Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Wave of Horror (1912).djvu/27

 you see a workingman voting a republican or a democratic ticket you will hardly think there is that much difference.

A Wave of Horror—do you know anything about the manufacturing of our common lighting matches?

Do you know that the manufacturers use deadly white phosphorous, because it is cheaper, which causes a horrible, lingering and fatal disease of the bones of the jaw, torturing the lives and killing multitudes every year?

This disease, "Phossy Jaw," is incurable, the manufacturers know that the white phosphorous will kill the workers, but profit is profit under capitalism, and workingmen and women and children are cheap and plenty.

Dr. E. Harlan Wells, expert on tuberculosis, recently said: "Medical scientists have discovered that the factors concerned in the perpetuation and propagation of this disease (consumption) are overwork, child labor, poverty and want." And he goes on to say: "When the wealth of the nation is so distributed that each man receives enough and no man too much—then only may we hope to see tuberculosis eradicated."

Disease is but another form of the wanton murder that an abnormal social system creates.

Every well-informed person is aware of this fact, and yet no Wave of Horror seems to bother anybody—unless they chance to catch the deadly germs themselves.

The sweatshops of any of our great cities, where your coat or your wife's cloak likely came from, commit more murder with filth-bred tuberculosis germs every year than James McNamara could commit the rest of his life by his coarse methods.

"What are you Americans going to do," writes Lincoln Steffens, "about conditions which are breeding up healthy, good-tempered boys like these McNamara boys,