words.

"These are the homes provided by the master who has established 'Free'
Labor as the economic weapon with which he has set out to conquer the
world.

"And he is conquering with it. The superior, merciless power of this
system as an economic weapon is bound to do in America what it has done
throughout the world. The days of Chattel Slavery are numbered. The
Abolitionist is wasting his breath, or worse. He is raising a feud that
may drench this nation in blood in a senseless war over an issue that is
settled before it's raised.

"Long ago the economist discovered that there was no vice under the
system of Chattel Slavery that could not be more freely gratified under
the new system of wage slavery.

"You weep because the negro slave must serve one master. He has no power
to choose a new one. Do not forget that the power to _choose_ a new
master carries with it power to discharge the wage slave and hire a new
one. This power to discharge is the most merciless and cruel tyranny
ever developed in the struggle of man from savagery to civilization.
This awful right places in the hand of the master the power of life and
death. He can deprive his wage slave of fuel, food, clothes, shelter.
Life is the only right worth having if its exercise is put into
question. A starving man has no liberty. The word can have no meaning.
He must live first or he cannot be a man.

"The wage slave is producing more than the chattel slaves ever produced,
man for man, and is receiving less than the negro slave of the South is
getting for his labor to-day.

"Your system of wage slavery is the cunning trick by which the cruel
master finds that he can deny to the worker all rights he ever had as a
slave.

"If you doubt its power, look at this bundle of rags in my hands and
remember that there are five thousand half-starved children homeless and
abandoned in the streets of this city to-night.

"Find for me one ragged, freezing, starving, black baby in the South and
I will buy a musket to equip an army for its invasion--"

He paused a moment, turned and gazed at the men on the platform and then
faced the crowd in a final burst of triumphant scorn.

"Fools, liars, hypocrites, clean your own filthy house before you weep
over the woes of negroes who are singing while they toil--"

A man on an end seat of the middle aisle suddenly sprang to his feet and
yelled:

"Put him out!"

Before Gerrit Smith could reach Evans with a gift of five