crowds thereafter, than can be overcome by half a dozen good speeches.
Of course, where the local Democracy can secure the services of some
one of our national leaders, no bureau mediation is needed, but our
national leaders are few and the work before us limitless, therefore
the service of the Volunteers' Bureau in training, equipping and
guaranteeing a large number of new speakers who can be secured at any
time, by any community, at a moderate expense, is meeting with hearty
response by Democratic clubs generally.
The best way to make a strong club anywhere is to institute a series of
meetings, all the year round, and, by having at least one able speaker
each time, never to disappoint the audience.
Let each town and village establish a lecture course at once, and place
itself in communication with the Volunteers' Bureau. The more numerous
and closer together such villages and towns are, the smaller will be
the expense to each community and the easier will it be to make up
regular circuits for speakers.
THE CO-OPERATION OF CONSTITUENTS NECESSARY.
Although every speaker sent out is guaranteed to do effective work,
the leaders of each community are urgently requested to report to
headquarters at once, the success or short-comings of each speaker
and meeting. Without such co-operation, the Bureau cannot keep that
oversight of its hundreds of speakers necessary to raise the standard
of work to the highest efficiency. It is assuredly the duty of local
workers to give straight-forward reports to headquarters, of the
short-comings and "breaks" on the part of the representatives of our
Bureau, who represent our party and for whom our party is responsible
as well as to report the benefits resulting from each meeting. The
fact should also be emphasized that each representative of the Bureau
receives a letter of recognition and instruction once a month from
headquarters, and his standing with the Bureau should be judged solely
by such letters or by direct correspondence. We must be able, when any
speaker fails on his part to fulfill our requirements, to cease our
connection with, and our responsibility for him.
CHAPTER IV.
METHODS OF TRAVEL.
For those very respectable speakers of the old school who go to a town
only when sent for and speak only at meetings properly advertised and
pre-arranged, who are blessed with a goodly supply of that eminently
obstructive article, the chief burden on every popular movement,
commonly called dignity, there is no advice needed as to methods of
travel. For such well regulated exponents of bimetallism and reform
about the only advice that can be given is "be sure that your car fare
is sent to you before boarding the train."
But to another class of speakers, those who make up the rank and file
of Democracy's Volunteers, those whose purpose and power of will are
such that no obstacles, no stumbling blocks, no hardships can embitter
or delay, those in whom the fire of enthusiasm for humanity has burned
up their dignity and who in starting out do not ask whether they have
means to go respectably and comfortably and quickly or not, but one
question presents itself, namely, "Can I get to my destination in time
to deliver my message?" The methods used by such will be various.
When we have the money to buy railway tickets and when cars go at the
proper hour, we will travel by rail. Otherwise we will drive when we
can conveniently secure a horse and vehicle, or we will gladly mount
the saddle or a wheel. But when car tickets, carriages, saddle horses
and bicycles are alike impossible, the man fighting for principle will
rise superior to his dignity and dependence upon small comforts and
taking a bundle of literature and a small bag will, before starting,
ask himself only, "Are my shoes good?"
EXPERIENCE FAVORS TRAVELING TWO BY TWO.
The early Christian disciples went out preaching the gospel by twos.
Throughout history and in the experience of those living, it has
been found that the will and intensity of purpose of the average man
is better preserved and that he more easily overcomes obstacles,
troubles and disappointments if in traveling among strangers he has
companionship. Therefore although, at times the Volunteers may travel
as individuals, lonely and homesick, still, wherever it is practicable,
we advise our speakers to travel by twos. It is much easier to walk
five, ten, twenty, or even forty miles in a day, from one town to
another with a companion. Not only is loneliness overcome, but two
speaker and workers have more than twice the influence upon a community
that either would exert separately. Besides it is safer, and, in case
of sickness or accident, there is some one to go for help or to "tell
the story."
AFTER ENROLLING.
Two young Volunteers start out for a month's campaign in the cause of
American liberty. We have no money, the extent of our capital being
a bundle of Democratic literature, an appointment from the Bureau of
Volunteer Speakers and a good pair of shoes each. We start at seven
o'clock in the morning from town "A." It is twenty miles to "B" where
we wish to speak at night. We walk six miles by nine o'clock and are
then overtaken by a farm wagon in which we are allowed to ride eight
miles, when it leaves our road. We give the driver a pamphlet, thanks
and a blessing and we part. It is now eleven o'clock and we walk six
miles further when at one o'clock we reach our destination.
In ten minutes we have found a friendly Democrat who, after looking at
our letters, shakes our hands, takes us to his house and provides food.
After resting a couple of hours after dinner, we make an outdoor talk
as suggested in Chapter three, and announce a night meeting.
If those who profess the name Democracy in this village are
overburdened with sham dignity and devotion to what is old and
inefficient and refuse to recognize or aid the appointed speakers
of the people's cause, we must be ready to rely on other resources.
Our afternoon collection may amount to ten cents or it may reach
fifty cents or a dollar. The crowd may, however, refuse to contribute
anything. We may sell literature sufficient to supply our wants, or the
gold standard and the trusts may have caused such a scarcity of cash
that we cannot sell anything. We may be compelled to get our supper and
maybe breakfast by trading a pamphlet to a grocer for crackers and
cheese. After speaking in the afternoon and evening if we should meet
with no success or recognition, expediency would suggest that we shake
the dust from the soles of our feet and proceed on our journey toward a
more friendly community, while the oppressor prepares the way for the
work of education later.
In some places friends will supply car tickets; in others they will
procure a carriage or wagon and deliver us to the next town. From
other villages or towns we may have to proceed as we started and as
the apostles used to travel, walking along the dusty road, the frozen
ground or through mud or snow. This method of travel is not only now
practiced by many of our speakers, but can and will become the method
of thousands more. It is a thoroughly practicable and sensible method
of teaching truth against great odds and adds to the force of the
speakers' message by proving him sincere.
That this plan of campaigning is altogether feasible the writer can
personally attest from actual experience. Years ago, as a mere boy, I
became intensely interested in the principles of the New Democracy and
starting without money, without friends or any organized assistance,
impelled merely by enthusiasm for humanity and hatred of that tyranny
through which my race and family had suffered, I traversed in this way
every county in the State of Kansas, circulating thousands of pamphlets
in which were pointed out the way to a nobler civilization. While still
a boy I also walked or rode with friends through Missouri, Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. I was often interfered with
by persons disposed to disagree, but at every village and town and city
through which I passed, I stood up in the open street in a carriage, on
a dry-goods box or a chair and proclaimed my faith that the poor people
need not suffer as they do if they would but unite in behalf of their
own interests and use the ballot against oppression and tyranny.
Very often I was without money, and I then discovered that my early
study of hygiene could be turned to good account. I found that the
great capitalists, aided by Edward Atkinson and the soup house
reformers, in trying to devise a diet for the poor that might enable
them to work for less wages, though failing in this, had at least given
me a pointer. I found that their bill of fare lacked but one ingredient
to make it very endurable, and that was enthusiasm and youthful hope
and fire. I added this ingredient and was independent of the world.
HYGIENE AS A WAR MEASURE.
Those Volunteers who intend not only to try to speak for the cause
during the next four years, but have determined to fight for the
continuation of our Republic in spite of all obstacles, should learn
how independent the body really can be of what are usually termed the
necessaries of life.
As an invalid child I attended a course of lectures delivered by one
Dr. O'Leary. This distinguished gentleman, with the theatre stage,
which he used as his platform covered over with polished skeletons,
manikins, human heads in chloroform and colored pictures of the various
parts of the human frame, impressed my young mind deeply. At that time,
I remember I had been "given up" by my parents and the doctor, as a
child who could not possibly be raised. I was accustomed to thoughts
of death and for years constantly expected a visit from the dreaded
monster. No memory is more distinctly engraven on my mind than the
nights when, with eager eyes fastened on this wonderful man and his
mysterious skulls and manikins, my heart throbbing, my face aglow, I
listened in rapt attention, that possibly I might catch some secret
that would help me defeat death and add strength to my frail body
sufficient to do battle with life's hardships.
After describing a boy who died at about my own age because his nervous
system had been deprived of the proper life-giving elements which had
been taken from his food by modern processes, the Professor took up
a handful of wheat letting it fall repeatedly through his fingers,
stating that each grain of wheat contains in it all of the elements
required to sustain human life. He said that civilization, by taking
away the outside, the most nutritious part of the wheat, had struck a
blow at the physical development of our race. He declared that man can
live for years on whole wheat requiring no other article of diet, and
that the outside of the wheat especially, now thrown aside as bran
and fed to the cattle, contains the elements of bone and nerve fibre,
that, while the lady who eats only the choicest white bread, made
of the finest flour, has to substitute gold for parts of her teeth,
the teeth of the cattle that eat the bran are perfect. He gave as an
illustration the march of Caesar and his legions through Gallia, when
Caesar's soldiers often for weeks at a time were without provisions and
were compelled to feed on whole wheat alone which they would snatch
in handfuls from the fields as they marched, thresh in the palms of
their hands and grind with their molars. The crushing of the hard wheat
grain gave the teeth exercise while the crushed bran and surface of the
grain supplied those elements required in the construction of bone and
teeth. "At the present time, nineteen centuries after," so this doctor
said, "there are numerous skulls of these same soldiers of the great
Caesar to be seen in the London Museum and as a result of their wheat
mastication, every tooth is as sound in these skulls, as whole and free
from decay as when heathen Rome was Mistress of the World and Caesar
was King."
A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
Whether this astounding statement of the learned doctor has any basis
of truth or not I do not know, but that the lesson he sought to impress
by it is true, my own experience can attest. During a period of several
years, with another young enthusiast, I subsisted on a diet of bread
and apples except when these could not be had, when we repaired the
waste of our bodies by eating whole wheat, a bag of which we constantly
carried with us for "emergencies." Often we have subsisted on whole
wheat and clear water alone for several days, and even a week at a
time. During these periods we did not notice that we lost flesh. Of
course we had very little to lose, but our vigor and the intensity of
our enthusiasm and faith in our powers, all of which depend largely
upon the amount of nutriment carried from the stomach to the brain, and
various nerve centers, were not in the least diminished. Later on we
found that when convenient, we could obtain more nourishment from the
wheat with less chewing by having it boiled, but when boiled, we could
not carry with us a week's rations without fatigue, and boiled wheat
will become sour in the summer time while whole dry wheat will keep for
years, and, like feminine beauty, remain ever fresh. It is the most
condensed form of digestible food known to man.
Of course where men have dissipated and their powers of digestion have
been undermined by intoxicating liquor, tobacco, or the habitual use
of highly spiced and over-prepared foods, any coming down to a natural
diet like this is a severe hardship. But for a young man with firm
faith and good health, NOT TO BE IMPEDED IN HIS DESIRE TO BECOME AN
ESSENTIAL FACTOR IN THE GREATEST MOVEMENT OF HISTORY BY THE MERE FACT
THAT HE HAS NO MONEY WITH WHICH TO PAY CAR FARE AND BUY GOOD FOOD AND
CLOTHES, the suggestions here given will be found helpful. I would
not advise others to do, what I have not done or am not willing to do
myself. The fact is, however, that any young man, in good health, and
formed of the right kind of "dust," can travel, without any money from
one end of the country to the other speaking daily, and accomplish
much for our cause, even if he does not meet more than one true
friend in a thousand miles. But the comforts and vices and follies of
civilization he must be able to do without.
This austere and ascetic mode of life is not commended for its own
sake. The suggestion is merely thrown out as one possible way of
beginning work, so that no young man in good health can claim that he
would have done wonders for the cause had he not been prohibited by
poverty. No such excuse exists. Healthy single men can live and thrive
if buoyed up by hope and faith and manly purpose, and travel the world
over on a quarter of the wages of a day laborer.
NOT CIVIL BUT MILITARY.
To those persons who may possibly criticise these suggestions as
tending to encourage a lower standing of living, thereby indirectly
aiding in the lowering of wages, I will simply say that I am not giving
suggestions for methods of civil life but only military suggestions to
be acted upon in time of war. The battle is now on. No conflict of the
past ever appealed more strongly to the sublime qualities in human
nature than the present war of the people against the united plutocracy
of all countries. It is therefore appropriate and timely to give any
and all suggestions that may be of value to those bearing the brunt of
the people's battle.
Can it be urged against the half starved Cuban patriots that because
they have learned how to subsist through months on roots and berries,
and sugar cane their habits are likely to lower the standard of living
in Cuba? In answer the smallest boy would say that the Cubans eat
berries this year in order to eat watermelons next year, that they
chew slippery elm and sheep sorrel to-day in order to have roast beef,
oysters and plum pudding to-morrow. They are now eating the food of
the animals and sleeping in the open fields with the beasts and dying,
as the cattle die, by order of a butcher, that their countrymen and
their children and their children's children hereafter may live as free
men, enjoying the heritage of a free Cuba and all the varied gifts of
civilization.
Did our forefathers of the Revolutionary War lower the standard
of living and decrease wages or injure the cause of labor or of
trade-unionism, because, in fighting for country they were willing
to go without shoes, staining with blood from their wounded feet the
projecting icy rocks that gashed them as they marched against the
British? Oh, no! Our forefathers went without shoes that we might have
them. They went hungry and cold and gave up their individual comforts
and lives, that we, their descendants and fellow-countrymen, might have
greater comforts, increased liberties and life more abundant.
GENERAL MARION.
When General Francis Marion with his brave soldier boys was lying in
at Snows Island on the Pedee River, North Carolina, preparing to make
another one of his surprising and brilliant raids on the enemy, an
officer from the British post at Georgetown was dispatched to visit
him to treat for an exchange of prisoners. The blooming Britisher was
blindfolded and carried by a circuitous route into camp. The bargain
arranged, he accepted an invitation to dine. The meal was served on
pieces of bark and consisted entirely of roasted potatoes of which
General Marion ate heartily, requesting his guest to profit by his
example, repeating the old adage that "Hunger is the best sauce." "But
surely, General, this cannot be your ordinary fare" said the well fed
adversary. "Yes it is," replied Marion, "For months at a time my men
have lived on roasted potatoes, and we are especially fortunate on this
occasion to be able to provide a double allowance to set before so
honorable a guest." The young foreigner was so overcome with admiration
for the brave patriots fighting for their country in such a spirit that
on his return to Georgetown he retired from the service, declaring
his conviction that men who could with such cheerfulness, endure the
privations of such a life, could never be subdued.
The blooming Britisher was right. The God of William Tell, of Cromwell,
of Washington and Marion, of Garrison and Lincoln, of Moses and of
Bryan, never has and never will permit such enthusiasm and faith and
patriotism to go unrewarded. Men with purpose so intense, whose flame
of patriotism burns so brightly as to consume their love of comfort
and dependence upon external things, can never be subdued by hired
Hessians nor the combined forces of opulence, ease and greed.
Going out in such a spirit, demanding three full square meals each
day for every human being born into the world, yet to obtain this end
willing ourselves to live like Marion's band on roasted potatoes, like
the Cuban patriots on sugar cane and berries, or on graham bread and
apples, or to ease our hunger if necessary by grinding with our teeth
dry whole wheat, we will in the name of God and humanity take this
country and rescue our world from those who now make of it a living
hell.
This unconquerable, independent spirit that rises above physical
conditions, social limitations, comforts and luxuries, is and always
has been the conquering spirit of the world, always the sure omen of
victory.
If Marion and his band could rise superior to physical appetites in
fighting for thirteen little colonies away off from the great centers
of civilization; if the followers of Gomez and the immortal Maceo can
march over perilous mountains and through deadly marshes, suffering
continually for want of food and drink, and for years swing with almost
supernatural skill their deadly machetes against the brutal hordes of
Spain, in order to free one little West India isle, then surely we,
who see the brutal arm of a united world plutocracy striking down and
destroying all that has been bought so dearly by Washington, Marion,
and Lincoln, about to enslave the world's home and refuge of freedom
for a hundred years, we should not be unwilling to make any sacrifice,
take any risks, perform any drudgery.
In defending our country we decide the destiny of the human race.
We fight to make seventy millions of people free and eventually to
free the world. Ours is the most sublime, the most terrific, the most
inspiring of all historic struggles.
In fighting we will take the advice and learn what we can from any
source however humble. We will listen to the hygienist, the vegetarian,
even to the soup house reformer, if their words will help free us from
those chains of poverty that paralyze the arm of the ordinary slave
and make him impotent to strike back against his oppressors.
The man who, because he earns his bread by labor, is looked down upon
by the companions of his youth and, because of his helplessness and
his clothes, is fenced out of respectable society, such a man requires
condensed and highly spiced food. He craves wine and beer and whiskey
and every condiment and stimulant that can raise his spirits, depressed
by failure, disappointment and the slow plodding life that offers no
advancement. Continual drudgery, without opportunity for promotion,
engulfs man in a gloom uncheered by a ray of hope.
