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ten cents. They are not so good as the others, but they are very warming.
'And so I have at last found my work in the world, thanks to you, young man.
It is the Master's work.' He looked at me, and his eyes twinkled. 'You caught
me feeding his lambs, you know. And of course you will all keep my secret.'
He spoke carelessly enough, but there was real fear behind the speech. He
promised to call upon us again. But a week later we read in the newspaper of
the sad case of Bishop Morehouse, who had been committed to the Napa Asylum,
and for whom there were still hopes held out. In vain we tried to see him, to
have his case reconsidered or investigated. Nor could we learn anything about
him except the reiterated statements that slight hopes were still held for his
recovery.
'Christ told the rich young man to sell all he had,' Ernest said bitterly.
'The Bishop obeyed Christ's injunction and got locked up in a madhouse. Times
have changed since Christ's day. A rich man today who gives all he has to the
poor is crazy. There is no discussion. Society has spoken.'
1A Mexican dish, referred to occasionally in the literature of the times. It
is supposed that it was warmly seasoned. No recipe of it has come down to us.
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Chapter 13
The General Strike
OF COURSE Ernest was elected to Congress in the great socialist landslide
that took place in the fall of 1912. One great factor that helped to swell the
socialist vote was the destruction of Hearst.1This the Plutocracy found an
easy task. It cost Hearst eighteen million dollars a year to run his various
papers, and this sum, and more, he got back from the middle class in payment
for advertising. The source of his financial strength lay wholly in the middle
class. The trusts did not advertise.2To destroy Hearst, all that was necessary
was to take away from him his advertising.
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The whole middle class had not yet been exterminated. The sturdy skeleton of
it remained; but it was without power. The small manufacturers and small
business men who still survived were at the complete mercy of the Plutocracy.
They had no economic nor political souls of their own. When the fiat of the
Plutocracy went forth, they withdrew their advertisements from the Hearst
papers.
Hearst made a gallant fight. He brought his papers out at a loss of a million
and a half each month. He continued to publish the advertisements for which he
no longer received pay. Again the fiat of the Plutocracy went forth, and the
small business men and manufacturers swamped him with a flood of notices that
he must discontinue running their old advertisements. Hearst persisted.
Injunctions were served on him. Still he persisted. He received six months'
imprisonment for contempt of court in disobeying the injunctions, while he was
bankrupted by countless damage suits. He had no chance. The Plutocracy had
passed sentence on him. The courts were in the hands of the Plutocracy to
carry the sentence out. And with Hearst crashed also to destruction the
Democratic Party that he had so recently captured.
With the destruction of Hearst and the Democratic Party, there were only two
paths for his following to take. One was into the Socialist Party; the other
was into the Republican Party. Then it was that we socialists reaped the fruit
of Hearst's pseudo-socialistic preaching; for the great majority of his
followers came over to us.
The expropriation of the farmers that took place at this time would also have
swelled our vote had it not been for the brief and futile rise of the Grange
Party. Ernest and the socialist leaders fought fiercely to capture the
farmers; but the destruction of the socialist press and publishing houses
constituted too great a handicap, while the mouth to mouth propaganda had not
yet been perfected. So it was that politicians like Mr Calvin, who were
themselves farmers long since expropriated, captured the farmers and threw
their political strength away in a vain campaign.
'The poor farmers,' Ernest once laughed savagely; 'the trusts have them both
coming and going.'
And that was really the situation. The seven great trusts, working together,
had pooled their enormous surpluses and made a farm trust. The railroads,
controlling rates, and the bankers and stock exchange gamesters, controlling
prices, had long since bled the farmers into indebtedness. The bankers, and
all the trusts for that matter, had likewise long since loaned colossal
amounts of money to the farmers. The farmers were in the net. All that
remained to be done was the drawing in of the net. This the Farm Trust
proceeded to do.
The hard times of 1912 had already caused a frightful slump in the farm
markets. Prices were now deliberately pressed down to bankruptcy, while the
railroads, with extortionate rates, broke the back of the farmer-camel. Thus
the farmers were compelled to borrow more and more, while they were prevented
from paying back old loans. Then ensued the great foreclosing of mortgages and
enforced collection of notes. The farmers simply surrendered the land to the
farm trust. There was nothing else for them to do. And having surrendered the
land, the farmers next went to work for the farm trust, becoming managers,
superintendents, foremen, and common labourers. They worked for wages. They
became villeins, in short serfs bound to the soil by a living wage. They could
not leave their masters, for their masters composed the Plutocracy. They could
not go to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was in control. They had
but one alternative to leave the soil and become vagrants, in brief, to
starve. And even there they were frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were
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passed and rigidly enforced.
Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole communities of farmers,
escaped expropriation by virtue of exceptional conditions. But they were
merely strays and did not count, and they were gathered in anyway during the
following year.3
Thus it was that in the fall of 1912 the socialist leaders, with the
exception of Ernest, decided that the end of capitalism had come. What of the
hard times and the consequent vast army of the unemployed; what of the
destruction of the farmers and the middle class; and what of the decisive
defeat administered all along the line to the labour unions; the socialists
were really justified in believing that the end of capitalism had come and in
themselves throwing down the gauntlet to the Plutocracy.
Alas, how we underestimated the strength of the enemy! Everywhere the
socialists proclaimed their coming victory at the ballot-box, while, in
unmistakable terms, they stated the situation. The Plutocracy accepted the
challenge. It was the Plutocracy, weighing and balancing, that defeated us by
dividing our strength. It was the Plutocracy, through its secret agents, that
raised the cry that socialism was sacrilegious and atheistic; it was the
Plutocracy that whipped the churches, and especially the Catholic Church, into
line, and robbed us of a portion of the labour vote. And it was the
Plutocracy, through its secret agents, of course, that encouraged the Grange
Party and even spread it to the cities into the ranks of the dying middle
class.
Nevertheless the socialist landslide occurred. But, instead of a sweeping
victory with chief executive officers and majorities in all legislative
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