talk of a special black code or of limitations in the way of the negro who might want to acquire property. Moreover the reconstruction days had awakened in the negro some political consciousness; it straightened his back that had been bent for two hundred and fifty years; it planted in his heart the desire for political emancipation. Reconstruction has left an ideal in the memory of the negro, which will eventually prove a real social force in the solution of the negro problem. Each and every nation is better off for having tried the enjoyment of human and civil rights than if it had never tasted of them at all. I. M. ROBBINS. (To be Continued.) EDITOR'S The Republican Convention. The capitalist class of the United States has been making rapid strides toward an efficient class consciousness and has tightened its grip on the Republican party. The Republican convention was a harmonious one because the new school of politicians who stand behind Roosevelt and Taft understand their business. The convention in shaping its platform had to do two definite things. One was to satisfy the capitalists who own the party machine that none of their vital interests would be threatened by the continuance of the party in power. This was easy. The other was to make alluring, vote-bringing promises to farmers, small merchants and manufacturers, and "pure and simple" laborers, which should keep them in line without at the same time committing the party to any really dangerous measure. This was hard, but it was well done, with only a few weak spots left open to Mr. Bryan's assaults. In just one state, Wisconsin, the small middle class controlled the delegation. Its representative on the platform committee presented a minority report signed by himself in opposition to the majority report signed by the other fifty-two members of the committee. He advocated strengthening the inter-state commerce commission so that it might enforce "just and equal" railroad rates. He asked for a tariff law which should take protection away from trusts which suppressed competition, and for a permanent tariff commission to watch over the enforcement of the law. He proposed the imprisonment of bad trust magnates, publicity of campaign expenses, national regulation of inter-state telegraph rates, trial by jury in contempt cases growing out of injunctions, and a few more measures which would be more or less annoying to the people who own the United States. Wisconsin was given twenty minutes to argue for its minority report, and the chairman of the committee contented himself with a three minute reply, in the course of which he paid the Wisconsin measures the undeserved compliment of stating that they had been rejected The on account of the doctrines of socialism embodied in them. measures were then promptly and almost unanimously rejected by the which convention, and the platform as reported by the majority Only one on question was adopted. the convention divided was of particular interest to the working class, and that was the injunction question. Here the measure asked for by Mr. Gompers never came before the convention at all except in the Wisconsin minority report, and it was voted down along with most of the other measures in that report by 952 votes against 28. The plank adopted was nothing more or less than a declaration of the Republican party's intention to leave the injunction to be used by capitalists the same as ever. The best thing in the platform is the contrast it draws between the efficiency of the Republican Party and the inefficency of the Democratic. Republicanism stands frankly and brutally for capitalism and for all measures required by the interests of the capitalists. Mr. Bryan's Party. The Review goes to press too early to comment on the Denver convention, but its action on all important questions is not hard to predict. Mr. Bryan is the inevitable candidate, and it is almost equally certain that his platform will be a curious hodge-podge of inconsistencies, viewing with alarm the inevitable tendencies of modern industry, and seeking by palliatives to mitigate the class war and to retard the extinction of the little capitalist. As for the injunction plank, it looks as if Mr. Gompers might be allowed to write it to suit himself, but when it is time to elect the representatives and judges who if the Democrats win are to translate the plank into action, the important business interests which provide the campaign fund will surely be remembered. The tariff is likely to cut a large figure in the campaign, and some farmers may desert the Grand Old Party in the hope of getting cheaper goods through tariff reductions. But to the wage-worker who wants to enjoy the full value of what he produces, Mr. Bryan has as little to offer as Mr. Taft. Never in the whole history of the United States have conditions been so favorable for the socialist movement as today. Free Speech and the Police. The Socialist national convention adopted an admirable resolution which up to the present time has not received the attention it deserves. It reads as follows: Capitalism fleeing before the triumphant advance of Socialism is trying to suppress free speech. Ignorance and intimidation are the twin forces that the ruling capitalist class relies on to hold its power in order to control and rob the working class. The police power of the state is being used forcibly to prevent the peaceable assembly of the working class to discuss their grievances and for the adoption of measures to secure its emancipation from wage Public meetings of the Socialist Party all over the country have been unlawfully and brutally broken up and the speakers arrested, fined and imprisoned without warrant of law by officials who slavery. ignorantly believe that a policeman's uniform clothes them with autocratic power. We, the Socialist Party of the United States in a National Convention assembled, serve notice upon the capitalist class that we shall hold its henchmen acting as public officials responsible for their illegal acts and that we shall prosecute