INDUSTRIAL PIONEER

the rent, interest and dividends paid by the workers to the owners of lands, bonds and stocks enable these owners to live in luxury, in idleness and, if they desire, in wasteful dissipation. The owners of American wealth, according to the returns published by the Internal Revenue office, state on their income tax blanks that their incomes amount to tens and hundreds of thousands, to millions and tens of millions of dollars each year. The most skilled of the workers seldom make over $100 a week with steady work, and seven-eights of them make less than $50 a week.

Furthermore, when hard times come, it is the worker who goes on the street and starves. The bondholder continues to draw his interest and the stockholder conThe bondtinues to receive his dividend. holder, under the law, can insist upon his interest. The corporations take care of the stockholder long after the workers have begun to walk the streets looking for a chance

to work.

These owners freed from the necessity for labor, develop rapidly into a leisure class, while the workers, struggling for existence, constitute a labor class. The leisure class controls the surplus wealth of the community. Out of this surplus it feeds, dresses and houses itself; buys privileges, corrupts the machinery of the state; invests in foreign exploiting opportunities; struggles with the leisure classes of other countries for the chance to exploit and rob.

Poverty and Want

Among the masses, who are laboring and producing without getting the value of their product, there is poverty and want. Diseases waste and ravage; vitality is sapped; energy deteriorates. Perhaps nowhere in the modern world is the picture more clearly presented than among the exploited British factory workers during the forty or fifty years preceding the World War. If the soldiers on on the field were cannon fodder, the men and women of Lancashire and Birmingham were factory fodder. While the leisure class of Britain was shooting grouse and chasing

foxes across the plowed land, the men and women and children belonging to the working masses were huddled in garrets and cellars-the prey of tuberculosis, rickets, anæmia and want.

The leisure class, having nothing better to do, plays at ducks and drakes with international affairs, plunges the country into economic and military conflicts, heaps up great debts, and wastes its own and the country's resources, while the workers do the massfighting, pay the taxes and suffer from starvation and disease. Between the two classes there springs up hate, class conflict and perIt was not for nothing petual dissension. that Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The various and unequal distribution of wealth."

When I entered the public life of the United States, the economic ruling class was just stepping into power. There was no leisure class to speak of. There was still an abundance of free land to the workers. The America that I knew in my young manhood was still talking, in all sincerity, about "government of, by and for the people." In the brief period of my own public experience we have adopted a species of feudalism more inhuman and more vicious than any of which history bears a record-a feudalism of artificial persons (corporations) using their power to exploit the workers in the interest of the parasites. Within my lifetime we have become a government of corporations whose attorneys are in the House and Senate and throughout the bureaus and departments of the Government, looking out for the interests of those who pay them their retaining fees.

This is capitalism-the control of the machinery of society in the interests of those who own its wealth. This was feudalism in France and slavery in Rome and in Assyria. This is the system of dividing the community into two classes-owners and producers -and of rewarding the owners at the expense of the producers. As I read history, this method of social organization has had and can have only one result. The leisure class rots out and drops to pieces; the workers starve and suffer and die. Sometimes they revolt-particularly in later years.

Generally they are too weak and too ignorant to do anything more than labor and reproluce.

Owners Rob People

In the preceding pages I have tried to show how this system was getting its grip on the United States. Out of my own experience in public life I have indicated the activity of the land-grabbers, the bankers, the moneyring, the beneficiaries of the tariff, the trust magnates, the railroad operators and the other masters of the economical world. Congress and out, year by year, they have taken possession of the country's best resources, robbed the people through monopoly, exploited and plundered the workers by means of low wages and high prices.

In

Then, with their ill-gotten gains, they have invaded other lands-Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Haiti-and there they have repeated the same process, by fair means or foul, gaining possession of timber, oil, copper and iron, and then forcing the natives to produce these commodities for a pittance wage. Behind them, in these ventures, the plutocrats had the army and navy of the United States to be used when necessary, as they were used against Spain, the Philippines, the Mexicans, the Haitians and the rest.

Meanwhile, at home, through the subsidy of political parties-through the passage of legislation through the courts-through the private control or, where necessary, through the open purchase or coercion of public men, the interests have taken possession of the government of the United States, shaping its institutions, and directing its policies along lines calculated to yield the largest net returns to the plutocracy.

Suppression of Free Speech

The last move in this direction involved the entrance of the United States into the World War; the conscription of men; the dispatch of an army to the battlefields of Europe; the suppression of free speech and a free press; search, seizure, indictment. trial, imprisonment and the deportation of inen and women in open and flagrant viola

JUNE, 1923

tion of constitutional guarantees and longestablished precedent.

