Winnetka,III.,Dec.17,1897
Mr. M.Pinner,
Elizabeth, N.J.
My dear Mr. Pinner,
I found your letter of Nov.28th awaiting me upon my return home, and was very much pleased by your kind words with regard to the Strike of Millionaires. Wish I could answer your question about Miss Jennie May, but I do not know. I will take the first opportunity of finding out and will let you have the results.
When I wrote the story of Spring Valley, I really believed that its revelations would have some effect upon the directors of the Railroad and the Coal Company. I brought it out first as an open letter in one of the Chicago papers. I was younger then I am now. It produced upon these men no effect whatever. There must be something about the possession of power industrial power as well as any other which makes it impossible for its possessor to believe or even see the truth as to its effect upon others. Things at Spring Valley have every since gone on from bad to worse; and recently an appeal went out through the country for food and clothing for the people there, as they were starving. This experience makes me understand what Ruskin meant when he said: I am done with preaching to the rich
I was interested to learn from our leading book-store here in Chicago that a gentleman from Oil City about six months ago came in very anxious to procure a copy of the book. He said he would be willing to pay anything for a copy. He must have one.At the same time he made some derogatory remarks about the accuracy of my book on the trusts. A copy was procured and sent him. You can imagine my interest when I learned that he was Mr. Boyle, the bully of the pen, who is employed by the Oil Trust. It was he, for instance, who conducted their newspaper in Toledo during the fight with that city. Some of his principles had evidently heard from some of their coal millionaire friends that the book was a terrible specimen of anarchistic mendacity, and brought it with the intention of ripping me up through an exposure of its enormities with the purpose of using that to discredit the other book, which they have not been able to attack directly. Six months have passed and not a word has been heard, and never will be. It was not I who wrote the facts in that record. It was the millionaires. I was but a photographer.
I have just got on the track of two little pamphlet speeches of Wendell Phillips on the money question. They are in the libraries of Boston. When I go there, I mean to read them. Did you make any collection of the printed matter by Wendell Phillips?
Your additional items with regard to the circulation of Helper's Impending Crisis are extremely interesting. They make me wish that you would write up that episode in full detail. It would be a most valuable contribution to the literature of the anti-slavery movement.
I shall induce my publishers to get out a cheaper edition just as soon as I can. I think the moment is rapidly approaching but has not yet arrived.
Your suggestion with regard to the labor commission would be an admirable on if the present social crisis were in the hands on either side of moderate men; but I apprehend that the issue has been pushed far beyond, now, the question of a fair wage. It might have been kept there indefinitely had the employer and possessors of capitalistic power used it with forbearance. But it is the salvation of the world that the Pharoahs never do so. You observe that the English employers have taken lessons from American employers and have abandoned their policy of friendliness towards trades unions, and have deliberately entered on the policy of extermination. The world is rapidly moving forward to a great crisis. The Prussian arbitration courts (as you remember) I believe still exists, and the institution has spread to France, Belgium and Switzerland, and has worked with great beneficence. I do not think it will ever be possible again to interest the workingmen in any scheme of arbitration in our country.
I send you a copy of the Coming Nation, with an article of mine which may interest you.
Faithfully yours, H.D Lloyd [signed]