re
intelligent, and shrewd. They understand their material interests and
how to protect them. You find the capitalists as a rule belonging only
to capitalist parties. They don't join a working-class party and they
don't vote the Socialist ticket. They know enough to know that Socialism
is opposed to their economic interests. Now, both republican and
democratic parties are capitalist parties. There is not the slightest
doubt about it. It can be proved in a hundred different ways. You know
how the republican party treated the demands of labor in its recent
national convention. You know, or ought to know, what has taken place
under the present administration. You know, or ought to know, something
about the democratic party, national, state and municipal. If there are
those who say that the democratic party is more favorable to labor than
the republican party it is only necessary to point to the southern
states where it has ruled for a century. In no other part of the nation
are workingmen in so wretched a condition. In no other part are working
people so miserably housed, so wretchedly treated as they are in the
southern states where the democratic party rules supreme.

At this very hour miners in Alabama are on strike under a democratic
administration. I know the condition there, for I have been in the
mines. I know many of those men personally. I know under what conditions
they have had to work. I have been in the shacks in which they live and
have seen their unhappy wives and ill-fed children. I know whereof I
speak. Only in the last extremity have those men gone out on strike.
They bore all these cruel wrongs for years and were finally forced out
on strike. And then what happened? The very first thing the democratic
governor did was to send the soldiers to scab the mines. It doesn't make
any difference to you, if workingmen are starved and shot down, which
party is in power. It occurs under both republican and democratic
administration. There will be no change as long as you continue to
support the prevailing capitalist system, based upon the private
ownership of the tools with which workingmen work and without which they
are doomed to slavery and starvation.

Now, I repeat that this body should declare against this system of
private ownership and in favor of the collective ownership by the
workers of the tools of production. This will give you a clear aim and
definite object. This will make your movement revolutionar