Page:Industrial Unionism (Ettor).pdf/29

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The Road to Freedom


produces annually an average of $2,400.00 worth of wealth and receives less than $450.00 in wages.

You workers whose sisters, wives and mothers have been driven out of the homes into the mills and factories to compete with you and bring your wages down.

You, whose children have been driven out of the playground and kidnapped from the schoolhouse and strapped to the machine in the mills and shops, that their young lives, their very laughter and joy denied, may be rolled and coined into so many dollars for the pleasure and satisfaction of a few Industrial Herods.

You, of the wage working class, of whom it was required that in one year over fourty thousand workers—men, women and children—should be killed in the industries of this nation, burned to death as in the Triangle fire of New York City, their lives snuffed out in coal mine explosions and in a thousand various ways.

The blood of these workers, it seems, was needed to grease and spur the machines in the mills of our masters. Their lives sacri-

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