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“K. OF L.” BREAKING UP

POWDERLY’S REPLY TO THE ASSERTION

We are breaking up as the plowman breaks up the soil for the sowing of new seed; we are breaking up old traditions; we are breaking up hereditary rights and planting everywhere the seed of universal rights; we are breaking up the idea that money makes the man and not moral worth; we are breaking up the idea that might makes right; we are breaking up the idea that legislation is alone for the rich; we are breaking up the idea that Congress of the United States must be run by millionaires for the benefit of millionaires; we are breaking up the idea that a few men may hold millions of acres of untilled land while other men starve for want of one acre; we are breaking up the practice of putting the labor of criminals into competition with honest labor and starving it to death; we are breaking up the practice of importing ignorance bred of monarchy and dynamite, in order to depreciate intelligent skilled labor at home; we are breaking up the practice of employing the little children in factories, thus breeding a race deformed, ignorant, and profligate; we are breaking up the idea that a man who works with his hands has need neither of education nor of civilizing refinements; we are breaking up the idea that the accident of sex puts one-half of the human race beyond the pale of Constitutional rights; we are breaking up the practice of paying woman one-third the wages paid man, simply because she is a woman; we are breaking up the idea that a man may debauch an infant girl and shield himself from the penalty behind a law which he himself has made; we are breaking up ignorance, intemperance, crime and oppression of whatever character and wherever found. Yes, the Knights of Labor are breaking up, and they will continue their appointed works of breaking up until universal rights shall prevail; and while they may not bring in the Millennium they will do their part in the evolution of moral forces that are working for the emancipation of the race.—T. V. Powderly.

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— August, 1887 —