Kentucky Irish American. (Louisville, Ky.) 1898-1968, 1898-09-10
A Standard Oil Magnate Exhorts the
Laboring Men to Arise and Fight
the Trusts.
ITO Succeed Labor Must Fight Capital
With Capital or With Anarchy
or Revolution"
BRAINS AND MONEY ARE NEEDED

Here is Standard Oil millionaire who
says the laboring class should unite and
prepare themselves for mighty conflict
with capital; who openly denounces
monopoly as tyranny and monopolists as
thieves and robbers; who asserts and be-
lieves that labor fails to get its Just
rights, and who says the time must come
when labor shall .be emancipated, and
who predicts a revolution.
The man who makes these astonishing
statements is himself a member of the
Standard Trust and a stakeholder in it.
He is Charles Russell Burke, decend-
ant of Edmund Burke, the great Com
moner of England. He was Secretary Of
the famous Eagle Oil Company before it
was swallowed up by Mr.. John d. Rookie
feller's great octopus, and has ever since
held an important place in the Standard,
being an expert on the oil trade.
His father, Russell w. Burke, was the
greatest handler of petroleum in the
world prior TO the organization of the
great trust by Rockefeller, into which he
was drawn with most of the other dealers
in America.
He owned the Empire, the Queens
County and several other oil refining
plants, and did a heavy business in the
export as we'll as in the domestic trade.
But the octopus took him in, and its ten
tacles have held all his interests fast ever
since that day.
Charles Russell Burke, the author of
this striking bit of advice to American
workingmen, is cousin of Senator Red
field Proctor on his mothers side. The
ssuEes are a family.
A very rich and influential uncle of the
writer is Charles c. Burke, ex-President
of the New England Produce Exchange.
This new and ardent friend of the
laboring man married few years ago
Miss Maria c. Benson, daughter of h.
II. Benson, founder of the beautiful town
of Bensonhurst, L. l.
In his novel, called thistle Sifters,"
the advance sheets of which the Sunday
Journal has just received from f. Tenny-
son Nicely, Mr.. Burke says all this, and a
great deal more.
The novel itself is light and himsy
affair, the characters being, in the main,
a weak and detestable crew. But the
story is interesting and the pointed les
son it conveys to the men who produce
all the wealth in the world, and who reap
so little of the fruit of their toll, is suf-
ficient excuse for the medium chosen by
the author.
This is Mr.. Burke's language to Ameri-
can labor:
"You are being oppressed to the verge
of slavery by your masters, the control
lers of the great monopolistic corpora
tons. There is no help for you UNI
leso you take these monopolies into your
own hands. To do this you must have
both brains and money.
"You must adopt their methods to
some extent. If you have the money you
can buy the brains, as the big corpora
tions are now doing. propose plan by
which you can acquire all the money you
need.
at is business plan. 1t is based on
tie very principles which have made
possible the vast accumulations of capital
which now threaten to enslave mankind.
You must make sacrifices to achieve it;
you must make up your mind to wait
patiently, to save, to deny yourselves, to
trust those whom you chose to execute
your high purpose, and to be faithful
unto death till the goal is attained.
"You must remember that all the cap
ital in the world is produced by your own
toll. Every dollar that is controlled and
used against you by the mcnopolists,
every dollar that has been employed in
the building of railroads and telegraphs,
in the development of mines and oil
fields, and in bringing to the yielding
point all the great natural resources of
the country, is the direct outgrowth of
your toll, or the toll of men who, like
you, received only pittance for their
work, while all the vast profits have gone
into the pockets of manipulators and
schemers.
'In your present broken and disor-
ganized condition you can do nothing
to further your interests nor to regain
your rights. You see the struggle be-
coming more hopeless every day, and
you must know that unless you do some
thing effective to help yourselves the
situation of your children will be worse
than your own, and that of your chill
dren's children absolutely desperate.
IF you can not accomplish the great
result in time to enjoy its fruits your
selves, you can certainly do so in time to
save your children from slavery more
abject than your own, and you must be-
gin at once, for your enemy is growing