THE 
 
 PRESENT ASPECT 
 
 OF THE 
 
 |- Labor Problem, 
 
 BY 
 
 * ■ 
 
 R. H eber Newton. 
 
 
 
 Four Lectures given in All Souls Church, 
 New York, May, 1886. 
 
 New York : 
 
 The Day Star, 3115 Fourth Ave. 
 1886. 
 
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 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. Labor’s View of the Situation. 
 XX. Capital’s View , of the Situation. 
 
 III. Society’s View of the Situation. 
 
 IV. The Wav Out. 
 
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 LABOR’S VIEW OF THE SITUATION. 
 
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 The events of the past few weeks have opened the eyes of 
 the most optimistic American to the reality of the danger concern- 
 ing which many a warning has been given hitherto in vain. ' Even 
 the sanguine believers in manifest destiny realize at last that 
 an industrial contest is upon us, out of which may easily come 
 social anarchy in our great centres, and a sorer crisis for our repub- 
 lic than that through which we have so lately passed. There is 
 ample time for a peaceful adjustment of, this threatening conflict, 
 but, if we are to have peace, there is urgent need of dispassionate 
 thought and calm counsel between the contending sides. The 
 danger in such a situation is that interest will blind the judgment 
 and passion inflame the will, and that from both sides men will act 
 under hot impulse rather than under the cool guidance of reason 
 and conscience. The duty of the pulpit is clear in such an emer- 
 gency. It must speak with calm words on behalf of peace and with 
 fearless words on behalf of justice. It must call upon the better 
 natures of men on each side to go forth from class lines and meet 
 midway to reason together. 
 
 You, my friend, who are an employer of labor cannot but 
 come under the natural bias of your position. You would be super- 
 human if your judgment was not colored by your interest, if your 
 conscience was not clouded by your feeling. You see your views 
 reflected in the opinions of your friends. You read them stated 
 in the leaders of the papers which you take. Everything tends 
 -to confirm you in your own conclusion. It is the same with the 
 working man. He looks at the matter from the stand-point of 
 the employee. Interest colors his judgment and feeling clouds his 
 conscience. He hears his own views reiterated in his Union meet- 
 ings, and argued with warmth in his labor journals. He is thus con- 
 firmed in his own one-sided judgment of the case. I want, as 
 far as my words may reach, to bring employer and employee 
 together, to look each upon the situation as it presents itself to 
 the other, and both upon the situation from the point of view of 
 society at large ; trusting thus to aid in the formation of that 
 calmer, truer judgment which will bring us peace in righteousness. 
 
 I shall thus try to set before you, who are employers of 
 labor, the workingman’s view of the situation. You are very apt, 
 my friends, to jump to the conclusion that there is no real case 
 for the other side. You are keenly aware of the ignorance of eco- 
 
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4 
 
 homic laws often displayed by labor to-day, of the dictatorial and 
 despotic spirit that it manifests at times, of the unreasonable claims 
 that it frequently urges, of the folly of much of its action. Pre- 
 cisely because of this clear vision of the real weaknesses of labor’s 
 position you may be blinding yourself to the back-lying strength 
 of its position. A gentleman now engaged in teaching Political 
 Economy in this city, whose personal sympathies are very con- 
 servative, said to me a few weeks since, at the time of the first 
 great street car strike : “I have not met an employer of labor 
 who has not taken unconsciously a class- view of the situation.” A 
 few days since an employer in this city said distinctly : “ Labor 
 has no legitimate ground to warrant any agitation such as is dis- 
 turbing the country. It ought to be put down with a strong 
 hand.” One who keeps his eyes and ears open cannot fail to note 
 on every side the indications that hand is joining hand to carry 
 out some such determination. I do not wonder that any of yt>u 
 should be swept into such a current. Enough and more than enough 
 has occurred to provoke your passions and to rouse the fighting 
 nature which is in us all — the heritage of far-back ages when life 
 was ail a savage strife. I pity from my heart any man who is to- 
 day a large employer of labor, and would not for his wealth ex- 
 change my modest income, if I had to be booted with his cares and 
 anxieties. None the less, without taking on any airs of mental or 
 moral superiority, and speaking from a position where if my inter- 
 ests are biased at all they would naturally swing me upon your 
 side of the case — I call on you to stop and think calmly before you 
 act strongly. 
 
 I. You say : “ Why do our men treat us with such suspicion ? 
 We mean to do squarely by them. We are honestly desirous of 
 bettering their condition. When we plan any improvement for 
 them we find our plans regarded with distrust and our overtures 
 sullenly rejected. They make us feel at every turn that they 
 have no confidence in our veracity or honor, or in our desire to 
 make a human relationship out of the bond between us.” This 
 is often doubtless true, and being true it is hard indeed. I know 
 how some of you have planned large things for your employees 
 and how disappointing has been your experience at their hands. 
 But remember that you are not the only employers of labor in the 
 land. There are, alas ! too many in your position who have not 
 your conscience. Shylock is in business still. And as one Shylock 
 stamped a race with opprobium, so one Shylock to-day may brand 
 a whole class with the mark which leads men to turn from it in 
 distrust and fear. The principle of solidarity holds over all employ- 
 ers of labor, and you sutler because of others whose hearts are 
 made out of Hint and whose consciences were forgotten in their 
 make up. 
 
 Remember, still further, that the old personal relationship of 
 
5 
 
 employer and employee has been rapidly disappearing in our midst, 
 through the development of corporate industry. Joint stock com- 
 panies are dispossessing private enterprises in all directions. The 
 shareholders in a corporation have nothing to do with its manage- 
 ment. They know nothing of its hands, and come into no living 
 relationship with them. They may perhaps attend an annual 
 meeting and vote the right ticket, and then all their duties are 
 discharged, except that of drawing the quarterly dividend. The 
 management of the business falls upon a superintendent, who has 
 necessarily a very large liberty, and who, if he be so disposed can 
 become a great tyrant, without the stockholders knowing anything 
 about it. These superintendents are often smart, sharp, poshing 
 men, who by reason of these qualities, which make of them efficient 
 administrators in our times of fierce competition, are apt to become 
 hard masters of the men under them. The employees cannot get 
 the ears of the directors of the company — since they know that 
 any whisper of discontent may lose them their positions. Read 
 the testimony of intelligent workingmen before either of the great 
 Congressional committees, and you will find that this is a serious 
 factor in the situation. In one of the manufacturing towns of New 
 England there is a factory known as “ Hell’s Mills ” — a sufficiently 
 suggestive title. On one occasion, when the hands had struck 
 for an increase of ten per cent, of their wages, the superintendent 
 held in his pocket an order of the Board of Managers authorizing 
 him to grant the increase ; which he withheld until he forced the 
 men to terms, and thus saved to the company ten per cent, addi- 
 tional profits. This is the sort of man that is stirring up trouble 
 in many an unsuspected quarter, and envenoming the attitude of 
 labor toward capital. One “Hell’s Mills” is enough to turn 
 thousands of workingmen into demons. 
 
 II. You complain, my friend, of the loss of interest in their 
 work shown by your employees. This is doubtless, to a consider- 
 able extent, the fault of labor, about which I shall- have somewhat 
 to say next Sunday. But is it wholly labor’s fault that it is losing 
 interest in its tasks ? 
 
 Consider the change that has come over the conditions of labor 
 and the nature of many of its tasks. In the olden time, the weaver 
 sat in his little home with his family around him, blithely joining 
 in his labor. He could readily enough work long hours and n3t 
 grow discontented. Now he leaves his home early and spends the 
 daylight in a huge factory, amid its din and clangor, separated 
 from his family, or perhaps still worse, finding them with him in 
 one of these great barracks of industry — even the little children, 
 who should be at school, having some task which they needs must 
 do to eke out the support of the family. 
 
 Of old the artisan was master of his craft. He made some- 
 thing. He began a process which he finished. Now the factory 
 

 hand does a little bit of a job over and over again — a fractional 
 part of a process which he neither begins nor completes, and which 
 lends him no joy of the intelligent craftsman. He once was a 
 workman, fashioning with his own hands the watch into perfected 
 shape. Now the machine is the true workman, taking the raw 
 materials and turning out the finished watch. The brains are in 
 the machine. The man is but the living tender of the steely 
 monster who has robbed him of his brains and stolen from him 
 the joy that comes from their rightful exercise in making things. 
 
 Of old the workingman’s relationships were settled and contin- 
 uous. There was time for warm personal bonds to knit, and for 
 trust and loyalty to make an esprit du corps in the establishment. 
 In Nuremberg there was, three hundred years ago, a family of the 
 name of Sach, distinguished as manufacturers of Dutch metal. They 
 had then in their employ certain workmen of the name of Schmidt. 
 To-day the same business is conducted upon the same spot by the 
 descendants of the family of Sach, and among the employees are to 
 be found descendants of the family of Schmidt. This was the old 
 order, under which a beautiful loyalty was possible. Contrast with 
 it our nomadic industry. Factories passing from one hand to 
 another, their employees changing all the time — about as rapidly 
 as our domestic retinues, in which the new system of hiring by the 
 hour will soon come into play — and can you wonder that the old 
 loyalty has gone, and with it the old pfide in work well done, the 
 old interest in work at all ? 
 
 Go down in imagination into the lower grades of labor; realize 
 what the conditions are under which their tasks are wrought, how 
 utterly monotonous and unintelligent their occupations, and cease 
 to wonder at the loss of interest which you find. 
 
 III. You say again : “Our workingmen are well enough off, if they 
 only knew it.” Your skilled workmen doubtless are often well off 
 for wage workers. Skilled labor in this country is probably paid 
 higher than in any other country of the world. Your answer to its 
 complaints is fair enough, as far as it goes. But now about the 
 unskilled labor of the country ? If you examine the last United 
 States census, you must have noted the rather startling fact that 
 the average wage of the working people of the land is about three 
 hundred dollars per annum. How far does that go toward the 
 support of a family ? Every man who wants to be .informed as to 
 all the facts of the situation ought to read the late reports of two 
 of our great bureaus of labor — the report of the Massachusetts 
 Bureau and the report of the New York Bureau — upon the condi- 
 tion of working women in Boston and New York. There are cool 
 statements of facts therein which are painfully impressive. The 
 Chief of the Connecticut Labor Bureau, Professor Hadley, gives us 
 the reasons for concluding that our usual estimates of wages in this 
 country tend to err upon the optimistic side. The Pennsylvania 
 
7 
 
 Bureau of Statistics shows that in some instances the nominal wages 
 are in excess of the actual wages by 60 per cent. An examination 
 of the reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor shows a 
 difference of from 20 to 50 per cent in the estimate of wages given 
 by employers and by employees. 
 
 Whatever the facts may be, we must remember that wages are 
 determined, not by their nominal amount, but by their relative value 
 — their purchasing power. Despite of Mr. Evarts’ dictum in the 
 Consular Keports on the state of labor in Europe, every one knows 
 that the prices of many necessities are much higher here than in 
 Europe, so that workingmen do not find themselves nearly so 
 well off in coming here as they had expected. And then, further, 
 you must remember that the social wants of our workingmen are 
 greater than those of labor in other lands. Here is where the 
 'shoe pinches. 
 
 IY. But you say : “ Our workingmen are certainly better off 
 now than formerly.” If you refer to a short period of time I find 
 authorities again differing widely. Mr. Atkinson says that in 
 Massachusetts, within twenty- five years, the wages of cotton mill 
 operatives have increased 37 per cent., those of average mechanics 
 21 per cent, and those of skilled mechanics 33 per cent. But on 
 the other hand, the United States census— which Professor Hadley 
 thinks our most reliable authority — gives a drop of 25 per cent, 
 in wages during the decade of 1870-80. The testimony of working- 
 men in different industries as given by the New Jersey Labor Bureau, 
 indicates a downward tendency in wages. Let me give you a few 
 samples of these reports. Locksmith, Newark : “ In former years I 
 accumulated considerable, but now I cannot ‘make a cent above 
 expenses.” Weaver, Gloucester : “We have had a reduction of 10 
 per cent, and another of 15 per cent, in a year.” Jeweler, Canada : 
 “ Could get along before the war, making from $15 to $20 weekly. 
 Now I get but $6 or $7.” Silk-worker, Paterson : “ Wages have 
 been reduced 50 percent, in three years.” 
 
 Do you then mean, my friends, that labor is better off* now 
 than of old ? Certainly it ought so to be, with the astonishing 
 advance which our civilization has made. Unquestionably so it is, 
 in many respects* The poorest workingman to-day enjoys hosts of 
 advantages from civilization which the richest could not have 
 had a few centuries ago. The direct benefits of civilization for him 
 are enormous. He is better housed on the whole, and certainly 
 is better fed ; his length of life is increased ; he is not nearly so 
 liable to the dreadful diseases which formerly preyed upon him ; his 
 earnings are ordinarily secured for him ; he lives amid the manifold 
 privileges which are now the common rights of all ; and he has an 
 education such as only a few scholars then enjoyed. The direct 
 benefits of civilization — the increase of his wages, the lessening 
 of his work and the bettering of the conditions of his work — are by 
 
8 
 
 no means so clear. You have probably read the “ Progress of the 
 Working Classes in the Last Half Century,” by the President of 
 the British Statistical Society. If we can rely upon its figures, the 
 workingman has no case at all on this point. But, unfortunately, 
 figures are notoriously unreliable, and one has only to prod a few 
 of these roseate tables with some sharp questions to discover how 
 inconclusive they really are. In the Chair of Political Economy at 
 Oxford, certainly a sufficiently conservative institution, there is to- 
 day one of the leading authorities in his department. Prof. Thorold 
 Bogers inclines to the opinion that in real wages the workingman 
 of the fifteenth century was better off than the workingman of to- 
 day. The present movement for a reduction of a day’s work to 
 eight hours, according to this high authority, is simply an endeavor 
 to get back to what was once the normal day’s work. 
 
 “ This concerns England,” you say. True, but in the increasing 
 interrelationship which is taking place among all lands, the state of 
 labor in one land affects directly the state of labor in another. 
 American labor is inevitably tending, by natural causes, to the level 
 of European labor, except in so far as other factors are working to 
 counteract this tendency. 
 
 Hitherto we have been saved from the conditions which have 
 so dreadfully depressed labor in the old world. Those conditions, 
 however, are rapidly reproducing themselves here. We have reached 
 the limit of available free land, We are beginning to feel a sense of 
 over population. Our labor market is being over-stocked. The 
 whole world is becoming one open market in which labor anywhere 
 must compete with labor everywhere. We have been distinctly 
 warned through our Consular Reports that labor in this country 
 must expect to accept the conditions of the old world. And in the 
 old world, as we have seen, there is good reason to suspect that 
 the condition of labor is in some respects no better off than some 
 centuries ago. We have, however, as yet ho sufficient data from 
 which to generalize assuredly upon this question. 
 
 This much seems clear to me, that the tide has turned — that 
 the low water mark of labor was reached at the beginning of this 
 century, that a counter-current has been gathering headway, making 
 against the unfavorable tendencies of our system to which I have 
 referred, and that skilled labor is steadily rising. 
 
