"I WILL NOT LIVE UNDER A MASTER"
Wilson, President Woodrow
"I Will Not Live Under a Master" President WOODROW WILSON in "The World's Work" MR. ROOSEVELT'S conception of government is Mr. Taft's concep-tion—that the presidency of the United States is the...
...Pelletier going to do the duty of his office...
...Do you realize that is a blind alley...
...I will not live under a master...
...And then, smiling a gay goodby, he drove away—and there the case against him rests...
...When I am fighting monopolistic control, therefore, I am fighting for the liberty of every man in America, and I am fighting for the liberty of American industry...
...If you will but hold off the adversaries, if you will but see to it that the weak are protected I will venture a wager with you that there are some men in the United States now weak, economically weak, who have brains enough to compete with these gentlemen and who will presently come into the market and put these gentlemen on their mettle...
...But somehow as we recall how those two strike leaders were kept within damp walls, while this rich adversary, though under indictment for a meaner crime, is left free, the question again arises: Are the scales being held even...
...Every one of the great schemes of social uplift which are now so much debated by noble people among us is based, when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon benevolence...
...After 10 months of prison fare, a jury freed them...
...shrubbery on the way to fragrant blossoms...
...we will guarantee that they shall do everything kind and public spirited, which they have never heretofore shown the least inclination to do...
...After you have made the partnership between monopoly and your government permanent then I invite all the philanthropists in the United States to come and sit on the stage and go through the motions of finding out how they are going to get philanthropy out of their masters...
...It says: "We will not undertake it, we are futile to undertake to prevent monopoly, but we will go into an arrangement by which we will make these monopolies kind to you...
...America was created in order that every man should have the same chance as every other man to exercise mastery over his own fortunes...
...He was allowed to come to court in one of his numerous automobiles...
...We call upon all intelligent men to bear witness that if this plan were consummated the great employers and capitalists of the country would be under a more overpowering temptation than ever to take control of the government and keep it subservient to their purpose...
...they were lucky to get off with their lives...
...and gracefully arched macadam roads that beckon the indoor prisoners of Winter to exuberant outings by vehicle or atramp...
...I am willing to admit that if the people of the United States cannot get justice for themselves then it is high time that they should join the third party and get it from somebody else...
...Taft's concep-tion—that the presidency of the United States is the presidency of a board of directors...
...We want a free and a just government...
...the song of wild birds...
...We have, not one or two or three, but many established and formidable monopolies in the United States...
...And the minute they come into the market there will be a bigger market for labor and a different wage scale for labor...
...we have restricted opportunity...
...it is very attractive...
...we will guarantee that they shall pay the right wages...
...The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has come to stay...
...upon the right of children to thrive and grow up and be strong...
...Atty...
...Mind you, these artificially built up things, these things that can't maintain themselves in the market without monopoly, have come to stay, and the only thing that the government can do, the only thing that the third party proposes should be done is to set up a commission to regulate them...
...When is Dist...
...But you may recall that William Wood was also involved in a court proceeding growing out of the Lawrence strike...
...He was indicted on a dynamite planting charge...
...We do not want a benevolent government...
...upon all these fundamental things which appeal, indeed, to our hearts, but which our minds perceive to be part of the fundamental justice of life...
...What most of us are fighting for is to break up this very partnership between big business and the government...
...What I want to do is analogous to what the authorities of the City of Glasgow did with the tenement houses...
...the purl of spring-fed brooks, which gleam like diadems in the sunshine...
...He was admitted to $5,000 bail, a bond which he met by depositing five crisp $1,000 bills...
...That is not what America was created for...
...but we dare not enter on that programme until we have freed the government...
...It is an area noted for its majestic elms, now just budding into leaf...
...We will guarantee that they shall be pitiful...
...He, like they, was of foreign birth, and poor...
...For that long deprivation on a false charge they have never been compensated...
...has his sum-mer home...
...upon the right of women to bear children and not to be so overburdened that disease and breakdown will come upon them...
...Not far away, as distance is measured in these days of motor travel, on a tourist route which William Wood no doubt has often chosen for pleasure spins, stands the gloomy prison in which, a year ago, Ettor and Giovan-nitti were kept in solitary confinement for the part which they took in the Lawrence strike...
...When is Wood's case coming to trial...
...they propose things that we all want to do...
...As Brother Wood spins along the Salem turnpike, breathing the balmy, spring-scented air, does he ever, we wonder, reflect upon the superiority of his good fortune over that of Ettor and Giovannitti at the corresponding time of year a twelvemonth ago...
...Benevolence never developed a man or a nation...
...The justice proposed is very beautiful...
...You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that have made social reform necessary...
...We are at the parting of the ways...
...Law, the copybooks tell us, is no respecter of persons...
...These are not impertinent inquiries, to be answered in profane impatience, as Pelletier once answered Mary Boyle O'Reilly...
...I don't care how benevolent the master is going to be...
...justice treats alike the rich and the poor...
...He did not go to jail, to be locked in a solitary cell for 10 weary months...
...Through whose instrumentality...
...I want to light and patrol the corridors of these great organizations in order to see that nobody who tries to traverse them is waylaid and maltreated...
...He took the side of wealth and privilege, and prospered mightily...
...That is the point...
...But the question is, who is going to do them...
...They took the side of underpaid working people, and narrowly escaped the electric chair...
...We have controlled development and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men...
...They are questions concerning which the people WANT TO KNOW.—Cleveland Press...
...It accepts them...
...there were planks in that platform which stir all the sympathies of the heart...
...We have restricted credit...
...You can't find your way to liberty through that...
...FEW localities in eastern America excel in spring-time charm the region north of Boston in which the head of the American Woolen Co...
...Take the thing as a whole and it looks strangely like economic mastery over the very lives and fortunes of those who do the daily work of the nation, and all this under the overwhelming power and sovereignty of the national government...
...It is based upon the right of men to breathe pure air, to live...
...When Will William Wood Come to Trial...
...Are Americans ready to ask the trusts to give us in pity what we ought in justice to take...
...When you have thought the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that the programme of the new party legalizes monopolies and systematically subordinates workingmen to them and to plans made by the government both with regard to employment and with regard to wages...
...We have a great programme of governmental assistance ahead of us in the co-operative life of the nation...
...We have, not one or two, but many fields of endeavor into which it is difficult, if not impossible, for the independent man to enter...
Vol. 5 • May 1913 • No. 19
