Workmen's Advocate

TWO AT ONE GAME.

CAPITAL AND
LABOR FENCING
WITH EDGED TOOLS.

Homeopathic Treatment for Capitalists Who are Sick but Bound to Recover With Proper Attention—the World is Laughing.

The old saying, "Diamond cut Diamond," seems likely to be illustrated in a new and startling manner. Just at present there is apparent in society considerable friction, but there are so many base, ordinary stones in the market, and there has been such a lack of knowledge that the large and sparkling stones have commanded their own figures regardless of purity or quality. We refer to the social friction between Capital and Labor. Capital has been cutting its stones from Labor's stores, making Labor do all the cutting and polishing beside, and strutting about in its monopolized finery, till the people of brains who know a thing or two, and have that finer feeling of delicacy, known as justice, are beginning to think it a vulgar exhibition and about time for the high-flyers to return some of their borrowed plumage.

That we are all creatures of imitation no one will dispute. That when we have seen a thing done many times we naturally attempt to do some similar thing, nobody will deny. Having watched Capital for years we are beginning to realize that it has adopted good measures in many instances—successful it has always been when it has combined its forces. What has stood in its way? Not the poor instruments it has used—the wage-workers. For years and years they have only been too willing to aid, trusting that the time would come when they, too, might join in the competition.

The time has come for them to step in. But with the opportunity there comes a desire to set up a separate organization. With different aims, to be sure, but with similar machinery for running their combination.

While the monopolists of land and money have been very successful in their previous efforts, they have yet failed to monopolize one vital organ—the brain! This lacking quality is beginning to pit itself against the opposing force with all the energy of acquired education and the example set it.

An organization, planned on business principles, is now in the field, and its first advances are encouraging.

In turning against aggressive capitalists or monopolists their own weapons it makes them alarmed. Combinations, the extent of which they never dared dream of, are turned against them. The pill is not at all to their liking. For it is not always sugar-coated.

When we see political weathercocks veering around our way, we are wise enough to see that there is a machine inside that regulates the wind. When we hear of a combination of Croesuses planning to hire detectives to spy us out or form a body guard for their valuable hides, we smile and ask whether they know that they haven't hired some of us. When we see members of their social cliques abusing public and private trust and cheating justice, or when we read of the lust of aristocratic fashionables we deplore their code of morals and the teaching of their pulpits. We despise their ostentatious charity.

For we know our organization is a unit—vast and embracing all toilers. Soldiers are in our ranks, and Uncle Sam pays them. Scientists lend us their aid. Thinkers, who could teach the professors in half the colleges—teach us, and all are working unconsciously, perhaps, sometimes but earnest, for our elevation from capitalistic anarchy to universal co-operation.