Part 1

was the radical of his day. Many of the views expressed in his letters and speeches would strike a “good Republican” of today as extremely radical.

ARE YOU ACQUAINTED

with the great commoner’s views on political and religious liberty, on alien immigration, on the relation of labor and capital, on the colonization of negroes, on free labor, on lynch law, on the doctrine that all men are created equal, on the importance of young men in politics, on popular sovereignty, on woman suffrage?

All of his views are to be found in this edition of “LINCOLN’S LETTERS AND ADDRESSES,” the first complete collection to be published in a single volume. Bound in an artistic green crash cloth, stamped in gold. Printed in a plain, readable type, on an opaque featherweight paper.

For $1.95, sent direct to this office, we will enter a year’s subscription to WATSON’S MAGAZINE and mail a copy of LINCOLN’S LETTERS AND ADDRESSES, postage prepaid. This handsome book and Watson’s Magazine—both for only $1.95. Send today. Do it now.

TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE 121 West 42d St., New York City

WATSON’S MAGAZINE

THE MAGAZINE WITH A PURPOSE BACK OF IT

_THOMAS E. WATSON_ _Editor_ _JOHN DURHAM WATSON_ _Associate Editor_ _RICHARD DUFFY_ _Managing Editor_ _ARTHUR S. HOFFMAN_ _Assistant Editor_ _C. Q. DE FRANCE_ _Circulation Manager_ _TED FLAACKE_ _Advertising Manager_

April, 1906

_Frontispiece_ _W. Gordon Nye_

_Editorials_ _Thomas E. Watson_ _161_

_Sam Spencer_—_The Ungrateful Negro_—_An Indignant Wisconsin_ _Editor_—_The Man and The Land_—_Random Comment_

_Machine Rule and Its Termination_ _George H. Shibley_ _193_

_A Basket and a Fortune_ _Louise Forsslund_ _201_

_Control or Ownership_ _Charles Q. De France_ _209_

_The Sacrifice_ _Jack B. Norman_ _212_

_Our Civilization_ _Count Lyof Tolstoy_ _218_

_A Coal Miner’s Story_ _Charles S. Moody, M. D._ _219_

_The Pessimist; His View-Point_ _227_

_Those That Are Joined Together_ _Charles Fort_ _228_

_The Money Power_ _L. H. B._ _240_

_The Russian Apostle of Populism_ _Thomas C. Hutton_ _241_

_Lucianna’s Keep_ _Elliot Walker_ _244_

_Who Pays the Taxes?_ _William H. Tilton_ _253_

_Letters from the People_ _258_

_Educational Department_ _Thomas E. Watson_ _275_

_Home_ _Louise H. Miller_ _277_

_Books_ _Thomas E. Watson_ _290_

_The Easter Hope_ _Cora A. Matson Dolson_ _300_

_The Say of Other Editors_ _301_

_News Record_ _306_

_Along the Firing Line_ _Circulation Manager_ _318_

Application made for Entry as Second-Class Matter, February 17, 1906, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

Copyright, 1906, in U. S. and Great Britain. Published by TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE, 121 WEST 42D STREET, N. Y.

TERMS: $1.50 A YEAR; 15 CENTS A NUMBER

_WATSON’S MAGAZINE_

VOL. IV APRIL, 1906 NO. 2

_Editorials_

BY THOMAS E. WATSON

_Sam Spencer_

Not long ago the Voting Trustees of the Southern Railway Company wrote to Samuel Spencer, President of that robber combine, in the following terms:

“We congratulate you upon the success achieved in the extension and operation of the property which have resulted in nearly doubling the extent of its lines, trebling its gross earnings, and increasing its net earnings above fixed charges, _over five hundred and twenty-five per cent._ in the period of eleven years which have elapsed since its formation.”

Bully for Sam!

He set out to please the men who bought him, and he has done it.

The Wall Street rascals who grabbed up the railroads in the Southern States knew very well that they themselves could not do the work which was required for the success of their schemes. The Belmonts and the Morgans could not in person approach the editors, the politicians, the legislators and the federal judges.

Strategy requires that local men be used in the looting of any given state or section. One traitor inside the citadel is worth ten thousand soldiers on the outside, when the object is to take the citadel. To bribe somebody from within to open the gates is far more effective, vastly more to be desired, than to attempt to breach the walls or batter down the gates.

Consequently when Western states are to be plundered, the Wall Street corporations use Western men as their tools. Local Western corruptionists sell out to Wall Street, and do in Western states the dirty work of their Wall Street masters.

So in the South, the Wall Street robber-gangs do not operate in person; they act through Southern agents.

In pursuance of this subtle policy, the Wall Street corporations, who gobbled up the various lines which now compose the Southern Railway System, put at the head of it a Southern man, a Georgian, of the name of Samuel Spencer.

