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 Title 
 
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 18— 47372-1 «PO 
 
sre:ech v// 
 
 OF 
 
 Hon. William Jackson Armstrong 
 
 OF 
 
 PERRIS, CALIFORNIA, 
 
 AtJ-rnOF^ CDF 
 
 Siberia and the Nihilists," "The Masses and the Million- 
 aires," "Civil Liberfy," "Castelar and Spain," &c. 
 
 ^Ef=^C3l=tE 
 
 THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE'S PARTY 
 
 Omaha, July 4, 1892. 
 
 Price, Five Cents. 
 
 Printed and For Sale by The Bckkley Pkinting CoMPANy- 
 Omaha, Neb., to whom all orders should be addressed. 
 
 Xh 
 
Copyright Secured by William Jackson Armstrong in the 
 Office of the Librarian ol Congress, July, 1892. 
 
5 
 
 tury to a dazzling myth. The idle millionaire 
 is prince and lord; industrious poverty is his 
 vassal. Not manhood but monopoly guides 
 the affairs of the American State. New and 
 tremendous forces disordering the distribution 
 of wealth and changing the face of the planet 
 go unrecognized by learning and ignored of 
 law. 
 
 By the common toil of its people this 
 nation has advanced "to wealth beyond the 
 precedents or the dreams of history. Into 
 the scheme of the division of this wealth has 
 entered the applied science of the Lousiana 
 Lottery. I beg the Lottery's pardon. I do it 
 a wrong. That is an honest swindle. One 
 hundred thousand thrifty gentlemen playing 
 with notched cards against the nation's earn- 
 ings have within thirty years drawn out of the 
 game more than one-half of the possessions 
 of the American people! It is a game they 
 understand. A million of honest and willing 
 workingmen daily tramp the highways of this 
 republic and the streets of its cities hunting 
 for the privilege of earning their bread! Ten 
 thousand millionaires eat the daily bread 
 which they do not earn. A quarter of a mil- 
 
lion of American working women are starving- 
 in garrets and cellars on crusts that would not 
 feed the cat of the millionaire. The million- 
 aire gorges on the wine and the oil of the land 
 while living, and prepares to he under a mar- 
 ble mausoleum costing a hundred and lifty 
 thousand dollars when he is dead. No dead 
 American has a right to lie under a grave- 
 stone costing a hundred and fifty thousand 
 dollars while a live American woman is 
 starving in a garret! 
 
 In the homes of three millions of American 
 farmers the extortion of monopoly blights the 
 daylight of hope. The railroads have entered 
 into an enforced partnership in the profits of 
 the farmers' toil — with the farmers underneath 
 in the partnership, The imperial lands of the 
 west and south are pawned to the princes of 
 the east — the gentlemen holding down morocco 
 chairs in New York and London. The farmer be- 
 comes a tenant and serf on the soil where once 
 he was lord. Cunning sits in purple and Labor 
 runs in rags. To the best brain of this nation, 
 reinforced by forty years of professional expe- 
 rience, we give ten thousand dollars a year to 
 preside as chief justice of the United States. 
 
7 
 
 To a successful dry ^oods clerk or a railroad 
 manipulator we pay from the earninj^s of the 
 people two millions of dollars a year for the 
 pure pleasure of being gigantically robbed! 
 To-day, under the most primly virtuous ad- 
 ministration of this republic in half a century 
 — the Administration in pantalettes — we wit- 
 ness the spectacle of a cabinet office given for 
 the bribe of the largest donation to a cam- 
 paign fund in the history of American politics. 
 Hereafter it can be said, under Republican 
 administrations of this country, at least, that 
 the price of a cabinet portfolio to successful 
 makers of trousers is a hundred thousand 
 dollars! 
 
 In the presence of these appalling injuries 
 to the rights of men and of citizens, the ven- 
 erable institutions of our civilization are dumb 
 with wisdom as the venerable owls of the 
 leafy woods. (I apologize to the owls.) The 
 church moans of the mysterious ways of 
 Providence, and hypnotizes the faithful with 
 the glitter of assurance that a certificate of 
 virtuous poverty in this world will be honored 
 as a bill of credit against the redundant 
 riches of the next. The bar mutters of vested 
 
interests, the rights of property, the sacred- 
 ness of capital. Learning murmurs that 
 social classes owe nothing to each other. Po- 
 litical parties are silent. 
 
