It is to be feared that wealth will not yield to science, and that it will endeavor to bring it under its sway to further enslave the “toiling millions” and make them minister longer to its despotism.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
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Could this be arrived at, the dangers and difficulties now hovering around the issues between the still captive and the interests of enslaved labor, would be dispelled, and society, without further convulsive efforts, could assume its…
What the world needs to-day is, that science, supported by wealth, shall come into power.
One thing is patent to all, some great issue must come up which will be of sufficient magnitude and general importance to arouse the people from the slough of indifference into which they have fallen since the settlement of the slavery…
It would not be very strange should the interests of labor control the next Presidential election.
They behold with jealousy the attempts at organization among laborers, knowing that, if it is carried to its full results, it will compel equality of interest and obtain the means necessary to enforce it.
They are constantly subjected to legislation which filches from them the last possible farthing, that it may go to swell the coffers of some wealthy individual or some obese corporation.
In some regards the last condition is worse than the first; for in it there is nothing to guard the constant encroachments of the tyrant upon their “reserved” rights.
They begin to see that they obtained freedom from one “tyranny” only to yield themselves to another, less odious than it was from the fact that one was represented by one person, while the other is represented by numerous persons.
But it is just at this point, where the beginning of comprehension on the part of the representatives of labor is, that the fallaciousness of this arbitrary form of control begins to be felt by the masses who have hitherto yielded to it.
It is this principle which has made it thus long possible for government to be conducted entirely in the interests of capital.
It is the same principle—that of inferior intelligence yielding to superior intelligence—which makes the possibility of all forms of slavery.