 The general question is not so much as to whether labor is 
 better off than of old, but as to whether it shares proportionately in 
 the enormous advance of our century. It is hard for us to realize 
 what a stupendous stride forward the western world has taken in 
 our century. Look at the development of machinery! Since 
 1870, in the United States machinery has doubled the productive 
 power of our people. This represents an increase of 22,000,000 
 man power. On every hand, the processes which were formerly 
 carried on by hand are now being performed by mechanism. If 
 
9 
 
 one could have looked ahead at the beginning of our century and con- 
 templated this enormous transformation, how natural would have 
 been the sanguine expectation that the condition of labor would 
 be lightened by this change beyond anything known in history* 
 Has it been so ? Undoubtedly, labor has entered into the benefit 
 of machinery, by the cheapening of prices and by being relieved 
 from many of its more arduous tasks ; but, take it all in all, can 
 we dispute the judgment of so cool-headed an authority as John 
 Stuart Mill? “ Hitherto it is questionable,” he wrote in his great 
 work on Political Economy, “if all the mechanical inventions yet 
 made have lightened the day’s toil of any human, being. They have 
 enabled the same population to live the same life of drudgery and 
 imprisonment and an increased number of manufacturers and others 
 to make fortunes.” Professor Huxley says that the 7,500,000 
 workers in England can produce as much in six months as would 
 have required one hundred years ago the entire working force of 
 the world for one year. Does anybody imagine that they have en- 
 tered into their proportionate share of this tremendous gain of 
 productive power f 
 
 The increase of wealth in our century has been something 
 stupendous. In Europe and the United States, wealth has in- 
 creased since 1850 three times faster than the population. Accord- 
 ing to Mulhall, since 1830 Great Britain has almost trebled her 
 wealth, France has quadrupled hers, and the United States has 
 multiplied its wealth sixfold. At present we are growing nearly 
 $4,000,000 richer between each sunrisl and sunset. Does any one 
 again imagine that labor, as a whole, has shared proportionately 
 in this astonishing increase of wealth ? If it were so how could 
 there be the present discontent f If we had had a reasonable amount 
 of scientific statistical study, it ought to be a simple thing to 
 find out what is the relative proportion of profits and wages ; 
 but if you try this sum in arithmetic you must have clearer brains 
 than mine if you do not get muddled. From your point of view it 
 looks very clear doubtless. Mr. Giffin and other strong statisticians 
 claim that an increasing part of the profits of industry are going 
 to labor. Mr. Atkinson says that 90 per cent, of the wealth pro- 
 duced in manufactures goes to labor in wages, and only 10 per 
 cent, to capital as profits. The Connecticut Labor Bureau gives 
 only 5 per cent, of profits to capital. But on the other hand, 
 different manipulations of these figures are possible. The author 
 of “ Man’s Birthright, or the Higher Law of Property,” by no means 
 a socialistically inclined writer, claims that capital makes $1.08 
 on every dollar paid out in wages ; averaging 36 per cent, on its 
 investment. Mr. Carroll D. Wright, the head of our National 
 Bureau of Labor, and for years the head of the Massachusetts 
 Bureau of Labor, when on the stand before the Congressional Com- 
 mittee on Education and Labor, gave it as his conclusion that in 
 
10 
 
 certain industries the employer gets $98 profit on each hand, 
 who receives an average wage of $364. If he be right, then there 
 is clearly room in such industries, when conducted on a large scale, 
 for a considerable increase of labor’s share without hurting capital. 
 
 Our census studies are so manifestly imperfect that it is utterly 
 rash to make any sweeping generalizations on the data now before 
 the country. But, if you are candid, you must admit, my friends, 
 that labor clearly has a case worthy of being brought into court, 
 a case which must be met by calm reasoning and by clear figures. 
 If the employer’s books could be opened to labor, there ought 
 soon to be a better understanding. The late Professor Fawcett, 
 who was thoroughly conservative, wrote as follows : “ If any one, 
 a quarter of a century since, could have foreseen all that was about 
 to take place ; if he could have known . that trade was soon to be 
 trebled ; that railways would be taken to almost every small town 
 in the kingdom ; would it not have appeared absolutely incredible 
 that all these favorable agencies should have produced so little effect 
 that it may now be fairly disputed ivhether the poverty of the 
 poor has been perceptibly diminished ? There has, no doaibt, been 
 an unprecedented accumulation of wealth, but this wealth has 
 been unhappily so distributed that the rich have become much 
 richer, ichilst the poor have remained as poor as they ivere before .” 
 Even the optimistic Mr. Giffin is forced to confess : “ No one can 
 contemplate the condition of the masses of the people without 
 desiring something like a revolution for the better.” One has but 
 to study the development Qf New York to realize the truth of 
 the matter. Millionaires have multiplied in our midst, in a century, 
 from a handful to several hundred. To be a plain millionaire now 
 is not at all to be a wealthy man, as New York counts wealth. On 
 the other hand, look at the squalor of poverty in the midst of 
 which the largest portion of our people live. Here labor sees the 
 situation in the strongest lights and shadows. 
 
 The revolution in industry and trade that has been wrought 
 by the inventions of our century has played into the hands of the 
 powers already commanding the situation — brains and wealth. It 
 is natural that it should have been so. It argues no diabolical sel- 
 fishness on the part of either brains or wealth that so it has been, 
 but simply the average selfishness natural to us all on the part 
 of those who had a chance and then used it. When the tide turns 
 it turns for all the craft in the river, but it makes an enormous 
 relative difference where your boat may be at the turn of the 
 tide. If you lie by the shore where the tide makes first, and the 
 favoring breeze strikes you there while it is calm yet over on 
 the ebb shore, you will gain an enormous lead upon your fellows. 
 
 Y. But you say : “ Whatever the condition of labor it is its own 
 fault.” To a certain extent, undoubtedly, it is so, as I shall seek 
 to point out next Sunday, but this by no means exhausts the case. 
 
li 
 
 What. I have already said points to the fact that there are other and 
 far larger factors at work in the problem than mere laziness, and 
 ignorance, and waste. Our system is working against labor, in 
 some very serious respects. The growth of population is handicap- 
 ping labor. Were it ever so energetic tad intelligent and thrifty, 
 it would have everywhere a harder struggle, because everywhere 
 the labor market is feeling the pressure of an over- supply of hands 
 for the work which there is capital enough to undertake. Machin- 
 ery is dispossessing labor from one field after another at an alarm- 
 ing rate. The population of England and the United States 
 together equals some 80,000,000 to 90,000,000, but measured by the 
 productive power of machinery these two countries alone have 
 to-day a population of 1,000,000,000. This represents the real 
 extent of the crowd in the labor market. Machinery is pushing men 
 increasingly aside and substituting the labor of women and children. 
 Women work on the average for one-half the wages of men, and 
 children for one-third those wages. How portentous then is the 
 fact that, whereas our increase of labor at large between 1870 
 and 1880 was 52 per cent., the increase of child labor in the same 
 period was 98 per cent “ A man’s foes shall be those of his own 
 household.” This is coming to pass literally, as men’s wives and 
 children are called into the places which they themselves have 
 hitherto filled. There is thus massing in every labor market in the 
 world a constantly increasing body of unemployed or partially 
 employed men, ready to bid down wages in every department. For 
 every place vacated, there are a dozen, if not a hundred, ready to 
 step in. This is the growing danger which labor feels with a 
 shudder. 
 
 Our industrial system runs in fits and starts. A spell of 
 feverish activity produces a reaction, in which mills close and 
 factories shut down, and labor drops its work, of necessity, and 
 enforced idleness consumes the fruit of months of toil. This was 
 not so of old. It is a peculiarity of our modern system. It is 
 one of the results of our enormous development of productive 
 power unsystematized and accompanied by an unequal distribution 
 of its rewards. There is no real over-production. The mere idea 
 is an absurdity. Over-production of wheat, while tens of thousands 
 of men stand hungry, unable to buy flour ? Over-production of 
 clothes, while tens of thousands go half clad, shivering in the 
 cold and hiding their shabbiness from the, eyes of their fellow 
 men ? If you have enough necessities, are your higher wants 
 supplied? Relative over-production, of course, there is wherever 
 there is a glut, but that really means lack of power to consume — 
 that is, the power to buy things that are needed. Were there any 
 equable distribution of the wealth that exists to-day, from myriads 
 of homes men and women would go forth at once and buy the 
 things that they need, for body or mind — bread or books, clothes 
 
12 
 
 or pictures, and the biggest boom would be started that the coun- 
 try has ever known. Over-production in wealth, when the total 
 annual wealth of our country if equally divided, would only 
 leave to each man, woman and child 50 cents a day ! The greatest 
 curse of our industrial system to-day is this periodicity of stagna- 
 tion, in which everything comes to a standstill ; in which, while 
 rich men live on their interest, poor men eat up their little 
 principal of savings, and then grow fierce with the madness of 
 hunger. 
 
 I am astonished at nothing in our business-life so much as the 
 absence of an earnest, determined endeavor on the part of our men 
 of brains to find the causes of these chronic crises and hard 
 times, and then set upon the track of some remedy therefore. 
 Were there any serious endeavor to systematize production, now 
 carried on in the helter-skelter scramble of individual greed, things 
 would soon better with us in this respect. Here is a magnificent 
 work for our industrial and trade associations. 
 
 It is the uncertainty gendered by these recurring hard times 
 which indisposes poor men to habits of thrift and stays the de- 
 velopment of labor. Of old the worker felt reasonably sure of his 
 future. Now the average worker knows not what a day may bring 
 forth. The wolf is ever growling behind bis door. Mencius, the 
 great Chinese sage, three hundred years before Christ, taught that 
 uncertainty as to the means of existence is one of the most im- 
 portant factors in the demoralization of a people. There is a lesson 
 for us in this sagacity of “ the heathen Chinee.” 
 
 And then, not to pursue the matter further in detail, the 
 tendency to concentration of population in our towns and cities, 
 our imperfect and corrupt government, Municipal, State and Na- 
 tional, our crude and well-nigh barbaric methods of taxation, our 
 special legislation, partial to wealth, our grotesquely inadequate 
 system of education for the people, which provides in the common 
 schools for well-nigh everything but the most common need of 
 the common people — industrial training — these and many other 
 factors of our social condition enter into the problem, combining to 
 put down labor on the minus side. 
 
 Above all and back of all, we come up everywhere to the prob- 
 lem of rent. As Prof. Thorold Rogers shows, this is the one point 
 in which most signally labor stands at an increasing disadvantage 
 in civilization. In every land there is a steady tendency in the 
 direction of increasing rent. This prime necessity is eating more 
 and more into the incomes of the poor and of the middle classes 
 of people. Listen to the murmurs of discontent* as they rise in 
 every country, and, under all the changiiig conditions of life, you 
 will hear this one growl against the increasing exactions of land. 
 Without a footing in the soil the workman cannot really be inde- 
 pendent, since he must sell his one ware — labor — at any price, in 
 
13 
 
 \ 
 
 order to live. He must be found in work. Freedom of contract 
 under such conditions is a moc 1 ery. 
 
 Here, then, is a complication of conditions working against 
 labor which makes childish the optimistic talk that one hears on 
 every hand. When labor has taught itself to be energetic, intelli- 
 ligent and thrifty, it will then simply have prepared itself to grapple 
 with the forces in our industrial system which, while working for 
 it as a part of civilization at large, are yet working against it sorely 
 in special ways. The problem is too large for any man to solve 
 to-day. All the more, my friends, on you, who represent the brains 
 and the wealth of the country, lies the urgent duty of meeting 
 labor calmly and reasonably, for a comparison of views and for 
 a study together of the problem which in the long run is your prob- 
 lem as well as its problem. 
 
 VI. But you say again : “ Granting all this, it cannot be helped. 
 Natural laws are working these conditions, and it is vain to seek to 
 oppose them.” It is easy, my friends, for one who is well off to 
 talk thus. “ Put yourself in his place ” — the place of the man 
 who is standing sullenly idle in the market without work, who 
 has used up the hard-earned savings of months, whose wife and 
 babies are at home hungry. Would you thus calmly sit down 
 and say, “ it can’t be helped ? ” If I know you, with your clear grit, 
 you would be more apt to clinch your fist and take a great oath 
 that it should be helped somehow or other. Now these men 
 are of like passions with yourselves, and are coming to much the 
 same conclusion ; and this is the meaning of the sullen, bitter, dog- 
 ged determination that one finds on every hand, which is simply 
 incipient anarchism. Such a state of mind is the powder, which 
 only needs a match to set it off. If I stood in such a position and 
 believed that it could not be helped, I should quickly lose all faith 
 in a living God, and when that faith fell from me it would not 
 take much to madden me and make me ready for the worst. That 
 is the process of development of demons which our comfortable, 
 easy-going political economy is forcing forward. Dangerous classes ! 
 I do not only find them in the slums, but in the chairs of political 
 economy and the seats of enormous wealth, where brains and 
 wealth unite in the chorus : “ It can’t be helped ! ” Woe for us in 
 our civilization if so it be ! 
 
 But, my friends, it is a lie of the devil. If there is one wrong 
 on the earth that cannot, sooner or later, be righted, when men 
 shall but study and work together, then this is no world of God. 
 It can be helped ! It needs now but the determined resolve that it 
 shall be helped, to open the way out of the clouds into light. 
 Labor is beginning to study the problem for itself, with wits sharp- 
 ened by want ; and, with insight cleared from all sophisms of vested 
 interests, it sees that these things can be helped, that where there’s 
 a will there’s a way, here as elsewhere. 
 
14 
 
 It shall be helped — that is the meaning of the labor organizations 
 which are springing- up to day on every hand, developing such tre- 
 mendous power and provoking such strong opposition from the 
 employers of labor. I do not wonder at this opposition, after the 
 unreason and folly that has been displayed of late. If these 
 organizations are to persist in some of their present methods the 
 strain will be unbearable for employers of labor. I have no defense 
 to put in on behalf of these methods, which I reprobate as heartily 
 as you do. But. I pray you not to let such excesses drive you into 
 any equally unreasonable attittude of opposition. I appeal to your 
 sense of generosity, your justice, and your enlightened self-interest 
 in the matter. 
 
 Remember, my friends, what you employers of labor owe to 
 just such organizations in past times. Refresh your memories of 
 history and you will recall how, in the Middle Ages, manufacturers 
 and tradesmen and merchants were a semi-servile . class, at the 
 mercy of the rapacious and lawless Barons of the Crags — those 
 social vultures who from their eyries on the hills swooped down 
 upon the farmers’ fields, levied tolls upon the passing traders, and 
 ground the craftsmen of the neighboring villages into the dust. 
 Freedom and wealth and social position for the manufacturer 
 and trader and merchant were won by the stout burghers of the 
 towns banding together in unions which gave strength. It was 
 those Craft and Trade Guilds of the olden time, whose relics 
 remain in the great Companies of London, which formed the first 
 industrial organizations in our western world. Labor is simply 
 patterning after the good example which your ancestors set. Do 
 not meanly deny to it the use of the same all-powerful weapon of 
 association to which you owe your liberties. 
 
 Labor can no more win its economic independence to-day 
 without association, than employers of labor could have won then- 
 liberty in past times without union. You know, as well as the 
 workingman knows, that to stand alone is to be at the mercy of 
 unscrupulous and tyrannous employers, a victim of the hostile 
 circumstances which are closing round him and threatening a new 
 serfdom. The first right of self-preservation demands his freedom 
 of association. Be just enough to recognize this inherent right, 
 despite of the abuses to which it may lead. 
 
 All the real advances which labor has won in our century — 
 those advances to which you point as the evidence that his lot is 
 bettering — have been won chiefly by the power which he has de- 
 veloped through association. 
 