 In this crisis it has once more happened in- 
 the history of human progress that the teach- 
 ings of the people's sorrows have overleaped 
 the learning of the schools and confound that 
 learning with the spectacle of intolerable 
 wrongs. We have therefore met to denounce 
 the outrage of common and obvious justice. 
 We have met to solemnly protest against the 
 barbarous inequalities among classes of citi- 
 zens under the flag of Equal Rights — to throt- 
 tle the gilded lie in the throat of this republic. 
 We have met to indict the savagery of a 
 politico-industrial system that turns the toil of 
 the masses into the temples of millionaires. 
 We have met to affirm that the doctrine of 
 unrestricted individual enterprise in the affairs 
 of men has exhausted its epoch, and in an 
 age unfitted to its theory runs riot to the in- 
 jury of mankind. We have met to afBrm that 
 unearned riches have no sanctity — that vested 
 interests are a myth and the rights of property 
 a fiction. We have met to affirm that the 
 
only sacred thin;;- in this worhl is humanity — - 
 that the only thinj;' haxinj;' rights in this world 
 is man — that all allegations contrary to these 
 are glittering technicalities invented to con- 
 found the interrogations of justice for our 
 kind. We have met to affirm our deliberate 
 judgment that the sorrows of the poor are to 
 be relieved by the justice of this world and do 
 not await the mysterious judgments of the 
 next. We are met to record our modest pref- 
 erence for cash payments here to unlimited 
 sight drafts on the national banks of the here- 
 after. We are met to affirm that the legisla- 
 tion of states under which idleness becomes a 
 prince and industry a pauper makes the citi- 
 zen an enem}' of the commonwealth — makes 
 the anarchist and the tramp. We are met to 
 affirm that in the solemn bond of interde- 
 pendent human communities social classes 
 owe to each other everything. We are met 
 to assert that the policy of selfishness in the 
 industrial scheme of men has proved 
 a failure. We are met to affirm that 
 for the good citizen and the good man 
 there are nobler incentives to serve their gen- 
 eration than the lust for gold. From history's 
 
lO 
 
 twilight, since in the sweat of Egypt's children 
 lordly Cheops reared his brow against the 
 stars, till this latest noon of time when a new 
 world is trodden from sea to sea by civiliza- 
 tion's feet of lightning- and of light, the men 
 who have fashioned this planet to noble use. 
 who, outfacing winter's frost and summer's 
 fire, have laid on every zone and on every sea 
 the grasp of human knowledge and of power, 
 till man, save in length of years, does seem a 
 very god of sense and might, these have not 
 been the millionaires. They have been the 
 lords of brain, the sons of toil, the masses of 
 mankind, w^ho, like Him of Nazareth, have 
 often had no certain place to lay their head. 
 We are met to challenge the lie of civilization 
 itself — the preaching of its pulpits denied by 
 the practice of its marts. We are here to 
 commend to the conscience of Christendom 
 the gods of its professed worship — the ethics 
 of Christ as the creed of the industrial state. 
 The time is propitious. The old parties, 
 Republican and Democratic, are dead — dead 
 as the dust of Rameses and the Caesars. They 
 have not discovered the fact. Their piteous 
 ghosts, like the spirit of Hamlet's father, are 
 
1 1 
 
 doomed for a certain time to walk the earth. 
 Re-enacting their scenes of knightly pageantry 
 they move in procession, a mournful Mardi- 
 Gras. over the surface of the body politic. 
 Like the ancient dandy in the comic story, who 
 had been a promising young man all his life, 
 they have a great future behind them! Those 
 pathetic conventions yonder in Minneapolis 
 and Chicago! Cheerful stirrings amid the dry 
 bones of political cemeteries! Churchyard 
 whistlings for courage! They are hunting for 
 the offices! Mighty instinct strong in death! 
 The war was over a generation ago. State sov- 
 ereignty sleeps untroubling in its grave. The 
 bloody shirt, carried like the resurrected body 
 of the Cid at the head of many curious 
 triumphs, lies decently folded and fading in 
 the museum of political curiosities. The 
 negro, largely contented with his new rights, 
 belongs to the classic anthology of party 
 debate. The poor old Tariff ! Shades of l^al- 
 houn and Jackson! the threshed strawM the 
 sleeper's friend! reclaimed from the Repub- 
 lic's ancestral shadows and reduced to the 
 rattle of a tin cup, furnishes feebly forth 
 the dead march music of the funeral train. 
 
