The Say of Other Editors

“A FREE BREAKFAST TABLE”

THE recent suggestion of a tariff tax on coffee, probably put out as a feeler, is responsible for the resurrection and reintroduction of the once familiar but never appropriate phrase at the head of this article. It was never appropriate; it was always a sarcastic sneer, rather than a statement of fact, because the memory of the most aged citizen runneth not to the time when “a free breakfast table,” a breakfast table untaxed as to itself, its equipment and the food and drink it bore, could be found in any American home. At this time, under the tariff of 1897, what could be more preposterously absurd than the notion that a tax on coffee would be a decree of banishment for that alleged boon?

The Post, being an advocate and defender of the policy of protection, although a condemner and contemner of the outrages incident to the stand-pat policy, is in no hurry to witness the advent of “a free breakfast table”; but the Post prefers that such a crass absurdity, such a stinging satire as this old shibboleth, should be returned forthwith to the dust and darkness from which it was dragged when the coffee tax proposition appeared.

The truth is, you go to breakfast clad in taxed garments, wearing no single article that is not taxed in the tariff; you sit in a chair that is taxed as to all the various materials that enter into it, and taxed as a whole; the table itself is similarly taxed, and we can think of no article on it that is free. Your tablecloth, your napkins and your napkin rings are all in the tariff schedules. Your fish or meat, your vegetables and fruit, your bread, your butter, your rolls, your griddle cakes, your sugar and syrup, your salt, vinegar, pepper, mustard, olive oil and all other condiments show up in the list of things taxed. So is it with your china or other crockery, and your knives, forks and spoons.

And your coffee is free only as to the raw bean. It is roasted over a taxed fire and in a taxed roaster, is stored in taxed receptacles and transported by taxed horses in taxed wagons; when retailed, it goes out in taxed bags, to be deposited in other taxed vessels. Having been ground in a taxed mill, your cook prepares it for the table by using a taxed coffee pot. If you use cream in your “free” coffee you must use taxed cream; if you use sugar in it you must use taxed sugar.

This is the “free breakfast table” whose exit will come if a duty is imposed on the raw coffee bean!—Washington Post.

That familiar old hymn, “In This Wheat By and Bye,” has lost its attractions for Jawn W. Gates and his accomplices.—New York American.

FAR-SIGHTED CARLOS MORALES

The United States is now in Santo Domingo; President Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, has fixed Don Carlos Morales firmly in the saddle. That cheerful and ingenious bandit begins to enjoy the unearned increment of the “status quo.” He can read now with a smile of the erstwhile terrible preparations of Jiminez and Barba. He can sit in his palace and rake in 45 per cent. of the customs revenues of his republic, collected for him and scrupulously accounted for. That was what Morales wanted, and he is happy. Domestic malice, foreign levy—nothing can touch him further.

If Cipriano Castro had one-tenth of the ingenuity of his brother bandit of the black republic he would have seen long ago that his present policy is foolish. Instead of making faces at the United States, Castro should have been busy inducing the foreigners in his country to set up a concurrent roar. He should have acknowledged the validity of claims of any kind and to any amount, the bigger the better. Then, at the psychological moment, he should have pointed to the imminent danger to the Monroe Doctrine, and begged the United States to enter and preserve order, collect his revenues and pay him a share of the proceeds.

If there is any other Central or South American dictator who is shaky on his pins, now is the time he should apply for relief. Let him take a lesson from Morales and imitate that “prudent and far-seeing statesman.” Forty-five per cent. of the revenues, in clean, hard coin, without work or worry, is better than all the revenues with danger of revolution and dismemberment.

Step up, gentlemen! The United States has a big navy, and it has nothing to do at home. Our duty is to protect our weak and struggling sister republics, and now that the Senate is out of the way, we propose to do it. We shall take right hold, and leave to the future the problem of how to let go.—Washington Post.

A man was killed at Lancaster, Ontario, while trying to rob a bank. There are still a few of the old-time robbers who have not learned that the proper method of robbing a bank is to work from the inside.—New York American.

