The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South Part 23

"Fellow Citizens, Mr. George Evans, the leading advocate of Organized Labor in America, wishes to speak to you. Will you hear him?"

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" came from all parts of the house.

The man began in quivering tones that held Sam and gripped the unwilling mind of the crowd:

"My friends: Just a few words. I have in my arms the still breathing skeleton of a little girl. I found her in a street behind this building within the sound of the voice of your speaker."

He paused and waved to John Brown.

"She was fighting with a stray cat for a crust of bread in a garbage pail. I hold her on high."

With both hands he lifted the dazed thing above his head.

"Look at her. This bundle of rags G.o.d made in the form of a woman to be the mother of the race. She has been thrown into your streets to starve.

Her father is a workingman whom I know. For six months, out of work, he fought with death and h.e.l.l, and h.e.l.l won. He is now in prison. Her mother, unable to support herself and child, sought oblivion in drink.

She's in the gutter to-night. Her brother has joined a gang on the East Side. Her sister is a girl of the streets.

"You talk to me of Negro Slavery in the South? Behold the child of the White Wage Slave of the North! Why are you crying over the poor negro?

In the South the master owns the slave. Here the master owns the job.

Down there the master feeds, clothes and houses his man with care. Black children laugh and play. Here the master who owns the job buys labor in the open market. He can get it from a man for 75 cents a day. From a woman for 30 cents a day. When he has bought the last ounce of strength they can give, the master of the wage slave kicks him out to freeze or starve or sink into crime.

"You tell me of the white master's l.u.s.t down South? I tell you of the white master's l.u.s.t for the daughters of our own race.

"I see a foreman of a factory sitting in this crowd. I've known him for ten years. I've talked with a score of his victims. He has the power to employ or discharge girls of all ages ranging from twelve to twenty-five. Do you think a girl can pa.s.s his bead eyes and not pay for the job the price he sees fit to demand?

"If you think so, you don't know the man. I do!"

He paused and the stillness of death followed. Necks were craned to find the figure of the foreman crouching in the crowd. The speaker was not after the individual. His soul was aflame with the cause of millions.

"I see also a man in the crowd who owns a row of tenements so filthy, so dark, so reeking with disease that no Southern master would allow a beast to live in them. This hypocrite has given to John Brown to-night a contribution of money for the downtrodden black man. He coined this money out of the blood of white men and women who pay the rent for the dirty holes in which they die."

A moment of silence that was pain as he paused and a hundred eyes swept the room in search of the man. Again the speaker stood without a sign.

He merely paused to let his message sink in the hearts of his hearers.

"My eyes have found another man in this crowd who is an employer of wage slaves. He is here to denounce Chattel Slavery in the South as the sum of all villainies while he practices a system of wage slavery more cruel without a thought morally wrong.

"I say this in justice to the man because I know him. He hasn't intelligence enough to realize what he is doing. If he had he would begin by abolishing slavery in his own household. This reformer isn't a bad man at heart. He is simply an honest fool. These same fools in England have given millions to abolish black slavery in the Colonies and leave their own slaves in the Spittalfield slums to breed a race of paupers and criminals. Why don't a Buxton or a Wilberforce complain of the White Slavery at home? Because it is indispensable to their civilization. They lose nothing in freeing negroes in distant Colonies.

They would lose their fortunes if they dared free their own white brethren.

"The master of the wage slave employs his victim only when he needs him.

The Southern master supports his man whether he needs him or not. And cares for him when ill. The Abolitionist proposes to free the black slave from the whip. n.o.ble work. But to what end if he deprives him of food? He escapes the lash and lands in a felon's cell or climbs the steps of a gallows.

"Your inspired leader, the speaker of this evening, has found his most enthusiastic support in New England.

"No doubt.

"In Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts, able-bodied men in the cotton mills are receiving 80 cents a day for ten hours' work. Women are receiving 32 cents a day for the same. At no period of the history of this republic has it been possible for a human being to live in a city and reproduce his kind on such wages. What is the result? The racial stock that made the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts a civilized state is perishing. It is being replaced from the slums of Europe. The standard of life is dragged lower with each generation.

"The negro, you tell me, must work for others or be flogged. The poor white man at your door must work for others or be starved. The negro is subject to a single master. He learns to know him, if not to like him.

