their leadership made for industrial unity and victory, and for this
reason alone the enraged and defeated mill-owners are now bent upon
sending them to the electric chair.

These fellow-workers of ours who are now on trial for murder are not one
whit more guilty of the crime with which they are charged than I am. The
man who committed the murder was a policeman, an officer of the law; the
victim of the crime was as usual a striker, a wage-slave, a poor working
girl. Ettor and Giovannitti were two miles from the scene at the time
and when the news came to them they broke into tears--and these two
workingmen who would have protected that poor girl's life with their own
are now to be tried for her murder.

Was ever anything in all the annals of heartless persecution more
monstrous than this? Have the mill-owners gone stark mad? Have they in
their brutal rage become stone-blind? Whatever the answer may be, it is
certain that the Socialist party and organized labor in general will
never see these two innocent workers murdered in cold blood, nor will
their agitation and protest cease until they have been given their
freedom.

_The Campaign Now Opening._

In the great campaign now pending the people, especially the toilers and
producers, will be far more receptive to the truths of Socialism than
ever before.

Since the last national campaign they have had four years more of
capitalism, of political corruption, industrial stagnation, low wages
and high prices, and many, very many of them have come to realize that
these conditions are inherent in the capitalist system and that it is
vain and foolish to hope for relief through the political parties of
that system. These people have had their eyes opened in spite of
themselves. They have been made to see what the present system means to
them and to their children, and they have been forced to turn against it
by the sheer instinct of self-preservation.

They look abroad and they see this fair land being rapidly converted
into the private preserves of a plutocracy as brutal and defiant as any
privileged class that ever ruled in a foreign despotism; they see
machinery and misery go hand in hand; they see thousands idle and
poverty-stricken all about them while a few are glutted to degeneracy;
they see troops of child-slaves ground into luxuries for the rich while
their fathers have become a drug on the labor market; they see parasites
in palaces and automobiles and honest