And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON
THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS
OF THE EARTH.
Now, surely, this mystery is a mystery no longer! Now
we know what the seer of Patmos was foreseeing—Capitalist
Journalism! And when I call upon you, class-conscious workers
of hand and brain, to organize and destroy this mother of
all iniquities, I do not have to depart from the language of
the ancient scriptures. I say to you in the words of the
prophet Ezekiel:
So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court;
and behold, the glory of the Lord filled the house.
And I heard him speaking unto me out of the house:
Now let them put away their whoredom, and the carcases of their kings, far from me, and I will dwell in the midst of them forever.
A PRACTICAL PROGRAM
As I am about to send this book to press, I take one last look at the world around me. Half a million coal-miners have struck, a court injunction has forced the leaders to call off the strike, the miners are refusing to obey their leaders—and the newspapers of the entire United States are concealing the facts. For a week it has been impossible for me to learn, except from vague hints, what is happening in the coal-strike. And at the same time, because of false newspaper stories from Centralia, Washington, a "white terror" reigns in the entire West, and thousands of radicals are beaten, jailed, and shot.
I have pleaded and labored long to avoid a violent revolution in America; I intend to go on pleading and laboring to the last hour. I know that thousands of my readers will, like myself, be desperately anxious for something they can do. I decided to work out a plan of action; something definite, practical, and immediate.
I propose that we shall found and endow a weekly publication of truth-telling, to be known as "The National News." This publication will carry no advertisements and no editorials. It will not be a journal of opinion, but a record of events pure and simple. It will be published on ordinary news-print paper, and in the cheapest possible form. It will have one purpose and one only, to give to the American people once every week the truth about the world's events. It will be strictly and
