﻿DEAD LANGUAGE 

“Portland is going to do something for the unemployed.”— I hope I may not be deemed too inquisitive if I inquire—WHEN? 
There’s an old saying “barking dogs never bite.” How well it applies to the opening sentence is of course beyond my powers to prognosticate. We can, tho, examine that sentence and find it infers “Portland has not yet done anything for the unemployed.” 
I believe the inference is correct, for had Portland done anything she would not hesitate to mention it. (For Portland is proud of Portland.) 
The unemployed (not from choice) are still sleeping under bridges; platforms, lumberpiles, in sheds, shacks and bushes; are begging their sustenance from stores, dwellings and streets . . . 
The Commons, Grandma’s Kitchen and Missions are catering to chronic and devout mission stiffs (who cannot lie fast enough to convince the most unsophisticated as to any labor performed in the past ten years—other than the two-hour stint at Common’s woodpile.) 
Verily I believe Portland has done nothing for the unemployed. 
“We are just trying to see if something could not be done for unemployed.”— 
Oh yeah? 
Well sir, spare yourself the “trying to see”, our very existence is proof that things CAN BE DONE—every thing that is, HAS BEEN DONE— nothing, that can be conceived, is impossible. 
Heartening as the word is, “Portland is going to do something for the unemployed,” it lacks a very nescessary quality—it has no life. 
It is a dead statement, no action in it. 
Nobody, Portland included, shall do anything for the unemployed. If anything is done for the unemployment, it shall be done by the unemployed—this I doubt. 
They’re gonna sit pretty, pitying themselves and wait for a saviour—can you imagine! expecting the city of Portland to perform like a merciful God? . . . 
Now I’m not saying that it is impossible for Portland to do so; I have every confidence in Portlands’ abilities. My fear is the change of heart required cannot be accomplished with sufficient despatch to be of benefit to the present generation of unemployed—It seems a certain ritual must be gone thru before vitals and vittles are synonymous—a certain amount or red tape must be unraveled —a certain amount of pawing must be done before a step can be taken. 

The game of marbles is finished. 
The game came to an end because the big boy has all the marbles. “No game today” because nobody has marbles and the big boy doesn’t think it worth while or interesting to play “by his lonesome.” I don’t blame him—tho they do say “he hunched” on the I psychological shot, shots. 
How can we start a game? 
The big boy will have to “stick-in” for us, as we hate like the dickens to gang-up on him — run the game on an I. O. U. basis or stick-in for us just fer the fun of playing. Our soul craves marbles. 
Son O’ Man 
We watched poor labor suffer, bleed 
And yet we gave but little heed, 
And little recked his crying need, 
A pleasant word, a kindly deed, 
A place to sleep, a modest feed; 
“No more, no less, than to a steed,” 
We heard him plead. 
These we denied with promptest speed.— 
Humanity now gone to seed— 
With none to follow, none to lead 
We paid blind homage to the creed 
That labor shall be duly treed 
And never be of worry freed.— 
Upon the cross of greed. 
 
Bleeding inwardly and pale, 
Growing stagnant, cowed and stale. 
Doomed to ail . . . 
Day by day we see him fail 
Haunted by a fearsome jail; 
Aye, this tear-soaked, desert vale— 
Blows upon that stubborn nail. 
Deadens e’en the loudest wail! 
‘Tis a grewsome, ghastly tale 
Of a hero, docile, frail 
Mighty man is he (a male) 
Profits shall prevail! 
Music: 
“From. each according to his abilities; 
To each accenting to his needs.”— 

Harry Forss said enough, and well, but neglected to say the capitalist class own the workers. 

Consumers Ice & Cold Storage Co., Sacramento, Cal. caused two faucets and one drinking-fountain to be installed outside of its plant next to the sidewalk—that part doesn’t bother me. 
But there is a sign which reads: 
WELL WATER—HELP YOURSELF— 
(Usually such signs read— 
“Beware Of The Dogl”) 

Note: 
In Re Begging—which hath crept into this article—let me say: It is a description of a condition and altho I don’t go so far as to say “may the workers always be right, but right or wrong my fellow workers”, I am prepared to go with them should they decide to take the plaintive course. 
Joe Hill said Don’t MOAN—organize. 
Dr. David Starr Jordan did most of his dying on page four—a good man gone wrong. This was his first worst offense. 

Edison spelt behindwards spells No side. 