The reformer, the friend of labor, the idealist, the true Christian
believe that such victims should not only have the best food and drink,
better clothes and better homes, but that they and their children
should also have a chance to rise, should never be debarred from
opportunities for advancement or for utilizing any talent or genius
before discovered or that may hereafter be discovered, that might lift
them to a plane of distinction and honor.
We believe in luxury; so much so that we believe every poor man's
family should have an opportunity to enjoy all those healthful and
normal luxuries which invention and progress have placed within the
reach of men. But the greatest of all luxuries, that which is more
appetizing than pepper or salt or cinnamon or garlic, that which is
more stimulating than beer or whiskey or even champagne, and which must
precede in the hearts of the masses the procurement of all these other
and lesser luxuries, is that divinest gift of Heaven--hope. Give a man
all the other luxuries that the world affords, and take away hope, and
his blood thickens, his eye becomes dull, his color heavy and his pulse
irregular. But allow him only dry bread in the open air and sunlight
by a flowing brook, and give him hope, and his eye flashes, his heart
throbs quicken, his face flushes, his muscles harden and all his
physical and mental powers are ready for instant application.
We, the Volunteers of the New Democracy, have an abundant supply of
this stimulant more powerful than any liquor, more appetizing than any
condiment, more soothing than any narcotic, giving power and increased
facility without reaction. We have hope. We have faith. We have
purpose. We have absolute knowledge that our cause is just. We know
that we shall win. We cannot be suppressed. We cannot be put down. The
world is ours. WE ARE INVINCIBLE.
NO RAILWAY PASSES.
In starting out to destroy plutocracy, the first thing the average
weakling does is to approach some senatorial or congressional tool of
the very plutocracy that he thinks he is opposing, and ask him to beg
plutocracy for a weapon to fight it with, free of charge. In other
words, in opposing the trusts and monopolies, among which the railroad
monopoly is one of the most tyrannical and corrupt, he asks for a free
railway pass.
The railroad pass is the most corrupting instrument in American
politics to-day. It buys for a small price our congressmen and
senators, our county and state committees of both the Democratic and
Republican parties, our bosses in both parties, our editors, Democratic
and Republican, our preachers, Democratic, Republican and Prohibition,
and many of our Democratic lecturers and speakers. Even many of our
labor leaders make themselves impotent in this great struggle by
accepting railroad passes. Our labor statisticians, from the National
office in Washington to the smallest State branch, aid in smothering
facts and giving life to fiction in order to ride on railroad passes.
Our speakers, in accepting the gage of battle laid down by plutocracy
in the late campaign, must neither ask nor accept favors of our
enemies. We must defy them. Rather than ride on railroad passes we
should walk.
We should learn from that venerable Cuban patriot, Maximo Gomez,
who, when offered a sop by the brutal despotism against which he
was fighting, although it was presented to him by those two eminent
yet despicable toadies of European tyranny, Messrs. Cleveland and
Olney, refused point blank to consider their degrading propositions
and answered: "We do not accept favors of Spain. We hate Spain. Our
business is not to ask favors but to fight."
DEFY THE RAILROADS.
During the late campaign the railroad corporations united not only to
aid in continuing the gold standard by the use of corporation funds but
in robbing our people of a free ballot by the most treasonable acts
of coercion and intimidation. There is not a giant stock jobber, tax
dodger, labor skinner or other law protected thief in the country who
has stolen more than one million dollars from widows and orphans and
other unsuspecting investors, who has not been aided and abetted in his
nefarious schemes by the railroad corporations. There is not a single
monopoly nor trust that preys upon legitimate trade and commerce but
has been fostered in its unnatural growth by railroad discrimination.
There has not been a single reform advocated for the benefit of the
common people during the last thirty years, but has been fought
bitterly by the railway officials.
We cannot destroy plutocracy, we cannot fight the trusts, we cannot
fight the gold standard unless we are willing to defy the railroads.
If, during our coming Congressional campaign, the railroads continue
their habit of monarchical coercion and intimidation, depriving
American citizens of their right to a free ballot, we must be
sufficiently intelligent and determined to co-operate with the enraged
and long-suffering people who will then be forced to declare for
government ownership of all public highways thus destroying, at a
single blow, this most dangerous and tyrannical form of plutocratic
despotism.
We cannot afford to ask for railway passes. If we cannot pay our fare
and cannot secure a horse, WE MUST WALK.
BRYAN WAGONS.
Before describing our method of fitting up and sending out Bryan
wagons, something should be said about the use of the word "Bryan," and
of Mr. Byran's request that his name should not be used by clubs and
organizations.
The word Bryan no longer belongs to any one man. It has become the
common property of all who love liberty. The word Bryan became the cry
of exultation at the birth of the New Democracy. At this most momentous
historic event of the present century when an ideal was grasped from
the upper realm of books, of hope, of morality and religion, brought
down to the world of fact and embodied in flesh and blood; when what
before was a dream, a philosophy, an aspiration, suddenly allied itself
with physical agencies and created a political power that surprised
the world, the one cry into which the long oppressed millions breathed
their joy, their hope, their hate, their devotion to their fellows,
their defiance of their enemies was the magic word, Bryan! Bryan! As
this one word was repeated and cheered and cried aloud to express both
hope and anger, promise and defiance, it became sacred. It flitted from
the possession of the single human mite whom it had pleased God to
appoint as the herald of the new dispensation, and became the common
heritage of humanity.
At the Chicago Convention one citizen lost his name, but the world
found it and the word Bryan became the battle cry of all who fight for
freedom or strive for justice.
As this individual citizen of Nebraska cannot by any act or blunder in
the future, efface the mark that he has made upon history's scroll nor
smother the fire of enthusiasm his eloquence has lighted nor imprison
again in his single breast the wondrous truths breathed out of it that
now fill the whole world, so neither shall he rob us of the one magic
word, once his own, NOW OURS, which, wherever uttered, kindles lethargy
and inertia into enthusiasm and fills the abode of gloom with the light
of hope.
The people need a key-note, a battle cry, one single word that
expresses all they believe and feel and hope. We have such a word. It
is BRYAN. We intend to keep it and utter it wherever and whenever it
will cheer us or help our cause. And if again one individual citizen's
modesty prompts him to interfere with our rights, our only answer will
be: "Hands off, honored sir," or, in the immortal words of Pennoyer of
Oregon, "You tend to your business and we, the people, will tend to
ours."
BEST WAY TO START.
Where one or two or three persons are willing to start on a trip from
town to town, and, with the co-operation of their friends, can secure
a large covered wagon and two horses with a supply of condensed food,
we would commend this as the most economical and efficient method
of campaigning as it affords not only means of transportation, but
supplies a dwelling house to the occupants, and at the same time,
by the proper application of paint to the covered wagon, the wagon
itself and the horses may become living missionaries, continuous and
convincing speeches in themselves, by their presence protesting against
the continuation of existing political barbarism. If at the top of the
cover is painted in large letters, the words, "Bryan wagon," every
child, every woman in the farthest country district, every passerby,
whatever be his race, religion or education, will know instantly that
this wagon, now passing through the country, is one of the army of
wagons being used in the work preparatory to the decisive battle of
modern times to be fought in 1900. A few well-chosen sentences painted
on the wagon and American flags at the top, will make it serve as the
best possible advertisement for meetings.
MAKE YOUR ENEMIES ADVERTISE YOU.
The moment this wagon arrives in town every gossip, every old woman,
every street gamin, every enemy of Democracy is converted at once into
an advertising medium for the propaganda of our cause. The wagon, the
horses, the dried beef, the apples, the whole wheat, the literature and
everything that the wagon contains become subjects for conversation
in the village. The Bryan wagon is the center of interest and the
Volunteers who live in it are objects of curiosity. By meeting time the
people are prepared to listen with open eyes and open mouths, drinking
in every word of the speaker's message.
Its work done, the wagon moves on to the next town but the sight of it
is a powerful aid to the memory of every inhabitant of the village.
Each will recall time and time again the character of the speakers
and the words and prophecies that they uttered, so that when the next
speaker, traveling on his shoe leather or maybe in a palace car wearing
silk hat and patent leather shoes, arrives and tells the people how
they can free themselves from the money power, they will remember the
wagon and the men who lived and traveled in it and spoke from it.
It is well to have the wagon so constructed that, when the time for
meeting arrives, by removing the top it can be used as a speaker's
platform and the announcements made from the front seat as it is driven
from corner to corner.
FORWARD, MARCH.
Let a thousand such wagons be started out at once and kept on the road
for four years visiting every country school district every village
from Maine to New Mexico and from Texas to Oregon, each carrying an
abundant supply of literature.
Let every Democrat patronize the Volunteers liberally, purchase from
each a quantity of literature for distribution and sale and throw in a
piece of silver as the hat is passed around. When possible supply them
with substantial and well-cooked meals so that they can better stand
their heroic diet when they find no friends.
Start the hat agoing at once in each community, and let the town or the
county that purchases a Bryan wagon put the name of such county, town
or village on the cover. Let counties in Colorado, Arkansas and Texas
fit out such wagons and start them toward the heathen territory of
Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Maryland.
ABOLISH NAKEDNESS AT HOME BEFORE GOING ABROAD.
Let the money heretofore sent by our religious friends to teach the
naked savages of foreign islands to be ashamed of their nakedness and
to desire clothes, be applied now to the conversion of America to the
conviction that every citizen of our own country who wants clothes
should have a chance to earn them. If America is destroyed by that
arch-devil worship, gold idolatry, if our Republic goes down amid the
horrors of a violent revolution and military despotism, following in
the footsteps of Rome and Greece and Egypt, what will result from
our missions in foreign lands? They will become relics of the past
because no possible teaching can then convince the poor heathen that
our religion is a saving power. When the very country from which
the missionaries come is the helpless victim of greed, avarice and
organized crime, how are other races to be tempted to follow our
example? Let us rather turn our missionary money for the next four
years, ALL OF IT, into the coffers of the New Democracy, and start our
wagons toward the doubtful states from every Democratic and Populist
stronghold. Let the more civilized people of Missouri, Kansas and
Nebraska, where the creed of progress has reached the greatest altitude
in earth's history, share their increased physical, intellectual and
moral development with the less progressive and more barbarous states
that fringe the ocean uniting us with decaying Europe.
Such friendly action will not only be rewarded by the satisfaction that
always follows a righteous act, but the givers will be blessed of God.
Nothing that a man can do, or a woman, or a child, will accomplish more
good in this world or gain greater reward in the land of the hereafter,
than the giving of their dollars and dimes and pennies for the starting
of Bryan wagons. In this way the western and southern centers of
thought and unselfish patriotism may uplift and educate those states
where greed, political corruption and the infamies of Hannaism still
hold undisputed sway.
Let the churches of the Western states hold entertainments, let
suppers, masked balls, ice cream socials, cider picnics and barbecues
be held by the good women of every village and the proceeds devoted to
the equipment of "Bryan wagons." And after they are started out, each
well provisioned with literature, blankets and food, and containing
two good speakers and workers, the good women who raised the money to
start them should continue their benign activities and proceed at once
to raise a fund to keep on hand, so that when our missionaries send
tidings of persecution, accident or neglect, they can be answered at
once by a generous remittance.
In order to insure the permanency of the venture, and that the wagon
and horses may continue to serve the cause even if the men traveling
with them desert their posts, a bill of sale or transfer of the wagon
and horses should be sent to our National headquarters or to our state
officers on the day of departure. The friends of the organization would
then be communicated with in advance wherever the wagon went, and in
case either one or both the speakers tired or deserted, the vacancies
would be filled at once from headquarters, and in the meantime the
horses and wagon would be cared for.
OUTDOOR MUSIC.
There can be no greater aid to the success of a "Bryan wagon" than for
the volunteers to carry with them and be able to play a banjo, guitar,
violin, or small organ. Music is one of the world's forces and as rare
music, like all rare things, is a very small part of the whole, it
is not necessary that our music be of that sort. If we have the best
arguments, we can afford to let the other side have the best music.
But we must not, for this reason, give up music altogether. Therefore
a man who is proficient in any musical instrument that can be played
out doors, is a valuable acquisition to a Bryan wagon. But by far the
most popular and most effective music in the world, if well rendered,
is the exercise of the human voice in song.[6] To open a meeting with
music always strikes a sympathetic chord with the people. It aids and
strengthens every word that follows. If our speakers do not know how to
sing when they start out, they should practice singing our songs until
they do know. This should be part of the young speaker's education.
[6] A volume of songs, prepared for our volunteer work, and
for all sorts of Democratic meetings, will be ready shortly,
and can be obtained of our National Bureau or from any of our
volunteers.
STEREOPTICON PICTURES.
Another advantage of the "Bryan wagon" is that it can carry a certain
amount of baggage the "shoe leather traveler" cannot possibly take
with him. For those who do not possess an unusual oratorical talent, a
small stereopticon or magic lantern with views picturing the principles
of the New Democracy in effective colors, will prove a valuable
aid. Reform stereopticon views have been produced in great variety,
and the method of enlisting the eye wherever possible to strengthen
the impressions made through the ear is sound policy. In securing
collections for the payment of expenses, the average citizen is more
likely to give his nickel or dime towards the support of the travelers
if he has heard a dime's worth of music or seen a dime's worth of
comic and interesting pictures in addition to instruction gotten
through the medium of the speaker's voice.
BICYCLES AND DEMOCRACY.
Where a man doesn't care to walk, and where it is inconvenient or
distasteful to travel by means of the "Bryan wagon," that most modern
and popular conveyance, the bicycle, should not be despised as a means
of disseminating truth. The bicycle is one of the revolutionary factors
of our age. It is the enemy of tobacco, liquor and all other vices that
arise from abnormal desires created by a sedentary life. It is the
friend of health, strength, red cheeks and clear heads. Where there are
good roads it is an excellent means of travel, and a strong wheelman
can easily speak every night at a different town by using the wheel,
and still have plenty of time to advertise each outdoor meeting.
A bicycle, too, is an excellent companion to a Bryan wagon, because
while the wagon is slowly moving from one village to another, the
wheelman can be scouring along the side roads distributing small
circulars to the scattered countrymen, telling them of the meeting
in the next town the coming day or night. In fact, one of the most
important truths for every friend of the New Democracy to learn while
very young, is that our enemy, plutocracy, utilizes every invention
and element of civilization for the perpetuation of its power. In
opposing plutocracy we cannot be narrow, prejudiced, superstitious, nor
allow preconceived ideas as to dignity, custom, personal appearance or
respectability, to interfere with our free motion and our energetic
conflict.
We fight with every weapon that by any honorable means can be secured.
We travel by every means that will emancipate us from the limitations
of time, space and poverty. We accept as allies every friend who
will aid in impressing upon our fellow mortals the solemnity of the
opportunity that confronts them and the malignity of the enemy that is
destroying our common race and country.
Grasp every force in earth, in sea, in air, which by ingenuity, wisdom,
persistence, or heroism can be utilized in lessening human pain or
adding to human joy; which can be of service in forwarding these grand
principles that will, by one social and political transition, abolish
the primary sources of human misery.
CHAPTER V.
SALOON MEETINGS.
A young man, of splendid physique, of bright and formidable eye, the
very picture of strength and courage, who became an admirer of Mr.
Bryan during the late campaign, and, after careful and extensive
reading forsook the Republican party, embraced the New Democracy and
enlisted the week following the election as a Volunteer Speaker and
worker. He is an active member of the Young Men's Christian Association
and of the Christian Endeavor Society.
The first meeting he was asked to attend was held over a saloon. This
image of youthful power and courage walked through the bar-room of the
saloon with a disparaging air, sat down at a table beside the writer,
answered a few questions in a gloomy and dissatisfied manner and said
diplomatically that he had an engagement at another end of the city
and could not remain. He had promised to help arrange another meeting
a few blocks away and the next day partly fulfilled that promise by
carrying a bundle of circulars from the printing office to two men who
were to distribute them. He then suddenly dropped out of sight and has
never, so far as the movement is concerned, shown up since.
It has been learned that to a fellow churchman he remarked that he had
been attracted by the high and noble ideals of Mr. Bryan, had expected
to work for the cause, but that his attendance at a meeting in a
saloon was so offensive to him that he lost all heart and had given up
participation in the movement in consequence.
This man is only the type of a considerable class who would like to
have their fellow beings clean but would never help wash them, who
would dearly love to have them good but are too narrow to help save
them; who admire the poetry of patriotism but who cowardly shrink from
those sterner duties of which patriotism consists.
Think of a follower of Jesus Christ refusing to preach patriotism to
men because they are gathered in or over a saloon, after having been
denied the opportunity of meeting in a church or even a church yard.
If Jesus Christ had been so squeamish and "gentlemanly" as to have
confined his services to the respectable people, the early church would
have died before it was born. In no age has there been sufficient
vitality in the classes that call themselves respectable to give
permanent form to any social or religious movement. Those who wish to
do great things only in a respectable manner never do great things. A
man cannot at the same time be both great and respectable.