 Justin McCarthy, in his “ History of Our Own Times,” when 
 speaking of the famous Chartist movement, writes : “ There had 
 been a parliament of aristocrats and landlords, and it had for 
 generations troubled itself little about the class from whom Chart- 
 ism was recruited. The sceptre of legislative power had passed 
 
15 
 
 into tlie hands of a parliament, made up in great measure of the 
 wealthy middle ranks, and it had thus far shown no inclination to 
 distress itself overmuch about them. Almost every single measure 
 parliament has passed to do any good for the wage-receiving 
 classes and the poor generally has been passed since the time 
 when the Chartists began to be in power. Our Corn Laws’ repeal, 
 our factory ' acts, our sanitary legislation, our measures referring 
 to the homes of the poor — all these have been the work of later 
 times than those which engendered the Chartist movement.” All 
 who have carefully studied the history of labor organizations in Eng- 
 land confirm this judgment. If wages have risen, it has been 
 chiefly because labor has developed a power to enforce its demands 
 for a larger share of profits. It has been the same story with 
 us here. I spoke to you earlier in the winter of a notable 
 scheme of profit-sharing which had been introduced in a New Eng- 
 land company, but I did not know at the time that this wise measure 
 was the result of a long and trying strife which that company 
 had been waging with Labor Unions. 
 
 Labor organizations lmve learned wisdom, through experience, 
 in the past. They began in England with as abominable methods 
 as certain of these now brought into use here — in some of whiph, 
 however, let me remind you, they were simply imitating the bad 
 example set by employers of labor, 66 rattening,” for exampie, having 
 been first introduced by the bosses — but they have been gradually 
 correcting their mistakes, gaining sobnety and good judgment, 
 and turning their organizations into institutions for the education 
 of their members, for their mutual assurance and for political in- 
 fluence upon legislation. Mr. George Howells shows that a number 
 of societies, which he had specially studied, had spent in thirty 
 years upward of $19,000,000 through their various relief f unds, and 
 $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr. Harrison speaks of seven societies 
 spending in one year (1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their mem- 
 bers out of work. He shows that seven of the great societies 
 spent in 1882 less than two per cent, of their income on strikes; 
 and states that ninety-nine per cent, of union funds in England 
 u have been expended in the beneficent work of supporting work- 
 men* in bad times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving 
 the country from a crisis of destitution and strife.” 
 
 We may reasonably expect, therefore, that labor organizations 
 will educate themselves here, as they have done in England, in the 
 practical methods of self-help. This process is going on before 
 our eyes. The trades-unions of skilled labor are even now conserv- 
 ative institutions. They represent intelligence in intelligent action. 
 You have all read lately the calm, wise words of Mr. Arthur, the 
 chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Power is 
 safely lodged in such hands. The unions of unskilled labor 
 present, doubtless, the real danger before us. These unions are, 
 
10 
 
 however, also capable of becoming great educational instrumental- 
 ities, and education will bring them wisdom They are fortunately 
 being drawn into great federations, wherein the unions of skilled 
 labor come naturally to the top and take the reins of power. 
 Unskilled labor, comparatively ignorant and distrustful of its em- 
 ployers, will, in time, follow the guidance of skilled labor, and 
 this is always conservative. 
 
 , Such an association as the Knights of Labor, which, because of 
 its comprehensive character seems to threaten so much danger, 
 presents the very safeguard which society needs. So far from 
 standing aloof from the Knights of Labor, it seems to me that 
 all employers of labor ought frankly to recognize this order as an 
 invaluable ally. Its principles are, upon the whole, excellent. 
 The present head of the order may possibly lack the genius of a 
 Napoleon, but his judgment is, upon the whole, sound, and his 
 spirit temperate, and he may turn out a Wellington. ' What could 
 be more excellent advice to our workingmen than that which he 
 has given officially in the secret circular which lately came to light. 
 He is fighting within this National Order the battle of society with 
 the lawless elements which are threatening rebellion. That order 
 has already prevented hundreds of strikes, and for its own preser - 
 vation will tighten discipline, so as to stop local assemblies from 
 precipitating general contests. As it seems to me, employers 
 cannot better help themselves, and society through them, than by 
 lending encouragement to such leaders of the ranks of labor as are 
 honestly striving to turn the immense power of such an order into 
 channels where it will drive the wheels of reform, rather than let it 
 pour forth in floods of anarchy and revolt over the fields of industry. 
 It is true, as the New Jersey Bureau of Labor declares : “Increased 
 organization, whether of masters or of men, or of both, means de- 
 creased war.” Just as international war is becoming so frightfully 
 expensive, so unmanageably huge as to make for peace, so it will be 
 in the strife between capital and labor. 
 
 The best work of these labor organizations, however, I look 
 to see in other fields than this of war. They can become inval- 
 uable educational instrumentalities, immense mutual assurance 
 leagues, bureaus of information concerning the labor market, 
 omnipotent agents in our politics — correcting the present partial 
 legislation, guarding the just rights of labor under law, securing 
 a free field for the natural equation of the problem of wages — and 
 they can prove the nuclei for the great co-operative association out 
 of which, if ever, the dream of a Co-operative Commonwealth is to 
 realize itself. 
 
 Toward organizations discharging such functions there is no 
 need of hostility, and I pray you do not set your faces against them. 
 They have come to stay. Upon your attitude toward them largely 
 depends their attitude toward you and toward society. In simple 
 
17 
 
 self-preservation you must resist vigorously the dictatorial and 
 tyrannous methods which they are at present so largely using. 
 To do this it may be needful for you to combine, as in so many 
 lines of industry you are doing, but let me urge upon you to 
 proceed slowly and cautiously. Act not from feeling but from 
 judgment and conscience. 
 
 As I watch the signs of the times, the greatest danger that I 
 see is in the precipitation of a strife over these organizations such 
 as our country has nev6r known as yet. Within the last fort- 
 night I have observed perhaps a dozen notices of the formation of 
 associations among employers of labor, looking to actions which 
 seem to me certain to make not for peace but for war. A day 
 or two ago I read that one hundred manufacturers of Chicago 
 had determined together to reopen their shops on Monday, offering 
 ten hours’ work for ten hours’ pay, and inviting back their men 
 who were out on strikes ; declaring thfit the failure to return 
 within a week would put the names of absentees upon the “ black- 
 list,” which would bar them from employment in other factories. 
 The Nation , from which I had this item, remarks : “ This system 
 of . self-defense is growing popular.” Popular doubtless, but un- 
 speakably dangerous. 
 
 It goes without saying that manufacturers have the right to 
 black-list incorrigible hands, men who have proven themselves 
 hopelessly vicious. That is the right of those whose interests 
 are common to protect one another against their common enemies. 
 But how easily may this right pass on into a frightful wrong ! 
 How quickly may it become an instrument of tremendous tyranny! 
 How readily may it be used by superintendents and bosses, whom 
 you trust, to punish private quarrels ! How natural that mistakes 
 shall be made concerning the men who are thus proscribed ! How 
 inevitable that it shall mass in the labor market a growing host 
 who beai- the mark of Cain upon their foreheads, who find no 
 avenue of employment open to them, who face starvation, and 
 thus becoming desperate turn their hands against society, who 
 feeling themselves outlaws, act as outlaws! How certain that labor 
 at large will espouse the cause of men whom it will judge to be 
 martyrs, forgiving them their follies and crimes because they are 
 of themselves, backing them by the power of its organizations, 
 answering the black-list with the boycott. This is the danger in 
 the most guarded use of the black-list. What then the unspeak- 
 able danger in any such use of it as jthat which I hear spoken 
 of among you ? To assume to black-list men because of their con- 
 nection with labor unions — is to throw down the gage of war. 
 Ironclad contracts and similar devices to shut out men who maintain 
 their affiliations with labor organizations are simply so many 
 challenges of defiance to a power which needs to be conciliated 
 and wisely guided into paths of peace, rather than to be infu- 
 
18 
 
 riated into open rebellion against society. Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
 declares : “ the right of the workingmen to combine and to form 
 trades-unions is no less sacred than the right of the manufacturer 
 to enter into associations and conferences with his fellows, and it 
 must be sooner or later conceded.” 
 
 You can fight labor organizations if you will, my friends, and 
 perhaps you can crush them — though I doubt that. But have you 
 seriously contemplated what such a war means ? If not, before 
 you go further, I pray you, in the name of humanity, to sit down 
 and study out the issues of the campaign upon which you are about 
 to enter so lightly. 
 
 VIII. I show unto you a more excellent way. There should 
 not be this strife between employer and employee. Do buyers and 
 sellers think of organizing themselves into hostile armies ? In the 
 economic aspect of the matter, employers and employees are simply 
 buyers and sellers of htiman labor. Is it not possible that this 
 bargaining shall be carried on as between human beings, calmly, 
 fairly, peacefully? 
 
 There is a higher aspect of the matter, however, than that 
 of economics. The present trouble grows out of the fact that a 
 necessary human relationship has been degraded into a mere bar- 
 gaining of the market. It is just because this human relationship 
 has had the soul left out of it that its economic body is developing 
 such a dangerous disease. The same Chinese sage whom I have 
 already quoted, wrote again : “ Let the people be employed in a 
 way to secure their happiness ; although wearied they will not 
 murmur.” Employers of labor have neglected the happiness and 
 the welfare of their people, and hence this murmuring. You 
 can easily take the wind out of the sails of agitators. 
 
 I like to use a Faber lead pencil, not only because it is the best 
 pencil that 1 can find, but because its excellence continually brings 
 up to my mind the admirable establishment which produces such 
 work; the great indust lial village of the Fabers in Bavaria, where 
 brains and wealth seek not only to use labor for higher profits, but 
 to lift labor to higher levels of life. The Messrs. Faber are distin- 
 guished for their philanthropy and for their close attention to 
 the mural and physical welfare of their employees. At their own 
 expense* they have established schools and kindergartens, built 
 churches, founded libraries, archer clubs and other organizations 
 for the recreation and the improvement of their woikmen. All the 
 actual necessaries of lifp are purchased by the firm at wholesale, 
 and can be so bought by the men. A savings bank encourages 
 the habit of thrift, and a hospital provides for those who may 
 be disabled, and in old age a small pension secures them from 
 absolute, want Each family may own a home of its own, paying for 
 it in installments in the form of rent. It is needless to say that 
 strikes are unknown and that mutual trust and good-will prevail 
 
19 
 
 Now, this establishment is simply the type of a host of similar 
 establishments which, thank God ! are springing up in every land, 
 under the large-brained and large-hearted management of men 
 whose names will go down to posterity as the truest philanthropists 
 of our age of philanthropy. Such honored names are b* coming 
 familiar in our own land v One of our own citizens testified before 
 the late Senate Committee on Education and Labor, as follows : 
 “We are employing in the neighborhood of four thousand people. 
 We endeavor in all our intercourse with our working people to 
 treat them as human beings, with kindness, and consequently 
 it is very seldom indeed that we ever have any labor disturbances. 
 * * * We frequently give them a holiday or an excursion at 
 
 the expense of the firm. * * * We provide them with medi- 
 
 cal attendance free of charge ; and the senior member of the firm 
 has lately given instructions to engage a suitable building for a 
 library and to supply it with a large number of volumes for the 
 benefit of the factory hands without any cost to them. He has 
 under contemplation the propriety of giving them the benefit of 
 free schools at night.” 
 
 There is a yet higher development of this relationship, in 
 which I find the secret of peace and prosperity. The vice of the 
 present wage system is that it puts the two parties to the bargain 
 on the opposite ends of a seesaw; whereon each side tries 
 to go up by making the other side go down. What is needed for 
 peace and prosperity is to induce some identification of interests, 
 instead of this antagonism of interests. We need not concern 
 ourselves about the ultimate form of the industrial order into which 
 the wage system is to develop, but we may well concern ourselves 
 about the next step forward, in making capital and labor partners 
 instead of enemies. That step forward is what is now known as 
 Industrial Partnership or Profit-sharing — the allowance to the 
 employees of some share in the profits of the establishment, over 
 and above their wages, and pro rata to their wages. 
 
 This is no dream of the theorist, but simply the common 
 sense principle of securing harmony of interests, and thus the 
 greater productiveness which comes from putting “ heart ” back 
 of the hands. It is already in operation in a considerable number 
 of establishments in our country — the most notable experiment 
 being in the gigantic Pillsbury Flour Mills of Minneapolis. What- 
 ever may be said of this experiment, this is certain — as Mr. Howland 
 Hazard writes of his venture in the Peacedale Mills : “ It pays as 
 a lightning rod.” The man of brains and wealth who will repro- 
 duce upon our shores the superb success of M. Godin in Guise ; 
 who will organize an industrial establishment in which his employ- 
 ees shall have the benefit of a model town, while they are being 
 trained under his own direction into the ability to manage the com- 
 pany after he passes away, as their own property bought out by 
 
20 
 
 their gradual purchase of its shares — that man will be hailed by 
 the coming generations as the savior of society. 
 
 Men of brains and wealth, to whom God has given the highest 
 power on earth, the power of leadership, to you I appeal — to your 
 calm reason, to your conscience turned upward unto the face of 
 God. Make yourselves true Captains of Industry, and organize 
 not the war of destruction of whose glories the past has sung, but 
 the peace of production, whose glories the future will sing, while 
 angels bend low from the skies in the chorus : “ Peace on earth, 
 good-will among men.’' 
 
21 
 
 CAPITAL’S VIEW OF THE SITUATION. 
 
 “ Hear the other side ” is a good old rule for an amicable 
 adjustment of differences. It is a rule which each party in the con- 
 test between capital and labor needs to apply to the debate in 
 hand to-day. In this case, as in every other case of which I know 
 anything, there are two sides to the question. 
 
 As I tried to give last Sunday labors answers to capitals com- 
 plaints, so let me try to-day to give capital’s answers to labor's 
 complaints. 
 
 I. Unskilled labor says bluntly to the capitalist : “lam poor. 
 I am wronged in being poor. Somebody has done me this wrong.’' 
 With you, my friends, in the ranks oi* labor, I believe you are 
 wronged in being thus poor. There is a fault somewhere. As 
 Tregarva, in Yeast, said, when watching the life of the peasantry 
 in an English village : “ Somebody deserves to be whopped for all 
 this.” 
 
 Perhaps there are several parties to share in this whopping. 
 Capital asks : “Are you quite sure that one of them is not the man 
 whom you face in the looking-glass ? V 
 
 In that you stand in the ranks of unskilled labor you confess 
 yourself to be comparatively uneducated. This may be chiefly 
 your misfortune. In so far as it is, you have the sincere pity of 
 all men who have had better opportunities. But is it in no sense 
 your own fault ? Have you used the advantages offered in our 
 country and educated yourselves for higher occupations ? If not, 
 blame yourselves first of all. There is always room at the top. 
 The really skilled workman has rarely any need to answer adver- 
 tisements. Even so-called skilled labor is often most unskillful. 
 He who has need to employ mechanics of any kind knows how 
 constantly he must keep his eye upon many of them, to prevent 
 them from making most stupid mistakes. For such men, despite 
 our pity over them, there can be but poor wages, in the present 
 state of things. High wages for poor work would put a premium 
 on ignorance. Nature wiil see that we don’t stand thus in the 
 way of man’s education. Should we try to do so, she will starve 
 society back into general poverty very quickly. 
 