For the first and the worst time in the history of the land of our forefathers, foremothers and foremen the wages in the Sacramento Valley are in exact proportions to the amount of organization in the laboring class. Wages are nil, so’s organisation. Wages will continue to drop, without unionism to bolster them up, until such a time as one-third of the business men (over expanded class) hit the soupline. Can you stand it that long? 

Over in Idaho a man gets a penitentiary sentence just for slowing down on the job—in the same state a boss shuts down completely and nothing but prayers is said . . . Who’s which?. 

What became of the League of Assassinations? 
The league of grandiloquent gestures? 
And the Emergency, is it still emerging? 

Can Coolidge find his shoes, to run?— I nominate David Lloyd George, the First, for president; George Bernhard Shaw and Lady Astor for vice-squad and then let’s move to Lunnon. 

Our author has dropt down to three meals a day. 
Altho he realizes this is “reducing”, he will do it in the interest of helping to make the panic look real. He expects to remain on this diet of distantly related meals thru the winter and if the panic don’t “ketch”, in that time, he proposes to return to his normal consumption of food—a meal before each meal and one after. 
Many of the boys have already dropt down to two meals a day. That is a grave error! They have overestimated the rigors of this panic. 

This system, under which we worry, did not grow—get that out of your head— it was engineered, built. It’s growth cannot be regulated and the knocking of the scaffold from under the builders does not give the system any traits that it has not heretofore had. It shall still be had, minus the scaffold . . . 
A great discussion is going on among the business element at this time—system gets ‘em talking—and the burden of their woe is “the working people should be given three of four dollars a week for beautifying U. S. A. so that they could bring those three or four dollars to the business people.” 
Aren’t they a cheerful lot? And childish? 
Those three or four dollars given to workers is expected to keep business people out of the soupline—free them from the necessity of leaning on their own invention. 
What is there so terrible about the soupline that the mere thought of it strikes a chill to their marrows? 
Can it be they invented something they themselves did not intend to use? I guess they did and had they intended it for themselves it would at least have been a stew-line—a meal-line. 
But I am getting ahead of my story, and killed a “flash.” Much as these gentlemen fear the soupline, they are terrorstruck at the idea of giving labor anything—the three or four dollars is the size of their inspiration, including string attached: 
IN THE BEGINNING there was hunger. This hunger was contained in ONE man. He put the matter up to the “wise heads” in this manner: I AM HUNGRY, sadly in need of a meal. 
At the sound of the last word “meal”, six Lions, seventeen Rotarians and two Kiwanis dropped in a dead faint—when the echoes of their scream subsided, the chairman of the commercial club counted the twenty-five prostrate social pillars and declared this organization in favor of giving this poor, starving devil a—bowl of soup. 
Ain’t they a cheerful lot? And childish? And now that they have established souplines, with grave-diggers for head-chefs, they can like it—but they never, never can lump it. 
The soupline is the businessman’s Frankensteins— line forms around the corner, and performs with a spoon — knives and forks are passee. 
Why dirty the spoon? 
Let us say that in a city of fifty merchants there are fifty “beggars.” That forms fair enough, and a fact. 
At meal time these fifty beggars naturally desire to eat and approach the business men on the street— put out feelers, so as to say. 
What happens? 
Do those stores each feed a beggar and thus appease the hunger with one stroke each? Nay, brother, not on your tintype, the answer is “no”—Then the parade begins. Fifty beggars troop into each store by turns, take up each a minute or two of the merchants time and possibly a can or two of two-for-a-quarter beans. Along about the 27th hobo, so called, the merchant begins to sweat and lose his mind:” give them the store,” he roars to his clerk (that means 1½ inches of bologna and a stale loaf of bread) “give ‘em the store,” he repeats thinking the clerk hadn’t heard. “My Gawd”, he sweats, “two hundred hoboes and I’ve got to feed ‘em all!”— Not quite. 
There was not two hundred, there was only 48 and his quota of those was less than one.—Had he dutifully fed one, that one automatically left the parade. 
(Note: such parades continue from door to door indefinately until such a time as the hunger is dissipated—wan hope it is that festers on the idea starvation will put an end to it. Starvation wont even slow the parade, because nobody is going to starve to death.) 
Fifty beggars must each beg fifty stores—when it could be so arranged that each business man would see and hear only one beggar. 
As I said before, aren’t they a cheerful lot? and childish? 
(I said here “a stale loaf of bread:”I mean by that a dry loaf, a mouldy loaf, a bruised loaf; one with wrapper torn and thru which a mouse had excavated a meal or two—verily the “All Over The World” might be less Piggly and more Wiggly about handing it out.) —T-b-S