They chose wisely. They generally choose wisely. The expert workman does not better know how to select his tools than such men as Belmont, Morgan, Ryan, Rogers and Rockefeller know how to pick out the men who can do what Wall Street expects.

The Wall Street rascals had faith in Sam Spencer, and Sam has justified that confidence.

Never did any robber-chief have an abler lieutenant than Belmont, the Rothschild agent, has had in Sam.

The task to which they set him was hard. It demanded that he freeze his heart and stifle his conscience. It demanded that he shut out from his view of life every other purpose whatsoever, save the heaping up of dividends for a ravenous gang of Wall Street rascals.

To make his work seem good in the sight of the men who had bought him it was necessary that he combine railroads which the law said should not be combined, that he destroy competition where the law said it should live, that he charge excessive rates to shippers and passengers when the law said the rates should be reasonable.

He has done this in spite of the law, in spite of the people.

How?

Editors have been bribed into collusion or silence; politicians have been softened with boodle; lobbyists have been kept in clover; legislators have been duped or corrupted. Railroad Commissions have been seduced or defied, federal judges have been mellowed with favors, blandishments, indirect temptings which poor human nature can seldom resist.

Bully for Sam!

He is victorious all along the line. From Washington City he rules the South. In his native State of Georgia he is monarch of all he surveys. He made Terrell governor, and he means to make Howell governor. He controlled nearly all the daily papers, but he wanted another—so he had Jim English to cut the ground from under the feet of John Temple Graves and scoop the _Atlanta News_.

Hamp McWhorter is his hireling, and Hamp keeps the mechanism of corruption oiled. Hamp keeps the Legislature in pliant mood. Hamp jollies and greases the local politician. Hamp peddles the free passes. Hamp picks and chooses the “local attorneys.” Hamp “sees” the editor who appears to require “seeing.”

But the Brain and Will of the whole plot are those of Sam Spencer.

For eleven years that God-given brain and will have been concentrated upon one purpose, only one—to heap up riches for Wall Street rascals! Great has been the result. Sam Spencer’s masters are so highly pleased with his work that THEY congratulate HIM!

How interesting! It seems to me that _they_ are the fellows to be congratulated. Sam has doubled the amount of their property, he has trebled the gross income from that property, and has increased their _net_ revenues _over 525 per cent_!

Colossal profits these. _How were they made?_

By such a system of dishonesty, extortion, law-breaking, and reckless disregard of human life as has rarely been known, even in the history of modern commercialism.

The merchants and farmers throughout the Southern States have been ruthlessly robbed. The melon growers, the fruit men, the truck gardeners have, in thousands of cases, been so hounded and harried and victimized by excessive charges, secret rebates and discriminations in favor of other shippers, that they have been literally driven out of the field, broken and despairing.

Roadbeds, bridges, safety appliances, have been so wantonly neglected that almost every mile of the Southern Railway System from Washington southward has known its tragedy, where men, women and children were dashed to sudden, horrible death.

It was not the hard necessity of poverty that drove Sam Spencer to a policy so heartless as this. He had the means wherewith to put his roads in first-class order, had he wished to spend the funds in that way. It was not necessary for him to rob the men who were obliged to patronize his roads. If a fair, legitimate profit upon actual investment was all that he sought, he could have got it without doing the slightest injustice to any human being.

But he wanted more than that. A reasonable return upon the actual investment was not enough. So, he neglected the bridge until it fell, with its sickening horror, its shrieking mass of passengers doomed to frightful death. He neglected the safety appliances, and the full force of workmen, until some rotten crosstie, or defective rail, or open switch, or telegram which the dulled brain of an overworked engineer failed to comprehend, brought about derailments and collisions, with the heartrending consequence of crushed and burning cars, of crushed and burning men, women and children.

Had the same proportion of the earnings been used to improve the property, as is the universal custom in Europe, there would have been the same security to the passenger that there is in Europe.

But the net profit to Wall Street would have been only a fair return upon the money actually invested—as it is in Europe.

Wall Street demands more than that. Sam Spencer’s task was to get what Wall Street wanted.

Have I not already said that Wall Street knows how to pick out its man?

It never chose a better tool for its purpose than Sam Spencer.

He has doubled the _amount_ of their property.

That is good.

But he has done better than that.

He has trebled the gross earnings.

And that is good, too.

But he has done still better than that.

He has increased the NET earnings more than FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT!

Good, _better_, BEST.

That enormous profit had to be made out of somebody.

Freight rates and passenger rates are taxes which the transportation companies levy upon freight and passengers. When Sam Spencer added 525 per cent. to the net revenue of his masters, he had to tax it out of the people who patronized the Southern Railroad.

Who were these people? Mostly, Southern people. The tax was levied upon the South, and paid by the South.

Sam Spencer is a Southern man?