them in the criminal courts to the full extent of the law; also that we shall sue them in the civil courts for actual damages to compensate our comrades for wrongs inflicted upon them. The unanimous adoption of this resolution was a good thing, but resolutions must be carried out if they are to be effective. Not many instances of police interference with our meetings have come up since the convention, but in these few instances we seem to have failed to make good. At its recent session the National Executive Committee voted to flood with literature any city where our meetings are suppressed. This is all very well, and it is perhaps all that the National organization can do, but every local organization whose speakers are arrested should start a fight on the lines of the convention's resolution. If a policeman arrests a socialist speaker a jury trial should be demanded and a warrant should promptly be sworn out against the policeman for the illegal arrest. A civil suit should also be started. Even if not successful it will cause the policeman enough trouble and expense to make him hesitate about interfering with the next socialist meeting he sees. Another method of warfare not mentioned in the convention's resolution is worth while. It is an open secret in most cities that the police are themselves persistent lawbreakers. As a rule, that is no concern of ours, for they generally rob the robbers, not the workers. But if they fight us, we can with very little trouble uncover some of their law-breaking and bring it to the attention of the courts. Police Brutality. There is one practice of the police in many of our large cities which does concern the working class. When a felony has been committed and the detectives in charge have not brains enough to find out who committed it, they make use of the "drag-net". In other words they arrest without warrant any one who in their opinion might have some direct or indirect connection with the case. These unfortunates are locked up incommunicado, like the victims of the Spaniards in Cuba twelve years ago. Then they are put in the "sweat-box". This name is taken from the capitalist papers which thoroughly approve of the institution. It is a torture chamber where the victims are subjected to as much mental torment as they are sensitive enough to feel or the policemen clever enought to inflict. If capacity on either side is lacking, rumor has it that the mental torture is supplemented with physical. The finished product of the sweat-box is the Confession, implicating some one else. That some one is then invited into the sweat-box, and so the game goes merrily on. Now all this is contrary to the laws inherited from the era of small producers. These laws provide that a policeman may arrest a person only when caught in the act of law-breaking or when a warrant has been sworn out before a judge or justice. A policeman making an arrest, or beating a citizen in violation of law can be punished, or else the court can be put publicly on record as justifying the violation of law, and to do either of these things will help draw the attention of working people to the class struggle. We suggest these tactics to the comrades in all cities where the police are fighting us, and we should be glad to have a report wherever they are tried. India. Now it is India that is to the fore. Both in England and America the cry has gone up for justice to the Hindus. But the curious onlooker notices an interesting distinction between the Indian propagandas carried on in the two countries--or rather between the propagandists who have come to the front. In England it is the Socialists who persist in revealing England's shame and Asia's misery; in America it is the Society for the Advancement of India, a heterogeneous company of distinguished persons, educators, clergymen, Anti-Imperialists and charitable capitalists. The facts proclaimed by the Socialists and the philanthropists are the same; they agree wonderfully in their diagnosis of the case: the difference appears in the treatment prescribed. As I write I have before me Comrade Hyndman's ringing editorials in recent numbers of Justice and the rather voluminous literature sent out by the Society for the Advancement of India. There have occurred recently in Hindustan incidents sufficiently serious to put all the reactionary forces in England on their guard. The most striking of these was the bomb throwing in Bengal. Others were the imprisonment by the British government of patriots who had taken part in the Indian National Congress and the public flogging of Bengali students who welcomed them on their release. These events indicate a wide and deep discontent with British rule and a tyrannical bent on the part of the government which promises to stir up interesting developments in the future. land What are the causes of Indian discontent? Dr. Jabez T. Sunderanswers this question most strikingly in his pamphlet, "The Causes of Famine in India." "During the last forty years of the nineteenth century," we are told, "India was smitten by not fewer than ten famines of great magnitude, causing a loss of life that has been conservatively estimated at 15,000,000." Dr. Sunderland takes up the two excuses for these famines usually advanced by the apologists for the British regime, viz., rain-failure and over-population. As to the first of these, it appears that there is never a failure of rain over the entire country at once and that facilities for transportation are such that cropfailure due to drouth need not cause suffering anywhere. Moreover if only a considerable fraction of the sums which the English drain from India were devoted to irrigation enterprises any considerable failure of crop could be made absolutely impossible. The average rainfall, even in famine years, far exceeds what is necessary for agricultural purposes: all that is needed is proper storage and distribution. But the great fact This pamphlet can be obtained by writing to the Society for the Advancement of India, India House, 1142 Park avenue, New York. |