The representative. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1893-1901, 1894-05-02
Let Every Voter Read This.

Let Every Voter Read This.
1t is important to see ourselves as others
see. We have SO gradually grown into our
conditions that many of us are insensible
OF them. Here is an extract from the fam
Gus Englishman's, William T. Stead great
book,-"If Christ Came to Chicago" Mr..
Stead will be remembered as the man who
suffered imprisonment, in London, some
years since, for exposing the purchase of
young girls by the English aristocracy, for
licentious purposes. Read the following ter
r1ble indictment of our people for their
apathy and cowardice, and then join the
Peoples Party.
Il have watched the rapid evolution of
Social Democracy in England, 1 have
studied Autocracy in Russia, and Theocracy
in Rome and 1 must say that nowhere,
not even in Russia, in the first years of the
reaction occasioned by the murder of the
late Tzar, have 1 struck more abject sub
mission to a more souless despotism, than
that which prevails among the masses OF
the so-called free American citizens, when
they are brought face to face with the
omimpOtent power of the corpora tons.
Wealth, said a workman bitterly to me,
the other day, has subjugated everything.
1t has gagged the press, it has bought up
the legislature, it has corrupted the judges.
Even on the universities it is laying it's
golden finger. The churches are in it's
grasp. Go where you will, up and down
Ills country, you VIII ma our cltlZenS para
lyzed by sense of their own impotence.
They know the injustice, they know better
than any else the wrongs which they
suffer- they mutter curses, but they are too
cowed to do anything. They have not the
heart to try again
What this man said, have been hearing
on every side, in all classes of society.
There is the most = helpless hopelessness,
utterly strange to me- The Russian peasant
suffering under a corrupt tchinovnik, who
bows his head with the fataism of his
race, does not submit more abjectly to il
legal exactions than the American citizen to
the endless tyrannies of his plutocra tic
task-masters. The Russian peasant at least
has faith in God and in the Tar and
though, as he says, Heaven is high and the
Tar is far off, still who knows but thai
some day the wicked tchinovnik may meet
his deserts? But the American, if he is
religious does not think the affairs of this
world interests the Divine Being who is
chiefly concerned with chants and prayers
and sermons; and if he is irreligious, he
does not think Of God at all. AS for the
Tar, there is no Tar; the only substitute
on this side of the Atlantic for such a de-
liverer is the faT-off, semi-my thica1 concep-
ton Of arouSing Of public opinion. If pub
lie opinion were aroused, say some more
sanguine citizens, something might then be
done When or how? sheer the pes
simistS. You forget that the country is
not governed by the opinion Of Its citizens
lawfully expressed at the ballot box 1t is
controlled by the Dead Hand. Read our
constitution and the constitution of our
state and see how cunningy the money
power is intrenched behind constitutional
battlements Think you that in a country
where it is unconstitutional even to pass
truck act to save workmen from being
plundered by their employers, you can do
anything? If you carry your reforms at the
nnYt election 10 will
them up. If by some miracle they proved
incorruptible, their legislation could be de-
clared unconstitutional by the courts. And
if you want to amend the constitution you
have very long row to hoe.
'The root of the whole trouble is lack of
faith in God. If there be no God, or if He
does not heed such trivialities as mundane
affairs, if there be no law, invisible but
eternal, which is the silent but secret allv
of every forlorn fighter for justice and for
liberty, then it is not surprising that men s
hearts fail them for fear and they refuse to
rouse them for the fray.
THE citizens have acted, each man of
them upon the principle of leach for him
self and the devil take the hindmost." They
have made their fortunes, if lucky, or they
have failed if they were unlucky, but the
devil has taken among other hindmost
things the government of the city. Instead
of seeing. to it that the authorities were Just
men, upright, fearing God and hating
covetousness, they left the worst elements
in the community to convert the city gov
eminent into joint stock corporation, for
the spoliation Of the people and the promo
ton of perjury, corruption and all upright
eousness. And now, having accepted
Gains gospel and lived up to it, they are
reaping the consequences.
1.-The more l look into the operation of the
laws which have reduced the city of Chi
cago to this present uncomfortable position
face to face with the spoiler in the streets.
the more / am reminded of the old familiar
story Of the fate of the children of Israel
after they had established themselves and
had waXed fat and comfortable in the Land
of Promise. AS it was then, when the hosts
of Moab and of indian and of the Mesa
potamians fell upon the chosen people and
smote them and spoiled them, so it is to-
day in the city of Chicago Just before the
French revolution Gibbon, on concluding
his history of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, complacently congratulated
civilization, upon the fact that there were
no longer any hordes of barbarians on its
frontiers who might repeat the havoc of
Atilla, the Hun, or Alafic the Goth But a
few years passed and the reign of terror
proved that civilization gould breed her own
savages within her frontiers and that in
the slums of her capitals were hordes as
capable of devastating the land as any of
the hosts that followed Attila to the sack
of Rome. The American republic, in like
manner, although too strong to be in any
danger from without. is now learning that
democracies can breed tyrants and that the
conquerors of old who overran empires for
the sake of plumber, n and impoverished
whole nations to fiji their treasures, have
their legitimate heirs and successors in the
coalesced -plutocracy, of the United States