On Stirring the Emotions of His Audience 1903

E. T. Kingsley’s Rousing Meetings

“It’s as good as a tonic to hear Kingsley,” said one ardent Socialist after the street meeting last Saturday night, at which, as announced by a handbill and placard, E. T. Kingsley, of Nanaimo, was the speaker; and if Socialist weaklings were toned and invigorated by the irrefutable logic of his street corner rhetoric on Saturday, they were assuredly made absolutely “sound” by the “medicine” he administered to them at Socialist headquarters on Sunday night. Disclaiming anything like sentiment or emotion, confining himself to fact, figure and logical conclusion, Kingsley yet stirs in his hearers the very emotions he affects to contemn [sic] and awakens the sentiment he proposes to banish. Shame, anger, self-contempt and sudden hope, chase each other round the diaphragms of the men who listen to his scathing words, and a rising sense of conscious power makes them long to get their hands on the ballot with which they are to “do for” the system that enslaves them. “A slave is not a man,” says Kingsley and fact on fact is rapidly lined up to show them how utterly futile are their class combinations, their painful strikes and long-drawn-out struggles for a better wage or a shorter work day, while they permit capital to assume the function of government and control the markets when they must spend the wage, be it ever so big or ever so small. Corn beef and cabbage and overalls is the sum total of the worker’s wage. If he succeeds in getting “a raise” immediately the price of corn beef, cabbage and overalls goes up to meet the increased capacity of his buying power, and he is no better off than before his wages were raised. The law of supply and demand as governing the labor market of the world was expounded at length and the fallacy of a Labor trust with a stomach for its supreme dictator, ever hoping to compete with capital on any successful terms was clearly exposed.

Kingsley makes nothing in the nature of an “appeal” to the workingman. He merely shows him conclusively that he [missing text—must accept his?] condition so long as he elects the law-makers from the capitalist class, the interest of which is diametrically opposed to that of the working class.

The audience was large and intensely interested on both occasions, the indoor meeting being followed by a number of questions which were answered to the utmost satisfaction of the querists.