A PROTEST AGAINST CONDITIONS.
By Alexander Law, Secretary, New York.
As long as we will stand for private property in land, we must realize the unemployed as well as the poor will be always with us. In this so-called free country, generations are born and die who never draw a breath without being compelled to pay some pirate or parasite, who has monopolized the land, for the right to live on the soil of their birth and breathe the air of their native land, with the result that thousands are homeless and unemployed, strangers and wanderers in the land of their birth or adoption, as the case may be, while millions of acres of land are held out of use until the so-called owners can rob the not care how you vote on the outside, if you community of the fruit of their enterprise and labor as the price for letting go.
The masses of our big cities live in congested districts in inflammable, disease-breeding tenements, where thousands contract tuberculosis and other deadly diseases, and children are killed and maimed by the hundreds every year for having no place but the crowded and dangerous streets to play in. Through exorbitant rents the fathers and mothers of families are remorselessly robbed of their hard-earned wages as well as their health and lives. And the
pirates responsible for this wholesale robbing and slaughter of the innocents, masquerade around as our first and foremost citizens. What the Creator in his goodness, gave to the children of men, for the use and benefit of all, is now monopolized by the few, who make their lives bitter with hard bondage, and all this with the consent of His professed followers in both Church and State. Moses, in the person of Henry George, has shown the way to the promised land, where every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree with none to molest him or make him afraid.
We call your especial attention to the arctile on page 12, on THE ARMY OF DESPAIR, by Fred. Isler. This is the first of a series of 2 articles by the same Comrade. It is written around the “Barrel Houses.” Other numbers will have every phase of the hoboe’s city life, written up from the inside as only Isler can write it. These articles, alone, are worth the price of the paper.