 In that you are of our race, you may be unconsciously guilty 
 of that veritable original sin — laziness. I have stood in Central 
 Park watching laborers trundling their barrows, and learned 
 unsuspected lessons as to man’s capacity of approaching the 
 pace of a 8 nail. I have had some little opportuQity of employing 
 unskilled labor, in my wee bit of a garden, and have been pro- 
 foundly impressed with the disposition of the lads I have hired 
 to do just as little as possible in order to draw their wages. 
 Success is possible in no line to men who work with such a spirit. 
 They must always remain far down in the scale of labor, and be 
 paid according to their deserts. 
 
22 
 
 In that you are like us all, you may be, without knowing it, 
 very improvident. Every housekeeper who is worthy of the name 
 knows the truth of this as touching poor women. Her girls will 
 waste materials in a fashion to nearly drive her crazy, and then 
 complain of her meanness when she tries to rebuke their wasteful- 
 ness. Every employer of unskilled labor, and for that matter 
 many an employer of skilled labor, knows how reckless the hands 
 are of those small economies, those minute carefulnesses which 
 count so heavily in the aggregate, in the mill and factory and work- 
 shop. There is not an employer of labor to-day who could not 
 well enough afford to increase the wages of his hands very consid- 
 erably, if together they chose to be as careful as they readily might 
 be of his materials. The * old adage is true : “ Willful waste 
 makes woeful want.” 
 
 You might save enough in your foods alone to amount to 
 more than the equivalent of the increase of wages which you 
 desire, if you were at pains, so to do. It sounds hard when you 
 find Mr. Edward Atkinson giving you tables of the lowest cost of 
 living. Such figuring may be used as an excuse on the part of 
 avaricious employers to crowd down your wages ; but, for you, 
 it is the part of common sense to learn how you can make your 
 money go as far as possible. Of course, a generous diet is neces- 
 sary for effective work, but the essential elements of nutrition can 
 be supplied in vastly more inexpensive forms and methods than are 
 common among us all. Think of grand old Carlyle writing some of 
 his greatest books upon a diet of oatmeal porridge, and do not 
 talk about its being necessary for you to have the finest cuts, 
 as a butcher of our city told me many of our workingmen insisted 
 upon having. 
 
 Some of your habits, my friends, are even more inexcusably 
 wasteful. The drink bill of our country is some $700,000,0Q0 per 
 annum, a very considerable part of which labor is paying to-day. 
 Men who strike for higher wages can find enough generally for 
 whiskey and tobacco. In reading the testimony of intelligent 
 workingmen, I have been impressed with the recurrence of the 
 opinion that cne of the first things to do to better the condition of 
 labor, as a whole, is to reform its drinking habits. Suppose, as Mr. 
 Powderly advises, you boycott drink. 
 
 Lest you should think that I am speaking from an unsym- 
 pathetic position, let me quote the opinion of an intelligent and 
 thrifty man, who has worked in a mill from boyhood : “ If the 
 
 wife of the factory worker would practice the same economy prac- 
 ticed by an average mechanic’s wife, she would be just as able to 
 make both ends meet without going to the mill. The native Amer- 
 ican has a pleasant sitting-room with carpet and pictures, and 
 piano or organ, and a cozy home-look everywhere, while many 
 a mill operative, with the same wages, lives in a tenement house 
 
23 
 
 with bare walls.” That this is not the opinion of an individual, 
 let the following fact testify. A study of the comparative earnings 
 and savings of labor in Massachusetts and in England shows that, 
 while labor in Massachusetts earns forty per cent, more than labor 
 in England, it saves only four per cent. more. Make what allowance 
 you will for the imperfection of statistics, for our higher cost of 
 living, for our larger social wants, and there remains still a most 
 impressive lesson in this fact. 
 
 In simple justice, I must say these hard truths before passing 
 to other matters. They are preached so much to you workingmen 
 that I do not wonder you grow restive under such preachments. 
 They are used to cover up the back-lying facts of the situation 
 to which I referred last Sunday, to hide the large forces that are 
 working against you in our industrial society. I do not use them 
 in this spirit. I recognize that the conditions of our life to-day, 
 in many respects, induce these very faults in you ; so that I pity 
 while I blame. I recognize, also, that when you have educated 
 yourselves and become industrious and thrifty, you will then be 
 far from having solved the labor problem ; you will have then 
 simply qualified yourselves to grapple with that problem in its 
 harder form. But this I say, with the utmost kindliness, with the 
 profoundest sympathy, but with the frankness of truth — there is 
 no help that can come before self-help. There is no conceivable 
 condition of society that can give you what you need, and what 
 abstractly you ought to have, until you first make yourself fit to 
 receive higher pay by intelligence and industry, and fit to use 
 that higher pay by habits of thrift. 
 
 II. Unskilled labor puts this complaint concerning its pov- 
 erty in a still more direct form against the employer of labor. 
 It says: “ You are rich and I am poor. As I am working for 
 you, you have probably grown rich out of my labor. You have 
 made me poor.” In this form, the feeling does not articulate itself 
 into any definite proposition concerning the relation of profits and 
 wages, but it is simply a vague, blind suspicion of wealth. 
 Now and then you will hear it blurted forth in such a wild, mad 
 outcry of envy as Mary Parson’s speech in Chicago the other day. 
 
 With you, my friends, who stand in the ranks of unskilled 
 labor, I feel that there is a wrong in the fact of much of the wealth 
 that confronts you to-day. But, with the capitalist, I think that 
 the wrongful wealth is not his but the other fellow’s — the man who 
 is neither capitalist nor workingman, but the enemy of both. 
 
 There are by law allowed certain monopolies of the natural 
 resources of the earth, which create vast fortunes that will bear 
 no ethical examination. There are hosts of men, by courtesy called 
 business-men, who are engaged in no legitimate form of business, 
 who are simply preying upon the world of industry and trade, 
 injuring capitalists and workingmen alike. There are gamblers 
 
24 
 
 down-town, and not a lew of them, whose names are well known 
 in our community, who are distinguishable from the u blackleg ” 
 simply in that they deal with stocks instead of dice, and frequent 
 the street and Exchange instead of hanging over the pool-table. 
 Thus some of our greatest fortunes are accumulated, but they are 
 the accumulations, not of the legitimate business-man, but of the 
 speculative thimble-rigger. There are those who neither build the 
 good ship of industry nor sail it, but wreck it. The railroad 
 wrecker has come to be a well recognized form in our society. He 
 has cultivated his business into a fine art and reduced it to a 
 science. He has given it high sounding names and clothed it in 
 garments of respectability. None the less, when analyzed, it is the 
 business of the wrecker. There are, in forms too manifold to 
 trace, the operations of our modern freebooters, who harry every 
 field of industry and trade and pile up their colossal wealth out of 
 the ruins of honest toil, whether of brains or brawn. Capital 
 and labor are equally suffering to-day from these vampires of the 
 business world. These are the men whose openly immoral wealth 
 is teaching labor to regard all wealth as criminal. These are the 
 men who are breeding thunder-storms in our midst, and preparing 
 cyclones which may sweep over our land at any time in devastation. 
 
 But, my laboring friends, do not make the mistake of confusing 
 such wealth with the wealth of legitimate business ; do not identify 
 the gambler and the wrecker and the bucanier with the capitalist. 
 Many employers of labor may also be monopolists of some natural 
 resource, or they may be engaged in side speculations, and thus 
 their wealth may be chiefly not that of the capitalist but that of the 
 monopolist and speculator. Remember, I pray you, that there is no 
 capitalist class in this country, no hard and fast lines of an employ- 
 ing caste. The capitalist of to-day was the workingman of yester- 
 day. Nine out of ten of our great employers of labor were 
 themselves employed by others but a few years ago. I was speak- 
 ing a few days since to a gentleman who employs four thousand 
 men, and he said to me : “ Have we not all pushed our way up from 
 the ranks of labor ? ” This is the glory of our country. 
 
 Now these men who have risen to be employers, rose by culti- 
 vating their minds, and impioving their opportunities to fit them- 
 selves for higher positions. They have climbed the ladder by hard 
 work. As I grow older I may perhaps grow harder, but I certainly 
 grow more convinced of the fact that the difference between men as 
 to outward success, is largely a difference of disposition aud ability 
 for hard work. Successful lawyers and doctors and clergymen, as 
 well as successful manufacturers, are the men who can slave at their 
 work, while their friends loaf and dawdle. The men who have risen 
 are the men who have from the beginning practiced abstinence, who 
 have cultivated simple economies, who have determined to save 
 enough to get ahead. One of our most successful bankers told me 
 
that from the time when he began as a clerk it had been his rule al- 
 ways to keep within his income and to salt something down. 
 Political Economy is right in teaching that capital, originally, is the 
 fruit of abstinence, and that its legitimate profits are the rewards 
 which society pays to the men who deny themselves in the present 
 for the sake of the future. 
 
 Doubtless it is becoming ever harder for men to rise out of the 
 ranks of labor, as the stress of competition becomes fiercer, as the 
 plant of any industry becomes more costly, as the processes of 
 manufacturing become more subtle, and as the conditions of the 
 market become more involved ; but the way upward is yet open for 
 any man who has the clear grit to rise. Doubtless this very ca- 
 pacity, in which lies the secret of success, is one of the richest gifts 
 of nature — the boon of the few and not the common heritage of the 
 many. Those who have it must then look down from their superior 
 advantages with tender human sympathy for those who have come 
 into life dowered with a mortgage from the ignorance and dullness 
 and feebleness of earlier generations. On the other hand, labor 
 must recognize that the foundation of the wealth won by employers 
 of labor is laid by these honest qualities, which entitle them not to 
 our hatred but to our admiration and imitation — at least as touch- 
 ing these characteristics. Garfield said that his career opened on the 
 day wherein he read an essay of Emerson, of which he remembered 
 nothing but this one saying : “We are all of us as lazy as we dare 
 to be.” The hard look of life is largely the discipline of Mother 
 Nature to forbid our daring to be as lazy as we wish. 
 
 III. Skilled labor puts its complaint against capital more de- 
 finitely and personally. “ Labor,” it says, “ is the creator of all 
 wealth, therefore, it ought to get all wealth. Labor is wronged to 
 the extent of capital’s profits.” This is the pith of German Socialism, 
 in its more radical forms. You will find it clearly stated in Gron- 
 lund’s “ Modern Socialism.” If this be true, then the term which 
 Gronlund applies to the profits of capital is literally accurate — they 
 are “ fleecings.” 
 
 Now in what sense is it true that labor is the creator of all 
 wealth 1 In a general sense it is indisputable, but in this sense it 
 is axiomatic. The raw material of all wealth is found in the earth — 
 the land and water. None of the products of the earth, however, 
 constitute wealth, save as labor is applied to them. The pioneer 
 has to fell the trees that grow in the virgin forests, and catch the 
 fish that swarm in the waters, and hunt the game that roam through 
 its glades. From this point, the amount of labor necessary to pro- 
 duce wealth increases as man’s wants multiply and rise. 
 
 In our state of society all wealth is the result of three factors 
 — land, capital, and labor. One must have land to cultivate or on 
 which to plant his factory ; he must have capital to buy seed and 
 agricultural tools and to put up fences and barns, or to rear the fac- 
 
26 
 
 tory and stock it with machinery ; and then he must have more labor 
 than his own pair of hands, to work, his farm or to run his factory. 
 One naan may own the land, while another may supply the capital, 
 and many others must contribute their labor. The profits of the 
 enterprise must then be divided, in some ratio between these three 
 partners. Land does not come into our consideration at present, 
 as the immediate disturbance is between the other two partners, 
 capital and labor. 
 
 What then does labor mean when it declares that it creates all 
 wealth ? It surely cannot mean that, as between the individual em- 
 ployer of labor and his several laborers, the whole wealth of any in- 
 dustry is created by the laborers. The most hobby- ridden theorists 
 must admit the fact that the employer of labor contributes a very 
 essential part to the production. 
 
 The building in which the hands gather, he has reared, and the 
 machinery which stocks the building, he has bought and set up. 
 
 He is entitled to his interest on this plant. There is risk involved 
 in this outlay of capital, and this must be secured by insurance. 
 
 When the plant is established, the business must be organized 
 and directed. This labor of superintendence is entitled to its wages. 
 This is genuine labor, though the labor of brains, and essential to 
 production. To make a success of any large enterprise to-day, 
 there must be a genius of command which is no more common in 
 industry than in war. There must be a knowledge of men and of 
 affairs, which fev of us possess. There must be the capacity to 
 sweep in a bird’s-eye vision a market which is becoming as wide as 
 the world ; to forecast tendencies, to form correct generalizations, 
 to decide with unerring judgment questions which are subtle and 
 complicated and which, for the most part, cannot be reasoned out 
 but must be divined instinctively. There must be immense re- 
 sources of push and ' enterprise, unfailing supplies of energy, in- 
 domitable perseverance and a host of allied qualities. There must 
 be added to all these qualities a minute and exact knowledge of the 
 processes involved in the industry in question. I know of one 
 great manufacturer who understands personally every process 
 carried on in his great establishment, and is able to step into any 
 department and with his own hands do what is there to be done. 
 
 The absence of any one of these qualities may make the differ- 
 ence between failure and success ; that is, between no profits at all 
 and large profits ; that is, still further, between no wages, or possi- 
 bly low wages, and high wages. All these factors go to the making 
 of any wealth in industry, quite as much, to say the least, as the toil 
 of the hands. All must be paid for. . Their pay is drawn in the 
 shape of profits. In taking this pay there is no wrong done but • 
 simply justice rendered ; no robbery committed but service paid. 
 
 The function of brains in industry is increasing all the time, 
 as our processes become more refined and subtle and complicated, 
 
27 
 
 and as trade becomes larger and more complex. Science and Art 
 are increasingly entering into industry and in the truest sense mak- 
 ing the value of the products turned out from the factory. There 
 are hosts of industries to-day where the most important factor is 
 the chemist’s knowledge and skill. What makes one brewery turn 
 out beer that everybody wants while another brewery turns out beer 
 that nobody wants, is a secret of chemistry — a secret which the one 
 party has found' and the other party missed. In the one brewery 
 there is a thriving business, large profits and high wages ; while the 
 other barely covers expenses and is compelled to reduce wages, and 
 at last to close up. Cannot the workmen in the successful brewery 
 see that what puts work into their hands and wages into their 
 pockets is the product of brains more than of brawn ; that the wealth 
 is in the last analysis produced by thought rather than by muscle ? 
 I pass sometimes a great establishment near Broadw r ay, which has 
 acquired a national reputation for the beauty of its artistic de- 
 signs and the thorough workmanship of its wares, and I never do 
 so without thinking of the great-brained man who literally put his 
 life into that establishment, coining his fine thoughts into stuffs 
 which everybody wants and for which everybody is willing to pay 
 high prices. Cannot the workingmen in the great factory which 
 feeds that store understand well enough that, however cunning 
 the skill of their fingers, they never would have the wages that they 
 get but for the more cunning skill of the mind of the artist whose 
 genius built up that great establishment % 
 
 How pitiful then sounds the folly of such talk as one hears in 
 many a labor meeting to-day. One of the best known labor champ- 
 ions, in a little pamphlet which has had a wide circulation, I believe, 
 •speaks of the large profits which employers make — “ without doing 
 anything but superintend the work.” Thus the seaman, clinging to 
 the rigging in the midwinter’s gale, may look down upon the cap- 
 tain, standing calmly on the bridge, while the great steamer ploughs 
 her way through the fog banks, and say to himself : “ That man is 
 robbing me by pocketing ten times my pay without doing anything 
 but superintend the ship.” Thus the private, tramping across 
 heavy fields, may look up to the general, as he rides by the column, 
 with envious eye, and say to himself : “ He gets thousands a year 
 for doing nothing but superintend the army.” But then, seaman 
 and soldier, in talking so, would be very foolish, would they not ? 
 When you do any job, my working friend, that pays you well, 
 which does the most labor, your head or your hands ? Apply the 
 parable to the body social, and be sensible enough not be carried 
 away by such folly as Mr. Martin Irons contributed the other day 
 to the Congressional Committee. “ What do you think,” asked one 
 of the committee, “ about labor producing wealth ? ” To which 
 this worthy would-be dictator of American workingmen replied : 
 “Labor produces everything, and capital products nothing? 
 
