Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1898-07-14
The Trusts and their Policies.

The one thing We nave always 10
remember in the war with Spain, and
10 every thing else which effects our
national life. il. that no harm ever
comes Of justice
We have stuffed ballOt-boxes and
stolen elections; we have bribed, bull
dozed, cheated and perjured in our
national politics: We have practiced
fraud, extortion and so many other
forms of infamous wrong through the
trusts and unlawful combinations which
seek to control our business. that We
are in the gravest danger of losing.
through our OWE fault as a people, all
that has made our lie as people noble
and inspiring.
We cannot go on exaggeratlng the
evil tendencies of the last ten years
without ruIn-moral, political and in-
dustrial. II we do not gain for our
selves more compelling realization of
the meaning OF justice. it will soon be
impossible for any one but the most
consumate. grasping and audacious
scoundrel to succeed either in our pol
itics or in our business.
Our national life is but the reflex OF
our social and Industrial activities.
Freedom, progress. civilization = all
that makes life worth living, for the
individual or for the nation. depends
fundamentally Oh justice; when vast
combinations of capitalists league to-
gether as they have done in the sugar
trust, the whiskey trust, the tobacco
trust, the Standard oil trust. the steel
trust and a hundred others, to defeat
the laws, to control trade, 10 defraud
the direct producer, to rob and Oppress
the consumer, to coerce labor to brioe
voters, to purchase elections. and,
through fraudulent control of men
chosen as representatives of the people
to exercise. by usurpation for wrong
and robbery. the most sovereign and
vital powers of government-then what
hope can any honest American haye
for his country or for humanity except
in JUSTICE?
There is no other hope. There can
be none. We have in the White House,
j President, who, when a candidate
pledged himself to enforce laws made
to restore to our industrial life that
freedom, that honesty. that justice.
without which in our business, our
politics must become more and more
corrupt. and the hope of preserving
desperate. But our President has done
nothing. We know be can do nothing.
We see him at once the agent and the
victim of the very law breakers against
whom he pledged himself to use the
power of the people in enforcing the
laws.
Instead of the enforcement of the
laws at home, we are offered vast
schemes of colonial empire. We are
told that if we accept the imperial
policies of the trusts and combinations,
which are pluudering our own people
in open defiance of the law, .'our morn
ing drum-beat shall be heard round
the world" and the sun shall never set
on the glitter of American bayonets,
fixed TO hold in subsection weaker peo-
pie, who, in all four quarters of the
globe, through our superior fraud and
force, shall he made to toll for our profit
and our glory!
If we accept the offer: if We do not
recognize now that the crisis has come
in the history of America, when its
only hope as a nation, when our only
hope as nation, when our only hope
as free Americans, is in justice, then
American liberty will cease to be a
possibility. and the increasing corrup-
tion of our Industrial and political life
will make the name of american" a
stencil in the nostrils of the world
Mississippi TalEey Democrat and Jour
nal