HAS IT COME TO THIS ?
Has If Come To This ? AND now food riots are upon us! Hungry mothers with hungry babes in their arms and hungry children at their heels are surging through the streets of our largest...
...The Beef Tmst rushes i.'ito print with costly advertisements to "explain...
...As the need is now greater than ever before, so is the duty more imperative...
...Prices have* certainly got on the nervej of women who are bringing up large families on the same anouut of money this year as last year, with which to buy food " What is happening in New York is happening in every other city iu this country...
...It has reached the proportions of a national peril...
...Grand jury investigations and criminal prosecutions should follow promptly...
...Never in the histcry of this nation has there been a year like the past year for "surplus millions," "melons," "extra dividends'' for the rich and powerful few...
...The authorities should go after the higher up violators of the law first...
...They made these war prices the excuse for gouging our own people for every necessity of life up to the very last ounce of their resources...
...Yet these same magnates are reaping untold millions by forcing upward the cost of living from fifty to one hundred per cent, and in many cases higher than that While wives of workers in New York cry out in the streets for food, fashionable New York is all "upset" over the fact that the horde of "newly rich," invading their favorite winter resort, threatens to make the place '' common.'' While millionaires are reaping fresh millions, and new millionaires are being add&l to the social register, the plain people suffer and their babies starve...
...It is a grave situation, but it is not a NEW one...
...They rioted in "war orders" from stricken Europe for machinery, ammunition, clothing, food...
...This at a time when the banks are filled to overflowing with gold...
...Hungry mothers with hungry babes in their arms and hungry children at their heels are surging through the streets of our largest cities screaming zainly for bread...
...Since the outbreak of the war the trusts and combinations have had a mad revel...
...Let no man, however rich or powerful, escape...
...IT IS TIME TO ACT...
...Listen to this from a New York retail grocer to a reporter...
...And this in a period of much-vaunted prosperity...
...The Captains of Industry band together to defy these just demands...
...Along with these terrifying accounts of "food riots" appear the news reports of the "record-breaking" NET PROFITS of the war traders and the trusts...
...The villager is trying hard to make both ends meet...
...And the outcome of this crisis will determine to a large degree who really rules this country—the people's government or the industrial overlords...
...Outbreaks in several sections...
...they are contemptuous of the despair of the breadwinner...
...In the meantime women and children are crying for bread...
...The department of justice should strike at once and strike hard through the criminal law against these manipulators of food prices...
...They sought to extend their fabulously profitable foreign operations and to fasten their monopolistic control over the industrial life of this country even more securely by manufacturing a craze for '' preparedness.'' Drunk with power and profits, the world's gold niled high in their coffers, they are deaf to the cries of mothers and babies for bread...
...Mounted police charge mob, lulling and wounding...
...It has the power, if wielded with determination, to break«jtheir sway over the lives and well-being of our people...
...Army of frantic women storm city hall...
...Everywhere those who work for wages or fixed salaries are in deep trouble...
...No relief in sight...
...This in the face of good crops, humming factories, and domestic tranquility...
...In the smaller cities the problem has become acute...
...Before such an investigation can be made we shall have planted, harvested and marketed another crop...
...The wage earner, seeking to keep his family intact, and provided with food enough for existence, asked for eight or ten or fifteen per cent, increase in wages...
...A jail sentence should be imposed upon every guilty man...
...Suffering has come...
...Soaring rapidly higher, the cost of loiving has at last climbed out of the reach of householders of small means...
...Shrinking dollar now buys only 12 cents worth of food.'' "Infant mortality heavy...
...The high cost of living is the most pressing domestic problem that now confronts us...
...Violence—the last resort of empty stomachs—is threatened...
...Newspapers carry flamii£ headlines...
...This power should be invoked without further delay...
...Woiren go almost crazy when they observe the advance in prices from day to day...
...The farmer is feeling the pinch...
...The pressure of ihe high cost of living upon the backs of the people has at last rer.ched the breaking point...
...Housewives despeate...
...So do the other trusts—the Railroad Trust, the Steel Trust, the Coal Tntft, the Cold Storage Trust...
...The time for "investigation" has long been passed...
...It is in the congested metropolis that food distress in the life of any nation finds is most disturbing manifestations...
...The law officers of the federal government should proceed now...
...The condition which exists today in violation of law in every crowded and congested center of population is appalling...
...It demands immediate action...
...It was so in Paris when the French Revolution was growing to its inevitable outburst It :s so in New York City—this nation's metropolis- today...
...The President recommends an appropriation of $400,000 for an investigation by the Trade Commission...
...Taking advantage of a people stunned by a world catastrophe and flaunting a government laboring under the strain of international affairs, the financial barons and food kings opened wide the flood gates of exploitation...
...Their frantic and uncandid explanations only befog the real issue...
...The national government has the authority, it has the instruments, it has the funds to bring the trusts to justice...
...It is new only in the sense that monopoly extortions, unchecked for a generation, have today reached an alarming climax...
Vol. 9 • February 1917 • No. 2