IV. Labor when sensible — and our American workingman on 
 the whole is as level-headed as any other member of the community 
 — cannot but admit that capital is entitled to its share in the 
 wealth produced by industry. It insists however that capital gets 
 too big a share. It says: “You employers of labor ought to be 
 paid, but you are too highly paid. We must cut down your pay.” 
 This is plainly a matter to be determined, first of all, by hard 
 facts. As I said last Sunday, we have not the data upon which we 
 can decide off-hand this question of the present relation of profits 
 and wages. We have plenty of figures, such as they are, but they 
 are unreliable. It is entirely too soon, therefore, to go on to raise 
 the other question, which is being so fiercely mooted in certain 
 quarters, as to the justice of capitals profits. We should first know 
 accurately what they are, before we try to determine what they ought 
 to be. I am quite prepared to admit with you, my working friend, 
 that capital probably does get, at many times, and in many lines, 
 an utterly disproportionate share of industry. But, on the other 
 hand, capital replies: “Do not judge all by a few ; do not judge 
 all years by some years. Some of us are are making large profits 
 and others of us are making nothing. In some years we all make 
 handsome profits and in other years we all lose heavily.” 
 
 These are cold, hard facts, which every workingman is capa- 
 ble of recognizing for himself. How many an employer to-day 
 has locked up in his costly plant the fruit of years of toil, getting 
 from it all barely enough to cover expenses, and utterly unable to 
 sell out as he would be so glad to do. One who is listening to me 
 as I speak, situated after this fashion, went to his hands, a year 
 or so ago, and offered to make over to them the mill, as it stood, if 
 they would form an association and guarantee him 6 per cent, on* 
 his investment. They declined his offer, and were probably wise 
 in doing so. Have you any idea, my friends, how many man- 
 ufacturers not only make nothing but lose everything ? One of our 
 great dailies stated recently that about 95 per cent, of those who 
 go into industry fail. In trade and commerce, I believe, about 97 
 per cent. fail. Now are you going to judge the 95 per cent, in in- 
 dustry and the 97 per cent, in trade and commerce by the 5 and 
 3 per cent, who succeed ? You would be far less sensible than I 
 take you to be if you do. 
 
 But, granting that capital’s profits are high, you must recog- 
 nize the fact, my friends, that we have all to pay high prices 
 for the best things. You can get a coat that will fit you like a 
 bag and will drop to pieces on your shoulders for next to nothing, 
 but if you want one to fit you gracefully and to last long you will 
 have to pay well for it. You artisans and mechanics can get help- 
 ers for a song — but you will probably kick them out of the way be- 
 fore the day is over. They will * hinder you more than they 
 will help you. 
 
29 
 
 You can hire superintendents of a sort very cheaply. * There 
 are lots of men standing idle in this city who think that they have 
 brains enough to run the biggest industries, and that the world 
 has utterly failed to recognize their genius. Suppose a few hun- 
 dred of you club together and go into the capital market to-morrow 
 and employ one of these uncrowned kings of industry, that “ the 
 rod of empire might have swayed.” How far will he lead you 
 to financial success, in the terrific strife of competition, out of 
 which only the best brains and the strongest wills are wresting 
 victory ? You are altogether too sensible to trust yourselves to any 
 such sort of brains, however cheaply you can get them. If then 
 you want to hire the best brains for your superintendence you 
 will have to pay for them proportionately to their superiority. The 
 best brains must always have the highest prices. Their scarcity 
 and service fix their figures. To which part of your body does 
 nature send its fullest flow of blood? Which does it build up at 
 greatest cost to the system? That little mass of coiled, gray tissue 
 which you call your brain taxes the body infinitely more to produce 
 and maintain it than both hands with all their fingers. 
 
 There is a hard look in this statement. But then there is a 
 hard look in nature, too, my friends— not the hard look of an unfeel- 
 ing tyrant, but the hard look of a mother who loves us enough 
 not to pamper and coddle us but to whip us into effort and to diet 
 us into health. Apart from all their other and higher functions in 
 civilization, brains, as we have seen, form the chief factor in the 
 production of wealth. Just as the struggle for existence becomes 
 harder, so does the necessity of more brains and stronger brains 
 become greater. Nature puts her premium on the development 
 of brains by rewarding them higher. When a gardener wants to 
 force forward some Black Hamburg’s, he enriches the soil and 
 stimulates the growth of the vine, and by the craft of his art turns 
 the energies of the organism into the direction of grape-bearing. 
 Society does precisely so with the growth of brains. 
 
 I do not at all mean to say that capital may not take an ex- 
 cessive share of the profits of industry. This is a question to be 
 determined between the two partners in all industry, and it ought 
 to be determined calmly and peacefully, like all disputes between 
 sensible men, and would be so, doubtless, were the condition of 
 one of the parties not so often helpless if he retired from the 
 business. Society ought then to secure for you the conditions 
 in which you would find a fair field on which to contest this issue, 
 while it re-enforces the moral sense of the employer by the press- 
 ure of a public opinion demanding justice. 
 
 Y. . Labor puts in one final complaint against capital. “ Grant- 
 ing,” it says, “ all that capital has replied to my previous charges, 
 it remains indisputable that we are natural enemies, one of the 
 other. The rewards of our conjoint industry have to be divided 
 
30 
 
 between us, and profits and wages must therefore stand in an in- 
 verse ratio to each other. Whatever my employer makes, I lose ; 
 whatever I make, my employer loses. Our interests are antag- 
 onistic. They cannot be reconciled by any soft, smooth talk.” 
 
 There is, of course, a certain truth in this comp aint, but it is 
 an exaggerated truth. That truth is simply the fact which is 
 common to many other relationships than that of capital and labor. 
 
 Every time yo u enter a shop to buy som thing, you and 
 the shopkeeper stand over the counter in very much the same 
 relation in which you and your employer stand. You two are 
 buying and* selling ; each one trying to make the best bargain for 
 himself; each one knowing perfectly well that whatever the other 
 man makes in the bargain is made out of him ; and yet you do 
 not leap at one another’s throat’s as mortal foes. You are a seller 
 of labor and your employer is a buyer . of labor. A perfectly 
 equitable bargain is of course to be desired ; but it is to be sought 
 in very much the same way that a bargain in the shop is sought. 
 There is just such an inverse ratio, between profits and wages as 
 there is between the shopkeeper and the customer. If these parties 
 manage to carry on their bargainings in a friendly way, why 
 should you strike an attitude of irreconcilable antagonism toward 
 the man who seeks to buy the labor that you offer for sale % 
 
 In every firm, the partners stand in the same relationship in 
 which you and your employer stand. Five lawyers in a firm must 
 needs divide in some proportion their joint profits ; but they do 
 not dream of counting themselves one another’s enemies because 
 what each one takes from the common income of the firm has to 
 be deducted from the sum divisible among the other four members. 
 They do not take one another by the throats as sworn foes, but 
 rather join hands to make the biggest possible amount for the 
 firm; content to divide up according to the relative services of each 
 one ; the senior member, whose name and experience and ability 
 float the firm, taking naturally the lion’s share, but securing for 
 each junior member an income which he could not of himself have 
 won. 
 
 The fact is that you and your employer are in as real a sense 
 partners as the members of a legal firm. You are working together 
 to make common profits, which then of course ought to be divided 
 between you in the ratio of your services to the common concern, 
 just as the profits of the legal firm are divided. It would be very 
 well for you if you could draw at once the profits of capital and 
 labor, as it would be very well for the young lawyer if he could 
 draw at once the profits of the senior member of the firm with 
 his own profits as the junior member, just taken into partnership ; 
 but if you must have a partner, you must be content to give him 
 his share, and be sensible enough to work together with him 
 heartily as an ally and not as an enemy. This is precisely the 
 position to-day. 
 
31 
 
 Whatever may be the future of the firm of capital and labor — 
 and I for one certainly believe that the silent partner must be taken 
 into a larger share in the concern — as long as it is a firm, so long 
 that is as capital and labor are two parties and not one, so long 
 will it be the part of common sense to recognize that the firm’s 
 interests are common interests, that both parties are partners, and 
 that the more that they make together the more there will be to 
 divide up between them. 
 
 With all my heart I wish that you could dispense with the cap- 
 italist to-day and be your own employer. Society at large must 
 wish this, because it would be for the greatest good of the greatest 
 number. Dispense with him just as fast as you can. But while 
 you need him treat him squarely as a partner. Are you ready 
 now to dispense with him ? Have you money enough laid by to 
 break up the firm and set up for yourself ? Estimate the cost of the 
 ^plant in your factory, and answer this question for yourself. Have 
 you collectively, in your labor organizations, sufficient savings to 
 drop out the capitalist from the firm ? I suspect you often have, 
 if you only knew it. A certain savings-bank in Lowell had large 
 deposits from the workingmen of the city. They lay there, 
 drawing their small interest. There came along a bright, enterpris- 
 ing man, having little money, but the ability to use money — one of 
 the capitalizers who are rapidly becoming a distinct class in the 
 country. He borrowed a large sum from this savings bank and 
 set up a factory, into which came many of the very men whose 
 deposits he had lumped together and used to make himself an 
 employer of their labor. Might they not have associated them- 
 selves and become their own employers or might they not have 
 hired him as their manager % 
 
 The probable reason that they did not make themselves their 
 own employers was that they were conscious of lacking the power 
 of association necessary for such a business, and the individual 
 energy and experience and power of command essential to its 
 success. It is the lack of these factors which has made co- operative 
 production so slightly successful hitherto. There must be a head 
 to a factory, a head with natural powers of command. An army 
 cannot well be run by a committee. That method of management 
 has been tried in the face of the enemy, and the results have not 
 been very brillj^nt. Would you like to trust yourself on a trans- 
 atlantic steamer, that was sailed by a committee of the crew ? In 
 some form or other, for years to come, industry must find natural 
 leaders. Those leaders may hire their men or their men may hire 
 them — as our workingmen doubtless will come to do, when they 
 have developed their powers of association higher. 
 
 Until that time, they must of necessity be content to be taken 
 into silent partnership by capital — that is, by the few men who 
 have laid by enough to found the costly plarits that are essential 
 
to modern industry, and who have developed mental power enough 
 to organize and manage the large and complex affairs of modern 
 production. Until the time comes that you can offer yourself work, 
 somebody must offer work to you. Is the man who now offers 
 you the work in which you are to find bread and butter your 
 enemy, or is he your friend ? What will you do just now without 
 him ? Suppose you make the firm too hot for him ? He can go 
 out of the business, and live perhaps on his income or turn his 
 principal into some other enterprise. What are you going to 
 do if you break up the firm ? In the present state of society your 
 condition would be helpless. The fact that it would be so is one of 
 the most alarming features of our social order ; one that calls upon 
 us all to see that it is corrected, so that the natural equation of the 
 problem of distributing the rewards of industry may be worked 
 out freely and fairly. But, meanwhile, do not shut your eyes to 
 the facts of the situation. 
 
 Will it pay you to make it so hot for your employer as to disgust 
 him with the concern ? You can doubtless worry him well-nigh 
 to death, but how much will that increase the productivity of the 
 firm in which you are a partner? A certain woman, who has 
 some prominence among the Knights of Labor as an eloquent 
 champion of the order, in the course of a recent conversation kept 
 repeating with a malicious tone the refrain : “ We can injure the 
 manufacturers.” Judging from the action of some of your associ- 
 ates over in Long Island City lately, this sister seems to have 
 expressed your views of the way to bring capital to terms. Doubt- 
 less you can ail injure the manufacturers, but have you worked 
 out in your minds the problem of how their injury is going to 
 benefit you ? Are they to be thus made more friendly to you ? 
 Are they to be thus made more able to allow you bigger wages ? 
 You can ruin them if you will — but then when they close up their 
 mills where are you going to be ? Do you make much by lying idle ? 
 My hands can easily enough injure my head, and knock what little 
 brains I have into a very inactive condition, but I am not aware 
 that my hands will be any the richer in warm, red blood or in sup- 
 plies of nervous energy, because of this heroic treatment of my 
 very defective head. 
 
 So long as you are obliged to seek an alliance with capital, 
 remember, I pray you, that, as Chief Arthur lately assured you, your 
 partner has rights that you are bound to respect, and which you 
 must needs respect if you expect him to work with you. 
 
 Your employers plant is his property. You have no right 
 to injure it. 
 
 Your employer has the right to control the business that is 
 carried on upon the plant which he has provided and by the knowl- 
 edge and experience which he supplies. It is not fair to expect 
 him to carry on the business in which he has risked his capital by 
 
the dictation of the men who may be with him to-day and may 
 have left him to-morrow. 
 
 You have a right to refuse to work for him if the terms are 
 not made satisfactory to you ; but you have no right to impose 
 yourself upon him against his will. I believe thoroughly that 
 labor has the right to claim from society at large that it shall have 
 a chance of being employed by others or of finding employment 
 for itself. That is the right to “ life ” which is one of man's un- 
 alienable rights, according to our Declaration of Independence. 
 No people can afford to have a large body of labor shut per- 
 manently out from the opportunity of self-support. But this is 
 quite a different question from the right of the individual laborer 
 upon the individual employer. 
 
 Your employer has the right to seek other labor, if you cannot 
 agree with him as to terms. You have no right whatever, legal 
 or moral, to shut out from him other men who may be standing 
 without employment, and who are ready to accept employment 
 upon the terms which he offers. I understand well enough your 
 idea in committing this mistake. As I have already intimated, 
 the existence of a large body of unemployed labor is a constant 
 menace to labor at large. All who care for the welfare of labor 
 should join hands to secure some means of minimizing this danger. 
 But if there be other men in this city willing to take the place 
 of the strikers on the Third Avenue road — however unjustifiable 
 the action of the company may have been — the conductors and 
 drivers who have left the employ of that company can keep them 
 out of such work only by a direct encroachment upon the right 
 of the employer. 
 
