Some gentlemen are satisfied with these facts, but Socialists are not. They are preaching discontent. Should we not be worthy of your scorn and contempt if we did not preach discontent? If such discontent is wrong, contentment with the facts against which Socialists cry out must be right. Who has both the candor and the effrontery to say that contentment with such facts is right? Should we be contented with the woolen mill owners of New England who, fattening upon high Republican tariffs, starve men, women and little children with low wages? Should we be contented with the cotton-mill owners of the South, who, under the protection of Democratic state administrations, fill both their mills and the graveyards with little children? Should we be contented with a world in which a few own everything and the rest do everything—a world in which the worker is but a fleeing fugitive from inevitable fate, owning neither his job, nor the roof over his head? The cry of this wronged worker has come down through the ages, but never was his hold upon the means of life so slight as it is to-day. “Every creature has a home home— But thou, oh workingman, hast none.” So Shelley sang before machinery came. And, oh, the truth of it—the truth of it still! And the pity of it! In these days the inexcusability of it! Yet when we Socialists cry out against it—when we try to awaken the workingman to a realization that a new world was born when the steam engine was born, and that this new world may be and should be for him—we are rebuked by the capitalists because we are “preaching discontent.” Of course we are preaching discontent. We are going to preach it, if present conditions persist, so long as we have breath with which to preach. We respectfully decline to permit capitalists, as such, to tell us what we may or may not preach. We preach what we please without their leave. They preach what they please without our leave. At intervals, they preach a good deal, through some of the magazines, about religion. Big capital is behind the “Men and Religion Forward” movement, and some other similar movements. These gentlemen who are living in luxury off what they take from us tell us to take religion from them in the magazines and be happy. “In the sweet by and by” we are to get our own, while they get their own now. Socialists are willing to stand in on all of the sweet by and by they can get by and by, but they are also determined to make a prodigious fight for the sweet here and now.