﻿Charity covers a multitude of transgressions! 
By T-BONE SLIM

Philanthropy pays good dividends––remember this, my son, when you step out to garner your millions: Be sure to gather enough of them, five hundred million, thousand million––yea bo, two thousand million.
If you decide to select two thousand million for yourself, you can well afford to pass out five hundred million as a matter of philanthropy––for sweeet charity’s sake––and you’ll still have one thousand and five hundred million left over for a rainy day. 
Don’t get it all in one place; it will be noticed. Get, say, a thousand million from the workers and get the other thousand million from the consumers––the consumers can be depended on to refinance themselves from the proceeds of the workers’ production, or pay.
Now you’re all set. Your philanthropies have brought you a clear profit of a billion and a half––which same you’d never been able to get away with did you not open your heart to the gentle urging of blessed philanthropy. And when you come to die the people will say: “He had a heart like an ox”; they’re that dumb.
It will make no difference how many workers you shoot down at the factory gate, getting it––”industrial misunderstanding,” you know, and the law is with you.
No matter how many workers you evict from your houses on the bleak hill sides and how many of them you burn to death afterwards when you set fire to their tent colony in the dead of winter; for are you not an “economic royalist,” as they say, superior to the common people that you hold in contempt and use as pawns in the gathering of your millions according to law? 
And when you come to die you can say:
“I devise and bequethe to my son, who is just as good as I am, all my wordly possessions including tricks of the trade and sanctimonous expressions for every occasion, and for the rest of the world I can only offer good advice––save your pennies and work hard.”
You will have had a soft living. Starch never “ran” in you collars and wax never melted in your mustachees and, finally, death comes and delivers unto you a get-away.
How long, O tell me, are the people going to stand for this kind of racket within the law? When will they join the union of their class, the I.W.W. and put an end to industrial graft and commercial chiseling? Soon, I hope. 
I have offered advices consonant with the latter and spirit of law. I have tried, O noble editor, to stay within the limits of that charmed institution and if I have strayed it may be that the law has deserted the realm of reason and is given over to the protection of the enemy within our gates, while yet the prisoners of starvation make the land of the free hideous with their lament.
Brush away your tears, editor, and worry not. You can always dye your graying temples with shoe polish or printer’s ink. This article should stanp up well for we should remember––I have no son.
I am giving advice to a non-existant beneficiary. The principle is the same as employer insuring his workers. Time, red tape, and outright skullduggery defeat the purposes of law and nobody profits but the employer and the insurance company. Salaam. 
How Long Has This Been Going On?
John D. kicks the bucket and Cleveland gets the corpse. But Uncle Sam gets no inheritance tax. Something slipped up somewhere. Heluva note!
Rumor has it that it slipped through the loopholes lawmakers left in the walls of legal protection.
Procedure: When John D. reaches the jumping off place he gives his wealth to John D. Jr. and government puts the empty bag in moth balls; when John D. Jr. reaches the jumping off place he gives his wealth to John D. Jr. and government puts the bag back in storage. (How they love their country?)
Five hundred and thirty million to cure the hookwork of the pelegra victims in the starving South? Looks fine in blueprint but in practice it isn’t so hot. That 530 million removed from its regular orbit of circulation creates more pelegra and hookworm than all the goodly professors of the Rockefeller Foundation can shake a stick at.
That’s what I don’t like about these emolunaries, they never put things back in their place and 530 million dollars is missing from the rightful circulatory channels of trade and production.
Lots of life blood that, to donate for to subsidize professors––a better way would be for the workers to organize a one big industrial union and prevent the shekels piling up that way. They aint going to hand millions to charity if the workers have carried it away in their pay envelopes. 
Lotso logic in that and the I.W.W. is the most logical union in the world.
Edison almost made a tramp of John D. with his “electric” light and along comes Hank Ford and says, “cease weeping, John, we’ll burn the damned stuff in a gas buggy.”
