﻿We Worship At False Shrines 
Says T-BONE SLIM

The argument upon which political democracy was finally conceded was that superior thievery always rises to the top and that pick-pockets need no longer bind their victims.
Institute industrial democracy, and organized thievery will not rise, it will lay.
Industrial autocracy is the loop hole trough which organized thievery reaches our purse. It is an iniquitous element that intervenes between political democracy and the commonwealth. The convention of political democracy is fascism — the culmination of industrial thievery into its last jack pot. Then comes war, and the thieves rob one another.

War is a very active possibility . . . I don’t say it’s inevitable. The Big Thieves of the World are organizing for the purpose of holding all their gains against oher thieves and to gain the holdings of opposing thieves—the biggest thief is then expected to rule the world in the interest of the people. How naive!
Economic laws may be a factor; but I cannot see what economic laws apply to barefaced robbery, and the destruction of the world in the honored name of crookedness.
We are worshipping at the shrine of false gods.

Gentlemen prefer blondes, but the emloyers prefer married men. They reason that the full throated children will keep their fathers from thinking about the low pay they are getting. That is also the reason why the employer keeps a boss hollering in his ear, on the job, so as to curdle his ideas and prevent him from noticing that he is working for nothing.
These are intrusions upon the worker’s privacy, invasions of his personal tranqulity, and an assault against his freedom of thought. They are an act of war. The employer has purchased the worker’s labor power, but he has not purchased the worker’s thinking power, and he has no right to disrupt the worker’s chain of thought.
Such interruption is of such violence and specific gravity that workers could get relief and damages in an ordinary, prosaic police court on the grounds of cruelty, or mental assault and battery, to say nothing of the destruction of all those beautiful thoughts. Sounds humorous, doesn’t it? Well, truth to tell, it does look kinda funny when you see it every day, for forty years or so. Slave, body and soul— a very laughable incident? . . . I will yet win fame as a humorist!

Some of the Binghamton, N. Y., hospital nurses are gone off the twelve-hour-shift to the eight-hour-shift. The world sure does move! Not all of them are on the shorter shift. I suppose it was thought they couldn’t stand the shock—and only the toughest were selected.—T-bs.