Those who declaim so loudly and profusely about the wrongs labor suffers at the instance of capital, should be strictly guarded against, lest they, unwittingly, become your leaders and advisers.
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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Let this course be pursued a few years, and the enormous proportion of lawyer-legislators would be diminished by one-half.
Many of these have no sympathies in common with you, most of them are, by all their controlling influences, drawn from the consideration even of your condition.
What does it matter to them if the few articles you must purchase to render yourselves and families comfortable, cost you ten, twenty or fifty per cent. more than the actual cost of their production, if corporations for which they are…
For, do you not know that capital under such rule does not pay the taxes of the country, but that your labor does?
In this way, the common laborer, who should not be compelled to pay any levy at all, is taxed on almost everything he eats, drinks and wears, and thus labor is compelled not only to produce what makes wealth possible, but also to sustain…
This is a vast inequality in favor of capital and against labor, and still it is the laborer’s fault; and it lies just where we pointed, in the selection of proper candidates as representatives, State and national.
Let them urge the people to assemble and concert plans and devise means to carry them out, and to warn them to no longer intrust the most vital parts of the “necessary course” to the care of hereditary members of the caucus, whom money…
You should know by this time that “the purity of the ballot box” is simply a “play upon words,” and that elections are but farces to approve what is previously determined.
Nevertheless, demand of the press a course that cannot be denominated hypocritical, and if it does not respond, withdraw your patronage, and give it where it will contribute to your interests.
One of the great questions of the day, if not the greatest, is the true relations that should exist between labor and capital.
Charity, with its long cloak of justice escaped, has long enough covered a multitude of sins.