 The employer has a right to demand that, if you are dissatified 
 with the terms of partnership, you shall not break up the partner- 
 ship firm without due notice, and never without an attempt, first 
 of all, to effect a peaceful adjustment of any differences. This is 
 the simple, necessary law of any partnership — without which its 
 continuance is impossible. You have the perfect right, my friend, 
 to strike. You can often win your point by striking. The notion 
 of most people that strikes are almost universally failures you 
 know to be far from the fact. The last Report of the Bureau of 
 Statistics of Labor of our own State shows that out of 222 strikes 
 in the city last year only 34 failed, while 59 are still pending 
 and 129 have succeeded, in whole or in part. But you ought to 
 feel more keenly than any one else the frightful cost with which 
 such success is won. Do you think that the increase of wages 
 won by the strikes of this year has counter-balanced the loss 
 of wages caused by the idleness of the strikers ? Strikes, as the 
 habitual method of enforcing the demands of labor, would be ruin- 
 ous to the production out of which all wages must come. Let a 
 chronic state of striking be induced and how much capital would 
 
34 
 
 be invested in industry? Already the business boom which wa£ 
 anticipated for this spring has been lost by capital’s fear to take 
 up any contracts in the present attitude of labor. How much 
 more will the aggregate production of the year have to divide 
 between the industrial partners by this epidemic of strikes ? The 
 strike may and probably must be the last resource of labor, just as 
 war is the last resource of nations. But, like war, it is too costly to 
 resort to without first trying other means of adjusting differences. 
 
 Your employer has the right to the good-will of his business. 
 You have doubtless the right to use moral suasion to draw away 
 custom from him, and to thus punish him for his bad treatment 
 of you ; but you have no right whatever to step beyond the limits 
 of moral suasion and, by the tyranny of public opinion or by the 
 fear of physical violence, drive away his ciistom from him. The 
 boycott is a weapon cf tremendous power, doubtless, but it may 
 become the power of a reign of terror. In some of the forms in 
 which it has been used lately it is a direct interference with the 
 proprietary rights of a business, which law cannot allow. In 
 these forms, it is an un-American method of redressing grievances, 
 which this people will always be quick to condemn, as has been 
 seen this spring when our citizens rallied to the support of Mrs. 
 Gray. 
 
 Your employer has the right to demand that you shall not 
 arbitrarily limit his power of production. You have of course a 
 right to say how many hours you will work for him, and to decline 
 to work beyond that time; but you have no right whatever to 
 deny to him the use of his plant beyond the limit which you fix 
 for yourself, nor to deny to other workmen the use of their 
 power of labor to any extent that they may feel disposed to use it. 
 The employer’s right here will prove to ^e your interest. 
 
 There is no greater fallacy current among our workingmen to- 
 day than the notion that they can improve their condition by 
 lessening the production of the country. On every hand one hears 
 the talk that what is needed is a better distribution of wealth. 
 Doubtless — and let us all join to aid in this more equable, more 
 brotherly distribution, by the force of public opinion and by law, 
 wherever it is possible to use the strong hand of legislation 
 wisely. But that which first is needed is greater production — that 
 is, more to distribute fairly. Do you think we have enough to sat- 
 isfy all wants, in our present aggregate wealth? Were our 
 present annual increase of wealth divided up equally among our 
 people, every man and woman and child would get 50 cents a day. 
 Is that your idea of the millennium? Would we not have a little 
 jollier millennium if the share to each of us was a dollar a day ? 
 You have the right to eat no more than half a meal — but you do 
 not dream of growing fat upon this right. 
 
 But I may not push these illustrations further. What is 
 
35 
 
 needed now is that labor and capital shall recognize each in the 
 other a partner — an ally and not a foe, a friend and not an en- 
 emy; and that they shall work together for their common good. 
 
 I maintained last Sunday the right of labor to organize on 
 behalf of its juht claims, and therefore, I may to day, with the 
 greater fran sness, urge labor not to turn the mighty organizations 
 which it is developing into mere means of attack upon the power 
 which after ail is less a rival than an associate. I warn you, my 
 friends, distinctly, that if some of the methods which you are 
 pursuing at present are persisted in, you will goad capital into 
 opposing organizations — who:-e power will be more tremendous 
 and may be more despotic than anything you have hitherto 
 confronted. Watch your papers and you will see the signs of 
 the times. If you have such difficulty in contending with capital 
 when it is unorganized, what will be the task of grappling with 
 employers when they are banced together in compact association? 
 
 VI. I have thus sought to-day to pass in review labor’s 
 complaints against capital and capital’s answers to those complaints. 
 Labor feels itself wronged by being poor — it is urged first of 
 all to right the wrongs which it is committing against itself. Labor 
 looks with suspicion on wealth — it should distinguish between 
 the legitimate wealth which the employer wins by honest industry 
 and the respectable robberies of the freebooters of the business 
 world. Labor claims to create all wealth and demands its rights — 
 it must learn that brains as w r ell as brawn work, that capital as well 
 as labor produces, and be content to share the rewards of the 
 common toil. Labor complains that more than a fair share goes 
 to the employer — it is reminded that brains are dear and that it 
 must expect to pay highly for the high quality of the service ren- 
 dered by the employer. Labor insists that capital is its natural 
 enemy, between whom and itself there must be strife — it is pointed 
 to the fact that the two are partners, who should work together 
 for their common interests. 
 
 At the close of the Franco-Prussian war, Ernest Kenan ad- 
 dressed an impassioned appeal to his countrymen to face the facts 
 of the situation, however hard those facts might be. His country- 
 men thought him unpatriotic, because he told them the truth. None 
 the less, they have come slowly to recognize that there is no pros- 
 perity possible in shirking facts, and that he was their true friend 
 in opening their eyes to the realities of the situation. 
 
 My words may have seemed hard to you, my friends, who are 
 workingmen. God knows I have no wish to speak hardly. My 
 heart is full of the sincerest sympathy for you My soul is stirred 
 with indignation when I contemplate the ways in which society has 
 handicapped you in the race for life. My poor powers are at the 
 service of your cause. All true men feel for you, and long to lend a 
 hand in bettering your condition. To secure for you the best 
 possible lot is coming to be recognized as the task of the State. 
 
36 
 
 But, none the less, nothing is to be gained by blinking facts. In so 
 far as you are at fault for your condition, you must help yourselves 
 before other help can be of real assistance to you. Instead of 
 cherishing illusions, you must prick your bubbles and find out what 
 you hold in your hand. You must thus face the truth that, what- 
 ever the future may have in store for you, the present binds up la- 
 bor with capital in common interests. 
 
 The fight that you have to make is not so much . against capital, 
 as with capital against your* common foes. The fact is that capital 
 and labor are both in the same boat to-day and are trying to make 
 headway against unfavorable currents that are setting in from many 
 quarters. Your wages are low, and your employer’s profits are 
 small. You find little chance for work because he finds little chance 
 for safe and profitable investments. Let me give you a striking 
 illustration of this fact. You have all noted doubtless the danger- 
 ous revolt of labor in Belgium, lately. The whole of the little king- 
 dom has been agitated by this convulsion. It turns out that the 
 miners with whom the struggle originated were living on bread, 
 without even butterine — upon the very verge of starvation ; while 
 the capital invested in the mines was reaping only 2 per cent. The 
 London Times is my authority for this statement. Let capital and 
 labor pool their issues and turn their combined forces against their 
 common foes. What these are I propose at least to indicate hereafter. 
 
 Friends, you know well the story of the exodus of the children 
 of Israel. How sad the tale of their bondage in Egypt ! How 
 heroic their resolve to free themselves ! How bright their visions 
 of the promised land, a land “ flowing with milk and honey ! ” 
 How near seemed that land, yet how long it took them to gain it, 
 wandering about in the wilderness of Arabia for a whole generation ! 
 There was a short cut across the desert, but, for good reason per- 
 haps, they took the wrong road. 
 
 Heed well that ancient story. You sigh “ by reason of the 
 bondage ” of our industrial system. You lift your eyes to the 
 promised land of which your prophets are telling you : “ a land 
 whose stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig 
 brass ; ” the land wdiose title vests in the Lord, that it may be the 
 common heritage of his children, to the end “ that there be no poor 
 among you.” No mirage, that vision of the promised land, but a 
 substantial Canaan, which you shall yet win if you will. You vow 
 to free yourselves from the task-master’s lash and win your freedom, 
 and you band yourselves together for the heroic effort of the new 
 War of Economic Independence. You have allies waiting to help 
 you. The Omnipotent one hath heard your groaning — He will 
 come down to deliver you. Your Moses even now lies in some ark 
 of bulrushes. Judgments mighty and terrible will be wrought for 
 your deliverance. But when your great host goes forth from Egypt, 
 see that ye take not the wrong road to Canaan lest ye wander in 
 the wilderness forty years ! 
 
37 
 
 SOCIETY’S VIEW OF THE SITUATION. 
 
 There is a forgotten man back of the present controversy be- 
 tween capita] and labor. His name is Society. There are about 
 50,000 manufacturers in the country, and about 3,800,000 men and 
 women employed in manufacturing, mechanical, and mining indus 
 tries. The population of the country is over 50,000,000. The 
 forgotten man is a bigger man than either party in the present 
 contest. 
 
 "Without him, neither of them would find much value in the 
 result of their combined production. Society at large makes the 
 demand which calls forth all supply, and creates the security with- 
 out which there would be no wealth. Society has a right to a 
 voice in this dispute. 
 
 The forgotten man is really capital under another name and 
 labor in changed clothes. Employer and employee alike are more 
 than either employer and employee. Each is a consumer as well 
 as a producer. Each stands in many other relationships than those 
 involved in the problem of capital and labor. Each is a citizen of 
 a great nation, a participator in a noble civilization. Each has need 
 to rise above the personal aspects of the present struggle and view 
 it from the stand-point of society. 
 
 Whatever makes life worth living, society has embodied in her 
 institutions, and on behalf of these she lifts up her voice to-day 
 against the mad strife of her own children. If I owned a house and 
 rented two rooms out to different families, I should decidedly 
 object to their quarrelling so savagely as to endanger my property. 
 However indisposed to interfere in their quarrel, I should not 
 stand silently by when I saw them setting fire to my premises. 
 
 I. The immediate evils of the present disagreement between 
 capital and labor are serious enough. This strife is crippling the 
 resources of the workingmen of the country and shrinking the 
 profits of capital. It is checking production on every hand and 
 arresting the natural revival of business which was due this spring. 
 It is, as was lately seen in St. Louis, laying an embargo upon 
 the general traffic of the land and at times actually blockading the 
 leading ports of our internal commerce. It is frightening off capi- 
 tal from new investments which it would otherwise be now seeking. 
 It is accumulating in the labor market an increasing body of un- 
 employed or partially employed men, whose inability to demand 
 continues to yet further to depress the productive power of the 
 country, while it leaves themselves in bitter want. It is thus im- 
 poverishing the nation. It is killing the goose that lays the golden 
 egg. Society at large is suffering in this arrest of trade. The 
 development of our civilization is thus temporarily checked. The 
 nobler life of man languishes in the economic stagnation. A 
 continuance of the present contest means a prolongation of the 
 
38 
 
 industrial depression, whose consequences will therefore be far- 
 
 reaching and lamentable. 
 
 II. Nor is this all the evil. Acute inflammation prolonged 
 develops chronic diseases. Angry words pass readily into angrier 
 blows, and the quarrel may end in a fight in which society’s prem- 
 ises may easily be wrapt in flames. On the one hand labor is 
 organizing as never before, and is using its newfound power 
 to deal summarily with its supposed enemy, capital. On the 
 other band capital is also organizing. When one is hit hard be- 
 tween the eyes it is a natural impulse to hit back with equal vigor. 
 Capital at present is clinching its fists to deliver its return blows 
 straight from the shoulder. The lock-out -is answering the strike, 
 the black-list is replying to the boycott, manufacturing and trade 
 associations are drawing up into line over against labor unions. 
 Each further development of aggressiveness on either side will 
 naturally provoke yet further aggressiveness on the opposite side. 
 The immediate outlook is therefore stormy. We may be entering 
 an era of social as well as physical cyclones. 
 
 Capital and labor alike may do things in hot blood which the 
 sober sense of either would utterly condemn. Local anarchy may 
 easily be precipitated out of such a strife. 
 
 For the first time in the history of our country, anarchy is be- 
 ing preached among us as a gospel. Missionaries of the old world 
 have come with these good tidings of hatred. A moral epidemic is 
 sweeping over our western civilization, a madness of despair. A 
 savant like Elise Recluse and an aristocrat like Prince Krapotkine 
 are preaching this bad-spell with the fervor of enthusiasts. Passing 
 strange as it may seem to us, these men are teaching the poor that 
 there is no hope save in the utter destruction of the social order as 
 it exists. When our present tyrannous institutions are swept away, 
 so they tell the people who listen to them, then there may rise a 
 new order of plenty. When such men preach this gospel is it any 
 wonder that the ignorant and hungry are carried away by this dream 
 of despair ? * 
 
 Within the last two weeks I have received a couple of letters 
 plainly avowing anarchism as the last resource of labor. If you 
 know anything of the wilder labor sheets of this country, you will 
 understand the significance of such letters. For years past, men 
 have been taught to prepare for just such vengeance against society. 
 Paris never heard more frantic appeals to class-hatred than our 
 great cities have heard within the last half decade. This wretched 
 creature. Most, has not only gone about freely uttering his inflam- 
 matory appeals,' but has deliberately given to the public a book 
 entitled “ The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, an Introductory 
 Hand-book to the Preparation and Use of Nitro-Glycerine, Dyna- 
 mite, Gun Cotton, Bombs, Poison, etc.” This fiendish book even 
 stoops to give lessons in the warfare of the savages. It directs 
 
34 
 
 concerning the use of poisoned weapons. “ The best of all poisons,” 
 he says, u is the poison of the dead human body.” Do not let us 
 blind our eyes to the fact that just such moral monsters have 
 been begotten by society, creatures of whom Guiteau was a type, 
 men half lunatics, half knaves, and then armed with the weapons of 
 the Titans. 
 
 In themselves, such fiends in human shape can have little 
 power, but, given a state of things such as that into which we are 
 drifting — hosts of idle men proscribed and -unable to find work, 
 hungry and savage with want — and these monsters have the follow- 
 ing out of which they may readily precipitate disorders vastly worse 
 than any our land has seen. Well says Most’s paper : u Five hun- 
 dred revolutionists, each provided with half a dozen bombs and 
 working in concert could produce such a panic in a great city that 
 a small number of determined men might get possession of all com- 
 manding points.” Back of such half-crazy creatures are associa- 
 tions which for several years have been deliberately and systemati- 
 cally carrying on the propaganda of just such ‘principles ; societies 
 organizing the more desperate elements of labor for a violent i evo- 
 lution. A wide-spread strike at any time may give the opportunity 
 for which these anarchists lie in wait. We saw in our own city 
 within a few weeks how near we might thus be to the most serious 
 disorders. New York cannot surely have forgotten so soon the 
 dreadful scenes of the draft riot ! The country cannot surely have 
 forgotten already how near it stood to the verge of a frightful chaos 
 in 1877 ! 
 
 I have no fear for any general or prolonged disorders from the 
 action of our bona fide workingmen. No grander illustration of 
 heroism has ever been given in history than that which the opera- 
 tives of the Lancashire Cotton Mills presented when, brought 
 well-nigh to starvation through our Civil War, they endured silently, 
 patiently, peacefully, for the sake of the principle that was at stake. 
 But, when the camp-followers of the hosts of labor are these demons 
 of anarchy, we may well dread the scenes that may follow our eco- 
 nomic conflict. 
 
 III. Capital and labor are alike recruiting for the armies of an- 
 archism. Hunger is always savage. One who sees wife and children 
 crying for food is not apt to measure consequences carefully. The 
 man who lifts his two fingers to order out hundreds of hands and 
 leave them in idleness is enlisting followers for anarchism. The 
 Order or Union that uses the strike carelessly must hold itself in 
 part responsible for the desperation which the anarchist turns into 
 bombs. The association of employers which wages war, not against 
 the abuses of labor organizations but against their existence, must 
 hold itself in part responsible for the consequences that follow upon 
 such a running up of the black flag. 
 
