Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of AppreciationsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.)
Get ready, comrades, for action! No other course is left to the working
class. Their courts are closed to us except to pronounce our doom. To
enter their courts is simply to be mulcted of our meagre means and bound
hand and foot; to have our eyes plucked out by the vultures that fatten
upon our misery.
Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the
working class.
Whatever is done we must do ourselves, and if we stand up like men from
the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf, we will strike
terror to their cowardly hearts and they will be but too eager to relax
their grip upon our throats and beat a swift retreat.
We will watch every move they make and in the meantime prepare for
action.
A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat at Chicago, or
some other central point, would be in order, and, if extreme measures
are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed
as a preliminary to a general uprising.
If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it.
Growth of the Injunction
_Social Democratic Herald, May 6, 1905_
In the month of December, 1893, something over eleven years ago, a
federal injunction was issued that broke all the records up to that time
and stirred up the whole country. This injunction was issued by James G.
Jenkins, judge of the United States Circuit Court, and restrained the
employes of the Northern Pacific railway from quitting the service of
that company under penalty of being found guilty of contempt and sent to
jail.
The facts in the case, which are recalled by a recently published
interview with Judge Jenkins, who has retired from the bench, were as
follows:
The Northern Pacific, robbed and wrecked by the knaves who had control
of its affairs, applied to the federal court in the person of Judge
Jenkins for a receivership, which was promptly granted. Following this
order of the court and the appointment of the receivers, the latter
petitioned the court for an order making sweeping reductions in the
wages of employes, and fearing that a strike might follow, the receivers
asked the court at the same time to issue an order restraining the
employes from leaving the service of the company, and this was also
promptly granted. It was this latter order that aroused the storm and it
raged fiercely for some months. Indignation meetings were held by labor
unions, notably in Chicago, where a mass meeting was called for the
special purpose of denouncing Judge Jenkins and demanding his
impeachment. Obedient to the indignation and clamor of organized labor,
Congressman McGann, of Illinois, introduced a resolution in Congress
looking to the investigation of the affair by the judiciary committee,
but, of course, nothing came from it, and it was not long before the
judicial crime, for such it was, was forgotten.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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