A good sign of awakening conscience is evident by the protest from the ministers against accepting Rockefeller’s money that has been wrested from the people by indirection. The great success of the Standard Oil robberies has spawned upon the country hundreds of such corporations that plunder the public with even more skill than the Standard. If the church accepts this donation it will be as fatal to it as the thirty pieces of silver were to Judas. This protest against the gift by these ministers is a most courageous act. The Standard Oil tactics may lose every one of them their pulpits. The Standard Oil management will stoop to any kind of dirty work to perpetuate the system. They are attempting now to ruin Lawson, and, with all his astuteness and his millions of wealth to back him, they may succeed in doing so. The people should stand by Lawson to a man, and the congregations of these ministers that have dared to affront Rockefeller should see that none of his poisoned arrows reach them.—The Forum, Denver, Col.

CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

We hear much of Christian Civilization, but we do not see so much of it. Let us consider briefly the Christian world:

Russia—Anarchy, rapine, bloodshed, pauperism and starvation.

Austro-Hungary—Disease, strife, strikes, poverty and pauperism of millions.

Italy—Overpopulation, dire poverty, with millions of the people actual beggars, excessive taxation and a practically bankrupt treasury.

England—Army of unemployed, a vast section of the population in a poverty so appalling that it makes one’s heart bleed to read the details.

Ireland—Practically a nation of paupers, not of their own volition either, but as a result of evil laws and customs which have destroyed the hopes of a gallant people.

Spain—Once the proud leader of nations, reduced to the rags and sores of Lazarus.

United States—In the grasp of graft, the people being robbed of their earnings at every turn by a lot of as conscienceless pirates as ever scuttled a ship, and a government apparently impotent.

Everywhere we find more or less the same evil conditions.

Our so-called Christian Civilization is as much like the genuine article as the Texas long-horn is like a thoroughbred Holstein.—The Commonweal, Atlanta, Ga.

I interpret Dr. Osler to mean: Young man, get a move on you if you want to amount to anything. If you are a failure at forty, you have missed your vocation; your experience may serve you to good purpose, but if you are dependent at sixty, why, “off with your head!”...

Our President says it is very wicked for the mail-carriers to organize and have a man lobby for them; still worse to organize and defeat a Congressman who was blocking their efforts to get better wages and conditions of employment. Why don’t the President call a halt on the corporation lobby (some of them having known offices in Washington with as many as ten clerks) who defeat men and measures. Let this be denied, but we do know that corporations fix nominating conventions where nominations are equivalent to election; especially naming those who say: “I am in the hands of my friends.”—Ohio Liberty Bell.

The Government issues money and loans it to the national banks at one-half of 1 per cent. per year. This is old party doctrine, for it has prevailed under the rule of both old parties. The People’s Party favors issuing the money direct to the people without the intervention of banking corporations. On this question do you agree with the Populists or old parties?—Missouri World.

Wouldn’t it be amusing if an individual owned the New York Post-Office, paying sweatshop wages to letter-carriers, working them all hours, discharging them without reason—putting girls in their places as much as possible—and charging twenty-five cents for a letter halfway across the continent?

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if a J. P. Morgan or Mr. August Belmont of the race-track could own all the industries and real estate of New York?

How nicely Mr. Morgan would capitalize such properties in Steel Trust fashion! And what a nice time Mr. Belmont would have with the labor unions! There would be plenty of work for strike-breakers.

The American people believe in public ownership of all properties actually created by the public—and public ownership they are going to have.—New York Evening Journal.

The slave-owners of today do not realize that they own slaves. And the slaves do not realize that they have owners. Formerly one man owned one, a dozen or a hundred slaves. Occasionally even more than that. Now a hundred thousand men each own a part of every slave. The great mass of the people are slaves to unjust systems, and everyone who profits by these systems is part owner of everyone who loses by them. If there could be a partition suit and every slave owner be set apart his share, the fact that there are slaves today, and millions of them, would be quite plain. It would be found that this man owns fifty slaves, that man a hundred and some as high as fifty thousand. Should the richest girl in the United States be given white girls only as her share of the slaves, she would have a thousand at least—a thousand white girl slaves. Some persons are part slave and part free, because they get a little more than the commonest kind of a living. Sixty million people in the United States are either all or part slave, and the number who are all slave is much greater than that of the black population in the days of chattel slavery. This new slavery exists because the owners do not realize that they are owners and the slaves do not realize that they are slaves. Years ago Mrs. Emery, of Lansing, Mich., wrote a little book, entitled “The Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People.” The way to freedom is financial legislation in the interest of the people.—Missouri World.

