“The child is weak, you know,” continues the nervous, loving little mother, “and can’t do hard work; and I feel dreadfully worried about him.”
What a picture! Yet so common that the multitude do not see it. This mother, numbered by thousands many times over, instinctively understands the capitalist system, feels its cruelty and dreads its approaching horrors which cast their shadows upon her tender, loving heart.
Nothing can be sadder than to see a mother take the boy she bore by the hand and start to town with him to peddle him off as merchandise to some one who has use for a child-slave.
To know just how that feels one must have had precisely that experience.
The mother looks down so fondly and caressingly upon her boy; and he looks up into her eyes so timidly and appealingly as she explains his good points to the business man or factory boss, who in turn inspects the lad and interrogates him to verify his mother’s claims, and finally informs them that they may call again the following week, but that he does not think he can use the boy.
Well, what finally becomes of the boy? He is now grown, his mother’s worry is long since ended, as the grass grows green where she sleeps—and he, the boy? Why, he’s a factory hand—a _hand_, mind you, and he gets a dollar and a quarter a day when the factory is running.
He is an industrial life prisoner—no pardoning power for him in the capitalist system.
No sweet home, no beautiful wife, no happy children, no books, no flowers, no pictures, no comrades, no love, no joy for him.
In the capitalist system the soul has no business. It cannot produce profit by any process of capitalist calculation.
The working hand is what is needed for the capitalist’s tool and so the human must be reduced to a hand.
No head, no heart, no soul—simply a hand.
A thousand hands to one brain—the hands of workingmen, the brain of a capitalist.
A thousand dumb animals, in human form—a thousand slaves in the fetters of ignorance, their heads having run to hands—all these owned and worked and fleeced by one stock-dealing, profit-mongering capitalist.
And this system is supported alternately by the Republican party and the Democratic party.
These two capitalist parties relieve each other in support of the capitalist system, while the capitalist system relieves the working class of what they produce.