The Indiana State sentinel. [volume] (Indianapolis) 1868-1895, 1878-08-14
PROPOSED RELIEF.

At the Saturday session of the congress
sional committee on labor, which was held
in New York, various persons made speeches
embodying their ideas as to the cause and
the cure of hard times in this country.
Some of the speakers labored under the diff
fculty of not understanding either their
own arguments or plans, and made sad
havoc Of justice and right in attempting
divisions of capital and labor. Others were
firmly fixed in their own minds as to the
plausibility and practicability of their long
cherished propositions, and were willing to
abide by the results.
The secretary of the greenback party was
the first speaker, and he came, he said, as a
representative of the working class, and he
spoke for them and from their standpoint.
He believed the financial distress of the
country was owing to special class legisla-
'hon and the present educational sys-
TENS" A few men held the rail
road, manufactures and machinery,
and this Capitalization of power was steadily
increasing, until in the course of few years
such men could be readily counted One
effect of the second cause was that young
men receiving purely theoretical educations
grew TO regard manual labor as beneath
them, and they swelled the great army of
drones, ''the non producers" He also re-
garded the letting out by contract of public
works as a wholesale way of cheating the
government and grinding down the laborers
His remedies were the prohibition of the
importation of foreign manufactured goods,
of which the country exports the raw ma
terial then by homestead act the govern
ment should throw open to settlement all
public lands, and aid the industrious to get
20 them ana 10 secure homes upon them.
He would also recommend that series of
extended public Improvements should be at
once begun and idle laborers thus furnished
steady employment: and the present public
school shoulds be overthrown and technical
and industrial schools organized all over the
Union. He declared that the working
classes demanded strong central govern
ment; that revenues be derived from direct
taxation. and that the imitation of the cur
rency was the ultimate step that must be
taken to put to rights this sadly disorganized
country. He ended by warning the COM
mittee that unless laborers were at once sup
piled with food and employment they would
by force Of arms overthrow the government
and forcibly establish one founded on cor.
rect principles and practice.
The next speaker announced himself as
the originator as well as the representative
of the socialistic labor party of Brooklyn,
and he was emphatically for cooperation in
every thing, and he looked to this as the
grand remedy for all the evils in church, so
ciety and state. He would have the govern
ment establish vast cooperative society
after the style of the Shakers or the Oneida
community. OF this the nucleus should b.
the government itself, and the peopl,
should be drawn to it by seeing the benefits
of its work, and they should hold everything
in common, and all should stand on az
equality. Everyone should crafty his de
sires at the expense of the society, the uni
versal currency being social money issuet
whenever needed. The religion should be
''communistic Christianity" and all tn
money required to carry on the co-operatiy
society should be derived from taxes on tn