And to what base purpose the railroad magnates put these brotherhoods to still further entrench their power and perpetuate their reign of robbery! * * * * * At this very moment they are using them as political pokers to stir up the fire of public sentiment against rate legislation. And the poor dupes that pay the dues don’t even know that their unions are in politics, corporation politics, the dirtiest of all politics. On their own account the unions are forbidden to have anything to do with politics—that would fracture their delicate diaphragm—but when the corporations need them as political tools—ah, that’s different; that’s what they are for! Cannot you hoodwinked railway slaves begin to see something? In all the history of organized labor, from the earliest times to the present day, no body of union workingmen ever served in a more humiliating and debasing role than that in which the railway unions appear at this very hour before the American people and the world. It is a spectacle for the gods, and future generations will marvel that such an exhibition of servility was possible in the twentieth century. * * * * * Union workingmen, rallying round the robbers of the working class, and defending them against their own people! It is true that there is nothing in rate legislation for the workingman, but the incident loses none of its significance on that account. The free use of the brotherhoods by and for the corporations, at election time, when the legislature meets, when congress is in session, whenever and wherever required—that is the point. How smoothly this emergency appliance works! * * * * * The corporations sniff danger; they send for their officials—the officials for the “grand chiefs” of the brotherhoods—the “grand chiefs” for their decoy ducks, and presto! a joint committee—and it is a “joint” committee—serves notice on the president and the country that the million and more railway employes want no interference with the divine right of the railroad robbers to hold up the people. Then another set of political tools of the same robbers take their cue and bound to their feet in the capitalist congress and in a serio-comic burst of paid-for passion, exclaim: “Don’t you see, gentlemen, that organized labor, the horny-handed nobility of the land, the muscle and sinew, the very backbone of the nation, recognizes this measure as a menace to its “full dinner pail” and interposes its righteous indignation! Gentlemen, we dare not make such an assault upon the dignity, the sacred rights, aye, the very life of honest toil!” * * * * * That settles it! The trick is done. The Goulds, Vanderbilts and Harrimans are on top, their slaves at the bottom, and their “identity of interests” is once more triumphantly vindicated.