Page:The Debs Decision, 1919.djvu/14

 speech was deliberately misrepresented for the purpose of securing her conviction. The only testimony was that of a hired witness. And thirty farmers who went to Bismark to testify in her favor, the judge refused to allow to testify. This would seem incredible to me if I had not some experience of my own with a Federal Court. Who appoints the Federal Courts? The people? Every solitary one of them holds his position through influence and power of corporation capital. And when they go to the bench, they go there not to serve the people, but to serve the interests who sent them. The other day, by a vote of five to four, they declared the Child Labor Law unconstitutional; a law secured after twenty years of education and agitation by all kinds of people, and yet by a majority of one, the Supreme Court, a body of corporation lawyers, with just one solitary exception, wiped it from the Statute books, so that we may still continue to grind the blood of little children into profit for the Junkers of Wall Street, and this in a country that is now fighting to make democracy safe for the world. These are not palatable truths to them. And they do not want you to hear them and that is why they brand us as traitors and disloyalists. If we were not traitors to the people, we would be eminently respectable citizens and ride in limousines. It is precisely because we are disloyal to the traitors that we are not disloyal to the people of this country.

"How short-sighted the ruling class is. The exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He has just been cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, but he has no vision. You know this is a great throbbing world that speaks out in all directions. Look at Rockefeller. Every move he makes hastens the coming of his doom. Every time the capitalist class tries to hinder the cause of Socialism they hurt themselves. Every time they strangle