In order to be respectable, he must stifle genius and cover with the
ashes of artificiality all the deepest passions of the soul. He must
destroy his individuality and trim his sympathies as he does his beard,
like the barbarous Northmen when they entered Rome.
Love for humanity that can be checked or dissipated by inartistic
surroundings, contact with vice or the coarse companionship of
intemperate men is not love at all, it is a mere fad, a fitful remnant
of a religious instinct long since eaten out from within.
Imagine a mother talking about how she loves to have her baby clean
and sweet and wholesome, and then picture her refusing to undergo the
hardship required in making her child sweet and clean and wholesome.
Such a mother would be no mother at all, unless, perchance, a
stepmother or mother-in-law.
The young man referred to is a typical specimen of a sniveling,
impracticable and worthless counterfeit of religion, the only function
of which is to emasculate and weaken our youth. It serves to ease their
consciences and displace the instincts that prompt to goodness. For
courageous self-sacrifice, it substitutes the mumbling of prayers;
instead of active, righteous contact with the world it demands the
attendance at meetings in which love is expressed toward a phantasy
millions of miles up into the stars, while the Living God of Heaven and
earth is forgotten, and where imprecation, denunciation and charges of
wickedness are dealt out to those manly and courageous persons who lift
out a helping hand to the poor instead of praying for them and who
fight to make this world and this life heavenly instead of paying their
debts to their fellow creatures with mansions in the skies.
The refusal of this young man who, according to his own statement,
believed that the future welfare of the Nation depended upon the
triumph of the principles represented by Mr. Bryan, to assist in
spreading those principles in saloon meetings, means that his religious
and social training had unfitted him to do any great or noble thing,
unless in conformity with his Sunday-school manufactured tastes as to
nicety and elegance.
The young man sees the giant tree, injustice, and offers to assist in
cutting it down but, when we hand him an ax, refuses to take off his
coat and returns it saying that his little hatchet at home has a blue
ribbon around it and that he won't cut with any other.
He sings "Rescue the Perishing" at the Christian Endeavor meeting, a
pretty girl with pink cheeks and cherry lips on each side. The cheeks
and lips and song are so pleasing, he thinks he will go further and
help rescue the perishing. After careful study he is satisfied that
people are perishing for want of his friendly services and the services
of others like himself. Yet, when he is assigned a place to work, he
abruptly leaves his post of duty and goes back to prayer meeting,
because, poor boy, no carpet is on the floor, no angel pictures grace
the wall, and the tobacco smoke about him is offensive.
Innocent creature! Let him continue to sing his hymns and say his
prayers surrounded by pretty girls In the Christian Endeavor meeting
and pretty boys who should have been born girls, while the great forces
of reform fight the battles of the living God, conquer evil, destroy
injustice and lift up the fallen. We can do without him and without his
kind.
Not that we want to. We do not. We need all possible help. We will
not judge harshly all those who now are given over to such innocent
amusements. For the delicate white hand, the girlish student face, the
timid mamma's boy, taken from the prayer meeting and the Christian
Endeavor Society, once taught to see the great truths of social
salvation and human progress, does not always retreat in holy horror
when confronted with conflict and the smoke of battle. On the other
hand, such timid, singing, praying boys often become National heroes.
Before manhood is discovered by the growth of hair on the face, manly
character sometimes reaches maturity, with qualities developed, not
only superior to tobacco smoke at a saloon meeting, and the naughty
cuss words of the fellows who drink there, but to the smoke of powder
and the thunder of cannon.
Do not overlook nor belittle soft men, but ignore only those who stay
soft after you have tried the hardening process. For where one heart
may be formed of milk and water, the liquid state of another may be
that of molten steel, and may only require the cooling process of an
outdoor breeze to make it withstand the continuous persecution and
conflict of years.
There is no unholy place where men should not go who are fired by
a passion for justice. It is a fact that one of the centers of the
social life of the great cities of America and of Europe is the liquor
saloon. How much we may deplore this fact or the evil results that we
see flowing from it, is entirely another question. The fact remains in
spite of our deploring, our shocked ideals or our sympathies wrung by
the desolation and death caused by it, that the center of the social
life of our great cities, the place where society meets, (not that
floating, top-heavy buoy that calls itself society, but real society,
the people) is the liquor saloon.
At present it is managed in America, not with any reference whatever to
its social function, but merely for the private profit of individuals.
In order to increase their private profits and to defend their special
interests, the men who manage these saloons, as a general rule, abuse
their powers and add inconceivably to the horrors of the vice of
intemperence trying, by unnatural and vicious methods, to increase
their gain.
Not only this, but as the saloon is the center of the social life of
our American cities, the proprietors of saloons and the manufacturers
of liquors, who have associated their interests, have a terrible
and unnatural advantage in controlling the political power of the
people with whom they come in contact. They do not have to go where
the people are because the saloon keeper, in the natural and usual
performance of his business, is already in the midst of the people. He
always has a crowd. He is the greatest preacher of modern times. He
does not have to invent new methods for REACHING THE MASSES. He does
not have to scratch his bald head and say, "O, Lord! why are my sheep
deserting me?" The saloon keeper always has a congregation, always
a choir, is always surrounded by men in need of a friend, and, like
other members of the human family having a strange mixture of greed
and sympathy, cruelty and fellow-feeling, he exercises his charitable
instincts and lends a material helping hand to the members of his
congregation quite as often as do the five thousand and twenty thousand
dollar a year ministers who preach not to men drinking, but often to
men who have already drunk their fill.
The saloon keeper preacher, however, lacks one advantage possessed by
his more fortunate compeer of the church pulpit, for, where a member
of the saloon congregation has a perfect right to answer back and
correct misstatements, slanders and unjust vituperation, the friend
of the common people who happens into the fashionable city church
service must bite his lips and remain silent while the name of Jesus,
the revolutionist, the poor man's friend, is used to strengthen vile
calumny against His brave modern apostles who are fighting to realize
practically in government the principles represented by the cross.
Therefore, one of the most promising fields for the social reformer,
for the man who drinks beer and the man who drinks water, for the man
who smokes cigars and the man who washes his teeth before every meal
with charcoal powder and lives on vegetables, is the liquor saloon. It
is always open and you can go in without buying. You can take a seat
free of charge and you can talk. You have as much right to talk as
the bartender, and even if opposed to your principles, good business
judgment, if no other motive, prompts the average saloon keeper to be
tolerant. He cannot afford to drive away any large percentage of his
customers. You have a right, and even in the Republican saloons you
can get permission to declare the gospel of monopoly's downfall in the
back room, in the hall upstairs or in the main saloon, once a week,
without paying anything for heat, light or hall rent. These are already
furnished for the people who now go there. You do not need to advertise
the meeting, for there is always a crowd about the saloon. After you
have held two or three meetings they will grow in size and draw the
frequenters from other resorts.
The average saloon crowd is as open to conviction and as ready to be
taught concerning the moralizing of government and the establishment of
justice in the world as the average church congregation, and they will
treat you as civilly and listen as attentively even though every man
present disagrees with you.
Let the hundreds of saloons throughout our great cities be selected
as a mission field for the new gospel of manliness and brotherhood.
Christ went among publicans and wine-bibbers. We can afford to go among
wine-bibbers, even when they are Republicans. Our crowd may be small
at times but the kind of work that moves the world and builds up
civilization is work that is regular and continuous.
Let the Volunteers organize by twos, and the one, two or three evenings
a week that they can give to the cause, let those who choose this
work go to a saloon and tell the fellows there that under a proper
social system, each one of them can afford to have a home as sociable
and homelike and comfortable as a saloon; that, after they declare
their independence of the party whip, and, instead of obeying parties,
command them to do their bidding, they can soon have such opportunities
that they won't have to drink to forget their troubles, because they
will have no troubles; that they won't have to drink in order to
imagine that they are happy, because they will have real happiness;
that after the gold standard and monopoly are overthrown, there will be
a hundred different pleasures and opportunities opened to them, that
these will produce intoxication just as delicious as that produced
by wine and beer, and that every poor man who wants to drink will be
allowed to drink, not slops and refuse, but the same fluids that now
give the gout and dropsy to die millionaire.
The way to get up a saloon meeting is to see the proprietor, tell him
you are a Democrat, not a fraudulent, makebelieve hypocrite, using
the Democratic name to defeat Democratic principles, not an agent of
the gold bugs trying to corrupt the Democratic party, not an attorney
for monopoly attempting to pervert the Democratic organization to
help millionaires rob Democratic voters, but that you are a real
dyed-in-the-wool, anti-monopoly, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Bryan
Democrat, standing with all fours on the Chicago platform, the enemy of
its enemies, the foe of its traducers, and the opponent, uncompromising
and implacable of every man who upholds the infamous British Rothschild
gold standard of money. Tell him that you would like to talk to his
customers and a few others in his place every week, and show them how,
by united political action in the Democratic party, they can be made
just as happy as if they were drunk seven days each week.
He will let you come, and if you talk straight from the shoulder, you
will have a larger crowd at the second meeting than at the first. If
you keep the work up a year continuously, you will not only have your
name enrolled in the book of heroes, kept by the Democratic leaders,
but also in the book kept by the Divinity who guides the Nations. You
will be rewarded in this world for your sacrificing labor if you live
until the people crush monopoly, and if not, you will at least have
that consciousness of duty done which knows no time nor space.
CHAPTER VI.
THE HEROIC AND PROSAIC.
Heroism and the spirit of martyrdom and of self-sacrifice are
historical factors as real, as tangible and as much a part of human
nature as greed or hunger. The young Volunteers who forsake home,
business and personal ambition to help save our Nation from the money
power, starting in the name of humanity astride bicycles, horseback,
afoot and in Bryan wagons, preaching the new gospel of glad tidings
without money and without price, eating whole wheat, dry bread and
apples, with a square meal only now and then to remind them of the good
times coming, are not impelled by any strange or new force in society.
They are not the disciples of a new cult or ism, the latest off-shot
from the great tree of life. They are not a new product of civilization
but on the other hand they are the real conservative and belong to the
true nobility of the human race, that brotherhood of heroes, patriots
and martyrs of all ages and nations, as old as the human family itself.
On the other hand, the essentially NEW PRODUCT of our civilization is
the man who does not believe in heroism, who has stifled the nobler
instincts with which nature originally endowed him, and fills his
whole mind's horizon with the one image of gold. Those in whose minds
avarice has devoured all other instincts and desires to the point of
moral insanity, are the only strange or new off-shoots. They alone
are the special and characteristic product of our particular period,
distinguished above all else by its complete surrender to the one
passion--greed. The real cranks and monstrosities are not those who are
in line with historic humanity, but rather those who have crucified
their humanity on "a cross of gold" in accord with a temporary social
perversion.
HEROISM AND SOMETHING MORE.
Some say it is the weakness of our movement that we depend too much
on heroism and patriotism and other of the weaker instincts and
uncertain qualities of human nature and therefore the movement must
fail. Successful movements appeal to the more substantial motives and
instincts, such as cupidity, sectional pride, etc.
While it is true that we appeal first of all to the patriotism of our
citizens, to the heroic in man and to those deep religious and moral
sentiments of which heroism and patriotism are the highest product, and
while it is true that we regard these sentiments when fully drawn out
and properly applied, and during great occasions of National peril, as
being stronger than cupidity, sectional pride, or even regard for life,
and that the exercise of these qualities by vast bodies of men have
repeatedly, during each century throughout the history of our race,
saved the dominance of the Caucasian race and all those principles and
institutions that give value to the modern world, and, while we intend
during the four years to come, preparatory to the greatest crisis of
history, to continue to appeal first and foremost and all the time to
patriotism and heroism, love of justice and fellow feeling, still, we
intend to utilize every force and every means that will aid in bringing
about the better world for which we hope.
We recognize that while in a moment of enthusiastic ardor, a man will
give his life for a principle, and that during hours of deep religious
fervor, brought about by the preaching of gifted orators, people
renounce their old ways of living and often divide up their property
with the church and the poor, that such occasions are comparatively
rare, while every man born of woman desires food about three times a
day, that he desires clothing and suffers for the want of it during
every one of his sleeping and waking hours, that during a large portion
of his life intense feelings and regard are turned toward some woman,
and that nearly all men are at nearly all times vain, not in any bad
sense, but that they desire the respect and the confidence of their
fellow men, and when opportunity offers, strive to be conspicuous and
influential, and desire to be feared and loved and admired for unusual
qualities, possessions or acts.
Therefore, to make our movement completely and wholly successful,
we appeal first to patriotism and heroism, the noblest and highest
qualities produced by centuries of religious and moral training, but
secondarily we appeal to men's ambition, their love of gain, their
desire to eat, to be clothed, to marry, to become influential, their
vanity, their imagination, their love of activity and all the qualities
that they possess.
It does not lessen a soldier's courage for him to know that if
victorious in battle he is to be promoted, or that if a city is taken
or a country conquered, he is to have a plantation where he can rest
in peace when his gray hairs come with his children healthy and happy
about him. There is no need to dissect with the surgeon's knife of
close analysis the motives and minds of men in order to separate every
little vanity from the noble and unselfish impulses with which it is
interwoven, nor to cut away and lay apart from the strong patriotic
desire to serve one's country, every little individual and personal
hope that in the event one's country is served and saved, those who
bear the brunt of the battle will be especially favored and secure
first recognition in the universal enjoyment consequent upon such
victory. By taking human nature as we find it with its admixture of the
heroic and prosaic, its mingling of selfish and altruistic aims, we
seek to make every impulse serve the cause of humanity by contributing
to the one end--triumphant Democracy.
THE ROLL OF HONOR.
The most important feature of the Democratic Volunteers' organization,
is the honor roll, on which is recorded the work done by each
Volunteer. To all faithful workers are issued semi-annually
certificates of honor, and to those who perform services of unusual
merit special medals and other awards of recognition.
One copy of the honor roll is kept by the National leaders in a
safe-deposit in St. Louis, and a duplicate copy by the great leader of
Democracy at his home.
By this system, each worker knows that everything he does is recorded
at headquarters, and is kept there for all future time for reference
by our national leaders, when they wish, either in asking for services
or bestowing favors, to find the real, deserving, fighting material
in our party. Each worker knows, also, that it is the end of the
unjust custom, whereby one or two loud-mouthed adventurers, who have
done nothing but who claim all, in the hour of victory cast aside the
unselfish workers, whose years of patient labor gained the victory.
With an account kept of the sacrifices made, the clubs organized, the
members secured by each party worker in our country, there can be no
more climbing into favor on the shoulders of others, but, instead,
each man stands on his own bottom, reaping the fruit and recognition
of his own work, and is assigned to leadership as the result of the
exercise of his own genius and talents. At present, every Congressman,
Governor or President elected to office, is punished sufficiently to
offset all the pleasures and satisfactions of having been successful
by the impossible task of trying to disentangle the various claims of
the men who helped elect him. But no such discordant scramble need ever
recur, for the Volunteers will, in the future, keep an exact history
of the service rendered by every party worker, and, in Congressional
parlance, each fellow will know exactly "where he is at." The system is
as carefully thought out and perfected as that of any standing army.
The roll of honor appeals to the strongest instincts in man, which
have been utilized in every successful social or religious movement
since the dawn of history. If he is vain, it appeals to his vanity.
If heroic, it stimulates his heroism. If ambitious, he sees the way
to get place and position is to merit them by faithful work and that
they cannot be had by cheating the rightful owners out of the fruits of
their victories, to which he has not contributed.
In the Catholic Church and in many other institutions through all the
centuries, as among the followers of Napolean and Caesar, men have
often given up their lives for a medal or a bit of ribbon. For such
rewards England to-day gets almost as much service as from her vast
pay-roll.
By proper organization, vanity can be made to offset cupidity. It
is as strong an instinct, and we have the means of satisfying it.
To-day the name of England's Queen cannot inspire as great enthusiasm
in the majority of the English speaking race, as does the name of
William Jennings Bryan. The enthusiasm now aroused has sufficient
force to accomplish all our ends. What we need is simply to harness
this Niagara, organize this power, and apply it systematically and
continuously. It can be done. It is being done. Never in the history of
our country has the year following a great political campaign been the
scene of such a rejuvenation of the defeated party as has taken place
since our late repulse.
As every plant must shoot down two roots for sustenance, before
putting forth a new twig, so we have decided to plant the roots of
our organization prolifically throughout the Southern and Western
states, where our cause is strong, thereby securing the support for
a continuous and aggressive campaign before sending our Volunteers
into the doubtful states and those still given over to the idolatrous
worship of the golden calf.
Each congressional district in the Southern and Western states can
be made by contributions of one cent, five cents, ten cents at a
time, collected by the Volunteer Speakers, to support permanently one
organizer in Republican territory.
