THE FARMER'S FORUM
Russell, George W.
The Farmer's Forum An Open Letter to the Employers By "A. E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL) (This remarkable piece of eloquence, published in the Dublin Times at the time, of the great strike of 1913, is...
...You do not seem to realize that your assumution that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life...
...Modern Conveniences in Country Homes THE country home can to-day have the modern conveniences...
...5. As low interest rates as possible should be secured...
...and from those who were not members you insisted on a vow that they would never join it...
...the furnace can be used nearly half the year, while the drill and plow are used but a few weeks...
...You reminded labor you could always have your three square meals a day while it went hungry...
...So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry...
...SIRS:—I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class in its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog...
...You have allowed the poor to be herded together so that one thinks of certain places in Dublin as of a pestilence...
...but your collective and conscious action as a class in the present labor dispute has revealed you to the world in so malign an aspect that the mirror must be held up to you, so that you may see yourself as every humane person sees you...
...has cut out much of the hardest work for the men on the farm, and the modern conveniences in the home will cut out much of the heaviest work of the women on the farm, and will add much to the health and comfort of all members of the farm family...
...An honest man," replied Mr...
...A water system can be put in that will cost about as much as a binder...
...A furnace that will keep the whole house warm will cost about as much as a drill and a plow...
...The representatives of labor unions in Great Britain met you, and you made of them a preposterous, an impossible demand, and because they would not accede to it you closed the Conference...
...The modern improvements in the home not only lift the heaviest work from the shoulders of those least able to bear them, but they also make the home more sanitary...
...Cry aloud to Heaven for new souls...
...The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one, but any relation in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality...
...They, too, as a class, though not all of them, were scornful or neglectful of the workers in the industry by which they profited...
...2. The contract should provide for the repayment of the principal at the most convenient time, that is when the borrower is most likely to have the means wherewith to repay it...
...Be warned ere it is too late...
...YOUR insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity...
...you refused to meet them further...
...The obvious duty of you in regard to these things you might have left undone, and it be imputed to ignorance or forgetfulness...
...Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body...
...It is used every day in the year and the binder only a week or two, says the North Dakota Experiment Station...
...The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you...
...The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you...
...Even in the Dark Ages humanity could not endure the sight of such suffering, and it learnt of such misuse of power by slow dgerees, through rumor, and when it was certain it razed its Bastilles to their foundatic s. It remained for the twentieth century and the capital city of Ireland to see an oligarchy of four hundred masters deciding openly upon starving one hundred thousand people, and refusing to consider any solution except that fixed by their pride...
...When Borrowing Money A FEW pertinent suggestions have been made by T. N. Carver of the United States Department of Agriculture that will be helpful to farmers who are considering borrowing money to carry on any of the farm projects...
...3. The length of time the debt is to run should have a close relation to the productive life of the improvement for which the money is borrowed...
...The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow...
...We read in the Dark Ages of the rack and thumbscrew...
...Carver lays down the following five rules to be observed in securing a loan: 1. Make sure that the purpose for which the borrowed money is to be used will produce a return greater than needed to pay the debt...
...One funeral will certainly cost as much...
...The children will be taught to curse you...
...One sick spell may cost enough to pay for installing a water system or a furnace...
...Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, and aristocracies while "noblesse oblige" is not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile...
...You, masters, asked men to do that which masters of labor in any other city in these islands had not dared to do...
...YOU may succeed in your policy and ensure your own damnation by your victory...
...Some of you have helped Irish farmers to upset a landed aristocracy in the island, an aristocracy richer and more powerful in its sphere than you are in yours, with its roots deep in history...
...The souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the cinematograph...
...There are twenty thousand rooms, in each of which live entire families, and sometimes more, where no functions of the body can be concealed and delicacy and modesty are creatures that are stifled ere they are born...
...The infant being molded in the womb will have breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate...
...If they had done their duty by those from whose labor came their wealth they might have continued unquestioned in power and prestige for centuries to come...
...You went into conference again with representatives of the State, because, dull as you are, you knew public opinion would not stand your holding out...
...You are sounding the death-knell of auto-tocracy in industry...
...But these iniquities were hidden and concealed from the knowledge of men in dungeons and torture-chambers...
...But no...
...There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy...
...You insolently demanded of those men who were members of a trade union that they should resign from that union...
...Farm machinery...
...You chose as your spokesman the bitterest tongue that ever wagged in this island, and then, when an award was made by men who have an experience in industrial matters a thousand times transcending yours, who have settled disputes in industries so great that the sum of your petty enterprises would not equal them, you withdraw again and will not agree to accept their solution, and fall back again on your devilish policy of starvation...
...E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL) (This remarkable piece of eloquence, published in the Dublin Times at the time, of the great strike of 1913, is said to have completely revolutionized public opinion on the question, says the author of The Cry For Justice...
...THOSE who have economic power have civic power also, yet you have not used the power that was yours to right what was wrong in the evil administration of this city...
...The cost is really small compared to the returns...
...If you had between you collectively a portion of human soul as large as a three-penny bit, you would have sat night and day with the representatives of labor, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against you...
...It is not they—it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the social order...
...and to many who knew them in their pride of place and thought them all-powerful they are already becoming a memory, the good disappearing with the bad...
...Kimp, "is one who likes the same music in private that he says he likes when his wife is giving a musical evening.— Philadelphia Record...
...Even an oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human kindness, which harmonizes all things otherwise incompatible, were present...
...4. Provision should be made in the long time loan for the gradual reduction of the principal...
...T?ie rcriter, born 1867, is one of Ireland's greatest poets, and an ardent advocate of agricultural co-operation...
...Something of a Strain "What's your idea of an honest man...
...you assumed that no other guarantees than those you asked were possible, and you determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the ponulation of this city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of suffering of their wives and the hunger of their children...
Vol. 8 • December 1916 • No. 12