12 
 
 Unlimited silver? a viral spark, betrayed, by 
 either ghost — meaningless at best unless 
 directed by other forces to the pockets of Toil. 
 To these dead we oppose our living. We 
 unfurl the banner of the mighty future in the 
 temple of American politics. That future is 
 justice. We fare here so far forth as to 
 resolve that step by step, as times and occa- 
 sion permit, to plant in the fundamental 
 policies of this nation the principles of ab- 
 solute equity for all men. One step from 
 the mediaeval barbarism the modern Con- 
 science has taken — the protection of the 
 feeble from the mailed hand of force. We 
 submit to the quickening reason of man- 
 kind that the guardianship of the lowly and 
 simple from the velvet fingers of Cunning is 
 also a trust of the modern state. For the 
 crime of this disagreement with the venerable 
 judgments of our time we bear the cross of 
 its anathema. Ecclesiasticism through its 
 oiled priests warns us of the "awful sanctions 
 handed down from the beginning" for the pro- 
 tection of the plutocrat. Law recites against 
 our purpose the precedents of its dusty 
 centuries. The University thunders against 
 the logic of our creed. Art admonishes that 
 we violate the harmonies of the higher civil- 
 ization. The Stock Exchange and the mil- 
 lionaire threaten the weight of their gold. 
 The People's Party is here in the palpitating 
 
flesh to meet the indictment. To the priest 
 we say, " Go learn of your Master, the lowly 
 carpenter of Nazareth." To the Law we say, 
 " Simplify your precedents to the rule of 
 honesty and common sense." To the Univer- 
 sity we say, ' ' We are graduates of the learning 
 of your cloisters and have entered the world." 
 To Art we say, "Give to Labor its hire and 
 we will train its children in thy graces and 
 praise thy myrtles from the beginnings of 
 days." To Wall Street and the millionaire 
 we sa}', " ]Fd lolll burst your infer naJ Ixxnn!''' 
 To the bankers and the bandits of usury all, 
 wreckers of civilization and pauperizers of 
 mankind, we say, "The people will issue 
 their own bills of credit." 
 
 Our monitors know not the theme of which 
 they preach. That which turns the lettered 
 wisdom of this period into folly and its legis- 
 lation into crime is the fact that they stand for 
 an age which has passed away. They linger 
 in a generation which knows them not. While 
 the college trims its science the world of which 
 it dreams has slipped from under its feet — and 
 that science has become the wisdom of the 
 ancients. That science — that economy whose 
 basis was the learning of Ricardo and Smith — 
 concerned the creation and the acquisition of 
 wealth. But a miracle has, entered human 
 labor. The gods of electricity, of steam and 
 fire and force, have slain the industrial order 
 
14 
 
 of the past. Thatoldorderof that old economy 
 has vanished as a dream. The giants, the 
 Titans of Greek myth, have come again to up- 
 bear the earth. The laughter of wheels, the 
 music of steam and steel have come to lighten 
 the burdens of men. The production of wealth 
 has increased a thousand fold. But with this 
 increased production have come the appliances 
 by which the multiplied wealth created by 
 civilized man is plucked from the hands of its 
 creators — by which the toil of the many is 
 converted to the uses of the few. The once 
 independent laborer who exchanged his hand- 
 made products with his neighbor has changed 
 to the serf of the machine. The citizens of 
 this republic, like all the modern peoples, are 
 becoming swiftly a nation of employees. The 
 genius of man in the nineteenth century has 
 outwitted itself! It has enslaved his race! 
 
 Before this gigantic miracle of change the 
 learned economies of the schools are as the 
 prattle of children — the cooing of sucking and 
 helpless babes. The problem of this world is 
 no longer the production of wealth, but the 
 distribution of the riches created by its colossal 
 energies — the equity of the division to the 
 creators. In the presence of this problem our 
 most venerable critics stand aghast. Let them 
 prate: let them carry their dead: let them train 
 their corpse: let them rehearse the funeral of 
 the past, if they will. That problem is a ghost 
 
Fellow Americans:— On this sacred day 
 of the Republic we are met here at the core 
 of the continent to organize civihzation's last 
 fight for justice. We are here to re-baptize 
 the flag of the stars in the sublime meaning 
 of its birth. 
 