There are many different ways to work. One is by educating and
agitating and by advancing our principles indoors and outdoors upon
every possible occasion by public speeches. Another is to go to
work quietly, and, by personal man-to-man solicitation, to organize
regular ward or precinct clubs in one's own town or county. This is
the first thing to be done, where no regular Democratic club exists
independent of boodling bosses. But, anyhow, get five true and tried
workers enlisted and forward their names to headquarters. They will
then receive monthly instructions for carrying on and enlarging the
work. When a club is already formed, the Volunteer is to build it up
by increasing its membership and educating its members, and defeating,
as club officers, any man who is known to apologize for the existence
of any monopoly whatever. After this try to establish a league of
the clubs in the county, city or state, known to be formed on right
principles.
In the centuries to come, there will be no prouder title to boast of,
no higher family honor, no more distinctive mark of aristocracy, than
this record in black and white that one's forefather belonged to the
band of patriots who, through four years of persecution and struggle,
succeeded in driving from American soil, that last representative of
historic tyranny, organized plutocracy.
CHAPTER VII.
PRACTICAL POLITICS.
In a cause as holy as ours, false modesty is as unwise as false
dignity. When we realize that money represents human effort, that it
gives multiplied power either in war or peace and that the possession
of money, with its accompanying power to an almost unlimited extent,
is enjoyed by our enemies, it is well for us to admit at the start
that we, every Volunteer of us, must make constant efforts wherever
speaking or working, to raise funds, on however small a scale, for the
great work before us. One humble but time-honored method, which has
proved useful in every popular movement, recorded in history, is that
of "taking up a collection." People may laugh at it and the collections
be small but we must not be deterred by ridicule nor discouraged by the
apparent insignificance of the returns. This is the only way to give
all the people systematically and persistently a chance to contribute
according to ability to the cause that means liberty and the opening
of opportunity to them. Therefore, let no speaker listen to advice from
the timid and over-modest, who shrink from the sneers and taunts of
the over-nice, but at every meeting let them pass around the hat after
the manner of our forefathers. We must also remember that in every
audience, however small, there may be some penitent Croesus awake to
existing evils but as yet with no clear vision of a remedy, with power
and will to help but lacking knowledge as to where such help should be
given. Sudden conversions are not unknown where the message of truth is
delivered with sincerity and simplicity. There are thousands of rich
men at this moment who, if properly appealed to, would give liberally
to the cause that to them seemed likely to promote the general welfare.
There are many human hearts now waiting, like the Pool of Bethesda, for
the angel's touch, which shall "trouble" their calm and transform them
into sources of healing for the woes of humanity. No speaker knows but
he may be the one destined to open up these closed fountains of power.
The heights and depths of human nature lie beyond our ordinary vision.
A man's power of response to an appeal in behalf of those who suffer is
not always graven on his forehead, so that "he that runneth may read."
In any audience there may be some listener, apparently indifferent, in
whom all the preliminary processes of conversion have already taken
place, and who needs only the warm breath of an atmosphere charged with
unselfish enthusiasm to complete the work of regeneration. Such cases
are on record. Within a few years, the gift of a million dollars was
received by the promoters of a reform movement in New York, not from an
habitual contributor to such enterprises, but from a sudden convert,
a man ordinarily cold and indifferent to humanitarian movements, and
before unresponsive to his brothers' needs. Perhaps it was not the need
that previously had failed to stir his heart, but only the methods of
helping that had not satisfied his mind. There are rich men and women
to-day, honestly desirous of bringing about better social conditions
and willing to make sacrifices to that end, but who, so far, have found
none of the methods suggested practicable. To such we may appeal with
certainty of response, thereby being furnished with the sinews of war
by those who owe their wealth to the very system we oppose.
And why not? Because a man has been thrown into a brutal and wasteful
contest and has come victorious from the struggle is no reason why
he should wish his children and humanity at large to be forced into
another of the same kind. Such a man well knows that he, too, in spite
of apparent success, is also a victim. He sees the possibilities of
life under a better social system--the order, the beauty, the harmony,
the possible development of higher faculties and extinction of those
that link him with the brutes. All this he sees, and even while
scrambling with the rest for possession of the booty, he would hail
with joy any change that promised to relieve his children from a like
sad necessity.
Starve fifty Sunday school teachers for a week, lock them in a cage
together, throw in a roast of beef, a plum pudding, a pitcher of soup,
a plate of pickles and a pot of beans, at the same time telling each
to get what he can, as no more will be furnished for a month; and a
swinish scramble will at once ensue, in which two thirds of the food
will be wasted, and in the end one man will have a pocket full of plum
pudding, another a handful of pickles, and the strongest the roast beef
to himself in a corner.
Let it be understood that he who gets the roast beef is no worse than
the others, nor will he, because of his success, NECESSARILY favor
an indefinite continuation of such brutal scrambling. The difference
between him and the least successful is a difference in strength, NOT
NECESSARILY A DIFFERENCE IN AIM. To-day, most men are actuated by the
same spirit. To desire success and a share of life's gifts is right
and normal. It is the political system under which we live that has
transformed this natural and healthy impulse into a devilish desire to
absorb not only all wealth but all opportunities.
To remedy this radical evil, it is not enough to change individuals;
we must change the system. It is, of course, to be expected that the
impulse to change our present barbarous monopolistic methods will
come from those who have failed in the scramble for riches. For the
possession of wealth naturally tends to promote in the minds of those
who possess it, a certain degree of satisfaction with the methods
by which it has been acquired and a tendency to oppose any change.
A spirit of toadyism and fear of social ostracism also induces many
to sacrifice their highest ideals. Great fortunes often destroy the
independence which it might be supposed they would secure to their
possessors; yet, in spite of the temptations of wealth and the
unwritten, but none the less rigidly enforced mandates of a heartless
society, not a few are ready to make the required sacrifices in order
to advance the interests of our common humanity.
To such partially awakened minds, it ought not to be difficult to show
that the times are ripe for a solution of existing problems other than
that offered by charitable associations. For eighteen centuries the
Good Samaritan has been the working model of the church and society,
yet the number of the wounded and robbed on the world's highway has so
increased that the gigantic systems of modern charity are inadequate
to meet the increasing demands upon them. Why? The answer is clear. No
very keen intelligence is required to see that one very important duty
has been neglected by the Good Samaritans of all times. Occupied with
caring for the wounded, they have neglected to hunt down the thieves,
who have accordingly increased in numbers and boldness. It is time for
us to leave effects and study causes, to organize at once to hunt down
the thieves, for, when these are routed, there will be fewer victims
on whom to exercise charity. Why plan educational and charitable
institutions in the slums when the causes that produce the slums are
left untouched? Why add another to the five hundred churches of a great
city, when the influence of the money power makes the preaching of
the real gospel well nigh impossible,[7] thus largely destroying the
usefulness of those already built? Instead of new homes of charity,
let us organize to end the need for charity. Instead of building one
new school, the true educator will ally himself with those forces that
seek, through public action, to place education within the reach of
all. Instead of building a new church, the devout Christian or Jew will
divide his substance with the party that aims to make possible the
application of the principles of religion to the everyday affairs of
life and to all social institutions.
[7] A letter lies before me now from a talented and earnest
young minister of the Episcopal church, in which the writer
despairingly declares that he dare not preach the social and
economic doctrines of Christ, lest he bring ruin upon his wife
and children. "The money-power," he declares, "has control of
the church and Christ's ministers must either trim their sails
to catch the wind of its favor or suffer temporal shipwreck.
It is easy to say that the Christian should be ready to meet
any martyrdom, but it is equally true that it is not from
within the bosom of the church that such trials should come."
Never was there a cause that appealed more strongly than ours to a
man's generous instincts. In the middle ages all Europe was fired by
the idea of wresting the Holy Sepulchre from infidel hands; to-day
Greek and Cuban patriots are laying everything upon their country's
altar for the sake of national honor and freedom. Our cause is nobler,
larger than any of these. Not Christ's tomb, but the race He died
to redeem; not an insignificant nation, but humanity is through us
pleading to be rescued and restored to liberty. Our appeal is not to a
class, a church or a nation; it is to MEN for MAN.
ONE DOLLAR GIVEN TO OUR CAUSE WILL ACCOMPLISH MORE FOR THE ALLEVIATION
OF HUMAN SUFFERING, FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRUE CIVILIZATION, THAN
FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS SPENT FOR ANY COLLEGE, CHARITY OR CHURCH. As
hundreds of poor men have sacrificed all they possessed, given up home
and the comforts of family life, to travel from town to town urging
the principles of the New Democracy; so will there be rich men, who,
feeling their RELATIONSHIP TO HUMANITY TO BE MORE BINDING than any ties
uniting them with a selfish class, will also give up the larger part of
what they have and lay it on the altar of their country.
Those who feel the divine impulse to give to this movement will give
double by giving promptly, and will have the added personal joy of
seeing some of the results of their generosity. Not all the results,
because each dollar given to this cause starts a train of consequences
for the happiness of men and for the peace of society that will
continue as long as this old earth is inhabited by mortals. The effect
of every penny, given by the smallest child or the poorest servant
girl, may produce results for good that will be felt by mankind through
all the generations to come.
It is not unreasonable for us to ask for constantly, and to expect
to receive a single donation of a million dollars sometime during
the coming four years. Such donations have many times been given to
causes less holy than ours, and in emergencies not to be compared to
it in importance. We can in reason hope for several gifts of not less
than twenty-five thousand dollars each, and many of not less than one
thousand dollars, and thousands of lesser gifts proportionate to the
purses of the poor who will regard it not as a duty, but as a privilege
to thus co-operate with God. Such amounts have been subscribed to a
single college and to a single religious denomination within the memory
of the youngest reader. Can we not rationally expect that even more
will be given to the movement which is to multiply many times the
usefulness of all colleges and churches?
But do not trim your sails nor adapt your arguments to the rich, in
order to secure donations, but speak bravely and fearlessly in behalf
of justice and the rights of the people, and, if special selfish
interests are thereby alienated, unselfish interests will be drawn to
us.
Although generous help may be expected from those who have been
enriched by the very system that we seek to destroy, nevertheless it
is a fact that, as a class, the rich are satisfied with the system
of injustice that has given them their riches, and, as a class, will
oppose now, as they have opposed during all history, every reform or
change that promises improvement to the masses. Therefore the bulk of
the money to be raised for the people's cause must probably be given by
the people themselves according to their means.
We should for this reason not only call for donations and pass around
the hat at meetings when the people are enthusiastic, but, in forming
clubs in every township throughout our country, we should try to induce
each to appoint its most active and popular man as Treasurer, and
especially to instruct him to collect every week or month, a regular
subscription, HOWEVER SMALL, from every friend of our movement in his
community. In this way, we can establish a system similar to "Peter's
Pence," and the missionary contributions of the Protestant churches,
and raise a fund during the coming four years that will be a wonder to
ourselves and a menace to our enemies.
It may be asked, if the Volunteer Speakers work without pay, many of
them living on heroic diet and traveling on foot, what need of money?
To this it may be replied that the legitimate and honest uses for money
in promoting any cause are too many to enumerate. The field is large
and workers of many kinds are needed. Though many of our speakers will
travel and work continuously without compensation and the vast majority
will give their time without any reward even for their expenses, still,
to utilize properly the Volunteer work of the thousands who are willing
to make such sacrifices, it is very desirable that we have at least one
paid organizer in each Congressional District, and, if possible, in
each county one who will receive a moderate salary and who will be held
responsible for all the routine work required in his territory. The
Volunteer workers and speakers in any locality can be made many times
as effective, if there is some one man responsible to the national
office for the methodical arrangement of the work and the systematic
utilization of their services. It is also highly desirable that every
Volunteer be given a bountiful supply of the very best literature on
economic subjects. Money is also needed for our central school for
Volunteer Speakers in St. Louis, where those with hearts afire to speak
for Democracy can come, and within one, two or three months, be trained
and equipped with a practical knowledge of the details of the work in
which they wish to engage.
But it is folly to enlarge further upon the need of money. Every person
who appreciates the nature of our struggle knows that everything we do
can be done more effectively with additional funds.
CHAPTER VIII.
FUNDAMENTALS.
To educate the people, the first essential is that the educators know
exactly what they wish to teach and the ultimate purpose of such
teaching.
In the previous chapters are outlined methods of reaching and
persuading people. More important, however, than any manner of
speaking, traveling, advertising or gaining an audience is it that our
speakers never lose sight of the few great basic principles of our
movement, and that they keep these central truths steadily before the
eyes and minds of the people.
The principal danger to be overcome in every popular movement is that
in the adaptation of the central truth of the movement to local and
temporary requirements, the truth itself may be lost in a multitude of
petty intricacies.
In the beginnings of the great religions when they spread irresistibly
over the world, their teachers held firmly to a few great salient
truths. But the influence of every religion waned when its ministers,
forgetting its real object, gave themselves up to details of
worship and church government. This is also the history of nearly
every Christian denomination. In their vigor and youth, they dwelt
principally upon the great primary themes. When these were forgotten or
neglected, the movements themselves lost their power.
The weakness of the people's movement to-day is that our leaders
abandon too often the center of the stream, drawn away by the side
currents and little eddies. The intricacies of finance, statistics and
details of administration, often absorb their whole attention. Those
who would guide the crowd to a higher civilization forget the object
of their endeavors, the crowd forgets; then medley and Babel. Instead
of marching toward the goal, the multitude halt by the wayside, and go
to arguing over the incidents of the journey. The compass, governed
by fixed and universal laws, that acts regardless of the turns in the
road, no longer directs them. They are at the mercy of the local, the
incidental and temporary. When they give up the main road to wander
off in bypaths, unity and progress cease; division, disorder and
disintegration begin.
The silver question, the question as to the power of the Supreme Court
Justices, the railway question, are all merely incidental to the one
great fundamental conflict that has been waged for centuries, the
conflict of the general welfare resting on right against the special
interests that thrive by wrong, of liberty against tyranny; the people
against plutocracy. This conflict should be kept in the forefront by
every Volunteer, who should urge continuously and repeatedly upon his
hearers the few great simple truths of Democracy, holding these out in
bold relief, like mountains above the rolling slopes and projecting
crags that lead up to them, keeping the popular mind centered on the
goal of their efforts, the North Star, as it were, of progress.
Revolutions and special evolutions are brought about in human affairs,
NOT SO MUCH BY THE DISSEMINATION OF A GREAT MULTITUDE OF IDEAS, AS BY
THE CONCENTRATION OF A MULTITUDE OF MINDS UPON A SINGLE IDEA. This
single idea, however, cannot be of a local or temporary nature. It
must, on the other hand, be comprehensive and of sufficient import
to stir the very souls of the masses. A mere question of currency,
transportation or judicial powers, however important, even if
absolutely requisite to further progress, is not capable of producing
the universal enthusiasm required to institute any fundamental
innovation. The truths on which the popular mind is to be focused,
must be self-evident, general, and their application not limited
to a short time or a special locality. With the people's attention
fixed upon a great moral truth universally applicable, their faces
all turned toward, their eyes fixed on one star of deliverance, it
is easy to convince them that to realize their goal no sacrifice
can be too great. Men are prepared to act intelligently concerning
currency, transportation or other incidental reforms when their
enthusiasm and purpose are fully aroused and their attention is fixed
upon universal laws about which there can be no doubt, hesitancy or
confusion. Absorbed in great things, the petty causes of strife and
dissension disappear. We can gain unity only when, leaving details to
tried leaders, the people concentrate their attention on those simple
realities, self-evident and capable of being understood by all, the
attainment of which forces the righteous settlement of details and of
all questions dependent and incidental.
THE WORLD BIG; GOD GOOD; MAN ALONE RESPONSIBLE.
The first such central truth, self-evident to every man, to be
proclaimed tirelessly by the Volunteers, is that the earth is large
enough and rich enough to supply all the good things of life to every
human being born on it. Urge that especially since the triumphs of
modern science is it possible for man to satisfy every natural craving,
every healthy desire, every reasonable hope and dream, without any man
being compelled to sacrifice another human being to his purpose.
The great and the humblest mind alike can see this truth. It stands
out an impregnable tower of strength above all minor and subsidiary
questions. It is unanswerable, incontravertible and DYNAMICALLY
IRRESISTIBLE. The earth is large enough and rich enough and human
energy sufficient to produce in abundance everything required to supply
every natural, healthful human desire. This means that the world, now
made hell by human greed abetted by ignorance and prejudice, might just
as well be heaven. The misery caused by poverty, tyranny and neglect,
can be displaced by happiness, plenty and liberty for all.
Following this and demonstrable from it by the eternal laws of Logic
is the conclusion that the one primary and all-important duty of every
man seeing it is to do all he can, after providing for his simplest
physical wants, to help systematize and civilize human effort and
overcome prejudice so as to obtain this result.
