coal
corporations to force the strikers back into their dismal and hopeless
pits. The battle has already lasted two days. Many on both sides have
been killed, but the capitalist papers are doing all they can to hush it
up.

Long ago the miners were evicted from the company's wretched hovels.
They and their wives and children live in tented fields and the brutal
guards have even driven the women and children from there into the
wilderness to starve that the strike may be broken and the miners
compelled to go back to work at the terms of their greedy and heartless
masters.

And why is this awful battle raging and human beings murdering each
other as if they were wild beasts? Because a few gluttonous slave owners
like Henry Gassaway Davis and the Watsons and Elkinses who dwell in
gorgeous palaces on vast estates occupying whole mountain ranges,
privately own the mines and minerals which were intended for all, and
consequently the thousands of miners and their wives and children are at
their mercy, and when they meekly asked for five per cent more wages so
their families would not suffer for bread the brutal lords of the mines
sent out their private army of assassins to hunt them down and kill them
as if they were mad dogs.

The Socialist party says that those mines should be owned by all the
people and that is what will come to pass when the socialists get into
power, and then the green hills of West Virginia and other states will
no longer echo with the rifle shots of corporation assassins, nor run
red with the blood of honest workingmen slain to appease the greed of
their soulless masters.

In February last, four boys were hanged in Chicago. The oldest was
twenty-one, the youngest barely out of his childhood. They had held up
and robbed and murdered a poor truck farmer for the little money he had
on his person. Not one of these boys ever had a decent home. They were
born in poverty, reared in ignorance, and surrounded by vice and filth.

This is cultivating crime and reaping the harvest. We socialists weep as
we think of the cruel fate of those four poor, friendless boys who died
on the gallows while they were still in their childhood, because the
world has not yet learned that there is greater profit in raising
children than there is in raising hogs.

The frightful stories of the little children in the mills of Lawrence
and the cruel suffering they endured is still fresh in the public
memory. When the poor and