630 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORIALS 631 court the verdict was given, and the death sentence spoken. Letters, sworn testimony and witnesses whose veracity is above all suspicion, have not only shaken the testimony of the witnesses upon whose testimony rested the entire proof of the prosecution, but have actually exposed the trial as a judicial farce that was built, from beginning to end, upon a fabric of lies and forgeries, by a district attorney who is little less than a criminal. The whole trial fell to pieces like a house of cards. And yet one court after the other, from the lowest to the highest court of the Nation, has deposed that there can be no appeal from the sentence of death that had been passed upon Tom Mooney, that there was no legal justification for the granting of a new trial.
The gentlemen of Bisbee did not have to protest or to plead.
The case against them was thrown out of court, and no one so much as thinks of demanding a new indictment. But Tom Mooney, the workingman, whose innocence is beyond all doubt, has been pardoned to life imprisonment.
There are no classes in the United States. There is no such thing as class justice. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all!
Federation of Labor would be one of the delegates, thus giving organized labor a représentative on the American peace delegation. The government is now being accused of not sufficiently appreciating the services rendered by Samuel Gompers during the past year for the country.
In our opinion such an attack upon the government is wholly unjustified. For we are convinced that Washington would have been perfectly willing to give Gompers the fifth place in the peace delegation. And, pray, why not? Surely the President of the American Federation of Labor would have fitted perfectly into the general character of that delegation.
As a matter of fact, the refusal to name a nominal representative of the working class as one of the peace commission, was caused by entirely different considerations. It lies in the absolute refusal of the English, French and Italian governments to send labor representatives to the peace conference. And these governments had, as a matter of fact, very excellent reasons for so doing.
Whom should Great Britain, for instance, send to Paris to represent labor? There is not a representative of the British labor movement who could even be considered who is not a Socialist.
The appointment of Havelock Wilson, who is perhaps nearest of all British Labor men to the Gompers type, would have created a storm of protest all over the country. The choice lay between Arthur Henderson, Ramsay McDonald and perhaps Ben Tillet.
And every one of these men was on the face of it absolutely out of the question.
Similar conditions prevail in France. Whom could the French government have chosen. Jouhaux, Thomas, Renaudel or Longuet, all Socialists. However they may have differed in their attitude toward the war, they all are members of the socialist movement, and as such would energetically oppose the predatory desires of the bourgeois delegates.
In Italy and in Belgium, the same considerations prevented the sending of labor representatives. Everywhere the line of class distinctions is so clearly marked that a unity of the exploiting and Our Peace Delegates The publication of the names of the American peace plenipotentiaries was received all over the country as a matter of course. It was known that the choice of the American representatives lay wholly in the hands of the President, and it was hardly to be expected that he would choose men other than those who were in full accord with his policies. The expectations of those who hoped that one or more men of a more progressive type than those who were actually chosen, would represent the American people at the peace negotiations were out of the question from the very outset.
In one respect, however, there was perhaps some disappointment among certain elements of the population. It had been more or less confidently expected that the President of the American