upon them from every quarter—the low wages that they were forced to accept, often in depreciated or worthless banknotes, the continually increasing exactions of the landlords, the high prices squeezed out of them by monopolies, the arbitrary discriminations of law—these were not without their effect. The Workingmen's Party, formed in 1829 in New York City, was the first and most ominous of these proletarian uprisings. Its resolutions read like a proletarian Declaration of Independence, and would unquestionably have resulted in the most momentous agitation, had it not been that it was smothered by its leaders, and also because the slavery issue long obscured purely economic questions. "Resolved," ran its resolutions adopted at Military Hall, Oct. 19, 1829,
in the opinion of this meeting, that the first appropriation of the soil of the State to private and exclusive possession was eminently and barbarously unjust. That it was substantially feudal in its character, inasmuch as those who received enormous and unequal possessions were lords and those who received little or nothing were vassals. That hereditary transmission of wealth on the one hand and poverty on the other, has brought down to the present generation all the evils of the feudal system, and that, in our opinion, is the prime source of all our calamities.
After declaring that the Workingmen's Party would oppose all exclusive privileges, monopolies and exemptions, the resolutions proceeded:
We consider it an exclusive privilege for one portion of the community to have the means of education in colleges, while another is restricted to common schools, or, perhaps, by extreme poverty, even deprived of the limited education to be acquired in those establishments. Our voice, therefore, shall be raised in favor of a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic, it should be.