Bless you, yes!

Wall Street hired him to systematize the robbery of his own people, and he has done it.

During the eleven years of his rule he has plundered his own people of more money than they lost by Sherman’s “Marching through Georgia.”

The people of the South have lost more to the Wall Street railway corporations than they lost to the whole of Sherman’s army.

The battles of the Civil War were bloody, for it was Greek meet Greek, and it was, in truth, the tug of war. Especially were the battles bloody when Sherman came down against us, for he brought Western troops—the best that the Union had.

But we lost fewer lives to the invading host of Sherman than we have lost to the railroads during the eleven years that Sam Spencer has been one of their most relentless and unscrupulous lieutenants.

He and his allies in plunder and crime killed and wounded, last year, the staggering total of 92,000 human beings.

The ghastly record grows bloodier every year.

Human life is nothing; dividends are everything.

_Five hundred and twenty-five per cent!_

And Sam Spencer’s bosses pat _him_ on the back and congratulate _him_.

Ah, yes; they were feeling good. They expanded. They bubbled over.

As who should say: “Sam, you are a trump. When we bought you, we believed we had bought a good thing; now we know it. You have been tried, and you have proven true. We set you to the task of plundering your own people, and you have not flinched from the job. You have skinned them to the queen’s taste. You have doubled our estate, trebled the earnings, and so squeezed the train-crews, the section hands, the roadbed, the shipper and the passenger, that you have swelled our profits more than 525 per cent. We congratulate _you_—and, WE pocket the money.”

_The Ungrateful Negro_

_From a Newspaper_

THE AMERICAN FLAG INSULTED BY NEGRO BISHOP IN MACON.

DENOUNCED GLORIOUS EMBLEM AS A CONTEMPTIBLE RAG AT THE STATE NEGRO CONVENTION.

MACON, GA., Feb. 16.—In an address before the five hundred delegates attending the convention of negroes in this city to discuss racial problems, Bishop H. M. Turner declared the American Flag to be a dirty and contemptible rag. He further said that hell was an improvement on the United States when the negro was involved.

In closing he said:

“I have heard of both white and black men perpetrating rape upon innocent, angelic women, but no negro in this country has been tried by the courts and found guilty of the heinous crime of rape in fifteen years.

“I know that bloody-handed and drunken mobs have said so, but what Christian people would accept what they say? Yet there are millions of men who pretend to be moral and claim to be sensible in this country, who go to these drunken mobs to get information relative to the conduct of colored men.”

How it came to pass is a question which human wisdom may not solve, but in the earliest dawn of history we find the races of men separated by color and by characteristics, very much as they are at this time.

In spite of all the comings and goings, the migrations and conquests, the discoveries and colonizations, the world is pretty nearly the same old world, so far as the distinct races of men are concerned. The Jew is still the Jew, the Gentile still the Gentile. All the currents of the ages have not washed the yellow man white, nor turned the red man yellow, nor the black man red. The hot sun of the tropics pours down upon the heads of the sons of men as fervidly as in the days of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but it has not been able to kink the hair, flatten the nose, blubber the lips or blacken the hide of a single man, woman or child of the Aryan race. The Chinaman, racially, is what he was in the time of Confucius; the Hindoo is yet the dark man whom Khrishna sought to lead to the higher life.

In Africa, the home of the negro, there has been a monotonous repetition of the same old facts which historians learned from monumental inscriptions and indestructible tablets thousands upon thousands of years old.

The African negro has always been a distinct type, an inferior type, a savage type, a non-progressive type. Left to himself, he wore no clothing, built no houses, had no commerce, systematized no production of any sort and never had the faintest conception of doing anything to improve himself or his condition. He killed for the day the game he needed for the day. For the future, he made as little provision as the Indian and the Esquimau.

Beyond the herding of cattle he had no instinct for accumulation. His normal state was that of warfare against some other black tribe. His religion was the grossest superstition. He offered up to his heathen gods the sacrifice of the negro child; and when his appetite for four-legged animals was sated, he changed his diet by cooking and eating another negro.

Where the sexual relations of the men and women were not promiscuous, they were polygamous. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as morals known among them. Property rights which certain men had, or claimed, in certain women might be respected, but the conception of virtue was not reached.

They never evolved an alphabet. They never advanced beyond the crudest, rudest, most brutal tribe-life.

They had chiefs, or kings; and these kings exercised, despotically, the power of life and death over their ignorant subjects.

They had conjurers and witch doctors, and it was one of the time-honored customs that the witch doctors should “smell out,” for death, the wretched creatures whom the king wanted to kill, or whom the witch doctors themselves wished to put out of the way.

Thousands upon thousands of years ago, negro warriors sold their negro captives into slavery. Negro husbands would offer their wives and daughters to foreign travelers. Negro fathers would sell their children. In some of the oldest monumental inscriptions of the human race, the negro appears as the chained slave of foreign masters.