The Wilson administration and the Supreme Court have demonstrated and established that in time of war the Constitution, with all its amendments, is but a scrap of paper and of no force and effect. Hereafter, all that the people who do not work and produce no wealth have to do is to unite and get control of Congress and other branches of the government and declare war on some country-any country-and at once proceed to enact laws in total disregard of the Constitution, and all its guarantees, and arrest and imprison all who disagree or protest. It is well for the people who toil to make a note of this fact.

No man who has regard for the welfare of this country, or who is concerned for its future, can fail to be alarmed at the course that it has followed, and is still following, along the road that leads to empire and imperial institutions. There may yet be time, but unless we turn back soon, it will be too late. It behooves the working class to take over the industries and operate them for use instead of for profit, which will make it possible for the workers to erect an industrial government and to enact laws so that every man shall have all he produces.

Capital is stolen labor, and its only function is to steal more labor.

Editor's Note: The foregoing is reprinted, by special permission, from former Senator Pettigrew's book, "Imperial Washington," published by Chas. H. Kerr & Co. This book contains the frankest exposé and the most stinging indictment of the Washington government "of, for and by big business," that we have ever read. Mr. Pettigrew spent twelve years in the United States Senate, and knows what he is talking about. We might disagree with some of the author's conclusions and remedies, but when it comes to giving an intimate and vivid picture of how the powerful trusts and corporations own and control the governmental machinery, this book has no equal.

The book contains 441 pages and sells for $1.25. In order to carry the message of The Industrial Pioneer and the lesson of "Imperial Washington" into thousands of homes over the length and breadth of the land, we will send you the Pioneer for a year and the book for $2.25. Regular price for the two: $3.25.

ticularly true of workers in the agricultural, marine transport and mining industries in California, Nevada, Utah and Montana. In these and in the Gulf states, as well as in Mexico and South America, Solidaridad, the Spanish organ of the I. W. W., wields considerable prestige, with the result that many Spanish-speaking workers have been won over to the cause of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Among the Mexican steel workers a like connection prevails. Many imported Mexicans are to be found in the Bethlehem, Pa., steel mills. Thanks to the efforts of some Spanish marine transport workers and to the vigorous organization campaign being conducted by Metal and Machinery Workers' Industrial Union No. 440, of the I. W. W., a great part of them have been reached by the gospel of class solidarity. The I. W. W. press and organization have been of invaluable assistance to them in their fight against steel trust enslavement.

While this is creditable to the I. W. W., it is only a drop in the ocean. The I. W. W. must exert itself more stupendously than ever before, or the reactionary elements that are utilizing the exodus from the South will overgrow the organization and prevent its development, to the destruction of its great ideals. Make no mistake, the great labor problems of the future will center in the North and the East. Unless they are faced and settled there, no advance or solution can be had elsewhere. Let us, then, turn our faces in these directions and build up more organization there. And then still more organization. Nothing but complete, thorough and extensive organization will do.

That is one side, the northern and eastern side, of the revolution in migrations now going on in this country. But there is the other side. How will it affect the South? Will it leave the South in economic ruin and chaos? Or will it compel improvement and development? More likely the latter; especially as the South is failing in its attempts to stop this exodus. A regular war is going on for the control of the labor power of the South. The employment agents of large corporations are arrested and jail

Mexican Workers

ed. Negroes known to have slipped out to northern destinations also suffer the same fate. On all sides, the southern planters, bankers, and manufacturers are resorting to every means "to keep the Negro in his place." But all to no avail, the South is playing a losing game that will force modifications in its structure,-economic and otherwise. The South will have to step upward in the plane of industrial development, for it has been tried and found wanting; the exodus amply attests to this.

What will all this mean to white labor? For years there has been a tendency for white workers to drift South, especially in the textile, coal, marine, construction, and

ment for Mexico and Mexicans.

Already is this evident in the connections that are being made between the labor movements of both countries; especially the boycott by Mexican labor of California-made movies as a protest against the continued incarceration of the class-war prisoners and the Golden State's unjust criminal syndicalism law.

Verily, those who believe western migration to be "everything," have overlooked the newer migration northward. It is a revolution of profound import, and we had better wake up to the fact. Let us get on the trail of this new social phenomenon. And let us be lively about this, or else we will find it overcrowded by others who, grasping its great possibilities, will get there before us.