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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 16, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for December 1911, Part II
Found in Los Angeles, Interviewed by Estelle Lawton Lindsey
From The Los Angeles Record of December 21, 1911:
“MOTHER JONES” PREDICTS BRIGHTER DAY;
MEN NATURALLY GOOD IS HER BELIEF
By Estelle Lawton Lindsey.
“Some day men will go into the bowels of the earth and bring out lead to be made into type to enlighten the minds of their fellows, instead of bullets to brutalize. In that day we shall be civilized.”
The speaker was Mrs. Mary Jones, known through this land as “Mother Jones,” saint or revolutionist according to your point of view, a woman loved to adoration by 400,000 organized miners of the U. S., and who has been described as “the walking wrath of God.”
In conversation this woman, who will be 80 years old the first day of next May, and looks like a well-preserved and vigorous woman of 50, speaks little of wrath and much of love, understanding and education.
WOMEN MUST UNDERSTAND
My work is to prevent violence, to settle, peaceably, differences between employer and employed. Wherever there are strikes, wherever there may be violence—which I abhor—wherever feelings of revenge are rampant, there I go. My work is to teach men the causes of their difficulties, to show them how to remedy conditions by changing the laws and the system. My field of activity is the world.
The trouble with the average woman is that she is a sentimentalist. She is ignorant of the causes of our industrial disturbance. She cannot realize that as long as we have oppression we shall have violent reaction in the minds and feelings of the oppressed; and that such feelings are the root of violence. The thinker who understands the cause knows all violence can be done away with. Soon women will understand, then they will give the world better men.
My work is to keep people from getting into conflicts to get them to think instead of fighting; and to show others how to think. I believe in education; and through education I believe we can so change our forms of government that feelings of revenge will die of inanition.
In that day we will not devote millions, wrung from those least able to pay, to chaining human beings like beasts for being what the government has made them.
