Page:The Chicago Martyrs (1899).pdf/94

 86 knows? My own deliberate opinion concerning this Haymarket affair is that the death-dealing missile was the work, the deliberate work of monopoly, the act of those who themselves charge us with the deed. I am not alone in this view of the matter.

Let me first of all call your attention to the pre-existing conspiracy of monopoly against the American people, which I believe culminated in the Haymarket there. I will give you now a brief outline or history of this great crime; of the principles of the long antecedent conspiracy on the part of the Chicago Times and Tribune to use hand grenades, recommending the rifle diet for strikers, and arsenic and strychnine for the unemployed, as the outcome of Gould's admonition in the New York Tribune that it is soon that American workingmen must prepare to submit to the same wages as their European brethren that of the coercive policy of the hand grenade and rifle diet. This all resulted from the deliberate attempt of corporations to pay interest and dividends on bonds and stock which were clear water without a speck of dye in it, and, to keep up these double, treble and sometimes quadruple payments above the actual cash valuation of all the existing capital and innumerable corporations which girdle and reticulate the land, not only was production, transportation and telegraphic industry taxed four-fold, that it should bear in excess of ten per cent. upon actual cash cost, and this conducted on a contracted volume of money in order to enhance its purchasing power and usurious value and enable them to dictate the price of labor and its products; but the greatest crime of all: congress framed a bill by which, when bankrupted, the middle classes are brought to the verge of want by foreclosure of mortgage upon their farms. The managers of these corporations then turn their whole attention to the reduction of expenses, which follows as a direct blow at the wages of those by whose skill and labor the railroad, telegraph, and telephone and other corporations do their work, knowing that the overcrowded labor market would compel their employees to accept their wages to supply their wants or starve. An industrial war follows, because the wage system enables monopoly to do these things. Now, upon this the wage question has its basis. The crisis was reached when organized labor struck against long hours on the 1st of May, 1886 following the protest in April of the 15,000 employees of Gould's Missouri railway system of the southwest against the wages of fifty-five and seventy cents a day to which Gould's corporation and Manager Hoxie had reduced the army of skilled railroad operatives; but these events were precipitated on the first by the massed labor unions, and the latter by the district assemblies of the Knights of Labor of the southwest. What was the issue? On railroad stocks alone on all the roads within the United States at a cost of two billion dollars, there was a capitalization of six billions the effect of this false and fictitious value of labor, for skill and labor alone give any value to the stocks and bonds and enable these monopoly inflationists to build up vast incomes on that which has merely cost the paper on which these false calculations were issued. The employees of these public institutions and their patrons cannot understand why these holders, owners, and issuers of fictitious stocks and bonds regard it as a crime to strike. That was an issue in 1877, and it is an issue now in 1886 between the monopoly inflationists who hold that a strike for higher wages, which also aims to pre-