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Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches, with a Department of Appreciations

Chapter 160: Without Guile
By Eugene V. Debs
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About This Book

A detailed biography traces the subject's formative years and public activity, followed by a broad selection of essays, poems, and speeches that lay out arguments for socialism, critiques of the wage system, and strategies for labor organization. Topics range from personal conversion to socialist ideas and analyses of craft, industrial, and revolutionary unionism to responses to government injunctions and the conduct of strikes. Several pieces address prison labor and civil liberties. Appraisals and appreciations by contemporaries, reproductions of photographs and illustrations, and editorial notes contextualize the movement and its rhetoric for sympathetic readers.

Here Comes a Man

By George Bicknell
Here comes a man with one free call;
He shouts aloud nor does he fear
The foolish threat of deafened ear;
Nor does he heed who would enthrall.
Here comes a man with love for men
As pure and broad as boundless space;
He gathers light from every race,
And sheds it on the world again.
His joy is not alone for self;
His life makes gladsome whom he meets
By turning bitter galls to sweets
And shaming every show of pelf.
Here comes a man whose like is rare;
A kindred heart for hearts that bleed;
A refuge in dark hours of need;
A burdened world his greatest care;
His call the call to Love and Faith,
To Love and Faith and Liberty;
But some decry, and some there be
Who say: “A Dream;” “A soulless wraith.”
Yet, though his call be but a dream,
The love he sheds in spreading this
Will give the world much lasting bliss
And purify a Hate-filled stream.
Then hail to him who loves so well!
The Brother of the Poor; the Friend
Of them that labor without end.
And hail the dawn he dares foretell!

Without Guile

No man ever looked into the frank, blue eyes of Eugene V. Debs but felt the thrill of seeing the open soul of a man without guile. In two years’ daily intercourse with him I never saw him change in mental attitude. He has won the love of every person who has met and talked with him. His soul takes in the universe. He is one of the great men who will leave his footprints on the sands of the road of human uplift. Like all men who have higher ideals than their time and generation, he will be better appreciated in the time to come. It is not that he is the peer of any orator who ever addressed an American public, but that what he says goes to the root of things. It is what he says more than the beautiful way he says it. It always reaches the heart, reaches the deep-hidden good that is in every creature. He is the same in the ordinary conversation that he is on the platform. No man can look into his frank soul and refuse to love him. His name will live in letters of light on the pages of the history of this nation. And his star will grow brighter as humanity better perfects its telescopes of perception. We love him for what he is.

J. A. Wayland.