Ex[p]loiting Murder

     A human being, distinguished moreover as the Chief Executive of this nation, lies bleeding in Buffalo from homicidal wounds inflicted upon him, and with his life trembling in the scales. Does his pitiful plight evoke compassion from the Capitalist Class of the land? Does his dire condition, perchance, as much as chasten the habitual ribald-ruffianism of the capitalist press? Or does it, if but for a moment, turn the minds of both that class and its mouth-piece from its everyday dishonorable pursuits? Just the reverse: the one and the other are exploiting murder.
     Straddling the cruelly wounded, blood-stained body of President McKinley, the obscene capitalist press, acting for the obscene Capitalist Class, puts its obscene trumpet to its obscene mouth, and brays its obscene language into the air: Every capitalist, whose mill is a death trap to his employees; every expansionist capitalist, whose hands are red with the blood of innocent men, slaughtered because they prefer death to slavery; the whole rabble-rout that clung to Depew, when he cracked ghastly jokes at the corpses of seven employees burnt to death by the Company’s negligence in the New York Central Railroad Tunnel; every capitalist whose miners are periodically blown up into tatters by mine explosions; every capitalist whose fraudulent failures and fraudulent fires bring devastation into the homes of the people; every capitalist whose adulterated food saps the life of the masses;—the whole cormorant crew sees in the misfortune that befell the President only their chance to exploit murder. The howl they are raising against Socialism and Socialists, the news they are forging on the subject, is the means to their contemplated end.
     The thief, detected, will cry “Stop thief!” But his purpose is to escape: the cry is not intended to afford him a longer lease for his thieving practises, least of all to afford him a freer hand. With the anti-Socialist howl, now set up by the capitalist press, it is otherwise. The cry is meant to give the thrice-convicted Capitalist Class increased opportunities, increased freedom, increased facilities to ply its nefarious practices. It is meant to raise a dust under which this gentry may continue their criminal practices with impunity. It is meant to rid the Capitalist Class of its dreaded foe, the Socialist Labor Party. In short, it is an a[t]tempt to exploit crime in the interest of crime.
     Nor does the stupidity of the idea extenuate the act. On the contrary. The idea that, in this 20th Century, the Cause of Human Redemption from the criminal yoke of Capitalism could be stayed by an increase of capitalist crime and cruelty, can have for its effect only the hastening of its downfall.
     “Speed the day!” is the cry of the human race.