Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs — John Shaqi
Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. DebsDebs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
History
Labor and Freedom: The Voice and Pen of Eugene V. Debs
Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor)
Labor -- United States; Socialism -- United States; Socialist Party (U.S.); Working class -- United States
If you listen to the old fogies who still belong to the parties their
grandfathers did and who have not moved an inch from their grandfathers'
graves, they will tell you that socialists are foolish people and that
what they propose never can be done. That is what the fogies of every
age have always said. They are the "wise" people who do things in the
same way that their dead grandparents did before them, who never change
their minds, never accept a new idea, never grow, and who are always
dead long before they are buried and forgotten the day after the
funeral. Whatever you may be I beg of you not to be a fogy, nor to
follow a fogy's solemn advice. His brain has ceased to work--if it ever
did work. He is mentally stagnant and moss-covered and votes the same
old ticket with no more idea of what he is voting for than a wooden
Indian.
The Socialist party says there have got to be some changes and has set
about making them, or at least getting ready to make them. It says that
the world is big enough for all the people that are in it, with plenty
of room to spare for groves and parks and playgrounds; that there is
land enough to go around without crowding; that there are farms enough,
or can be easily provided, to raise all we can eat, so that no child in
all the world need to go hungry; that there is plenty of coal and iron,
oil and gas, gold and silver and other minerals and metals, stored in
the earth; that there are forests and mountains and water courses
galore; that there are mills and mines and factories and ships and
railways and telegraphs, and the power supplied free by nature to run
them all; that there are millions of men and women ready to do all the
work that may be required to build homes, raise crops, bake bread--and
cake too--weave cloth, make clothes and everything else that is
necessary for everybody, and have time enough besides to build schools
and provide playgrounds for every last one of the children, with plenty
of toys thrown in to make this earth a children's paradise.
Now why should not just these things come to pass and why should not you
children help us speed the day when they _shall_ come to pass?
Everything you can possibly think of to make this earth sweet and
beautiful and to make life a blessed joy for us all is within our reach.
The raw materials are at our feet; the forces to fashion them into forms
of beauty and use are at our finger tips. We have but to put ourselves
in harmony with nature and with one another to spread far and wide the
gospel of life and love and once more hear "the sons of God shout for
joy."
Socialists not only dream of the good day coming when the world shall
know that men are brothers and that women are sisters to each other, but
they are at work with all their hearts and all their heads and hands to
make that dream come true.
If you want to know what the plans of the socialists are in detail read
their platform, attend their lectures and study their literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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