The nation that prepares for war will sooner or later have war. We get just anything we prepare for, and we get nothing else. Everything that happens is a sequence; this happened today because you did that yesterday.—The Philistine.

In 1896 Mr. Bryan had undisputed control of the organized Democracy and was defeated.

In 1900 he still had control, and was defeated worse than before.

Now, let it be remembered that all the Western Populists, with their newspaper press—including such strong and widely circulated papers as the Nebraska Independent, supported him; and let it be further understood that now and in the future he will get no support from Populists or the Populist press; then figure out the lurid prospects Mr. Bryan has of sweeping the country in 1908.

Now, with this actual state of things confronting him, does anyone believe that Mr. Bryan has any hope of reorganizing the shattered ranks and disgraced leaders of the Democracy into a winning party in 1908?

And, if he has no such hope—and in reason he cannot have—what is his purpose putting so much into a cause that he knows is absolutely hopeless?

We can see but one reason for Mr. Bryan’s course, and that is that he intends to prevent the organization of a party that would unite the South and West, and defeat the plutocracy, thus restoring the Government to the original purpose of its great founders.

Mr. Bryan will hold in party slavery a great many Democrats who do not think—and unfortunately they are legion—and thus divide the men who ought to stand together, as it is evident they must fall together, making an easy victory for the Eastern money power.—People’s Tribune, Prescott, Ark.

“On account of insufficient laws regulating the matter, and the utter disregard of even these, hundreds of workmen, mostly foreigners, are being killed each year in the steel mills, blast furnaces and coal mines.”

Coroner Joseph G. Armstrong made this statement in addressing a jury in the case of a man killed at the plant of the American Steel and Wire Company. It was only a case of “another Hungarian killed in the mills,” as the Coroner expressed it, but Adelbert Merle, the Austro-Hungarian Consul-General in this city, backed by the Coroner, will appeal to the state, and, if necessary, to the Federal authorities, to do something to protect these men.

“During the first month of my term,” said Coroner Armstrong, “one plant alone, the Duquesne plant of the United States Steel Corporation, had twelve separate fatalities. That was the number reported to this office. How many more there were no one may ever know. I went to the officials of the corporation and entered a complaint. Then an order was issued that more care would have to be taken, and next month not a death was reported from the Duquesne plant.”

Said Consul-General Merle:

“A very large number of the Hungarians employed in the mills are American citizens, and some consideration should be given them on that account, if not on the score of humanity. It is proposed to organize the Hungarians and other foreigners who are voters and see if some action cannot be secured in the legislature to compel the mill owners to give better protection to the workmen.”

“The number of fatalities which occur in the steel mills, the blast furnaces and the coal mines in the Pittsburg district are never fully reported,” said an attaché of the consulate. “Scarcely a month goes by that we are not called upon to investigate the case of some workman who is reported to us as having ‘disappeared.’ At present we are working on two such cases. Both are identical as regards details.

“The men were stationed at the top of blast furnaces owned by the United States Steel Corporation to receive the cars of ore as they came up and dump them. There is only a small bridge for them to stand on. One misstep or awkward movement, and the man will follow the ore into the furnace. The men are not missed until it is noticed that the cars are not being dumped. No one knows what has become of them. Their coats and dinner pails await them at the bottom of the elevator, but the men never come to claim them. Then they are reported to have ‘disappeared.’ It is not known positively that they have fallen into the furnace, but there can be no other conclusion.”

The officials of the steel mills say they will do anything in their power to conduce to the safety of the men, and that the foremen in charge are mainly responsible for any dereliction.—New York World.

If a man should loan money at one-half of 1 per cent., and borrow it back at 8 per cent., and keep this up year after year, his family would have no trouble in getting him put under guardianship. The people through their Government are acting just as foolishly when they issue money to national banks....

