The Black Hills union. [volume] (Rapid City, Pennington County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1889-1904, 1896-07-17

upon which the latter depends for its
support-thirty-three years and four
months, at the end of which time the
unskilled laborer, if he had not died
sooner, would be ready to fill a pa,l-
per's grave.
Ten thousand dollars will buy, and
pay cash for, one of the finest 16O-acre
farms in the grandest agricultural
state in the Union; it will buy and
pay cash for two stores better than
the average stores of the country; it
Will buy, and pay cash for, ten If the
average blacksmith, wagonmaker or
carpenter shops Of the country. At 6
per cent interest $40, 900 will produce
an annual income, without the slight
est exertion on the part of it's owner,
as great as two OF OH unskilled labor
ing men can earn in the production of
wealth by a hard years work and be
just as fresh at the opening of it's sec
ond year as it was at the beginning of
it's first.
But What is perhaps more sugges
1--WE, $4,000 would have hired one hun.
dred better, brighter and brainier men
h Ia Ben Harrison. either of whom
would have sent better copy to the
paper employing him than Harrison
could.
Then who or what is Benjamin Har-
rison, that he should be thus favored
above other men?
physically he is a little, short. pudgy
fellow, a good deal after the style of
Punch in Punch and Judy, gray
bearded and gray haired and over 50
years old.
Mentally he is cunning enough to
keep his plate right side up when it
rains porridge" and to espouse the best
paying side of any question in which
he may be interested. 1t goes without
the saying, since he has never pro.
duced a dollars worth of wealth in his
Vie and is a corporation lawyer ever
ready to defend corporate interests.
right or wrong. that he is a plutocrat
OF the plutocrats; that he is not a
multl-millionaire comes, not because
he is troubled with the least qualms
of conscience about the morality Of
the business of appropriating to his
own use the wealth created by the
working bees in the industrial hive,
but solely because his cunning falls
short Of the degree necessary to make
the opportunity of it's requirement a
perfectly safe one.
Strange as it may seem in a country
where the majority is. said to rule
and where the humble producers out
number the leeches in the proportion
OF a hundred to one. this cold-blooded
parasite, who glories in the ability of
capital to crush the life out of labor
organizations, has been general in the
army, governor, United States senator,
and president Of the United States by
virtue of votes cast by men whom and
whose calling he holds in utter con-
tempt, and it is because of the hope
that the notoriety he has thus gained
may be made to rebound to it's private
gain that a plutocratic paper made him
the offer noted above.
Such men and such papers are fit
representatives of a Christian CO civil
~lization which differs from the barbar-
ism of the dark ages chiefly in the fact
that it has transferred the right of
man to possess himself of his neigh
bors' property from his physical to his
mental ability to do so. However, the
day is not far distant when theft,
whether accomplished at the end of a
gun-barrel or the end of a contract,
will be recognized for what it really is.
Then the history Of such men as Harri-
son and such offers as the above will
be objects of a great curiosity and won
| derment as the strangest relics of an
| earlier barbarism now is.