The Butler County press. [volume] (Hamilton, Ohio) 1900-1946, 1921-06-10


from life where there never has been
abundance, where there never has
been fullness, where there never has
been more than the foundation, the
essentials, the elementals.
Debating labor does not mean TAX
| ing from life where life has been
surfeited with an over-abundance.
The real essence of labor defation
is that it is proposed to squeeze from
labor-from the life of the working
people-some vital, necessary part of
the experience of human existence.
This is planned as definite scheme
of action. 1t is a thing upon which
men have deliberated. Courts recog-
nize difference between deliberate
murder and murder in the height of
passion. The crime of deliberate
planning and execution is always the
more heinous.
The great financial and industrial
powers declare that they intend to go
about the country taking away meal
here, suit of clothes there, home
at some other place, bit of freedom
and sunshine still further on. From
one home one thing, from another
home another thing. 1t is more re-
fined and less brutal in aspect than
it would be to go about pinching off
arms and fingers and ears.
Debate labor, is the cry. Take
something away from labor, leave a
little less in the homes of the toilers,
draw the window shades a little
tighter against the sunlight, let fewer
children pass through the doors of
schools, let fewer live to the age of
maturity, let fewer have access to
books and to the normal pleasures
and delights of life. Shrink the
waist-line and tighten the belts. De-
flate
A real defation of expanded values
finds Justification. There is reason
in taking away the unreal and the
fictitious. But that is not what is
proposed by those who say "defate
labor"
The deflation that is proposed is
subtraction of real values, taking
away of substance, sheer cut to the
quick of life,
And where the workers are con-
cerned the dehation is a sword of
two edges. The number of dollars is
to be reduced and then the buying
power of the remaining dollars is to
be reduced. What is proposed IS
double gouge into the life of the toll
ing masses. And so long as the work
ers are ready and willing to produce
the equivalent of the standard of liv-
ing to which they aspire somehow
there must be found way to keep
open for them the opportunity to
maintain this standard without the
interference of an arbitrary power.
The willingness of labor to produce
should be forever labor's guarantee
against shrinking the fullness of life.
Labor's contribution at the work
bench should be its injunction in per-
petuum against the hideousness of
defation; the fullness of effort should
measure the fullness of reward, and
the counting room should have no
voice and no power to reach out the
hand that throttles and chokes.
The voice of labor is raised in pro-
test throughout the land against the
cruelty of the theft that is proposed
and that has taken place at some
points Somehow there must be found
a way to take from grasping hands
the power and the strength to hestrict
the lives and the development of the
millions of our toilers. And until the
toilers find better way they will use
the weapons they now have, their will
and their determination and their
strength.
Defation of labor is not to be willed
and executed by the few who do not
labor!