Part 12

There is in this "promotion" the very climax of the irony of boodle.

Paul Morton, who began as a strike-breaker on the C. B. & Q., and reared a monument to theft at Hutchinson, Kan., and left his trail of crime all the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific, is fit, indeed, to be the cabinet associate and confidential chum of a president who puts him at the head of the company whose funds were stolen to buy his election.

William H. Taft is another of the elect, and it is easy to understand why Roosevelt has decided to make this illustrious son his successor as president of the United States and is now grooming him with the patronage of the national administration. Taft is a man after Roosevelt's own heart. Among his early acts as a judge he fined the bricklayers of Cincinnati two thousand dollars for going on a strike; he was next whirled to Toledo by special train and ordered by the Toledo, Ann Arbor and North Michigan railroad to issue an injunction binding and gagging its striking engineers and firemen and locking their leader up in jail and he complied with alacrity. From that time on it has been smooth sailing for the accommodating judge and there is not a bloated plutocrat in the land who would not hail with joy the election of William Taft as president; he would be almost as acceptable to these vultures as Roosevelt himself.

The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at here, but will receive due attention later on. The case of ex-Senator Burton is an instance in point. Other senators had taken thousands in similar cases to Burton's paltry few hundred dollars, but Burton was marked by Roosevelt for refusing to crook the knee to the sugar trust and pursued with merciless ferocity until he was lodged behind prison bars.

The president did not have a call to "go after" his old friends, Chauncey Depew and Thomas Platt, with the same virtuous passion to see crime punished and criminals jailed.

When Roosevelt was making his continental campaign in the palatial special trains furnished free by the railroad trust he stopped at Abilene, Kan., the home of the then Senator Burton, and opened his speech there in these words: "I am glad to be at the home of the senior senator from Kansas and am delighted to meet and greet his neighbors and friends. I want to say that no man in this world has done more, and I had almost said, as much, to place me where I am now, than your distinguished senator."

Fine way the president had of showing his gratitude. Burton should have known better and taken warning. Whenever Roosevelt gets that near to a man something is going to happen. "My dear" is then due to be metamorphosed with startling suddenness into an "atrocious liar."

Roosevelt can brook no rivalry. He is the self-appointed central luminary in the solar system. All others must be contented with being fire-flies. He must violate all traditions and smash all precedents. He is spectacular beyond the wildest dreams. He must have the center of the stage and hold the undivided attention of the audience. Any stunt will do when the interest lags. A familiar turn with a prize-fighter or a "gun-man" is always good for an encore. Nothing is overlooked. A dash to Panama with a fleet of battle-ships and a battery of cameras and a squad of artists and reporters is good for thousands of columns about the marvelous virility and fertility of the greatest president since Washington. He is followed with minute and eager details as he darts from cellar to roof, inspects every shingle, wears a solemn expression, throws a shovelful of coal into the furnace, snatches a bite from a workingman's pail, shakes hands with a startled section man and is off like a flash to look after some other section of the planet that it may not drop out of its shining orbit.

Mighty savior of the human race!

Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his administration.

Archbishop Ireland, the plutocratic prelate, will cheerfully certify to Roosevelt as the anointed of the Lord. And this will make another interesting chapter for a later review; a chapter that will deal with Ireland as the political as well as spiritual adviser of "Jim" Hill and the Great Northern, and of court decisions awarding him thousands of acres of land and making of the alleged follower of the Tramp of Galilee a multi-millionaire; a chapter that will tell of a high priest sounding the political keynote to his benighted followers in exchange for a promised voucher for a red hat to be worn in a land of freedom in which the state and church are absolutely divorced.

Only a few of the facts about Roosevelt and his regime have been here stated, but enough to satisfy all honest men that Theodore Roosevelt is the Friend of the Enemies and the Enemy of the Friends of this Republic.

INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.

American Socialist, May 27, 1915.

First of all, allow me to quote with approval the following paragraph from "An Introduction to Sociology" by Arthur Morrow Lewis: " * * * the greatest single achievement of the science of sociology is the concept of society, not as a collection of institutions, and sociology as an explanatory catalog or inventory--after the fashion of Spencer, but as a process of development, and the science of sociology as the analysis and explanation of the process."

Also the following from an essay on Revolution by George D. Herron: "Every revolution or true reform, every new and commanding faith, is in the direction of man's becoming his own evolver and creator. Every uplifting light or law perforces, in the place of the evolution that is blind and chanceful, an evolution that is chosen and humanly directed."

There is still room for reform and betterment in the present social system, but this is of minor consequence compared to the world's crying need for industrial and social reorganization.

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The next great change in history will be, must be, the socialization of the means of our common life.

Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to humane and civilized ends.

With all its marvelous progress through invention and discovery and all its monumental achievements in the arts and sciences, this poor world of ours has not yet learned how to feed itself. That is the problem of problems now confronting us more and more insistently and until that is solved the world is halted and it will either resume its march toward industrial and social democracy or be shaken to its foundations and into possible chaos by violent explosion.

There is no longer the shadow of an excuse for a hungry being. All the laws, all the materials and all the forces are at hand and easily available for the production of all things needed to provide food, raiment and shelter for every man, woman and child, thus putting an end to the poverty and misery, widespread and appalling, which now shock and sicken humanity and impeach our vaunted civilization. But these tools and materials and forces must be released from private ownership and control, socialized, democratized, and set in operation for the common good of all instead of the private profit of the few.

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It is well stated, "that civilization is at present rudimentary, and that it is to develop indefinitely."

Now, in view of the fact that the crops this year (1914) are the most abundant ever produced, that there is no market for the almost sixteen million bales of cotton lying in the warehouses, while at the same time there are millions of unemployed in the land who are without food and without clothing and who, with their wives and children, are doomed to indescribable suffering; in view of this solemn and indisputable fact it would seem that there could be but one opinion among students and thinkers as to the one great, vital and essential thing to do for the relief of our common humanity and for the promotion of the world's progress and civilization, and that that one thing is the one to be emphasized with all the power at our command.

A privately owned world can never be a free world and a society based upon warring classes cannot stand.

Such a world is a world of strife and hate and such a society can exist only by means of militarism and physical force.

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