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Updated: July 19, 2025
A propertied bankrupt could conceal his assets and hire adroit lawyers to get him off scot-free on quibbling technicalities a condition which has survived to the present time, though in a lesser degree. But imprisonment for debt was not the only fate that befell the propertyless.
They take us back three-quarters of a century, to the era before Marx, to that past so remote in intellectual and moral character, though recent in point of time, when the working class of no country in Europe possessed the right to vote when the workers were indeed proletarians and not citizens; not only propertyless, but also "without a fatherland."
If you have really spread this call, as you can do within a few years, through the 89 to 96 per cent. of the total population which, as I have shown you, constitutes the poor and propertyless classes of society, then your will can no longer be resisted depend upon that! Quarrels and feuds may exist about political rights between the government and the capitalist.
We ask at your hands, and we believe with all the sincerity of our souls, that the evidence warrants it, we ask a verdict of not guilty for the defendant, Thomas H. Tracy!" If the speech of prosecutor Black was a whine, that of prosecutor Cooley was a yelp and a snarl. Apologies, stale jokes, and sneers at the propertyless workers followed one another in close succession.
This does not mean that the capitalists and laborers may not, as men, find points of contact; it means only that the accumulation of capital, resting as it does on keeping from the laborer a part of the products of his labor, forces a propertyless proletariat to sell its labor at any price it can get.
Where the majority of the citizens are property owners and taxpayers there is but little danger that public ownership will be subject to this abuse. But where there is great inequality in the distribution of wealth and a large propertyless class, democracy is the only guarantee that the benefits of municipal ownership will not be monopolized by the property-owning class.
The political philosophy I would urge on my fellow-citizens is summed up in the neglected fundamental principle of this republic: Freedom and equal rights. The true point of view from which to see the need of the application of this principle is from the position of the unemployed, propertyless wage-worker.
They are all more able to stand scaling down than the proletarians. Assuming that it is possible to bring up wages to the level of the higher prices, and that the rise in rents can be checked by legislation or captured by taxation, the rise in prices is, on the whole, a thing to the advantage of the propertyless man as against accumulated property.
All that is new when the minority attempting to establish its dictatorship is composed of poor, propertyless people, is the fact of their economic condition and status. That is the only difference between the dictatorship of Russia by the Romanov dynasty and the dictatorship of Russia by a small minority of determined, class-conscious working-people.
Under universal suffrage municipal self-government would mean the ascendency of the propertyless class, and this, from the standpoint of those who control the state government, would jeopardize the interests of the property-holding minority. This is doubtless one of the chief reasons why the state government has not been willing to relinquish its control over municipal affairs.
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