The immediate effect of the practical acceptance of this one
self-evident truth is almost inconceivable. Once convince men that
their sufferings are unnecessary, that science has placed in their
hands all the power and materials needed which rightly applied will
give to all men the satisfaction of all their normal desires, and you
at once transform the world.
The most formidable obstacle in the way of further progress is not
that men are insufficiently versed in political economy or lacking
in intelligence, but it is that the people are without hope. Popular
effort has so often been thwarted by selfish cunning, great moral
enthusiasms dissipated by the science and superior organization of
tyranny, that men have lost heart.
Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.
The people must have faith that something can be done.
The majority of men know of public measures that would be beneficial if
an upward step were possible, but they are overwhelmed by a multitude
of incidental obstacles and petty disappointments that cloud their
small horizons and shut off from sight the great universal and historic
forces that are slowly but surely working out their destinies.
Convince men that our country is large enough and rich enough to give
them all an opportunity to work and earn sufficient to support their
families and educate their children properly, convince them that their
present poverty and sufferings are wholly the result of social crimes,
and, if they can believe that this change is actually to be brought
about, you change the whole base of their operations and revolutionize
their attitude of mind. They are then ready to co-operate with those
bold thinkers who have studied out the details of social progress.
Our speakers cannot dwell too long upon, cannot repeat too often, this
one all-important, fundamental truth, the basis of all right political
thought and action, namely, that the world is all right, nature
is lavish, God Almighty is generous, and that human invention has
multiplied many times the gifts that God originally gave to man, and
now the human family might just as well sit down amid merry-making to
the great feast steaming before us, prepared through ages of endeavor,
but for a miserable dog in the manger.
Proclaim everywhere that organized greed is this dog. Teach that the
highest patriotism consists in striking it, that the only martyrs are
those devoured by it, that to kill it is the sublime mission of this
generation.
Do not try to teach many things, but urge with all the passion of your
being at all times and in all places, the self-evident and fundamental
truth that our world contains everything required to make men happy. If
want exists, it is the result of crime. Those who profit by this crime
try to convince us that nothing can be done to prevent it. Our work is
to create hope and courage and let the people know that this crime can
be stopped, the criminals caught and punished, and the purposes of God
and nature be permitted to proceed unmolested. Tell the people they can
put an end to their sufferings, that misery results from human, not
from natural causes, and that it need not be. Teach and preach and cry
aloud this one fact. Repeat it indoors and out, with all the fire and
intensity within you. Each convert will become a center, and our cause
will spread irresistibly.
Therefore, Volunteers, do not weary your hearers with statistics and
historical or legal minutiae; do not cram them with detailed arguments
relating to questions of a local or temporary nature; do not confuse
them by trying to explain all the intricacies of a financial system
soon to perish from off the earth. Rather even let the sophistries
of an opponent go unanswered. But concentrate all your energies upon
helping turn the attention of the people away from petty and vexing
intricacies to these few great central truths, which, if once clearly
seen, make all else plain.
The man who comprehends fully the truth that our world, since the
discoveries of modern science, is capable of giving every human being
all the good things of life, that as civilization is now blessed and
glorious to some so it can be made to all--such a man will forsake all
small purposes at once and devote himself thereafter to the realization
of his ideal. Nothing else in the world can compare to this work in
importance. When he learns that there is but one great party that
stands for progress, he will immediately ally himself with that party.
CHAPTER IX.
THE CHURCH AS A FIELD.
Though in large cities the shelter admitted to be the most accessible
to the poor, who wish to discuss methods for improving their condition,
is the corner saloon, yet in country districts it will be found that
the churches still cling to many of their ancient virtues and will be
found open and hospitable to every traveler who has a suggestion to
make for the good of the community.
Whatever a speaker's prejudices may be against any church or against
all churches, when he consecrates his life to the cause of humanity
through the Democratic party, he must suppress such prejudices and
regard all buildings as existing for use. And a true Volunteer is
always certain that the highest use that can be made of any building in
the world is to have taught in it the truths of human brotherhood and
progress as embodied in the New Democracy.
In securing a church building for purposes of instruction, it is best
not to mention the name of our movement. The name that we have adopted
being an old name and used by various people for various purposes has
been used upon numerous occasions by bad people for bad purposes. Even
the word politics, which, in reality, means the science and art of
government, has come to mean, in the minds of many, a mere personal
contest for gain and position. The sacred banner of Democracy has
often been dragged into these degrading brawls and the principles
designated by the banner and name lost sight of. For these reasons and
on account of the limitations of the average human judgment, it is well
in dealing with church committees to discard all political names and
to ask only for permission to speak in behalf of human brotherhood,
social improvement or methods of helping the poor. The fact that human
brotherhood can only be realized by men through the establishment of
Democratic principles need not be told the committee, but had better
be reserved for the audience. The fact that justice is a mere dream,
intangible and unreal, unless, by political action on the part of the
many, the few who profit by injustice are deprived of their privileges
(or, in other words, until the Democratic program is carried out),
makes it eminently proper that church buildings be opened to our
speakers as often as possible. Of course, when the churches of a town
are controlled by scribes and Pharisees, as they were when Paul was
a volunteer speaker some centuries ago, unless some other building
can be had, we must follow Paul's example and make our rostrum in the
open street or field; but where the church buildings are controlled
by Christians instead of gold worshippers, by sincere men who desire
justice and brotherhood and to help the poor, then, however different
our prejudices, our personal likings or our superstitions may be, we
should grasp our newly acquainted brothers by the hand and arrange with
them for meetings in the church for the examination of methods whereby
religion can be made practicable and applied to human affairs.
To the charitable who are really to be found here and there in the
village and agricultural churches, we must make plain that no amount
of teaching or preaching, applied internally or externally, can ever
benefit the poor, until organized society recognizes men's rights,
women's rights and children's rights as equal to money rights.
Buildings owned by Catholics, the different Protestant denominations,
by Jews, both reform and orthodox, and by free-thinking societies,
can all be secured for the promulgation of these moral truths, if our
workers will divest themselves of prejudices and don a tactful address.
The success of this plan lies altogether in the judgment, personality
and breadth of mind of the Volunteer who attempts the task.
When you approach the trustee of a Methodist, Episcopalian, Catholic
or a Jewish church, remember that the building, the use of which you
ask, has been paid for by contributions given at a sacrifice by earnest
men and women, with minds turned towards the solemn and higher things
of life. However mixed with ignorance, superstitious fear or motives
of vanity, these buildings, in the smaller towns and agricultural
communities, are associated with thoughts above and separated from
personal controversies and material things and, if you can convince
those in control that you wish to present facts, views and ideas of a
helpful nature to the community, not incongruous with the teaching of
their faith, you will generally receive an affirmative answer.
LAY PREACHING.
It is common in country districts for laymen, persons neither ordained
nor licensed as ministers, to speak from Christian pulpits at regular
church services. This custom should be utilized. A lecture in a church
building on a week night may attract the more studious or the more
curious of the community and supply them with rich materials for right
thinking; but a lay sermon to a regular congregation, backed by the
regular services and the presence of the minister, carries with it a
force and authority possible on no other occasion. A Volunteer, by
reciting, under such auspices, a simple story of the crimes against God
and humanity perpetrated by the money power, and describing feelingly
the effect of unnecessary poverty on the souls and characters of men,
will not only stir the congregation to a new sense of patriotic duty,
but will furnish material to the country minister enabling him to add
a new flavor to the food of his flock for months to come. In those
outlying districts where God has not been entirely superseded by gold
in the church, a large part of the educational work of our movement can
be accomplished in this way.
The farmers compose a large part of our country's population and vote.
They still believe in healthful religion and its power to affect human
life. They can best be reached on Sunday and very often better through
the church than in any other way. The reason that the great cities have
not responded so quickly and so enthusiastically to our movement as the
country districts is that vice, crime and disease in the great cities
have, to a large extent, eaten away the capacity for appreciating
justice and brotherhood, and destroyed in a large class the fundamental
virtues of courage, manliness, patriotism and belief in the supremacy
of good. It is to the country, where these virtues are still fresh and
normal, that our movement must appeal principally. In the city there
are a thousand places of amusement and dissipation for every idle hour.
The boy coming from school or work, the mechanic after his day's labor
pass the open saloon, filled with music and merry-making, the theatre,
with its novelties, laughter and appeals to all the emotions, the
gambler's den, the game tables, the dives and a hundred other places,
always open, some positively and immediately hurtful to both health and
morals, others absorbing time, attention and vitality.
In the country, however, work or study done, a man or boy has not so
many places of amusement. There is much more inducement than in the
city to attend some church entertainment, some healthful neighborhood
ball, and much more time and energy left for meetings at the school or
church for the discussion of social problems and questions of national
or class well-being.
Thus the Volunteer who would teach farmers and villagers must accept
the church as one very promising field of work.
SUNDAY WORK.
No day is more appropriate for effective work in behalf of human
brotherhood than Sunday. By common consent it has been set aside by
the majority of civilized races for serious thought, meditation and
worship, and what is more befitting this day than to think out, study
out and talk out the solution to the great problem of human justice and
brotherhood. To speak for the New Democracy on Sunday is no more than
to gather in the fruit of all the great religions that have come down
to us. The New Democracy is not religion and those who proclaim its
truths are neither preachers nor priests, but it is religion's highest
product. The great religions of the world, nurtured by God's hand and
growing out of the fertile and sympathetic souls of the men and women
of all climes and all centuries, have at last produced a practical
ideal capable of being realized in actual life. This product is the New
Democracy. It is the answer to the prayers of the ages. It is God's
gift granted in answer to the cries of suffering of injustice and
poverty throughout the world. It is God's method of redeeming society,
of saving our nation, now well-nigh unto death, from greed and sin. Let
each retain his attachment to his own sect and religion, but instead of
quarreling about sectarian differences, let us unite in realizing our
common dreams of brotherhood. Instead of building new walls to separate
us, let us make one platform so large that on it all earnest sons of
God can stand erect, confident of His presence.
Centuries before Jesus Christ traversed the plains of Galilee and
bathed in the troubled waters of the Jordan, there was one Buddha who,
despising the superstitions of his time, gathered about him others
who, like him, believed that the larger part of human suffering was
unnecessary and could be extinguished by human agency. This band
traveled throughout the most populous districts of Western Asia
teaching the great truth that the object of life's endeavor should
be to lessen pain and to increase joy. Their one command was "cease
causing pain; do not kill or cause to suffer any man or animal."
And within two hundred years, from this little band and from this
one whole-hearted man, an enthusiasm for mercy and love and justice
overspread a third of the human race. Buddha's teachings were free from
the multitude of miserable superstitions that haunt the people who bear
his name to-day. His teachings, with those of Zoroaster, Confucius,
Mencius, Moses and Christ, in their purity, attempted primarily to
induce men to live as brothers, to teach men that individual good is
social good and that both duty and true happiness consist in devotion
to others--to the commonwealth.
Some preachers, however, get so in the habit of prophesying that, when
their prophecies are fulfilled, they think it wicked and heretical to
believe it. They refuse to believe their own eyes when they see the
answer to their prayers. So deep-rooted has grown their habit of prayer
that the means has become an end. They ask no longer to get what they
ask for but for the exercise of asking, which they call pious. Their
prayers answered, they are astounded. Now that their prophecies are
fulfilled, they open their unbelieving eyes in wonderment and condemn
those who stop asking for what is already given.
DON'T ASK FOR WHAT YOU HAVE.
Christ many times used the relation of a child to its father to
represent the relation of man to God. When a boy begs his father
for a sleigh and pony, and, after much pleading, the father grants
his request, the boy stops asking, accepts the gift with thanks and
proceeds to take a ride. If he were to continue on his knees pleading
for them after being told they were in the back yard subject to his
orders, we should call him a simpleton. What is the use of his saying,
"Oh, papa, please, dear papa, give me a pony and sleigh," when papa has
already given it and is anxious to see it driven past the house. If the
boy has any sense at all, upon first seeing his father drive his new
pony toward home, he will stop praying, take off his hat, throw it up
in the air, and hallo a "Hurrah for pop." He will jump into the sleigh,
go for his best girl, and not show up again till two o'clock in the
morning.
For centuries the human race has longed and prayed and hoped for a time
when justice would be possible on earth, when the reign of brutality
would be superceded by the triumph of justice and brotherly love.
This desire, this deep yearning, has taken definite expression in the
ceremonials and prayers of all religions, and in the grand prayer given
us by Jesus Christ:
"Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven."
The soul of the universe has found expression in the Divine Hand that
guides the course of nations, and has answered the prayers of the
churches and the heroes and the saints. And that justice, which for
centuries has been an object of prayer, has become, for the first time
in history, a tangible, definite thing, capable of realization. What
we have asked for, God has made possible. Why now crawl longer in the
dust like worms beneath the feet of tyrants, when God bids us rise and
stand erect? Why continue to pray and plead for what God has already
placed within our reach? Tell the preachers to stop praying for this
gift, already ours, and accept it as God gave it. THIS SIMPLE ACT OF
ACCEPTING GOD'S ANSWER TO THE PRAYERS OF THE GOOD AND THE TRUE OF ALL
PAST CENTURIES, IS THE PROGRAM OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY.
I ask father for a horse and sleigh. Now that he brings it to me, I
stop asking for it, and take a ride. We have prayed during centuries
for an era of justice. The New Democracy is the fulfillment of God's
prophecy. It is the greatest moral tidal wave that ever thrilled with
new life this old world of ours. It embodies the practical program by
means of which the Infinite Intelligence is leading humanity to its
inheritance.
HUMANITY'S SCOUTS HAVE FOUND THE WAY.
A body of pioneers lose their way in the wilderness. After days of
weary trudging and hunger, they kneel and pray to God for guidance to
food and shelter. In the midst of their devotions, a scout returns and
rudely interrupts them, crying, "Get up, boys, stop your prayers; I
have found the main road, and we are only ten miles from town." What
should our pious travelers do? If they have an ounce of common sense,
they will jump to their feet, brush the dust from their trousers, and
follow their deliverer. Should we not call them insane, on the other
hand, if, accustomed to hunger and thirst, they had come to believe
prayer and privation the ends of life, and, if instead of rising up
and accepting God's answer to their prayers, they should continue to
grovel and pray on?
After eighteen centuries of prayer and privation, of hunger and thirst,
the couriers and scouts of the human race have returned, and to their
kneeling, miserable brothers they cry aloud, "Arise, cease your prayers
for already they have been answered. We have found the road and the
promised land is near. Hunger and thirst are no longer necessary. Let
thanksgiving and praise to God now take the place of begging petitions
for that which He hath already granted us."
As true religionists, is it our duty to say to these scouts, "Stop, you
infidels, you interfere with our devotion?" Such a policy is insanity.
These teachers are not infidels. They are not enemies of religion.
Otherwise God would not have revealed to them His plan for answering
the prayers of the millions and fulfilling the prophecies of past ages.
We have been praying: "Lead us aright. Show us the way to realize
Heaven in this world." Humanity will now stop asking and accept, as
a child from its father, God's last and greatest gift. The weary
travelers of earth will see that the privations of centuries are no
longer necessary. They will stop pleading with Heaven for the manna to
be had by simply putting forth their palms.
PRISONERS OF THE BASTILE.
For an explanation of the action of those poor, irrational creatures
who are so accustomed to privation and prayer that when relief comes
they only continue to pray, failing to recognize that their prayers
are answered, we can only point to the last poor inmates of the French
bastile. The most prominent and intellectual citizens of France, they
had been torn from their homes without a trial, thrown into dungeons
containing not a single ray of light, fed there on bread and water from
year to year until lonely and in torture their hair turned prematurely
white and their bodies withered. When, at the first stroke of that
most glorious of revolutions, the bastile doors were opened, and the
soldiers of the people broke down the huge iron gates and doors, crying
aloud in the name of liberty, "You are free, you are free, come out
long imprisoned brothers," the populace were astounded to find that
many of the poor, white-haired, white-bearded, pale-faced prisoners,
instead of walking out into the long-wished for sunlight, clutched the
walls of their cells, clung to their prison floors and cried in fear.
They had to be torn from their gloomy haunts by main force by their
rescuers. Their years of trouble, of darkness and gloom had destroyed
their power to enjoy the light of freedom. Many of the brightest
intellects of France had thus been dimmed. Their souls, once afire for
freedom, had burned out in despair. They had become maniacs.
So now there are devotees of religion, so inured to the gloomy slavery
of poverty and injustice, so in the habit of praying for relief, that
when the bold servants of God strike down with their ready hammers
the prison walls, and freedom's air and sunlight stream in, these
poor souls are horrified, paralyzed by the very light and atmosphere
for which they have been praying. "Go away," they say, and, crying,
they clutch their cell walls refusing to be free. They, too, have
become maniacs. But the majority of the human race will not refuse
freedom's balmy breeze or the sunshine of liberty. At the call of the
New Democracy they will throw down their broken chains of poverty, leap
through their open prison doors, and cheer with might and main as the
majority of the prisoners of the bastile cheered a century ago when
they were given freedom's light.