Anybody on earth who wanted to buy him could do it. His king was ready to sell him; his father was ready to sell him. The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman owned black slaves as far back as the records go; and the historian Gibbon did no more than express the universal experience and opinion of the ages when he wrote that the negro was a distinctly inferior race.

Of all the negroes that have ever lived Tchaka was the greatest. He ruled in Africa, in the eighteenth century.

He was a man of immense natural power. His ambition was boundless, his soul untroubled by fear or scruple. Absolute master of a strong tribe, he hurled it against other tribes, one after another, until he had conquered and devastated an imperial territory. In his march to dominion, it is estimated that he caused the slaughter of a million human beings, all of whom were his brothers in black. But he never built a city; never put a ship on the sea; never made two blades of grass grow where one had grown before. He founded no institutions of any kind. He was densely ignorant and superstitious himself, and he had no conception of anything higher or better.

To kill, to conquer, to feast, to indulge bestial lust, to inspire terror, to exploit and mercilessly abuse the abject servility of the negroes over whom he ruled were his “pleasures of living.”

It was believed that he caused the death of his own mother; it is _known_ that when he buried her he buried fourteen young negro girls with her—_buried them alive_!

It is _known_ that, during the “period of mourning” which followed, he caused the death of some thousands of maddened and helpless negroes. It is also known that his sisters got his brothers to assassinate him. Then one of these brothers murdered the other, and so became king of that happy land.

In Africa where the negro is still to be seen in his natural state, you can still buy negroes from negroes. Husbands will yet sell wives, fathers will yet barter daughters and sons. The buying and selling of negroes goes on now just as it did in the days of the Pharaohs. There is not so much of it as there used to be—to the regret, doubtless, of African chiefs who have negroes they would like to sell.

Not long ago there was a story which went the usual rounds. An English traveler was about to set out from a certain coast town of Africa upon a journey into the interior. He expected to be gone for several months. In fitting himself out with camp equipage, he bought a negro girl to carry along—to serve as his mistress. Her father sold her, and the only surprise that was caused by the transaction was the amount paid. The Englishman gave about one hundred dollars for the girl and it was generally considered an extravagant figure. As to the girl, she seemed proud to have been selected, and gratified at having been sold so high. When the Englishman had finished his trip, he probably sold her at a discount to some other white man who desired a complete camp outfit.

* * * * *

Excepting those portions of Africa wherein the white man has set his foot and impressed his will, the negro is at this day the same lustful, brutal, besotted cannibal and voodoo slave that he was thousands of years ago.

In Jamaica, the white man has to steer for him, and control him.

He did not even know what to do with bananas till Col. Baker, a white man, came along and taught him.

In Liberia, he has gone back to heathenism and savagery, because the white man’s strong hand is not there to guide and control.

In San Domingo, he had—as a starting point—one of the fairest civilizations the world has known. Aided by the yellow fever, the black man drove out the white; and now he has gone back into chaos, voodooism, cannibalism and imbecility.

In the United States, negroes can run a bank, for they can see white men running banks all around them and they are quick at imitation.

How is it in San Domingo, where the black man rules the white?

Apparently there is not a bank in San Domingo. If there is, it cannot be trusted. Why do I say this?

Because that portion of the San Domingan custom-house receipts which was to be paid to the creditors of the negro republic had to be deposited in a New York bank for safe-keeping.

In the United States, the negroes can run colleges, manufacturing establishments, automobile street-car lines, newspapers and magazines. Why? Because they see how the whites run colleges, manufactories, and automobiles, newspapers and magazines.

In San Domingo there is no Tuskeegee, Hampton or Howard. In San Domingo there are no flourishing manufactories created and operated by negroes; and no up-to-date automobile street-car lines, such as the negroes started in Nashville, Tennessee.

The negroes of San Domingo ought to have a commerce—one of the most profitable in the world; but they haven’t. Their navy is a myth, and their army a joke. One revolution chases after another with such confusing rapidity that when our Senate meets to debate the ratification of the San Domingan treaty which Roosevelt had arranged, the “President” with whom Roosevelt had made the treaty is a fugitive, whose “Cabinet” has compelled him to take to the woods.

There used to be an “Order of Nobility” in San Domingo, with its Marquis of Lemonade and its Duke of Marmalade; but as these eminent Noblemen have failed to show up in the later turmoils I fear their titles have become extinct, or that the “Order of Nobility” has been abolished.

Which is a pity. It would have been something worth living for to have seen the Duke of Marmalade paying a visit to this country, receiving the adoring attentions which New York’s “Swell Set” pay to all “noblemen” whomsoever.

* * * * *

Nowhere else in the universe is the negro treated so well as in the United States.