 I know a man of superior mind, who, a few years ago, was a 
 
40 
 
 mill band in a New England factory. He bad worked in that same 
 mill from the time be landed on our shores. The owners of that 
 mill one day placed in bis hands, as in the hands of the other oper- 
 atives, an ironclad contract, forbidding his connection with any la- 
 bor asociation, on pain of instant dismissal. He declined to sign 
 the paper, and lost his place. Wandering from mill to mill, he 
 found everywhere, on one excuse and another, work denied him, urn 
 til it dawned upon him that he was ostracised throughout New 
 Ed gland, and that not a cotton mill was open to him. On the 
 verge of starvation, maddened by despair, having turned every 
 whither for some opening through which might come bread for his 
 babies, he one day took wife and children with him to the mayor’s 
 office, carrying in his pocket a revolver — determined, as he told me 
 afterward, to stay there until some work was found him or to shoot 
 the man who tried to remove him. If this be the action of the black- 
 list upon a man of brains, what will be its infuriating influence upon 
 the rank and file of labor? Our great employers seem bent on go- 
 ing into the business of manufacturing such human dynamite. 
 
 Nor is this all our danger. Back of our embittered working- 
 men, back of their monstrous camp-following, stands the great 
 rabble of the criminal population of our cities. We must never 
 forget that just below the fair surface of our civilization there is 
 a genuine barbarism ; that below the New York of wffiich we know 
 there is a city of criminals, a villainous population ever ready 
 to swarm to the surface, when the mechanism of society comes 
 to a stand-still. Let the arm of the law be paralyzed for a few 
 days, let travel be stopped and communication be cut off while 
 mobs are in our streets, and who can venture to predict the scenes 
 that may ensue ? 
 
 IV. These visions are sombre enough, but they are not the 
 darkest shadows in the back-ground for the lover of humanity. 
 Society will survive such shocks, though our streets run in blood. 
 Order will be restored and civilization will be maintained. But are 
 we sure that the reality of the Republic may not disappear, as again 
 and again republics have thus disappeared ? No one who reads 
 history with his eyes open should be blind to the fact that through 
 just such experiences the greatest republics of antiquity perished. 
 
 We wonder at the instability of those beautiful Greek repub- 
 lics ; but we may cease to ^vender when we perceive the facts on 
 which the muse of history has not cared much to dwell — being too 
 busy with tales of court and camp. Greece established equal politi- 
 cal rights for all her citizens, but failed to develop any equality 
 of conditions. Growing economic inequalities, with the growing 
 social inequalities thus involved, rent each Greek city into 
 classes, between which a deepening strife ensued. Plato wrote: 
 “ Each of the Greek states is not really a single state, but comprises 
 at least two; one composed of the rich, the other of the poor.” 
 
41 
 
 A modern French student declares that : “ The Greek cities were 
 always fluctuating between two revolutions, the one to despoil the 
 rich, the other to reinstate them in possession of their fortune. 
 This lasted from the Peloponnesian war to the conquest of Greece 
 by the Romans.” 
 
 Rome tells the same story. Its history turns upon the ever 
 embittering strife between patrician and plebeian ; beginning with 
 peaceful political agitation, but ending in bloody revolutions and 
 bloodier counter revolutions ; Marius and Sylla taking turns at 
 converting the seven hilled city into a hell of demons. When the 
 strain grew too severe, when civic strife became chronic, when 
 property lost security and the social order shook with the convul- 
 sions of the proletariat, then came the Caesar, the savior of society, 
 and the republic disappeared in the empire. 
 
 Our modern world has not escaped the ancient danger. It 
 tends toward democracy, yet democracy, while realizing political 
 equality, fails thus far to realize any approach to equality of 
 economic and social conditions. De Tocqueville pointed out that, 
 such being the case, democracy must develop social strife. Out 
 *of that strife may come the worst of dangers for our Republic. 
 Macaulay left this prophecy, which it behooves us now to ponder 
 well : “ The day will come when, in the State of New York, a mul- 
 titude of people, not one of whom has had more than half a 
 breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a 
 legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will 
 be chosen ? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect 
 for vested rights, strict observance of public faith ; on the other 
 is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, 
 and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne 
 and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in 
 want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be 
 preferred by the workingman who hears his children crying for 
 more bread ? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such 
 season of adversity as I have described, do things which will 
 prevent prosperity from returning. Either some Caesar or Napoleon 
 will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your 
 republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbar- 
 ians in the twentieth century as the Roman empire was in the fifth ; 
 with this difference — that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the 
 Roman empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals 
 will have been engendered within your own country and by your 
 own institutions.” 
 
 What would Macaulay have said could he have seen the Cab 
 ifornia Constitution passed a few years ago ! We have thus actually 
 found one of the dangers to which he referred coming true Already 
 at the end of our first Centenniad, we hear the whispers which warn 
 us that some of our wisest and best men have been anticipating the 
 
42 
 
 possibility of some fulfillment of the other alternative of his proph- 
 ecy. A few years ago, one of the leading Presbyterian divines of 
 our country, in some lectures upon socialism, gave utterance to this 
 portentous omen : “ It is no procession of peaceful industries that 
 I see marching now. Labor and capital, from opposite camps, are 
 moving toward one another. * * * * It may be to meet as 
 Pompey and Caesar met at Pharsalia. I confess I expect no 
 Csesar. But then I expect to see this communistic madness rebuked 
 and ended. If not rebuked and ended, I shall have to say, as 
 many a sad-eyed Roman must have said nineteen hundred years 
 ago, I prefer Civilization to the Republic After the riot in Chi- 
 cago, Professor Swing was reported as echoing this word of Dr. 
 Hitchcock. 
 
 Woe for us, woe for the world if already, in the first shock of 
 this great contest, we are to prepare ourselves even to contemplate 
 the possibility of surrendering those free institutions for which 
 our fathers toiled, in which, the hopes of humanity rest. Yet 
 no one who has watched the signs of the times during the last few 
 years can doubt that these two utterances are fair expressions of the 
 frightened feeling that is spreading through our midst, and that 
 may readily crystalize, in times of renewed danger, into actions 
 readily taken but not to be undone again save by bloodier revolu- 
 tions than those through which fell the monarchies of old. It 
 would not require many panics for Property to cry aloud for some 
 strong man to come forth as the Savior of Society. The coup d'etat 
 would be easily wrought. The old form of freedom might continue, 
 as the old form of liberty continued in Rome — the ghost of a dead 
 republic. Our Republic could be Mexicanized without any change 
 of titles. Let us then ponder the observation of one of the lead- 
 ing papers of Europe upon our recent labor riots : “ The true trial 
 of republican institutions is now coming on.” 
 
 I am not an alarmist. But, reading history and watching the 
 signs of the times, to me it seems plain that we are blindly drift- 
 ing into no less serious dangers than these which I have outlined 
 before you. 
 
 Y. Society therefore must needs call on both sides of this con- 
 flict to pause, before the lists are drawn, and contemplate the issues 
 of such a. campaign. There is doubtless much to be said on each 
 side, as I have feebly' tried to indicate ; therefore each side needs 
 to approach the other calmly, considerately, dispassionately and with 
 an open conscience. Each side is more or less at fault, as I have 
 also tried to show. 
 
 The essential fault of capital, as it seems to one who looks upon 
 the contest from the stand-point of society, is its failure to recog- 
 nize that we are in the midst of a period of economic and social 
 transition. The eighteenth century began the political emancipa 
 tion of the people. Midway in that process the nineteenth century 
 
43 
 
 has entered upon the most astonishing industrial revolution of 
 history. Science has harnessed nature’s forces to the mighty mech- 
 anisms which would have seemed miracles to the men of two or 
 three generations ago. The conditions of industry and trade have 
 been completely transformed. Under this too rapid transform- 
 ation the competitive system labors heavily, getting out of gear 
 every few years and coming to a stand-still, threatening to break 
 down altogether. Plainly some higher organization of the industrial 
 mechanism is becoming a necessity — and may therefore be ex- 
 pected to develop in due time. Meanwhile we are between the old 
 and the new order, in a period of disorder. 
 
 This disorder bears indeed heavily upon capital, but it bears 
 far more heavily upon labor. Social inequalities, which of old 
 pressed lightly on workingmen, gall sorely now that there is 
 equality before the law. Even the economic freedom of labor is 
 being endangered at the very time that it is entering upon 
 political freedom. It is inevitable therefore that there should 
 be the struggle that is taking place to-day. That struggle is 
 labor’s endeavor to throw off the burdens of the present disorder, 
 and its aspiration for the realization of the higher economic and 
 social order which looms above the horizon. 
 
 It is in the interests of society that this evolution should progress 
 naturally. The greatest good of the greatest number demands a 
 more equitable distribution of wealth, a higher general level ; even 
 though that levelling upward should reduce the mountain tops 
 of wealth which now tower above our dark valleys. It is indispens- 
 able to a republic that the mass of the people should be econom- 
 ically free, and thus be loyal to t the social order. Whatever de- 
 velopments are necessary to secure something like an equitable 
 distribution of wealth and to provide for the economic freedom 
 of labor must be sougUt by those who .have the welfare of the 
 nation more at heart than personal aggrandizement or the priv- 
 ileges of a class. For one, I am thoroughly satisfied that society 
 is moving forward to such a higher industrial order, as the true 
 economic fruition of our new political order. 
 
 This evolution may be helped forward — it cannot be per- 
 manently thrust backward. Its pathway can indeed be blocked — 
 but then its forces will only rise and swell over all obstacles, 
 no longer in peaceful progress but in the fury of the freshet. 
 This peaceful evolution can readily be turned into a bloody revolu- 
 tion. This is the danger which I apprehend from the side of 
 capital. 
 
 The essential fault of labor to-day seems to me its failure to rec- 
 ognize that this evolution of the higher economic and social order 
 is to be brought about not through cataclysms, but through a grad- 
 ual, orderly, peaceful, natural development out of the present system. 
 Labor dreams of gaining the millennium, which it has sighted, in a 
 
44 
 
 bound. Yain illusion ! As Lasalle taught the workingmen whom 
 he banded together in Germany, the economic millennium is to 
 come in slowly and gradually. The roots of social civilization are 
 not to be cut in order to bring forth the flower. Better conditions 
 must be supplied, richer nourishment must be secured, more skillful 
 care must be devoted to the plant and thus the life must strain 
 forth toward its beautiful blossoming. Legislation cannot wind up 
 the old order at a given date, and establish from and after a certain 
 day the new and higher civilization. Legislation can only facilitate 
 the natural growth of society. Force may be invoked, but force is 
 more apt to wreck than to build, more potent to destroy than to 
 create. 
 
 Whatever the injustices and oppressions of our present state of 
 society, those wrongs are to be righted rather by constitutional 
 treatment than by surgical operations. Heroic remedies may cure, 
 but they may kill. The knife may remove the tumor, but it may 
 sever the arteries and let the patient bleed to death. Society can- 
 not afford to run any risks. Mistakes would prove too serious in 
 their consequences to be lightly ventured. 
 
 The social order, as it now is, with all its manifold imperfec- 
 tions, is the result of generations and centuries of human toil. It 
 has been bought at a fearful cost. It has been won through untold 
 sacrifices. It has been baptized with blood and tears. It repre- 
 sents immense gains upon the past. It holds the promise and 
 potency of vastly greater gains. It is growing the higher order 
 slowly but surely before our eyes. As Dr. Barth, one of the first 
 economic authorities of Germany, writes : “ Take a list of wages 
 wherever you please, and you will always find wages to have ad- 
 vanced with rare interruptions during the last half century.” Even 
 that apparently most dangerous foe to labor, mechanism, is visibly 
 working good as well as evil — as one illustration will indicate. 
 “ The ratio of cost per pound for labor of common cotton cloth for 
 the years 1828 and 1880 was as 6.77 to 8.31, wages for the same 
 dates being as 2.62 to 4.84 ; the average consumption of cotton, 
 which indicates the standard of life as well as any one item, was per 
 capita of total population for the year 1831, 5.90 pounds, while in 
 1880 the consumption rose to 13.91 pounds, this being exclusive of 
 exports.” 
 
 Given improvements in our society which are clearly within our 
 reach, and the most beneficent revolution of history would be real- 
 ized. Society cannot allow of any crass, crude tinkering with its 
 complex organization. Theorists must not try experiments which 
 risk the life of civilization. We will listen sympathetically to your 
 beautiful theories, my socialistic friends, and allow that if men were 
 made over again and all the conditions of earth were changed the 
 millennium might be set up to-morrow ; but we must insist that, 
 while men are as we know them and the conditions are what we still 
 
45 
 
 find, it will not do to try brand-nevr schemes, however well they 
 work — on paper. We will even confess that your noble ideal of the 
 co-operative commonwealth is the very ideal before an earnest so- 
 ciety and a noble State, but we will not make the mistake of im- 
 agining that an ideal is a reform bill, a measure of practical 
 economics and politics, to be embodied now in legislation. Society 
 must grow slowly toward its ideals. We can take no leaps in the 
 dark. We must move carefully, one step at a time, according as we 
 find our footing secure among the crevasses over which we are cut- 
 ting our way. 
 
 In truth, however, as I have sought to hint in the previous 
 sermons, and as will appear from what I have just said, the chief 
 responsibility for the present state of things lies neither with capi- 
 tal nor yet with labor. The economic mechanism is out of gear, in 
 our transition period. We have outgrown the old methods of in- 
 dustry and trade and we have not grown into an understanding of 
 the nejv methods and a mastery of them. Society itself is so im- 
 perfectly developed that it is seemingly aggravating these economic 
 disorders. The State is as yet so far from a knowledge of its own 
 true functions or a capacity to assume them that it fails to provide 
 that wise direction of the head of the body politic which is absolutely 
 necessary to any solution of our problem — the co-ordinating action 
 of the brain of the social organism. 
 
 Society, therefore calls upon both capital and labor to recognize 
 the facts of the situation, to cease from their mutual strife and to 
 join hands in trying to solve the great problem which our age pre- 
 sents to civilization, by a movement all along the line of social devel- 
 opment. That task is a long and tedious one, calling for the utmost 
 patience, the most extreme care, in which all the resources of the 
 economist, the social scientist and the statesman will be heavily 
 taxed. The mental and moral conditions in which the task is taken 
 up are however of the first importance. They constitute a prime 
 factor in the problem which we can set at work immediately. Eight 
 feeling is quite as important here as right thinking. While the 
 understanding is plodding along in its slow-going gait toward the 
 correct conclusion, the feelings can leap to a point from which men’s 
 instinctive action will put the whole problem in a vastly more favor- 
 able light. The worst symptoms of the present situation would 
 yield speedily before the action of a calm and kindly spirit, the 
 spirit of men who feel themselves brothers and so try to do justly 
 by one another. 
 