THE COMMANDMENTS GROWN WITH THE WORLD.
If men claim that we are to be forever satisfied with the commands,
"Thou shalt not steal," and "Thou shalt not kill," we will answer
that these commands have grown, and that under the banner of the New
Democracy we shall declare in thunder tones to all the world, "thou
shalt not be killed," "thou shalt not be robbed," and not only this
but also, "thou shalt not allow thy brethren to be killed," and,
"thou shalt not allow thy brethren to be robbed." These commands have
developed still further, so that the cry shall go up from sea to sea
that our present and past systems of thievery, robbery and murder shall
be swept away, that the teaching of the churches against thievery,
robbery and murder, through all the centuries, has borne fruit, and
that now, not only shall the poor, dependent teachers of abstract truth
proclaim between hymns and prayers, "thou shalt not steal," and "thou
shalt not kill," but that the whole people shall Join in one mighty
chorus, and declare that public thievery, robbery and murder must cease
from off the earth and that our social and political systems shall be
made to conform to the teachings of our religion.
To those who oppose us in the name of religion, let our answer be,
"We do not fight the church; without the church and its teachings for
nineteen centuries, the New Democracy would have been impossible." The
New Democracy is an outgrowth of all religions. Religion has protected
and kept alive, through the barbarous past, the great moral truths that
we are now applying to actual life. Even if the church or any part of
the church or priesthood or ministry attempts to oppose us, we will
simply laugh with God at every futile effort to stem the flood, the
source of which is their own teaching through nineteen centuries. For
the church, or any part of it, to oppose or belittle or criticise the
New Democracy, is for the tree to disclaim its own fruit, for the
rivers to disown the sea, for the fountain to dry up its stream, for
the mother to cast aside her child.
The founders and prophets of all the great religions taught the
principles of justice and brotherly love. The New Democracy makes
possible their realization.
What nobler work can any man engage in on Sunday than the proclaiming
in open air or behind closed doors these eternal truths, or tell of the
new impulse that is fast taking hold of men to weave these truths into
the texture of our social institutions.
CHAPTER X.
ONLY TWO PARTIES IN THE WORLD.
Another of the few foundation truths upon which the structure of the
world's present progress is being reared, a truth that cannot be too
often told nor too continuously urged, is that THERE ARE ONLY TWO
PARTIES IN THE WORLD.
One party consists of those who, seeing wrong, try to end it;
seeing injustice, strive to abolish it; and, being told of possible
improvements, investigate and EXPERIMENT, hoping to attain them.
The other party is made up of those who cannot see wrongs when
practiced upon others, who are blind to injustice for fear of the
unjust, and who, being told of possible improvements, antagonize their
instructors, in defense of the private interests of themselves or their
masters, that might by change be jeopardized.
One party represents the cause of the people; the other the selfishness
of kings, nobles and plutocrats.
The fight now is not simply a continuation of the old fight that
has been going on from ancient times, but is the world climax, the
end of the struggle. Those who produce and trade and teach, earning
their money by honorable exertion, are forming all along the line,
against those who are too lazy to work, too stupid or too proud
to trade or teach, but who wish to grow rich by acquiring other
people's property. The honest masses who believe in law, order and
progress, are approaching a decisive contest for permanent supremacy
with the dishonest classes who, in order to defend their systems of
plunder, utilize in their service the combined forces of ignorance,
superstition, toadyism, lawless cunning and the force of arms.
If the lawless, irresponsible dictators of industry and commerce are
successful, then liberty, constitutional government and personal
security are at an end, civilization is derailed into an abyss, and
retrogression displaces progress through another age of barbarism.
Gold becomes the only God, and bayonets the only prod to duty. The
university, the press and the pulpit will all be made permanent
attachments to the one despotic machine which is to control every
source of communication and instruction, and stifle all thought and
aspiration that does not strengthen the ruling power.
On the other hand, the people's victory will end class rule forever,
and gradually abolish all special privileges and monopolies by means
of which one man holds an unjust advantage over another. The people
holding the reins of power will apply the best talent, experience and
energy possessed by man to the establishment of justice, order and
public achievement. This is the situation confronting our country and
the world. It is the situation as it confronts every individual man.
The war is universal. There are no non-combatants. Everyone is affected
by the outcome. Each has the power to help decide the result. Whether
in compliance with or against our will, each of us must participate and
assist one side or the other.
Which shall it be? The party of the people or the party of tyranny.
This question presents itself alike to the citizen of America and the
inhabitant of Europe. Since the historic people's victory at Chicago,
July 6, 1896, the people's party in America has taken the name "REGULAR
DEMOCRATIC." In Germany, France and England it is known as the "Social
Democracy;" in the Balkans and Asia Minor it is the "Greek;" and in the
West Indies, the "Cuban Army."
When once the masses realize that the same class of adventurers,
tax-gatherers and oppressors of labor who in this country have gotten
absolute control of the Republican political machine, are the present
friends, the advisers and colleagues of the despots, plutocrats and
military leaders of Europe, that their families are intermarrying,
their interests being pooled, their cause becoming one, their interests
identical, all their plans and hopes one and inseparable, then will
it be impossible for designing demagogues to mislead or confuse them
further. When it becomes generally understood that the forces of
reaction throughout the world are one, then will the common people
come into closer union and bind themselves together as a unit.
The union of those who profit by tyranny necessitates the union of
all who believe in liberty. The internationalism of millionaires is
creating an internationalism of the common people. The situation is
being so simplified that all may comprehend clearly the two forces
whose conflict extends over the modern world. All minor and secondary
divisions and issues are swallowed up. The international aspect of the
problem does not, as one might at first suppose, confuse the mind,
but, on the other hand, simplifies the issue so that none can mistake
concerning it. Old prejudices, reverence for party names, sectional
hatreds, sores left by historic feuds, religious differences and
affiliations with local political machines, in which self or friends
are interested selfishly, all tend to cover up the real issues, when
only the local end of the fight is studied.
But, when we learn that the same class that induced the governments of
Europe and America to co-operate with Spanish murderers in starving,
killing and torturing tens of thousands of our patriotic brother
Americans in Cuba to protect the value of their Spanish bonds and
got these so-called Christian governments to assist the Turk, supply
him with arms and drill and general his soldiers for the massacre of
hundreds of thousands of defenseless Armenians and Greeks, to secure
the continued payment of interest on their Turkish bonds; that this
class is made up of the same individual bondholders who are gaining
control, through syndicates, of our American breweries, distilleries,
railroads, street car companies, gas companies and other manufacturing
and commercial institutions; that they are ever ready mercilessly and
barbarously, by murder or giant fraud, to advance their interests,
regardless of duty to humanity, country or to God, all of which they
deny; and, when we prove that this class now controls absolutely
the machinery of the Republican party in America, and is trying
again to control Democracy, the masses, in their fury against it
will, regardless of historic prejudices or past or local political
affiliations, unite in common defense of home and country to stamp it
out.
THE PARTY OF EXPERIMENT.
Our enemies say ours is a party of EXPERIMENT. We admit it. No forward
step in the world's history, no achievement in science, art, literature
or politics has ever come but by EXPERIMENT.
We are not, however, the only party of EXPERIMENT. The plutocrats,
who now control our country, also believe in EXPERIMENT, only their
experiments are in the direction of further despoiling the people
without adding to popular rage, and of tightening their grip upon our
property, our lives and liberties without inciting to rebellion.
One man experiments with surgeon's knife upon the body of another,
chloroformed or a corpse. But suppose the chloroform ceases to act or
the corpse proves a case of suspended animation, rises up snatches
the surgical instrument, ties his tormentor to the couch and begins
to experiment on him. The EXPERIMENT in either case may be equally
beneficial to science, equally dangerous to the victim. But the
personal value of the EXPERIMENT to either of the principals depends,
in a large measure, upon WHETHER HE IS THE EXPERIMENTER OR THE MAN
EXPERIMENTED ON.
The millionaires united are at present experimenting on the people.
The records of their discoveries are doubtless of great value to
political science but when the unfortunate public, heretofore thought
dead or safely hypnotized, arises and with ghastly alacrity, begins to
EXPERIMENT on its doctors, not only will science be equally benefited,
but the "corpse" will enjoy the operation hugely.
This outcry on the part of the plutocrats against political
experimenting means simply that _they want to do all the experimenting
themselves_.
OUR ENEMIES ARE THE INNOVATORS.
A family, sheltered for many years to their entire satisfaction by an
old homestead, that also protected their property, suddenly discovers
that their silverware is fast disappearing with many heirlooms, jewels
and valuable papers and pieces of furniture. They discuss a plan for
changing the locks and, with the aid of a skilled mechanic, make an
examination of every wall, floor, door and window with a view to a
general overhauling and repairs. A neighbor makes serious objection and
in a solemn manner appeals to his friends not to interfere with the
ancient landmarks nor lay an irreverent hand upon the old homestead,
that served their father so well and that sheltered them and protected
their property so long. His only object in thus warning his friend
against dangerous innovation being grateful reverence for which has
been so useful in the past.
Supposing the owner to be possessed of common sense, his answer
will be: "Yes, my friend, the old homestead has served me and my
fathers well for a long period of years and I had never intended to
irreverently destroy it. But I have discovered that some stranger has
already laid an irreverent hand upon our home and broken the locks of
our doors and windows. We find that he has cut a hole in the floor
of our side closet and effected entrances through the roof and the
cellar window. The home which once protected us serves no longer as
a protection, because mutilated by an intruder. If the house still
protected us as it did our fathers we should be satisfied; but, since
others have changed it, we, in self-protection, must adapt ourselves
to the changed conditions. It is not the old house that protected our
fathers that we are changing, but the new house, the changed house,
the mutilated house--this it is that we wish to renovate and re-adapt,
so that it may again be made to serve us as did the old one. The same
outside framework, the same old flag-pole, brown front and corner stone
remain, but many of the foundation stones are gone, the strength of the
house, its power to serve and protect us have been taken away so that
we are in constant fear of its caving in upon us. Therefore, we shall
repair it thoroughly or else remove to another."
Our government for many years served the people well. Its past is
sacred. It protected our fathers, made our lives and our fortunes
possible and we are tempted to give weight to the arguments of a
compatriot when he says to us: "Touch not the ancient landmarks; do not
lay irreverent hands on our government; do not seek to change its laws
or institutions; it has served us well and we should show our gratitude
by protecting it and by opposing innovation."
In answer, however, we are forced to say that, although we have the
same flag-pole and flag, the same brown front and corner stone, an
enemy has for years been removing one foundation stone after another.
He has removed the vital parts from the locks of our doors and windows;
made entrances through the roof, the floor and cellar, so that our
silver is now disappearing, our jewels and our heirlooms are missing,
and our liberty, our lives and our property are in danger.
WE ARE NOT THE INNOVATORS. WE ARE THE VICTIMS OF INNOVATION. We seek
to battle against the invaders who have mutilated our government and
would destroy us. We strive to make our government, of which now only
the shell remains, serve us as it served our forefathers, capable of
affording us that shelter and protection, which is the true function of
government, and which our forefathers intended we should have.
TWO GOVERNMENTS IN MORTAL COMBAT.
We have two distinct governments in our country, whose interests are
antagonistic and irreconcilable. One government is the United States;
the other, the United Trusts and Syndicates. The former is democratic;
the other despotic. This inner-treasonable despotism controls our
industry, commerce and means of life and pleasure. It is using the
United States government as a machine to enforce its decrees and extend
its dominion, hoping soon to abolish the last vestige of popular rule.
It is world-wide in its extent, and only uses local and national
governments as means of power.
The United States enacts laws openly. The United trusts and syndicates
enacts laws secretly. Disobedience to our state laws is punished only
after a public trial, but the merchant who breaks a trust law is ruined
without a trial, the laborer who ignores it is secretly blacklisted;
the minister who defies it is forced out of the church, and the lawyer
disregarding it loses his profitable practice. The nation enacts a law
and the trust officers laugh at it so far as it applies to them, and
then, by gaining control of the law-enforcing power, use this law as an
additional club in the subjugation of their victims.
When the people attempt to defeat a new aggression on the part of the
trusts by carrying out the plan of some renowned thinker, known to be
uninfluenced by special interests, the emissaries of the trusts scatter
the people by crying: "EXPERIMENT." "An untried and Utopian scheme,"
"Innovators." While the patriots argue as to whether their plan is
really an EXPERIMENT, the enemy captures a new position.
The United Trusts and Syndicates, by experimenting constantly and
pushing forward all along the line and at the same time by convincing
the United States not to EXPERIMENT, succeeds in approaching the
same relation to its rival government that a live ant sustains to
a dead worm. By incessant and fearless activity, and by using our
constitution, traditions and flag as a blind, this irresponsible
despotism is fast nearing the time when it hopes to throw off its mask
and publicly usurp supreme power. Not a day passes but these organized
conspirators try some new EXPERIMENT, attempt some new aggression never
dared before, attack some nearer outpost of the people's liberties
heretofore thought impregnable.
Often these EXPERIMENTS fail. The people are sometimes bull-headed, and
repulse the attack with loss to the United Trusts and Syndicates. But
failing once, twice or a hundred times, do they cease to EXPERIMENT?
Even though they lose millions in attempting some audacious act, do
they therefore refuse to attempt another act equally bold? Never.
They see clearly that all enterprise, all progress, all victory, all
increase in power and dominion, result only from repeated EXPERIMENTS.
The boldest of all EXPERIMENTS was the hatching of the conspiracy that
gave their present organization birth. EXPERIMENT gave them all they
have. They live and grow by it. To stop EXPERIMENT is to stop action,
for the modern world is a new world and in it there are no tried and
beaten paths. The floods and glaciers of innovation have carried away
the ancient landmarks, and by raising new barriers and structures
largely shut off from all progressive peoples, even the kindly rays
from the lamp of experience. Not agitators, but science and invention,
have pushed us away from the ancient world, with its well-worn roads
and lighthouses, and where we walk now human feet never trod before.
The light from our foreheads is our only lamp, and eternal truth our
only guide, prefer to EXPERIMENT, OR TO BE EXPERIMENTED ON; TO BE THE
SURGEON, OR THE CORPSE.
The Democratic party in power in 1900 controlled by the common people
will, without doubt, EXPERIMENT boldly. It will lead our government
into new and untried ways, as our enemies very clearly and very
truthfully predict. It will, without doubt, commit blunders and make
mistakes. The one thing that above all and in spite of all it is
pledged to do, is to arouse the United States government from its
paralysis, stupor and corpse-like state of being experimented on, and
declare that whatever the EXPERIMENTS of the future, instead of being
made ON THE UNITED STATES, THEY SHALL BE MADE BY THE UNITED STATES.
The important question for the citizens of the United States to answer
is simply this: Do you prefer to EXPERIMENT, or to be experimented on;
to be the surgeon, or the corpse?
When the victimized people declare their independence, through their
own government, of the despotism of the trusts, it will necessarily be
an EXPERIMENT.
Every time General Grant ordered an attack on the forces defending
negro slavery, he tried an EXPERIMENT. Never could he tell exactly
what the result would be. There might be more dead Union men than
Confederates, or there might possibly be more dead Confederates than
Union men. The one thing of which he was certain, however, was that
his duty consisted in going ahead, and, when defeated, he gathered his
troops together and tried again. He knew that, if followed long enough,
his plan would crush the Confederacy.
So each attack on the white slave power to-day is an EXPERIMENT. We
cannot at any time foretell the immediate result. An attack on a
special monopoly may fail. Many times we may be repulsed with loss,
but by constantly renewing the attack and continuing to press forward
we shall eventually triumph. During the late war, the southern states
defended black slavery. They lost. Black slavery was abolished. To-day,
the southern states, dominated by the common people, have espoused the
cause of liberty and to the oppressors of the North and East they say,
"White slavery also must be destroyed."
Both parties are parties of EXPERIMENT. The only difference is that we
avow ours openly and write them in our platform, while the experiments
and aggressions of the Republican party are planned in secret and
executed in dark corners where only traitors and adventurers are
allowed admittance.
To hesitate and refuse to EXPERIMENT is to tie our hands and remain
inactive, while our enemies harass us, rob us, and assault us from
all directions. It is as important to weaken the enemy as it is to
strengthen your own forces. Therefore, when by an extensive literature
the money-power instill in the people a horror of EXPERIMENT, they
palsy their limbs and incapacitate them for defense.
Therefore, the Democratic Volunteers will frankly admit the charge
that they favor EXPERIMENT and will boldly proclaim that EXPERIMENT is
one of the foundation stones of their creed. By ceaseless and tireless
repetition in every community of our nation we will ask the people
to begin to EXPERIMENT on their own account, instead of permitting
EXPERIMENT to longer remain a monopoly in the hands of those who
continually decry it. We will ask them to decide whether they will
longer remain objects of EXPERIMENT, or, by government action, begin to
EXPERIMENT on their persecutors.
