Yet, “competition” is the cry of the hour.  Millionaires compete with each other in the management of vast railroads and water routes, reducing labor to the verge of subsistence while exacting mints of money as tolls for transportation from the toilers of the soil and the consumers who live by their labor in other industrial enterprises; the manufacturers join in the competition, selling goods at the least possible profit to themselves and the least possible profit to those who labor for them; and, when no market can be found at home, boldly enter foreign markets and successfully compete with manufacturers who employ what our writers are pleased to style “pauper” labor.  Every branch of industry is in the field competing, and the competition is ruining every branch of industry.  The constant effort to obtain the maximum of production at the minimum of cost operates injuriously upon employer and employee alike; while the shrinkage in money circulation, caused by the competition, reduces, in every branch of industry, the wages of those who are the great consumers as well as producers; it produces those “hard times” which bear so hardly upon the poor in every walk of life.  Even the laboring man has entered the race, and now competes in the labor market with his fellow for an opportunity to make a crust of bread to feed his wife and child.  When things reach this stage, when the man who is working for one dollar and a half per day is underbid by a man who will work for a dollar and a quarter, then the condition of the great wealth producing and consuming class is desperate indeed.  And so it is.

Frederick Douglass, the great Negro commoner, speaking at Washington, April 16, 1883, on the “Twenty-first Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia,” said: 

Events are transpiring all around us that enforce respect of the oppressed classes.  In one form or another, by one means or another, the ideas of a common humanity against privileged classes, of common rights against special privileges, are now rocking the world.  Explosives are heard that rival the earthquake.  They are causing despots to tremble, class rule to quail, thrones to shake and oppressive associated wealth to turn pale.  It is for America to be wise in time.

And the black philosopher, who had by manly courage and matchless eloquence braved the mob law of the North and the organized brigandage and robbery of the South in the dark days of the past, days that tried men’s souls, standing in the sunlight of rejuvenated manhood, still was the oracle of the oppressed in the sentiments above quoted.

All over the land the voice of the masses is heard.  Organizations in their interests are multiplying like sands on the seashore.  The fierce, hoarse mutter of the starved and starving gives unmistakable warning that America has entered upon that fierce conflict of money-power and muscle-power which now shake to their very centers the hoary-headed commonwealths of the old world.  In John Swintons Paper of a recent date I find the following editorial arraignment of the present state of “Labor and Capital:”