Haven" plunderers; so you will be prepared to hear that the "Transcript" buried this apology of Senator Lodge in a remote corner, and without comment!
Or take the experience of my friend Feigenbaum, Socialist Assemblyman of New York State. The Socialist assemblymen had been protesting against the custom of the machine gang to drive through bills without consideration. They resolved to put a stop to the custom; whereupon the machine leaders set a little trap for the Socialists. A bill was introduced, without being read, and the speaker asked unanimous consent to advance it to the second reading. The leader of the Socialist group immediately objected. The bill had not been read, he declared, no one on the floor knew what was in the bill, no one even knew the name of the bill. The speaker cut him short: "No explanation is necessary. Your objection is sufficient." So the bill, under the rules, went over to the next day. Says Feigenbaum:
The members drifted out to the cloak-rooms, or they remained
at their desks. They didn't know what the bill was about, because
nine-tenths of them hadn't read it, and not more than four or five
were in the secret of the day's mysterious doings.
But next morning the Socialists found out what had happened.
The bill was to turn over certain lands in Saratoga
County to the War Department, and the Socialists had been
guilty of stopping war legislation which was desperately
needed! The "New York Tribune" carried an elaborate account
of a tempestuous scene, in which the speaker had
"scathingly rebuked, the Socialist leader. The members had
swarmed around the Socialists, shaking their fists in their
faces, threatening them with physical violence; also, the
Socialist leader had refused to stand at the playing of the
national anthem. Says Feigenbaum: "The whole story was
a fabrication, pure and simple, out of whole cloth." And he
tells what happened afterwards—
A campaign of vilification hitherto unheard of. It went so far
that Albany papers called for the raiding of the rooms we occupied,
called for a boycott of us by shop-keepers and restaurant-men in
Albany, and gave high praise to a drunken ruffian, an ex-prizefighter,
member of the Assembly, who in a drunken fit of temper called for
the lynching of the Socialists. This speech was highly praised editorially
in Albany and Troy.
During the war our industrial autocracy has learned to