CHAPTER XI.
WITNESSES FOR PLUTOCRACY DISCREDITED.[8]
[8] For part of this chapter credit is due to Carl Vrooman.
When the nature of the present world conflict is understood, those who
favor the people's cause will cease to receive any further instruction
or advice whatever from their enemies or the allies or agents of their
enemies.
If America declared open war upon Britain should we put the slightest
confidence in any statement, emanating from English sources as to the
best line of attack? And, if a coterie of young Britishers were to
enter our camp and advise our soldiers to open fire in a northward
direction, should we not rather suspect an attack from the enemy on the
south? Is it not a rule in war always to fire in the direction opposite
to that advised by your enemies? In all business and other practical
affairs of life is it not universally recognized as the extreme of
folly to accept as facts the statements of those who may profit by our
discomfiture?
Most assuredly! And it is time for the merchants and workingmen of
America to apply to their political struggle these simple maxims so
well established elsewhere.
WORTHLESS TESTIMONY.
Imagine a courtroom filled with spectators and a group of culprits
being tried for wholesale theft. The strongest evidence has been
produced by both the prosecution and defense and the result is in
doubt. Anxious crowds are waiting in suspense for some decisive stroke
that shall give an advantage to one side or the other. The counsel for
the defense arises and plays his last card by an eloquent appeal in
behalf of the prisoners, basing his plea entirely on the superiority of
his witnesses. He shows that they stand much higher in the community
than the witnesses for the prosecution, who are poor, untutored
countrymen. "My witnesses," says he, "include the leading men in
your community--your parson, the principal of your high school, and
the editor of your paper. Yours are mere yahoos and ignoramuses, not
capable of exercising judgment in such a case as this." A murmur of
assent passes around the room. There is a cheer of confirmation, and
the jurors nod their heads significantly.
The prosecuting attorney, instead of making a speech, plays his last
card by taking the jury to the stable, where they discover that the
horse on which the teacher rode to court is one of those stolen from
Farmer Hayseed's stable, and further he proves that the suit of clothes
worn by the parson on the witness stand was made of the very piece of
woolen goods taken from the country storekeeper, and that the coins
that fill the purse of the respected editor are the same identical
marked coins accumulated by Widow Jones for her old age and taken from
her money drawer on the night of the crime in question. No speeches, no
arguments are necessary after this. The jurors purge their memories of
the testimony for the defense, and the culprits are sent to prison.
In the great case of "The People versus Monopoly," now being tried
at the bar of Public Opinion, the defense, beaten upon every other
point, bases its last plea upon the superiority of its witnesses. It is
claimed that the authorities on finance, the press and the pulpit are
witnesses in defense of Monopoly. We acknowledge this, and in answer
wish only to take the jury, who are to decide this case, to the homes
of these witnesses, where they can see for themselves that they are
sharers in the plunder that has been taken from the plaintiffs.
THE PRESS.
The first important witness in behalf of the defense is the great
metropolitan press, the peculiar and special product of the dying years
of the present century.
Now, the modern newspaper is a corporation, formed for the one purpose
of paying dividends to stockholders. In order to make money it must
serve the people who have money, for now all the profits of the great
dailies are derived from the sale of space in their columns, the
receipts for the sale of papers not covering expenses. The business
manager, with a few exceptions, controls the editorial department and
dictates all policies. So we poor wayfarers, hungry for information
concerning some important interest, seize upon a learned editorial in
a great metropolitan daily, and while we think we are being instructed
by the weighty opinion of some friendly and scholarly writer, we are
in fact reading THE PAID ADVERTISEMENT of our enemies, placed in the
paper to confuse us. When, in the news department, we read a speech or
an interview, it is often so garbled that the meaning is quite changed.
And what we consider to be a simple statement of fact is often a
doctored narrative, containing fictitious figures, and printed for the
sole purpose of misleading the public.
The attempt of the gold press to array the agricultural producers
against the city laborers, and the mechanics against the agriculturists
is cruel and deliberate. And this power to deceive and mislead carries
with it the power of life or death.
Suppose I were to go to Mr. Jones and tell him that Mr. Smith had
declared to me that he was going to shoot him on sight, and that I had
seen him purchase a revolver for that purpose; and then I should go to
Mr. Smith and tell him that his friend Jones had just armed himself to
the teeth for the purpose of killing him, stating that I had heard him
swear and curse and declare before heaven that Smith should not live
another day. Now, suppose these two neighbors, heretofore warm friends,
were to approach each other, and Smith, as a precaution, would reach
his hand toward his hip-pocket, and Jones, in order to save his life,
would pull out his weapon and fire, both men shooting each other at the
same time.
The result would be TWO DEAD FOOLS, the victims of ONE LIVE LIAR.
The power to deceive great masses of people by simultaneous and
premeditated conspiracy on the part of the papers owned by monopoly,
carries with it the power to weaken the masses by dividing them in a
struggle over false issues; and while they fight among themselves, to
rob them and legislate their children into slavery.
Here are the words of the great journalist, John Swinton, before the
New York Press Association, in response to a toast, "The Independent
Press:"
"There is no such thing in America as an independent Press, unless
it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is
not one of you who dare express an honest opinion; if you express
it, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am
paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week for keeping my honest
opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are
paid similar salaries for similar things. If I should permit honest
opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello,
before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. Any man who
would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on
the street hunting for another job. The business of the New York
journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and
race for his daily bread, or for about the same thing--his salary.
You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an
'Independent Press.' We are tools and the vassals of rich men
behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks; they pull the strings and
we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, all
are property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
In the case of "The American People versus the Banks and Trusts," we
have found, by personal examination, as also by the confession of a
member of the family, John Swinton, that the money which inflates the
purse of the prominent editorial witness consists of the marked coins
that made up a portion of the booty in question. No sane juror will
believe the testimony of such a witness.
CLERGY NEEDS SYMPATHY, NOT BLAME.
It is also claimed that God's ministry has offered its testimony in
behalf of the defense. It is not my purpose to say anything against the
clergy, because if there is an abused and ill-treated class of men on
the face of the earth to-day, who need pity and prayer and succor, it
is the men who have dedicated their lives to the Christ who was killed
by the rich of His time, and who are now dependent for their living,
their children's food and their wives' clothing, upon the blended piety
and pride, the virtues and vanities of the rich of to-day.
In all that inconsistent barbarism, which we call civilization, there
is no man who needs sympathy so much and deserves blame so little as
he who is attempting at the same time to preach for God and to get
his living from God's enemies, to build monuments to the Christ who
lived and died for the poor, and gain the material and cost of these
monuments by flattering those who are grinding the faces of the poor.
Many clergymen have told me how their hearts have bled for the victims
of social injustice; how in anguish they have wept over the piteous
cries for help uttered by their dying brothers and sisters in Jesus
Christ; how, bursting with indignation, they have longed to strike a
blow against the brutality that crushes Christ's little ones in order
to grind from their bones and blood colossal and unnatural fortunes.
But they said, "We must conceal our tears and swallow our indignation,
though it chokes us. We dare not speak out--we could neither destroy
the tyrant nor save the victims. We would only succeed in dragging down
our own wives and little ones into that dark stream of poverty, from
which those who have once fallen in can never hope to rise. First of
all, we must live--and then do what little we can to temper the reign
of injustice and oppression. The overthrow and destruction of this
system of injustice rests upon the shoulders of God and the common
people."
I would ask the workmen of the country who are rapidly leaving the
churches not to judge the clergy harshly, because the majority are dumb
in your behalf and because a few openly and blatantly champion the
cause of the oppressors.
But I must also ask you to place no confidence in their testimony in
this political trial, for their lips often utter words their hearts
fain would withhold, and they often pray for success to the banner for
which they cannot fight.
Let us not condemn them because they are bound with chains of
dependence, but let us rather include them among those whom we shall
liberate when we establish a POLITICAL SYSTEM WHICH SHALL SET ALL MEN
FREE.
In the case of "The American People versus the Money Lending and
Bondholding Class," we find that the long, flowing garb of the
ministerial witness, that at first inspired our confidence in his
testimony, because of the holy office it suggested, is made of the
very cloth, a part of the plunder, the disapperance of which is the
basis of the present trial. The testimony of such a witness, cajoled,
terrorized, and a sharer in the booty taken, is also without value.
THE TESTIMONY OF THE COLLEGE AUTHORITIES.
Now, as to the college professors: From the earliest times down to
the present day, learning has been fostered, patronized and supported
by wealth. The kings and nobility of various times and nations, too
stupid or lazy to acquire distinction in the field of scholarship
themselves, have vied with each other in gathering around them the
greatest scholars, musicians, poets and minstrels, as well as the
greatest athletes, the most beautiful and voluptuous women, the fastest
horses, and the most interesting curios of every description. Some
of the patrons of learning and art have been really serious in their
devotion to the beautiful and true. It is, perhaps, one of the greatest
encomiums that we can pronounce upon the wealth of the world, that in
all ages it has supported learning as the stalk supports the flower.
This condition of affairs has not existed, however, without causing an
undesirable dependence on the part of the beneficiaries.
Who has passed through the great art galleries of the Louvre at Paris,
and beheld the acres of canvas, covered with the work of the immortal
Rubens, without being filled with anger and disgust as he thought
of the genius and years of toil which, instead of being devoted to
conceiving and executing new masterpieces to delight and inspire all
future ages, were applied to daubing the vain and cruel countenance and
the unattractive person of the patroness who gave him his bread?
The first and greatest universities in this land were founded, have
been built up, and are at present supported by the bequests and
donations, the gratuitous contributions of the rich. The vast undying
benefits that have flowed from this wealth, which have been devoted to
learning, ancient and modern, cannot easily be overestimated. What the
world would have been without the enlightenment which has come from
this source it is not easy to imagine. We should hold in high esteem
the solitary student who, in past ages and to-day, gropes his silent,
difficult way towards those hidden truths in science, in history or in
art which will one day enlighten and beautify the world. We should be
lovers of all that is beautiful, and all that is true, and all that is
lovable in this great world of ours. Music, painting and sculpture,
the sciences, literature and history, should be to all sources both
of inspiration and of light. With all our hearts let us welcome these
products of man's talent and genius.
The historian is the hinge linking the present to the past. His
office is not only a useful, but a sacred one. Scholarship is like
womanhood--one of the most holy and sacred things in the world. But,
like womanhood, when prostituted, it becomes the most debased. He who
muddies with error and personal prejudice the fountain of pure truth
is an enemy to his race. But let us not attempt to blame nor censure
individuals. We know that wealth has been the friend of learning; that
in all times past those who have devoted their time to the pursuit of
truth or beauty have been dependent upon the support of the rich and
powerful. You say that if wealth has been the friend of learning, it is
only natural that learning should be the friend of wealth. Yes, this is
exactly the fact in the case. Learning is the friend of wealth for two
reasons: One, because she feels grateful for past favors; the other,
and greater, because she is hopeful for favors to come.
It is well known in educational circles that any college found
propagating "heresies" like "free silver" or "government ownership of
the railroads"--in other words, any institution which does not distort
and curtail its teachings so as to bias the student in favor of the
single gold standard and the eternal reign of monopoly--will be cut off
without a dollar by plutocracy and doomed to a future of comparative
impotence and uselessness for lack of funds.
THE RESULT.
What is the result? The president of a large private university,
knowing that his reputation for success or failure depends upon
the growth of his university as compared with that of neighboring
universities, continually trims his sails to secure favors of those who
have money to dispense. It is a common thing for a college president
to make what he calls a "begging tour." He endeavors to show to those
who are supposed to have money to bestow that his university is in
great need, and can make the best possible use of "sound" money in
propagating "sound ideas."
A good illustration of this is the tour which Brooker Washington, the
famous colored orator, the President of the Tuskegee Institute, made in
1896, through the North and East. He is a man of intellectual power. He
is, no doubt, thoroughly devoted to the enlightenment of his race; but
the way he flatters and cajoles the rich, advocates the gold standard,
overlooks and keeps silent about their corruption and crimes, and
assents to their plans for further aggrandizement, is a lesson which
every patriot can study with profit. He has become a pet and fad among
the wealthy classes of New York and New England. Even Harvard in 1896
conferred upon him an honorary degree. He has doubtless gotten heavy
endowments for his college, but he has had to fawn and flatter and
stultify his manhood to do it. And he has given a striking example of
what almost every college president must do to a greater or less extent.
The fact is, that PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES, DEPENDING AS THEY DO UPON THE
CHARITY AND CONSCIENCE MONEY OF THE RICH FOR SUPPORT AND GROWTH, LIKE
ALL THOSE WHO LIVE BY CHARITY, HAVE ACQUIRED THE FAWNING SPIRIT OF
SERVITUDE AND DEPENDENCE, AND FAITHFULLY LICK THE HAND THAT FEEDS THEM.
"Verily the ox knoweth his master's crib."
Many college presidents dare not use any but "orthodox" gold standard
text-books, and professors who dissent from the views of these books
are forced to swallow their own opinions and propagate error.
Many of "our great authorities" are mere sycophants of wealth,
creatures of the millionaire, placed by him in the same category as his
musician, his ballet dancer or chaplain, all valuable dependents. The
money lord of creation often builds the college (Chicago University,
for example), places the poor book-worm in the position that makes him
a "recognized authority," and the "authority" must dish up statistics
as a cook dishes up his delicacies to suit the taste of his master. If
he refuses he loses his job, and is no longer a "recognized authority."
Young men are not only taught in many instances that the rights of
monopoly and money are more sacred than the rights of men and women,
but are shown frequently that if they want to make a success in life,
and be an honor to their family and their college they must ally
themselves with the powerful corporations and trusts and keep their
skirts clear of all popular and reform movements.
The recent action of the Yale students who brutally attempted to insult
the honored guest of their city, Mr. Wm. J. Bryan, is not without
significance.
The authorities and the respectable element among the students were no
doubt, deeply humiliated by such a disgrace. Yet it is fairly plain
that the dogmatic, uncharitable and violent opposition to Free Silver
indulged in by the professors, has contributed its part toward causing
this exhibition of anarchy and puppyism.
There is a wide distinction however, between professors and professors.
There are numerous truly great men who are aristocrats at heart, who
love luxury and culture and refinement, whose friends are principally
among the rich, whose sympathies are with the rich, and whose interests
in life are bound up with the prosperity of the wealthy classes. These
men oppose popular rights as conscientiously as did the old Feudal
Lords. They all oppose the New Democracy.
There are many others--men of splendid intellect, but utterly without
principle--who are mere dishonest, mercenary tools of the highest
bidder, willing to distort and manufacture history, tamper with
statistics, and lie like "shyster lawyers."
As, for instance, the learned professor of the Chicago University, who
declared with brazen effrontery that whatever might be charged against
Mr. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil Trust, no one could say that he
had accumulated his millions in any way that interfered with the
accumulations of others.[9]
[9] See detailed account of the lawless Anarchistic methods
used by Standard Oil Trust to destroy competitors in "Wealth
Against Commonwealth" by H. D. Lloyd.
Again there are a few university "authorities" who, at the risk of
their living and the success of the institutions they represent,
have told the truth fearlessly. They oppose monopoly and the gold
standard. But their testimony is buried beneath the overwhelming mass
of prejudice, sophistry and misinformation supplied by their colleagues.
Very distinct from any of these classes is that swarm of cowardly
pusillanimous book-worms, who, as underlings in the large universities,
and as full-fledged professors in the small colleges, retail at
second-hand with stupid pertinacity and pig-headed bitterness, all
the errors of the "authorities," together with new ones of their own
special brew.
It is by the prejudiced and purchased testimony of such men as these
that the monopolies of the country try to prove that empty stomachs
are full, bare backs clothed, and that a constantly growing and
appreciating dollar is an honest one. It is with such untrustworthy
witnesses that they attempt to prove to us that the men who have stolen
our property are more honest than we.
The teacher witness for the defense may be more "respectable and
learned" than the witnesses of the prosecution, but when we see that
the universities are built and professors' salaries paid from the
booty wrung from the people--in other words, "that the teacher rides to
court on one of the very horses taken from Farmer Hayseed's stable" it
does not take us long to decide that this testimony is misleading and
false.
Therefore, the workmen, merchants and tax-payers who compose the jury,
which is to hand in its verdict in 1900, must refuse to consider the
testimony of these collegiate, pulpit and editorial witnesses, who are
proven to be sharers in the tribute forced from the people by that
gigantic and almost sublime system of world exploitation carried on
scientifically and persistently by those powerful "trusts" which have
cornered the world's gold and monopolized nearly every necessity and
comfort of life.
