The real merits of the question are of much greater significance than is generally supposed, even by those who raise it.
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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It is one fraught with more direct benefit to a greater number of people than any other question has even the external appearance of being.
One of the great questions of the day, if not the greatest, is the true relations that should exist between labor and capital.
To begin a work right, is to have it half accomplished; and most powerfully does this apply in the matter of determining who shall be your representatives.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
For, do you not know that capital under such rule does not pay the taxes of the country, but that your labor does?
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…
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.