Speak in terror of dollars and cents, (the language best understood by the ruling class) - Rose Pastor Stokes

Is it possible that according to the law of our economic autocracy to be poor is to be obscene and to have property is not to be obscene? Ah, but these propertyless agitators who are spreading this scientific knowledge among the poor and the propertyless must be suppressed. For it is the business of our greedy capitalist society to prevent the poor from regulating the size of their families

We have met here in protest against the law which operates to keep the knowledge of contraception from the mothers of the poor and blinks the fact that the comfortable classes obtain that knowledge from their highly-paid physicians and from one another. We demand that the law which is a dead letter for the rich also become a dead letter for the poor, and declare that we shall continue in ever-increasing numbers to honor this law by breaking it. The poor and they physicians of the [poor], and those who realize the immediate necessity of spreading contraceptive knowledge, will not continue to respect a law that is negatively responsible for so much misery among the masses of the people.

I see no hope of functioning 100 percent in the interest of the common people except through the Socialist Party, and hereby apply for readmission to membership. I left the party because I considered dangerous the party’s attitude toward America’s participation in the war; but the crisis created by the St. Louis resolution is past, and the present immediate danger is an imperialistic peace which, I believe, only a unified and strengthened international Socialist movement can prevent. I thrill to think how rapidly the world would move forward if, for instance, the German Social Democracy were to unite — if the party of the right were to unite with the party of the left — and sweep the Hohenzollerns out of power, or if the several parties of the Social Revolution in Russia were to sink their differences and go to the heart of their common purpose; or if in Italy, France, and England there were but one unified expression of the Socialist movement; and because my heart cries out to them, “Comrades, unite!” I am brought to a keen realization of my own remissness. If I see and deplore the results of disruption and desire unity for my Comrades abroad, I must surely strive for unity here, where 90 percent of the American people, whose hearts beat warm as any in the world for humanity, need to stand as unitedly against their own and the world’s anti-humanitarian 10 percent, as the 90 percent of any other country. President Wilson’s last message; the British and French government’s failure to meet fully and in a spirit of frankness the democratic implications of it; the imprisonment in Germany of 300 of her left wing Socialists; the counterrevolutionary attempts in Russia, where an unseen hand not Russia’s seems to be playing fast and loose — these four significant events are among the foremost impelling me to rejoin the Socialist Party. I beg, dear Comrades, that you admit me again to your ranks.