Middletown transcript., 1916-04-22
RICH ROBBERS


1 that some of the big manufac
turers, notably the Trusts, well STYLED
predatory, are making these times
of stress occasions for squeezing the
people by raising the prices of nearly
every article they consume especially
the great staples of life which every one
must have.
A big campaign of commercial graf
would seem to be under way, for certain
it is the prices of nearly everything are
going up, up, everlastingly up! In g
few cases with some reason, in most
cases with little or none. A baleful
greed of great and quick gain seems to
be in all the air-one of the evils that
usually follow in the of train horrid war.
By the recent Rittman process so per
cent more gasoline is now obtained from
coal oil, and yet because of the rascally
tricks of the Standard Oil monopoly,
the price of gasoline has advanced over
100 per cent in the last few months
Here in Delaware gasoline is selling
at 26 cents. while IN Detroit and in
many places in the Western states it
can be bought for about half that price
The Commission which has recently in
vestigated the subject, reports that
prices thus widely differ in various
sections of the country, showing con-
clusively that the big rise is due to g
fraudulent "cornering" of the market
by these thieving corporations.
The mere threat of this investigation
sent gasoline down several cents a gal
Ion. Were two or three of the rich
scoundrels who are making a business
of thus robbing the masses sent to Jail
as they we'll deserve, the price of this
household necessity, gasoline, would
come down on a run.
But that never has been done, and
what is more, never will be. Rich and
powerful thieves who thru manipula-
tions of the markets or thru food adul-
terations, etc, rob every man, woman
and child in the country, seldom or
never are convicted; but if by some rare
chance, as in the case of Heike the
Treasurer of the thieving Sugar Trust,
and of Morse, the banker-thief, they
are convicted, either the friendly upper
Courts that usually keeps rich swindlers
out of Jail, overturn the conviction
on some paltry quibble. or a tender
hearted executive pardons the wealthy
rogue, andhe escapes with his Doodle
less the share the lawyers get for help
ing him beat the law.
Meat goes up nearly every week
truly, as the Mother Goose rhyme has
it, "the COW jumps over the NOON.
The Beef Trust is "skinning'' not only
their beeves, but their customers also.
In fact, this grasping set of plunderers
out in Chicago not only rob the public
who buy, but the cattlemen in the West
who sell, for tho the price of beef in the
market is going up, on the hoof it is
going down, the cattlenen now getting
less money for their beeves than they
did year ago!
Are we here in America sowing the
fruitful seeds of another French Revo-
luton? 1t only needed about a century
of kingly tyranny-Louis XIV to Louis
XVI and Of land and commercial mo-
nopolies, wherein the historian says ''the
rich had the enjoyments, and the poor
carried the burdens, to precipitate
that cataclysm, and we have already
gone some part of the way with our
grinding corporation tyrannies and op-
pressive monopolies.
Our peril today is not the grisly threat
Of anarchistic socialism with its Nc
Namara bomb campaigns, not yet the
making Industrial Workers of
.he World, "Madmen casting firebrands
and death. These are open dangers
md may be fought.
1t is the hidden perils issuing out of
Nall Street where in princely offices,
nlllionaires plot the levy of all kinds of
,rinding monopolies, of transportation.
f money, of foods-of everything save
ir and water there is where the
Jation's peril lies.