John Donnelly Brophy

“ There was also a glint of that grim, terrible kind of humor in them that flashes out of a bold-spirited, reckless man when, rendered almost insane by some terrible evidence of human misery, he is full ready to curse his God.
It was in an iron-worker's cabin in South Troy, where poverty's pinch makes even little children look old, where a wolf is chained at every door, and where the Iron King rules with an iron hand. ”

“ And then, Retribution!
"Justifiable homicide," says the coroner's jury. "Justifiable Hell!" grinds out a brawy iron-worker. "A cow would have been simply driven out of that potato field, not riddled with bullets. But, then," he continued, "animals are valuable; animals have owners, and STRANG had none."
Among men "live and let live" is a thing of the past; and, as civilization progresses, Murder assumes newer, safer and more enticing shapes. ”

“ Yet the weak, pitiful cries of that widow and her starvelings may linger in our native air until their thin volume is swelled by oppression, until it assumes the proportions of a mighty roar of maddened men. ”

“ Note.—This outrage is only one instance of the hundreds of thousands occurring every day under all climes of the globe, and which never come to daylight If Socialism were the law of America, such outrages would be impossible. Socialism guarantees to every man and woman an independent human existence. ”

“ The usual signs of poverty began to appear in the STRANG family, in patched clothing, shoeless children, and the absence of the family from the little chapel from which young STRANG, then the finest specimen of manhood in Troy, led his young bride, thirteen years ago. ”

“ The stamp of hunger was upon the faces of the dying ten; the stamp of death was upon the face of their natural protector. Dying they, because they have feasted by stealth for the last few weeks upon the proceeds of robbery ”