The pivotal point in this campaign is the question of the reliability
of witnesses. Not only do opinions differ, but the history, statistics,
and facts, advanced by the defenders of monopoly and the gold standard
contradict the history, statistics and facts discovered by the
champions of the people. There can be only one truthful history of
the crime of seventy-three, and the seventy-three other crimes of
the shirkers against the workers. Figures do not lie. Only one set
of statistics, as to the rise in the value of the gold dollar, can
possibly be correct. Facts do not conflict. When men contradict each
other upon a question of fact, one side is wrong.
Whose history and statistics are we to believe in this campaign?
Are we to believe the interested, prejudiced, purchased witnesses of
corrupt wealth, or are we to believe the testimony of the witnesses of
the people--men who have sacrificed and suffered in order to tell the
truth.
It is because the classes who have the advantages of culture and
leisure, always care more for their own comforts than for truth and
justice, that these problems, my reader, must be worked out, by the
millions made of the same identical common mud that you and I are.
As William E. Gladstone has said, all the reforms brought about in
England during the last century, and of which all her citizens now
boast, "were at first merely impossible ideals in the minds of the
ignorant and fanatical poor," and were carried through by the working
people "in opposition to the cultured and leisure class."
It is because those who possess the power and the learning to lead
mankind aright have always proven recreant to the trust imposed
upon them, that God, in directing the course of human history, has
invariably swept this class aside and accepted as His instruments
the poor, the simple-minded and uncorrupted. From the birth of the
primitive church among the poor fishermen of Galilee to the abolition
of chattel slavery by an agitation instituted by social and political
outcasts, the hand of God moving in the world has invariably brushed
aside the rich and powerful with the intellectual parasites that swarm
about them, and in building nations, religions, or instituting great
reforms, has uniformly chosen the normal, healthy material at the base
of society still uncorrupted by luxury.
CHAPTER XII.
VOTE YOURSELVES RICH.
Those who have been voted rich, not by their own votes, but by our
votes, the votes of the common people, are now engaged in proving to us
THAT WHAT WE HAVE ALREADY DONE FOR THEM WE CAN BY NO POSSIBLE MEANS DO
FOR OURSELVES.
Having accumulated immense fortunes by means of vote enacted
legislation, THEY PREACH TO US THE UTTER FOLLY OF OUR HOPING FOR ANY
GAIN FROM THE SAME SOURCE.
So interested are they in our proper economic education, that they are
willing to supply both text-books and teachers. They love learning and
from purely philanthropic motives seek to make us wise.
But what is their wisdom so willingly imparted? From what follies are
they so anxious to guard us?
TO VOTE OUR ENEMIES RICH: THIS IS WISDOM.
TO ATTEMPT TO VOTE OURSELVES RICH: DANGEROUS FOLLY.
Their science teaches that IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE INSTRUMENT WHICH IS
THE SOURCE OF THEIR WEALTH TO BE OF ANY EFFECT IN BEHALF OF THOSE WHO
WIELD THE INSTRUMENT.
Text-book in hand they say to the people, "It is impossible for you to
vote yourselves rich."
Strictly speaking, it is unnecessary for the people to "vote themselves
rich." WE, THE PEOPLE, ARE ALREADY RICH. We are rich by the gift of
nature and the will of God. Each scientific discovery and invention,
wrung by toil, genius and martyrdom from the strange earth and
firmament that greeted primeval man, has added to our riches. We are
now rich, but are debarred by force from the possession of our own. We
are heirs, not only to the riches of the earth as originally created,
but to all those opportunities for utilizing these natural treasures,
resulting from the accumulated knowledge and skill of the centuries.
But we are kept from our inheritance.
We have been deprived of our wealth by vote-enacted legislation, and it
is vote-enacted legislation that will again give us possession.
Our enemies say contemptuously that government can no more increase
wages by legislation than it can increase the size of your foot or
the length of your arm, for the increase or decrease in both cases is
governed wholly by natural law.
"Let the poor," they say, "stop agitating and hoping to become
prosperous through legislation, and instead let every man go to work
building his own home and fortune, and all will be well."
"The Government cannot legislate a single dollar into existence."
"The remedies for poverty are industry, frugality and temperance."
These are the things they say. But suppose we watch their acts instead
of listening to their words. Then we learn that, while for us they
point in one direction to the road that leads to fortune they seek this
road themselves by going the opposite way. We, who have followed their
advice, have been impoverished; they, who imitated their acts, have
been enriched.
POTATOES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY.
I ride to market with a load of potatoes, the result of sweat and labor
for half a year. A ruffian knocks me off my wagon, takes my seat and
drives away.
Questions: Shall I ask a policeman to help me catch the despoiler,
or shall I "cease agitating and go to work?" Shall I arm myself and,
with the help of friends, take back my own, or shall I return to the
farm and "practice industry, frugality and temperance?" Is it nobler,
manlier, more courageous of me to get possession of my potatoes by
fighting, or, forsaking them, to go to work and raise another crop for
the next thief?
Honest and contented labor under these circumstances is dishonorable.
WHEN A MAN IS ROBBED, THE WAY FOR HIM TO GET MONEY IS NOT TO WORK FOR
IT BUT TO FIGHT FOR IT. To tell a man that he cannot possibly make any
money by talking nor get any potatoes by agitating police officers
is absolutely true, PROVIDED, the man has been loafing all year and
has not been robbed of his crop. But these demonstrations of the
economists go into the waste basket, when the fact is made plain that
the man, seeking by government aid to get potatoes, has already earned
them by hard labor, but is deprived of them by the criminal act of
another. Under such circumstances, the man who, instead of fighting and
pursuing, applies himself to honest toil, is a coward.
Men who, wrongfully deprived of their property, go to work to earn
more, thus providing additional booty for their despoilers, are
unworthy a better fate. Honor impels a true man to fight, not work,
when a wrong is suffered either by himself or friends.
To quietly plow while another eats the result of last year's plowing,
to contentedly plant while another reaps, to submissively bow one's
head beneath a yoke and receive the kicks and jeers and sneers of the
drivers, are not the acts of a man nor the duties of a citizen, but the
follies of an ass. When a true man, after gathering his harvest, sees
his product taken by another, he mounts his horse, before planting
again, and with pitchfork, shotgun or other efficient weapon, starts in
hot pursuit. He seeks to recover last year's product before trying to
raise another crop.
Therefore, when government-made millionaires try to persuade the
working people, small tax-payers and business men to stop meddling with
politics and instead to work harder in the hope of laying by something
for old age, they really desire them to cease defending their property
and to continue creating more for others to enjoy.
The learned professor teaches that "the government cannot legislate
into being a single dollar, nor a dollar's worth of wealth." From this
premise, he reasons that a dollar legislated into one man's pocket
must necessarily be legislated out of another man's pocket. He then
concludes that the poor cannot legislate themselves comfortable without
to the extent of their gain depriving another class of their earnings.
If my neighbor accompanied me to market with a load of potatoes and
I were to ask a policeman to help me take his load from him, the
economists' words would apply. The government, through its agent, the
policeman, could not double my wealth without robbing my neighbor. But
this is not the situation. I came alone. A stranger assaulted me and
took both wagon and potatoes, leaving me very poor. Now, in spite of
the professor's words, the state, in the person of its officer, can
abolish my poverty and give me a wagon filled with potatoes without
doing injustice to any one else. I can be made happy without depriving
any other being of what he has earned, and I do not ask the state
to legislate into existence a single potato. I simply ask that the
potatoes already existing as the result of my labor be taken from the
highwayman and returned to their rightful owner.
This is what the masses ask. Not that the government give them anything
produced by others, not that the government attempt to create anything
independent of the labor of its citizens, but that it return to them
their own. We demand the capture of the highwayman, monopoly, and that
the opportunities taken from us by him be restored to us.[10]
[10] When a monopoly becomes a government monopoly, its nature
changes entirely, and all that was objectionable disappears.
The evil pertaining to a monopoly is its exclusiveness. When
private monopoly becomes government monopoly, it is no longer
exclusive, for the whole people enjoy its benefits alike.
Unity of administration is not an evil if the resulting
benefits are shared by all. The only possible way to destroy
the great monopolies is to convert them into government
functions, and administer them as the post office, the army,
navy, weather service, the public schools and parks are now
managed. There is no other way to destroy our new industrial
despotism.
Read "Socialism and Social Reform," by Prof. R. T. Ely; also
"Wealth against Commonwealth," by H. D. Lloyd.
We not only demand but we are actually organizing for the pursuit. The
Democratic Volunteers are superintending the preliminaries and in 1900
law and order are to be established, the adventurers suppressed, and
restoration made. The issuance of the nation's money, now a private
monopoly, controlled by bankers, will again be made a function of
government, and the people will be permitted to exchange their products
without paying revenue to their enemies for the means of exchange,
which is their own creation. Other wrongs will be righted with equal
facility.
Each victim, however, must be taught that his vote is both horse and
hound for pursuing, and both gun and rope for punishing and reclaiming.
Our vote is our one weapon, our one means of defense, and source of
power.
The value of legislative control to our enemies is shown by the
desperation with which they oppose any effort on the part of the people
to recover it. They know it to be the true creator of their fortunes,
and they look to it alone for future "fruits of labor" and "rewards of
genius."
We are rich, but we have been ousted from our patrimony. How shall
we recover it? By the same means through which we lost it, namely,
legislation. The oppressions that curse man are all entrenched in,
and owe their power to, legislation. If we are to be freed from them,
it will be by legislation. In primitive times, government was openly,
frankly exercised for the enrichment of a class at the expense of the
mass. For ages the "right divine" was believed in honestly. Later when
its justice was denied, its benefits were seen to be too valuable to be
relinquished. So duplicity was employed, and the art of "plucking the
goose without making it squeal" was invented.
Money-making heretofore has not been so much a function of government
as money-taking, and this function can be made to work one way as well
as another.
If thieves by government action can despoil honest men, honest men by
government action can despoil thieves.
If legislation has been made the instrument of crime, it also can be
made the instrument of restoration. No personal temperance, thrift and
industry can enrich men so long as the power to legislate rests in
other hands. Labor makes wealth but legislation decrees how it shall
be divided. When the people legislate directly and intelligently the
division will be in accord with justice. By the ballot we can enter
upon our inheritance.
Poverty exists and we are told that it is the natural order, with which
legislation has nothing to do. There has been told no more transparent
lie. Wealth is created by the union of man's labor with nature's gifts.
What is it but legislation that keeps apart in unnatural divorce these
two that God hath joined together? What but legislation can remove the
barriers and allow them again to come together?
Legislation CAN make money; so lavishly that no man need want. How? By
making conditions favorable to labor, and securing the laborer in the
fruit of his toil.
WE CAN ACTUALLY VOTE RICHES INTO EXISTENCE.
Our instructors say, "Government cannot legislate a single dollar into
existence." Let us see.
While riding to market with a crop of potatoes, I am dispossessed.
In the struggle a portion of the crop is injured. The highwayman, in
escaping, lames the horses by overdriving. Instead of going to work the
next day, in company with an officer, I start in pursuit. The robber,
alert, removes to another state at an expense of half his booty.
Whether successful or not, my time, the officer's time and the thief's
time are all wasted, in addition to three-fourths of my product.
Now, my neighbors and I, who together make up the government, suppress
brigandage. Instead of three fourths of my crop being wasted by
struggle for possession, it is all sold the very day it is carted to
market. Instead of exchanging my hoe for a gun and chasing another
man, I plant another crop of potatoes. Instead of helping me in the
chase the policeman grows a crop of his own, and the bandit, knowing
beforehand that it is impossible to live by robbery, ceases to watch
for possible victims and raises his own potatoes instead of taking mine.
Without proper governmental interference the three of us have
only a portion of one crop of potatoes between us. AS THE RESULT
OF GOVERNMENTAL ACTION, WE HAVE THREE FULL CROPS. THE GOVERNMENT,
BY LEGISLATIVE "EDICT" OR "FIAT," if you please, CREATES TWO AND
THREE-QUARTERS CROPS OF POTATOES. WE CAN VOTE OURSELVES RICH.
And of each dollar voted into our pockets, not more than fifteen cents
will be stolen property reclaimed. The other eighty-five cents will be
a new product, rescued from waste or destruction.
The saddest feature of our present industrial cannibalism is that where
one dollar is stolen at least seven dollars are wasted. THE PREVENTABLE
WASTES OF CIVILIZATION CAN MAKE EARTH A PARADISE.
PROSPERITY, "THE McKINLEY" AND OTHER BRANDS.
We can vote our country prosperous. But it is very essential that we
understand clearly WHOM we mean when we say "country." We have been
voting for one kind of prosperity for a long time, even before the
"McKinley brand," was on the market. Our mistake has been in not asking
the "Advance Agents" to tell us whose prosperity they represented.
If a burglar is emptying your wife's jewelry box, and filling his
trousers pockets with the contents of your safe, prosperity to him
means ruin to you, and your success means the burglar's death. So, in
the larger affairs of our nation, the kind of prosperity hoped for by
the plunderers of the people means ruin to their millions of victims,
while good times for the workers, the farmers, the merchants, mean hard
times to our despoilers.
We now have the best times the world has ever seen. Mr. Rockefeller,
or Robafellow--one is his name, the other ought to be--has an income
of forty thousand dollars a day, and it is increasing. No country
in the world has ever produced so much; never were there barns so
bursting with grain, or warehouses so filled with clothing, furniture
and jewels; never before so many men making from five to forty thousand
dollars a day.
This great National Joint Stock Company of ours, with its seventy
million stockholders, is doing a thriving business and making barrels
of money. There is only one objectionable feature. It is that after
the labor of these seventy millions of people, their genius, their
suffering and their sweat, are converted into wealth, the dividends are
given to a few hundred men, while the rest of us pay the assessments.
We do not need better times. Anybody who wants to make more than forty
thousand dollars a day is a hog. The real issue is not whether we shall
have hard times or good times, prosperity or panic in the abstract, but
it is whether that prosperity and good times, now monopolized by the
few, shall become the inheritance of every child of God.
THIEVES TAKE PANIC WHEN PURSUED BY HONEST MEN.
If a select company of burglars and safe-blowers were to enter your
village and relieve a number of your merchants of the contents of
their safes, their stocks of jewels, silks and clothing, and were
to secure all of the finest horses from half the neighboring farms,
and utilize them in getting the booty safely to the nearest forest,
they would no doubt, while unpacking their wealth and feeding their
horses, after their hasty trip, congratulate one another upon "their
remarkable prosperity." They would be very apt to brag about the
unusual "good times." But if, as the sun rose over the tree-tops and
they were repacking their goods they saw suddenly the glistening
pitchforks of half a hundred angry farmers and the determined furious
faces of as many brawny workmen and merchants, bent on reclaiming their
property--there would be a PANIC.[11]
[11] If you want legal evidence to prove the existence of
gigantic steals and robberies, read Lloyd's "Wealth Against
Commonwealth," Harper Bros., and the "Seven Financial
Conspiracies."
The plunderers of the world are enjoying good times at the expense
of the masses. Their profits are as fabulous as their methods are
cruel. But in the midst of their celebration feast, their crime is
discovered, and the pitchforks of five million farmers glistening in
the morning sun, the angry faces of four million city workmen loom up
in the distance, and the result is PANIC and loss of confidence--(among
the revelers.)
As we approach November, 1900, this panic will increase. But as there
wells up the sound infernal of their weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth, there will be heard still louder, the voices of millions
singing their chorus of deliverance. As these offenders look into the
grave where lies buried their every plan for selfish aggrandizement, to
us, their innumerable victims, that same grave will be the open window
through which we behold the land of promise.
INDEX.
Chapter Page
I. Introductory 5
II. How to Begin Work 23
III. Speeches and Meetings 43
IV. Methods of Travel 65
V. Saloon Meetings 101
VI. The Heroic and Prosaic 115
VII. Practical Politics 127
VIII. Fundamentals 141
IX. The Church as a Field 151
X. Only Two Parties in the World 171
XI. Witnesses for Plutocracy Discredited 189
XII. Vote Yourselves Rich 211
The Volunteers' Training School For Speakers.
Opens at St. Louis September 15, 1897.
Young men of moderate attainments can become ready speakers in from one
to three months time.
Practice both indoors and outdoors every day by every student, under
the direction of experienced campaigners.
All the arts and secrets of successful oratory taught in the most
expeditious manner, accompanied by the daily application of every truth
learned.
Tuition per month $1.
Text books, good for one year, $5.
Especially Cheap Rates at Volunteers' Boarding House.
Address Joseph Hoffman Mgr.,
4713 Page Avenue, ST. LOUIS, MO.
In preparing for this course read any of the following:
Wealth Against Commonwealth, Henry D. Lloyd, Pub. by Harper Bros.
Socialism and Social Reform, Prof. Richard T. Ely.
Social Aspects of Christianity, Prof. Richard T. Ely.
Ten Men of Money Island, Norton.
Merrie England, Robert Blatchford.
Seven Financial Conspiracies.
The New Democracy, Vrooman.
Coin's Financial School.
The First Battle, Bryan.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Democracy, by Walter Vrooman
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