Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Wave of Horror (1912).djvu/25

 the little children do not live long, no matter if their joyless lives are soon snuffed out by the accursed system.

What does Big Business care for murder—unless some crazed workingman, like the McNamaras, chance to do the murder—then comes a wave of horror.

More than 500,000 human beings crushed every year in preventable accidents and mine explosions!

That is nothing, compared to the profits in the game.

More than 600,000 girls living in prostitution and white slavery, because capitalism pays them wages too small to live honest lives.

The average lives of these girls is five years.

The white slave syndicate figures on needing 200,000 fresh recruits every year to assure an attractive stock, as some quit the business, or become too diseased to keep it up, before the five years roll around with its death sentence.

When you vote for Capitalism you vote for this thing to go on.

And that unknown quantity carried off annually by disease bred of filth and unsanitary conditions and poverty—the biggest toll of all to the god of Mammon.

But what of this, anyway, man? Why, your capitalist courts have declared that a workingman is only worth $350 more than a mule, and it is blamed hard and expensive, too, to collect the $350.

After your lawyers and courts are done with you, I should judge you would be left with about seventy-five cents clear, so virtually you bring in the neighborhood of six bits more than the mule. I suppose a woman would not be worth so much, and a child less.

Here is the court decision that has established the market value of a workingman. The decision was rendered in the federal court, at Cleveland, in December last (1911), and the rendering is reported as follows: