_At the time this remarkable paper was written and published in the Appeal to Reason, two years ago, “fool dinner pail” prosperity flourished like a green bay tree._ _One there was who, wanting an audience for his voice of warning, yet sounded with his pen a loud alarm. Debs had in the beginning of his life’s labors allowed the railroad companies to coin his brawn and his brain in their service, but had since devoted himself, with an earnestness sublime, to the study of the condition of wage workers in general and railroad employes in particular. From his hard experience and many years of study he was in position to know, and he did know. Whatever else has been said, no detractor has questioned his honesty and the fine fiber of his magnificent manhood._ _Yet, his warning went unheeded. The so-called “labor press,” as well as the capitalist papers, decried him as an alarmist and a mischiefmaker._ _How swiftly and how accurately has his forecast been verified! We see the system he has arraigned trembling and crashing, we hear the hunger tread of the unemployed, and the tragedy he foretold is in the “rat-tat-tat” on a million kitchen doors._ _Industry is confounded and labor is confused. By the statement of the railroad companies themselves a half million railroad workers alone are out of employment._ _Choked into despair, it is to be hoped that Debs’ mighty appeal to them, which is here republished, will now be read and assimilated by railroad men and the way of Socialism learned._ BRUCE ROGERS. _Girard, Kansas, March, 1908._ * * * * * This appeal is made particularly to railway employes, among whom I began my career as a wage-worker, with whom I spent twenty-seven consecutive years—the complete span of my young manhood—as co-employe, labor organizer and union official, and for whom I shall have an affectionate regard of peculiar tenderness that will end only with my days. The very relation I bear them inspires me with the liveliest sense of obligation to that great body of brave and brawny men whose hands, as hard as their hearts are soft, first grasped my own in welcome as a recruit to the army of toil; whose honest faces, beaming with approval, first warmed my heart and stirred my blood, and whose applause, the first I ever knew, fired my boyhood years with high resolves. In every dark and trying hour these comrades of my early years stood staunch and true and pushed me on and raised me up that others might see my face and know my name, while they remained unnoticed, unapplauded, the soldiers of obscurity, the rank and file, the lower class, the common herd, who made and move this world and who should be, and yet will be, its ruling aristocracy. * * * * *