There is something human in the touch of their lives. The poor white man here is the slave of many masters. The negro may lead the life of a farm horse. Your wage slave is a horse that hasn't even a stable. He roams the street in the snows of winter. He is ridden by anybody who wishes a ride. He is cared for by n.o.body. Our rich will do anything for the poor except to get off their backs. The negro has a master in sickness and health. The wage slave is honored with the privilege of slavery only so long as he can work ten hours a day. He is a pauper when he can toil no more.

"Your Abolitionist has fixed his eye on Chattel Slavery in the South. It involves but three million five-hundred thousand negroes. The system of wage slavery involves the lives of twenty-five million white men and women.

"Slavery was not abolished in the North on moral grounds, but because, as a system of labor it was old-fashioned, sentimental, extravagant, inefficient. It was abolished by the masters of men, not by the men.

"The North abolished slavery for economy in production. There was no sentiment in it. Wage slavery has proven itself ten times more cruel, more merciless, more efficient. The Captain of Industry has seen the vision of an empire of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He has seen that the master who cares for the aged, the infirm, the sick, the lame, the halt is a fool who must lag behind in the march of the Juggernaut.

Only a fool stops to build a shelter for his slave when he can kick him out in the cold and find hundreds of fresh men to take his place.

"Two years ago the Chief of Police of the City of New York took the census of the poor who were compelled to live in cellars. He found that eighteen thousand five hundred and eighty-six white wage slaves lived in these pest holes under the earth. One-thirteenth of the population of the city lives thus underground to-day. Hundreds of these cellars are near the river. They are not waterproof. Their floors are mud. When the tides rise the water floods these noisome holes. The bedding and furniture float. Fierce wharf rats, rising from their dens, dispute with men, women and children the right to the shelves above the water line.

"There are cellars devoted entirely to lodging where working men and women can find a bed of straw for two cents a night--the bare dirt for one cent. Black and white men, women and children, are mixed in one dirty ma.s.s. These rooms are without light, without air, filled with the damp vapors of mildewed wood and clothing. They swarm with every species of vermin that infest the animal and human body. The scenes of depravity that nightly occur in these lairs of beasts are beyond words.

"These are the homes provided by the master who has established 'Free'

Labor as the economic weapon with which he has set out to conquer the world.

"And he is conquering with it. The superior, merciless power of this system as an economic weapon is bound to do in America what it has done throughout the world. The days of Chattel Slavery are numbered. The Abolitionist is wasting his breath, or worse. He is raising a feud that may drench this nation in blood in a senseless war over an issue that is settled before it's raised.

"Long ago the economist discovered that there was no vice under the system of Chattel Slavery that could not be more freely gratified under the new system of wage slavery.

"You weep because the negro slave must serve one master. He has no power to choose a new one. Do not forget that the power to _choose_ a new master carries with it power to discharge the wage slave and hire a new one. This power to discharge is the most merciless and cruel tyranny ever developed in the struggle of man from savagery to civilization.

This awful right places in the hand of the master the power of life and death. He can deprive his wage slave of fuel, food, clothes, shelter.

Life is the only right worth having if its exercise is put into question. A starving man has no liberty. The word can have no meaning.

He must live first or he cannot be a man.

"The wage slave is producing more than the chattel slaves ever produced, man for man, and is receiving less than the negro slave of the South is getting for his labor to-day.

"Your system of wage slavery is the cunning trick by which the cruel master finds that he can deny to the worker all rights he ever had as a slave.

"If you doubt its power, look at this bundle of rags in my hands and remember that there are five thousand half-starved children homeless and abandoned in the streets of this city to-night.

"Find for me one ragged, freezing, starving, black baby in the South and I will buy a musket to equip an army for its invasion--"

He paused a moment, turned and gazed at the men on the platform and then faced the crowd in a final burst of triumphant scorn.

"Fools, liars, hypocrites, clean your own filthy house before you weep over the woes of negroes who are singing while they toil--"

A man on an end seat of the middle aisle suddenly sprang to his feet and yelled:

"Put him out!"

Before Gerrit Smith could reach Evans with a gift of five dollars for the sick child which he still held in his arms the crowd had become a mob.

They hustled the labor leader into the street and told him to go back to h.e.l.l where he came from.

Through it all John Brown sat on the platform with his blue-gray eyes fixed in s.p.a.ce. He had seen, heard or realized nothing that had pa.s.sed.

His mind was brooding over the plains of Kansas.