﻿We Traded Our Garden For a Meal of Swill
By T-BONE SLIM

Business recession now begins to show signs of reality. S’awful! Business cannot find consumers. Heluva note! Ten million unemployed are not buying. Quarter of the working class are on light diet; reducing to stay reduced. Not much protoplasm in potatoes and salt. Horsefeeds in the “schiwel.” But that is not worrying me.
We traded in our Garden of Eden when we sold ourselves to the employer. Adam has nothing on us, we’re naked too—and they are boarding up the clothes foundries.
Business is folding up—they can’t make the grade. The “Law of Supply and Demand” (that therial motivator) looks rediculous with out the “demand”—like ham and eggs without the ham (and the eggs spoilt). Here, waiter, take ‘em away! I’ll eat some other time.
This is getting to be serious as prohibition on the Moorhead reservation. Employers are considering the reduction of office force because they are not sure they can wring their upkeep from the scant 30 per cent in the production end—other 70 per cent hung up their teeth weeks ago.
It looks bad, boys, no telling when the big shots will order a purge—they claim to have 15,000,000 more workers than they can use.
Don’t stand still like a balky donkey—organize.
We have overproduction over and above our buying power—that makes under consumption.
We have the power in our union to remedy these, both—if we have a union.
Overproduction can be remedied by slowing down and shortening day—have time-clock saving time; under consumption can be cured in many ways but I think the best way is increase the buying power first with fat wages. Surplus commodities will disappear ‘sif by magic. Nothing like fat wages to put a double chin on a skinny lad.
Our Hogocracy
Don’t worry about the boss. He can take care of himself. If he can t, suppose we shall have to take over industry and see what we can do when no chiselers are gouging dividends.
How the thing will go cannot be predicted at this time. State supervision of industry is responsible to a political party at least—a pyramided power; individual employer is responsible neither to God, man or law—the all in one; worker control is responsible to society, mankind, and humanity—and unselfish movement.
But the workers are unorganized and misorganized, they are following the bosses’ bell-wethers—so the purge looks ominous.
Employers intend to climax their mismanagement with a grand display of insanity.
It seems as if our employers show a marked trait for piggishness which goes to prove they are not decended from a monkey and consequently not Kosher in Labor’s Book of Pedigrees. This explains why so many of their undertakings tarn sour and leads us to believe, if we follow them long enough, we will arrive at the wallow.
Legendary annals recite the tale of one beautiful sorceress, Circe, that changed men into swine; a good alibi but we can take it with a grain of salt and rightly conclude they were born hogs.
They have a thumb in the middle of their palms and are incapable of any worth-while production —although they are not lazy. Their sole industrial acumen is represented in ceaseless grunts and squeels—lots os noise and little if any accomplishment—the same old tale over and over again, twenty years out of date.
It is for other men, renegades from the working class, to bring a modicum of order out of chaos but even that is and must be incomplete for the imbicilities of the employers are so profound they hang like a pall over the works, and jim the detail.
Their plates are so dirty you have to wash them before you put ‘em in dishwater.
I have heard of Swedes electing an Irishman for mayor and I have often wondered. . . And here we have a bunch of pure-blooded monkeys being ruled by a slavering, ungulate boar.
Better Start a Purge of Our Own	
Bob Ingersol once threw a pretty broad hint that we are descentants of a jackass—only time Bob lost his temper and got sarcastic after watching the working class dive for pearls for Mr. Porkchops, the Industrial King.
i Swine are not in our class and a real monkey, instead of bowing to the slovenly hog, would more likely make faces at him and chatter maledictions in seventeen tongues with the governor belt off.
But we, freeborn American homo simians and industrial subjects, find great joy in holding our nose to the grindstone so that the hogs might grow big and strong, broad of jowl, eat well, sleep long hours and die—AH!—die a just death of a venerated Satrap of the Swill Barrel (the hight of his ambition) and High Mogul of an Industrial Age.
The working class should take stock of itself and discover is it not true that their penchant for worshipping at the shrine of swine has brought them swill, as I knew it would, for swill is the swine’s ut most in ideals.
We can dream better than that. We can see a world free, wellfed, well-dressed, happy, beautiful—pansies growing in the midst of our jubilation and nightingales enhancing the wealth of our smiles.
The One Big Union—let’s have it. Slop no more hogs—let ‘em root. Monkeyshines can be carried too far.