 U It is the glory of our kind that there does 
 not tread this globe a tribe of men so poor 
 or so servile that it does not revolt against 
 oppression. It is the superb distinction of 
 our Anglo-Saxon race that for eight centuries 
 it has led the van of the march for human 
 freedom and has never lost the cause of right 
 to the oppressor. Neither shall we fail here — 
 no more than the barons at Runnymede, no 
 more than Cromwell and Hampden, no more 
 than Patrick Henry and Washington, no more 
 than John Brown and Lincoln. From the 
 heights of victory which we fail to conquer 
 our children will look back in amazement on 
 the storied wrong. 
 
 It is the splendor of our cause that its jus- 
 tice is complete, that its issues are more clear 
 than the stars of the cloudless night. For 
 nineteen hundred vears the civilization which 
 
we inherit has professed its parentage from 
 the Sermon on the Mount. A million of 
 church spires over the expanse of Christendom 
 mark the sites of its temples of alleged 
 faith in the brotherhood of man. A century 
 and sixteen years ago — on the immortal date 
 pictured on yonder banner — [pointing to the 
 standard of the Massachusetts delegation], the 
 mighty declaration which gave this Republic 
 birth transformed the doctrine of that faith 
 from a sentimental abstraction into a practical 
 motto for the government of peoples. In the 
 face of these facts the industrial policies of 
 nations have remained savage and unchanged. 
 Under the shadow of the church spires the 
 economies of human communities have re- 
 mained pagan. Intellectual might and cun- 
 ning have remained the law of right, the bat- 
 tle of life a grab game — victory for the strong- 
 est, the devil for the hindmost. Amid the 
 palaces of the rich are heard the groans of 
 the starving poor. To the appeal of Lazarus 
 Dives answers still, like Cain of old, " I am 
 not my brother's keeper." In the teeth of the 
 great Declaration the equality of American 
 manhood has dwindled at the end of a cen- 
 
which will not down — the Sph}nx of the modern 
 roadway. It stands there, alert, silent, ex- 
 pectant. Behind it, in serried ranks, stand 
 two hundred millions of the toilers of this 
 world! It cannot be laid save by the' sacred 
 wand of justice waved in the councils and 
 practice of civilized states. There are no 
 solved problems that have left out the right. 
 
 It is the people, the masses from their fields 
 and forges, the plundered workers of hand and 
 brain, who here take up the problem which the 
 wisdom of the learned knows not and dares 
 not to face. The People's Party! There is 
 no longer warfare: there is no longer division. 
 The hot brain of Craft, the conservative Con- 
 science of Agriculture meet at last in common 
 cause — the latest miracle of our time! Hand 
 in hand, the farmers and mechanics — the men 
 from field and factory and forge are here. 
 (The newspaper man is expected to arrive.) 
 
 Under the sun of brotherhood the feuds 
 of sections have melted like waxen wings. 
 Our brothers of the knightly and generous 
 South are here. Yonder [pointing to the 
 standards] sit Texas and Tennessee, and 
 Alabama and Virginia, and Mississippi and 
 Arkansas and Louisiana ! Yonder are the 
 loyal sons of Georgia and the Carolinas — the 
 old South blent in the new ! They are near 
 our hearts. Let them have kingly welcome 
 here ! The People's Party ! Americans all, 
 and lovers of our common countr^^ we give 
 
i6 
 
 warning here to the ghosts of dead poHtical 
 factions, to obstruction under every masque, 
 not that there should be, but that there shall 
 be a change. 
 
 With mahce toward no class of our fellow 
 citizens we undertake the great mission. We 
 shall carve and we shall achieve. Defeat will 
 not chill us and derision will fail We have 
 entered the lists. We dare the right. We smite 
 full on its front the mailed wrong. The world 
 is in its callow, barbaric youth. We invoke 
 the aid of the brain and heart of our time — of 
 all the brave and just. We stretch our hands 
 in fraternal sympathy to the struggling 
 peoples of the earth. From this heart of the 
 continent we look to the four corners of the 
 great land. The dawn is creeping on the 
 hills! It is the real morning of the world. 
 Amid the shadows lifts the vision of the gran- 
 der Republic. The struggle of man against 
 his fellow has ended : his war is with Nature 
 alone. A smile is on every lip. The spectre of 
 Fear has been dragged from the homes of all 
 the lowly. Upon the Republic's brow, gild- 
 ing with the sun, is set the sign of eternal 
 hope for man. It is the achievement of the 
 Common People ! It has been so written that 
 when Religion was dumb, when Art and Law 
 and Learning failed, the bronzed hand of 
 Labor, which had fashioned the palaces of 
 the proud, wrought once again, in love and 
 charity, and saved the fortunes of our race ! 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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