These excellent ancestors of yours had not been away from the old world long enough to realize that man is of more value than his purse, so they said every man who has an estate in the government shall have a voice and they said what shall that estate be? And they answered that a man who had property valued at two hundred and fifty dollars will be able to cast a vote, and so they sang "The land of the free and the home of the brave." And they wrote into their Constitution, "All males who pay taxes on $250 shall cast a vote," and they called themselves a Republic, and we call ourselves a Republic, and they were not quite so much of a Republic that we should be called a Republic yet. But as soon as the war was over and our government was formed, instead of asking the question, who shall be the governing force in this great new Republic, they began to eliminate instead of include the men who should be the great governing forces, and they said, who shall have the voice in this great new Republic, and you would have supposed that such men as fought the Revolutionary War would have been able to answer that every man who has fought, everyone who has given up all he has and all he has been able to accumulate shall be free but it never entered their minds. They did not equivocate in a single word when they wrote the Declaration of Independence no one can dream that these men had not got the most sublime ideal of democracy which had ever dawned upon the souls of men. They got the vision of a government in which the people would be the supreme power, and so inspired by this vision men wrote such documents as were went from the Massachusetts legislature, from the New York legislature and from the Pennsylvania group over to the Parliament of Great Britain, which rang with the profoundest measures of freedom and justice. Never in the history of the world did it dawn upon the human mind as it dawned upon your ancestors, what it would mean for men to be free. If it had not been for the men and women who, in the past, have had the moral courage to go to jail, we would still be in the jungles.Īdapted from The Fundamental Principle of a Republic by Anna Howard Shaw (1915)
They are simply paying the penalty that all men have paid in all the ages of history for standing erect, and for seeking to pave the way to better conditions for mankind. Those prison bars separate their bodies from ours, but their souls are here this afternoon. They may put those boys in jail-and some of the rest of us in jail-but they cannot put the Socialist movement in jail. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. I may not be able to say all I think but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I must be exceedingly careful, prudent, as to what I say, and even more careful and prudent as to how I say it.
I realize that, in speaking to you this afternoon, there are certain limitations placed upon the right of free speech. They have come to realize, as many of us have, that it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world. I have just returned from a visit over yonder, where three of our most loyal comrades are paying the penalty for their devotion to the cause of the working class. To speak for labor to plead the cause of the men and women and children who toil to serve the working class, has always been to me a high privilege a duty of love. Adapted from Emancipation of the Working Class by Eugene Debs (1918)
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