A billion and a half of taxes. Another billion and a half of railroad charges. And a billion of interest, not counting the interest on public and railroad debts. A total of four billion dollars. This is the sum the people of the United States must pay each year whether money be scarce or plentiful. Is it any wonder times get harder when money gets scarcer?...

If the people could realize that their hard struggle to keep body and soul together and at the same time lay by a little for old age—making life a mere battle for existence—if they could realize that this struggle is made necessary by the present systems, that prosperity is the natural right of everyone who does his share of labor, they would be more easily induced to vote against monopoly rule. Populists should endeavor to dissatisfy the people with their present condition and show them that they should be getting so much more out of life.—Missouri World.

LESE-MAJESTE

Because a passing steamer did not regard it necessary to give a tow to the Sylph the other day some of the frenzied Republican newspapers of the North seem to think there will be trouble with the skipper of the afore-mentioned steamer when T. Roosevelt gets back to civilization.

For the Sylph, they claim, is the President’s yacht, and certainly there must be punishment, prompt and dire, for any rover of the high seas who dares show lack of deep concern over her.

Lèse-majesté with a vengeance!

Of course, it does not occur to the frenzied Republican press that the Sylph is not the President’s yacht; that she is a vessel of the navy, kept in commission at public expense, and should be used only for public purposes; and that the President has no possible warrant in law for keeping her at Washington or taking her out to sea for the personal pleasure of himself or the members of his family.

If the Sylph is not needed in the active service of the country she ought to be taken out of commission; if she is needed by the navy she should be so used. In either event she is not the President’s yacht, nor should she be utilized as such at public expense.—Atlanta Constitution.

AUTOMOBILE MANSLAUGHTER

Within one week of the new season five persons have been killed by automobiles in this city, not counting the young man who fell from the “Seeing New York” omnibus. As many more have been very seriously hurt.

The heartlessness of some speed-maddened votaries has been again illustrated. There was the woman who in a Brooklyn street shrieked out: “Go on quickly, Harry; the man is killed!” There is that young man of the reckless rich class, whose autos are debited with two deaths and are a terror to thousands living, caught again running at eighteen miles an hour in the street. That “sports” might scorch to the Aqueduct races a little girl in Elmhurst yielded up her young life.

The man who drives his auto at dangerous speed is as responsible morally for the death he thereby causes as one would be who should fire a revolver at random down the same street and by “accident” kill a victim.

Manslaughter by automobile will continue until it is punished as severely as other manslaughter, and until the certain penalty of illegal speeding is jail, not for the driver, but for the owner.—New York World.

Mr. Thomas Lawson has tumbled from his lofty pedestal. Multiplied thousands of people in this goodly land of ours were venerating him, were reverencing him—some of them just about beginning to worship him. But he has proven himself to be only common clay. He was leading the van against the iniquities of “frenzied finance,” exposing the chicanery, the fraud, the swindling, the downright stealing every day perpetrated in the Stock Exchange dealings, the manipulation of stocks and bonds and the fleecing of the lambs. Now comes the news that in December last he made in stock speculations, as a votary at the altar of “frenzied finance,” $1,500,000, and in this mild and gentle month of April the comfortable figure of $1,000,000. Alas, alas! and lackaday! He was only human after all. His wings had not even begun to sprout.

—Southern Mercury.

If Bryan, Hearst and Dunne should succeed in raising the old hulk of Democracy, Cleveland, Hill and Gorman will scuttle it again. Better come out, boys, and take a new ship....

Dr. Washington Gladden is not going to let the Rockefeller gift rest. He says it is the right and duty of every American citizen to sit in judgment on Rockefeller and his methods.—Forum, Denver.

Judge A. B. Parker, in a speech in New York “Jefferson Day,” said the “defeat of the Democratic Party was emphasized by the unprecedented expenditure of money.” Everybody knows that there was not one-fifth as much used by the Republicans to defeat him as there was to defeat Bryan. Perhaps he meant the “unprecedented” use of money to secure him the nomination. What else could he mean?—The Jeffersonian, Thomson, Ga.

Stand for the referendum in the management of the business of the Farmers’ Union. By this means you will do away with the boss, especially the political boss. Demand the right to settle your own affairs, and do not leave it to self-constituted leaders.—The Watchman, Cleburne, Tex.