It is not violence in word or action the attorneys of the State and their urgers-on are waging war against; it is our doctrine—Anarchy.
We contend for Communism and Anarchy—why? If we had kept silent, stones would have cried out. Murder was committed day by day. Children were slain; women worked to death; men killed inch by inch, and these crimes are never punished by law. The great principle underlying the present system is unpaid labor. Those who amass fortunes, build palaces, and live in luxury, are doing these things by virtue of unpaid labor. Being directly or indirectly the possessors of land and machinery, they dictate terms to the workingman. He is compelled to sell his labor cheap, or to starve. The price paid him is always far below the real value. Tie acts under compulsion, and they call it a free contract. This infernal state of affairs keeps him poor and ignorant; an easy prey for exploitation.
I know what life has in store for the masses. I was one of them. I slept in their garrets, and lived in their cellars. I saw them work and die. I worked with girls in the same factory—prostitutes they were, because they could not earn enough wages for their living. I saw females sick from over-work; sick in body and mind on account of the lives they were forced to lead. I saw girls from ten to fourteen years of age working for a mere pittance. I heard how their morals were killed by the vile language and the bad example of their ignorant fellow workers, leading them on the same road to misery, and as an individual I could do nothing. I saw families starving and able-bodied men worked to death. That was in Europe. When I came to the United States, I found that there were classes of workingmen who were better paid than the European workmen, but I perceived that the state of things in a great number of industries were even worse, and that the so-called better paid skilled laborers were degenerating rapidly into mere automatic parts of machinery. I found that the proletariat of the great industrial cities was in a condition that could not be worse. Thousands of laborers in the city of Chicago live in rooms without sufficient protection from the weather, without proper ventilation, in which never a stream of sunlight flows. There are hovels where two, three and four families live in one room. How these conditions influence the health and the morale of these unfortunate sufferers, it is needless to say. And how do they live? From the ash barrels they rather half-rotten vegetables; in the butcher shops they buy for a few cents offal of meat, and these precious morsels they carry home to prepare from them their meals. The dilapidated houses in which this class of laborers live need repairs very badly, but the greedy landlord waits in most cases till lie is compelled by the city to have them done. Is it a wonder that diseases of all kinds kill men women and children in such places by wholesale, especially children? Is this not horrible in a so-called civilized land where there is plenty of food and riches? Some years ago a committee of the Citizens' Association, or League, made an investigation of these matters, and I was one of the reporters that went with them.
What these common laborers are today, the skilled laborers will be tomorrow. Improved machinery that ought to be a blessing for the work in man, under the existing conditions becomes for him a curse. Machinery multiplies the army of unskilled laborers, makes the laborer more dependent
