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Show STRIKES NOT NEW. fittttlatiei Showing That labor Haa Always Al-ways Had to Fight for Its Rights. Strikes were as common in ancient times as at the present day. The exodus of the children of Israel from the land of Egypt was a great strike, where over a million of laborers threw down their tools and refused to work longer. Moses, a man who had been educated in the court of Pharaoh, organized them; and after much difficulty led them out in a body through the wilderness to the land of Canaan. This is one of the greatest strikes recorded re-corded in ancient times. We shall have to refer to the character of the government govern-ment they set up further on. There are records of strikes in ancient Greece and Rome, of great magnitude. The strike of the 20,000 miners in the silver mines of Laurium, where they were compelled to work naked, and on the most indifferent food, during the Polopo-nesiau Polopo-nesiau war, turned the scales against Athens, for, joining the forces of Sparta, they fought against their native land, in hopes that their hew masters would lighten their burdens. In the first servile war in Eome 200,-000 200,-000 laborers struck and took np arms against their country. It ended by many thousands being slaughtered by the armies of Rome in battle, and then after af-ter their dofeat hunted down like wild beasts into their retreats in the forests and jungles, and 20,000 of them captured and crucified. In the. second servile war, 73 years before the coming of Christ, 800,000 laborers struck and carried car-ried on a successful .war against their country for several years,, but were finally defeated and 6,000 of them crucified cruci-fied on the Appian Way, and left to hang there as a warning to future rebels. This great strike happened only after the greatest provocation. They had been reduced by the avarice of Rome to the most wretched slavery. Spartacus himself, their general and leader, was a captive slave, trained as a gladiator in the arena, where he was compelled to murder his fellow workmen to satisfy the cruel tastes of the elite of Rome. The slaves of both sexes were compelled to labor in the hot suns of summer and the chilly winds of winter, with no clothes on at all; and if 'they asked their masters for clo tiling were whipped and sent back to work. Their fare was black bread, nuts and dried figs. They were not allowed to have wheat bread. This is why Lazarus is represented in the Lord's parable as asking for the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table; he knew better than to ask for bread. As to the low condition to which the industrial classes had been reduced in the days of the Caesars, we have but to refer to the census of the free citizens of Rome, which are given at but a few thousand, while she had a population of probably 2,000,000, or inquire into the ownership of the land, which was held by 2,000 men. There was a time in the history of Rome vi'hen her landed property prop-erty bolonged to her citizens, but the patricians got bold of it in time through the mortgage system. The lands were sub-dividod after this, under a communistic com-munistic labor movement, and all private debts were abrogated, but in due time the patricians again got control by managing man-aging to loan the plebeians money on their real estate. This time their control was to last. There had been a law passed to sell a man into slavery for debt, so that at the time of Augustus Gttsar the most considerable con-siderable number of the citizens of Rome were slaves. The lot of the few free citizens that remained was nearly as hard, for they had to compete with slave labor in tlia race of life. This was the state of Rome when it fell. The great mass of its citizens, having lost all patriotic patri-otic feeling for their country, refused to take up arms in its defense or joined the farces of her enemies. |