 VI. To this I appeal to-day in the name of civilization's fairest 
 flower, the greatest and most beneficent of earth’s republics. We 
 have outgrown the childish exuberance of our early Fourth of July 
 self-glorification, but only to grow into a chastened sense of a most 
 real mission from Providence, calling to high duties and imposing 
 solemn responsibilities. Our “ manifest destiny ” is verily that con- 
 
46 
 
 cerning which our great seer wrote, in the midst of the darkness of 
 our Civil War : 
 
 ‘ ‘ The word of the Lord by night 
 To the watching Pilgrims came, 
 
 As they sat by the seaside, 
 
 And filled their hearts with flame. 
 
 “ God said, I am tired of kings, 
 
 I suffer them no more ; 
 
 Up to my ear the morning brings 
 The outrage of the poor. 
 
 » 
 
 “ Lo ! I uncover the land 
 Which I hid of old time in the West, 
 
 As the sculptor uncovers the statue 
 When he has wrought his best ; 
 
 “ I will divide my goods ; 
 
 Call in the wretch and slave : 
 
 None shall rule but the humble, * 
 
 And none but toil shall have. 
 
 “ I will have never a noble, 
 
 No lineage counted great ; 
 
 Fishers and choppers and ploughmen 
 Shall constitute a State. 
 
 “ And ye shall succor men ; 
 
 ’Tis nobleness to serve ; 
 
 Help them who cannot help again : 
 
 Beware from right to swerve. 
 
 “ To-day unbind the captive, 
 
 So only are ye unbound ; 
 
 Lift up a people from the dust, 
 
 Trump of their rescue, sound ! ” 
 
 With high hearts did the people of the land answer that call 
 of God, and now to-day the Nation renders God thanks that when 
 the awful altar was reared there was strength given for the sacrifice 
 through which the Republic’s life was saved. Beautiful day, on 
 which memory weaves fresh garlands for the tombs of the Nation’s 
 saviors, and patriotism sings the glories of their heroic deeds ! 
 Are the children of such fathers to prove themselves worthy of the 
 glorious heritage which they have bequeathed, in title deeds w T rit 
 with their own heart’s blood ? Do you dream that the day of 
 heroic effort has gone by, that Duty’s voice is not again to speak 
 to the Nation in thunder tones, calling to new tasks of self-sac- 
 rifice ? Lo ! even now the storm clouds of a sorer strife are massing 
 in the horizon, dark, heavy, sulphurous. 
 
 Shall we not then learn the lesson of this beautiful day, whereon 
 North and South, so lately in deadly conflict, go forth together to 
 the graves of the brave boys in blue and the brave boys in 
 gray ? Why should capital and labor wait for the end of a bitter 
 
47 
 
 strife to find that after all they have interests in common ? Why 
 reach peace only through the miseries of an industrial war? Be- 
 neath the shadow of our great Grant’s tomb, laden with the flowers 
 of a grateful land, the Nation which he saved lays its hand upon 
 her angry children whispering : “ Let us have peace.” * 
 
 * This lecture was given on Decoration Day. 
 
48 
 
 THE WAY OUT. 
 
 The Alpine tourist learns a secret of progress in his mountain 
 climbs. As he leaves the cold climate of Germany behind him and 
 trudges up the old St. Gothard pass, he does not dream of being 
 able to survey in a bird’s-eye view all the windings of his zigzag 
 path, until it lands him in fair Italy. He is content to see but 
 a little way before him, and pushes on confident that, as he 
 rounds the corner, a new stretch of the upward path will disclose 
 itself. ii.gain and again the narrow road may seem to be blocked 
 in the distance by some insurmountable mountain wall # or to make 
 a plunge over some sheer precipice, but he plods on sure that, 
 when he reaches the point where advance seem impossible, some 
 way out will open for him. Thus he climbs until at last the 
 summit is passed, the descent begins, and soon he is amid the 
 smiling vineyards and gray-green olive groves of the sunny South. 
 
 If any one has expected to-day a topographical survey of 
 the route by which we are to reach the promised land of our 
 industrial civilization, he is doomed to disappointment. I have 
 never been in that fair land, save in dreams. Nor do I know 
 of any one who has visited it otherwise. Some of those dreams are 
 indeed to me far more than mere illusions — they are clairvoyant 
 visions, prophetic glimpses of what the future is to open ; whose 
 main outlines I trust, while I do not attempt the folly of writing a 
 physical geography of Utopia. If Society is to find its way into 
 its Italy, it must climb an untrodden path over the mountains, 
 following on from point to point as seems feasible, seeing ahead 
 in short vistas, rounding corner after corner, finding the passage 
 apparently blocked again and again, and yet always discovering 
 some way out, until at the end there comes the easy drop into 
 the fair land of peace and plenty. If we wait until we see the 
 whole pathway open before our eyes, we shall never move forward. 
 We must make for the points that are in sight, and trust that 
 when we shall have won them, we shall see yet further ahead, and 
 thus grope our way out. 
 
 The Social Problem is so vast and complex that no one but 
 a charlatan will pretend to have found its complete solution. It in- 
 cludes a host of special problems, each of which has to be solved 
 before the grand equation can be completed. The quack may 
 offer a specific for the disease of the social organism, and insist 
 on heroic remedies, but the wise physician will be content with 
 watching the course of Nature’s development, and with treating 
 the case symptomatically as the conditions change. 
 
 No one can carefully study the situation without recognizing 
 that the trouble lies far below the surface on which men usually 
 dwell. If that trouble were confined to any one country it might 
 be attributed to local causes. How can it be due to our tariff 
 
49 
 
 alone, when one finds the same state of things in protective 
 countries and in free trade lands ? How can it be due to any one 
 or more of the other causes often assigned, w r hen it is found in 
 nations where those causes do not exist ? The present depression 
 prevails in all the industrial countries of the Western world. 
 Plainly, certain constant factors are working to produce this 
 uniform result in different lands, under different political, social 
 and economic conditions. 
 
 While there would be no real overpopulation were our systems 
 of land tenure wisely ordered, there is a relative overpopulation 
 in most countries — a pressure upon the resources of the earth as 
 now developed, and this fact enters largely into the problem. 
 
 The marvelously rapid introduction of power-machinery has 
 very much to do with the situation. This is multiplying the press- 
 ure of population enormously, in the manufacturing centres, by its 
 immense displacement of human labor It has created what we or- 
 dinarily speak of as an overproduction— meaning by that simply 
 an overproduction relatively to the power of the people at large 
 to consume. It has thus glutted the market everywhere, causing 
 stagnation in industry and trade. This enormous productive power 
 has fallen into the hands of individuals, before society has devel- 
 oped any method of regulating its activity in the interests of the 
 people. The socialist charge of “ planless production” is valid. 
 Production has been rushing ahead under the heedless greed of in- 
 dividuals, without their stopping to consider the wants of society, 
 its power of consuming. Herein, as it seems to me, is one of 
 the most powerful factors in our present problem. This is evidenced 
 by the fact that the countries which have not developed this 
 mechanical power are relatively free from the troubles of the 
 industrial nations. 
 
 The problem is further complicated by the breaking down of 
 the old-time barriers between different nations. There is now 
 but one market, and that is twenty-four thousand miles long. Each 
 people is competing with every other people. Wages therefore 
 tend, except as counter-currents act upon the labor market, toward 
 the lowest level. A process of equalization is going on among all 
 nations. If the higher peoples cannot level up the lower peoples, 
 they themselves will be levelled down to the conditions of the 
 cheapest labor. 
 
 Back of all other factors is the increasing taxation which 
 rent imposes in industrial and trade centres. Capital and labor 
 are dependent upon land. The systems of land tenure in the 
 Western world exaggerate this dependence. The profits of capital 
 and the wages of labor are thus being increasingly depleted to 
 pay the tribute of rent. 
 
 These are but a f^v of the economic aspects of the problem, 
 in its large and general form. Back of all the economic factors are 
 
50 
 
 other and yet larger factors. Many social forces are working in the 
 problem, complicating the purely economic disorders. The prob- 
 lems of vice and crime open side aspects of this gigantic question, 
 full of perplexities. Under the law of heredity, physical, mental and 
 moral defects are dowering each generation with a load that sinks 
 multitudes into poverty. The science of government is as yet so 
 imperfect that the functions of the State — the most important fac- 
 tor in the problem — are very inadequately discharged. Our system 
 of education, our burdensome taxation, our political corruption, 
 our municipal mismanagement — -these and a host of other defects in 
 government tell mightily upon the problem. 
 
 How difficult then is that problem ! How delicate the task of 
 solving it ! What patience the attempt demands ! That it is solv- 
 able is unquestionable to him who believes in progress. The human 
 mind is turning its energies upon it and studying it from a hundred 
 points of view. Already, light is breaking forth from the darkness, 
 and gleams of the coming day are dawning. Time alone is requisite 
 to bring that consensus of economic judgment in which will be re- 
 vealed to man the laws governing the situation — by laying hold of 
 which he shall be able to extricate himself from the present 
 trouble. 
 
 Meanwhile there is much that can, be done to alleviate* the sit- 
 uation, to facilitate the social evolution, to work out details of the 
 problem and thus prepare for its general solution. In our coun- 
 try, we are so favored that we ought not to feel the more severe 
 pressure of the problem. We ought to be able to save ourselves 
 from going through the whole course of bitter experience under 
 which the old world is groaning. There are some points beyond 
 us toward which we ought to press, trusting that when we have 
 won them the way out will open yet further. 
 
 I. Our labor organizations have much to do toward the solu- 
 tion of the problem. Organization is an essential condition of self- 
 help on the part of labor. Individually, the workingman is 
 powerless. Associated, he will have power to gain his just rights. 
 I have sufficiently indicated what seem to me the great dangers be- 
 fore these organizations — let it suffice now that I suggest what 
 appears to me to be their true line of action. 
 
 Education is the prime need of labor. The associations which 
 these organizations bring, the discussions they open, the reading 
 and study they stimulate, all foster that education. 
 
 These associations can become mighty forces in the war against 
 one of the worst foes of the average laborer — Intemperance. They 
 can boycott rum. 
 
 They form the natural nuclei for the economic combinations of 
 which labor stands in such m ed today. They can be made vast 
 mutual assurance leagues. They can develop, in various forms, the 
 principle of co-operation ; leading out into lolh and building socie- 
 
51 
 
 ties through which workingmen may become the owners of their 
 homes, co-operative stores through which they can cheapen the nec- 
 essaries of life and secure the best quality in them, and ultimately 
 co-operative productive associations through which their savings 
 can be capitalized and labor become to some extent its own employ- 
 er. I have no illusions about co-operation. I recognize clearly its 
 limitations. But I see in it certain very substantial advantages 
 which labor needs, to strengthen itself for its more arduous tasks. 
 My chief interest, however, in co-operation centres in the education 
 that it carries on ; its general quickening of the intelligence and its 
 practical training in business — an indispensable condition for the 
 coming higher forms of industry, in which labor and capital are to 
 blend. 
 
 These organizations secure the means for carrying on that pa- 
 tient agitation out of which is to come the gradual and peaceful 
 shortening of the hours of toil — one of the most important condi- 
 tions for the economic prosperity of labor and for its intellectual 
 advancement. 
 
 Our labor organizations provide the instrumentalities through 
 which the power of the ballot is to be utilized. Political action must 
 be the ultimate hope of labor in a republic — not the formation of a 
 class-party for national campaigns, but the judicious and timely 
 exercise of pressure on behalf of particular legislation. When our 
 trades-unions and Knights of Labor are thoroughly organized, they 
 can control legislation, in so far as such legislation is necessary and 
 practicable ; and thus secure the best possible conditions for the 
 solution of the problem. 
 
 II. Our great manufacturing and trade and commercial associa- 
 tions have somewhat to do toward the solution of the problem. 
 They can exert a very positive influence toward this end, without 
 repeating the mistakes of the guilds of olden times. Very much that 
 needs to be done for the better regulation of the business world 
 can be far better done by these associations than by the clumsy 
 hand of legislation. 
 
 Some control of speculation is imperatively needed. It seems 
 impossible as yet, to frame laws which will reach the evil without 
 interfering with the freedom of trade. But were our great business 
 associations bent on putting a stop to the gambling of our Ex 
 # changes, they could soon do $o, by the force of public opinion gen- 
 erated in these bodies. 
 
 Some regulation of our present helter-skelter production, in 
 which every man is free to push manufacturing ahead to the full ex- 
 tent of his power without thought or care for .the general needs of 
 the community, is urgently demanded. Until there is found some 
 better regulation of our industrial mechanism than the alternate 
 fever and chill of our periods of prosperity and depression, we must 
 expect our social problem to go unsolved. We dare not think of the 
 
52 
 
 State’s undertaking suck a delicate task, but surely we might rea- 
 sonably look to these modern guilds for some honest effort to im- 
 prove upon our present “ planless production.” 
 
 These associations can do much toward the development of a 
 higher relationship between capital and labor. They can stimulate 
 the study of the various experiments that have been made in differ- 
 ent countries with reference to a more harmonious alliance between 
 employer and employee. They can thus foster the growth of profit- 
 sharing and possibly of wiser forms of a true industrial partnership. 
 And they can at once make for peace by introducing boards of 
 arbitration. 
 
 III. Society at large has something to do toward the solving of 
 the problem. 
 
 The economic evils of luxury have doubtless been greatly exag- 
 gerated, yet those evils, as far as they go, are actual. Luxury is, to 
 a considerable extent, an economic waste. It employs labor truly, 
 but largely for non-productive pursuits," in occupations which de- 
 moralize those engaged in them. But the true evil of luxury lies in 
 its immoral influences. It sets false standards of life. It multi- 
 plies and materializes wants, instead of simplifying and ennobling 
 wants. It goads men of business to a reckless pursuit of riches. 
 It fires the fever of speculation. It turns the noble aspirations of 
 poverty into ignoble ambitions. The poor hunger not after culti- 
 vated minds, but after silk dresses and jewelry, even though it be 
 pinchbeck. It feeds the jealousy and envy of the less fortunate 
 of earth, as they look up to the wealth that flaunts itself upon our 
 avenues in lavish ostentation. 
 
 Is it not time to call a halt in our selfish indulgence of lux- 
 urious tastes ? Society can do much toward easing the social prob- 
 lem, by cultivating that “ plain living and high thinking ” which is 
 the true glory of a civilization. Here is somewhat for womanhood 
 to do in the great task of our time. 
 
 Society’s demand for cheapness is intensifying the strain of the 
 business world. We grow indignant over the inhumanity of employ- 
 ers who, to make large profits, cut down the wages of their hands 
 to starvation rates. There is need of a good deal of wholesome in- 
 dignation in this direction. But let us not pour it forth too gen- 
 erously upon others, when each of us perhaps may need to heap 
 a little upon ourselves. Employers are driven into a cut-throat 
 competition to undersell one another, because the purchasing public 
 demands above everything else cheapness, and never troubles itself 
 about the real cost of goods. 
 
 True, it must be difficult for us, who buy, to solve this problem 
 before our own consciences, until it shall come to pass that our 
 stores will take pride in marking upon their goods the actual cost 
 thereof. It would perhaps seem like a strip of the millennium to 
 find any store honestly letting the public know the wages paid for 
 
53 
 
 labor on its goods — but I am persuaded that whoever leads in such 
 a new departure will find an immense constituency waiting to sup- 
 port him. Meanwhile I pray you, good women, who take such 
 delight in shopping, remember the moral responsibility which may 
 be involved in your “ splendid bargains.” Go home and read again 
 the “ Song of the Shirt,” and muse over it a little. 
 
 IV. The Church has a part to play in working out this prob- 
 lem. The solution lies largely in the action of moral forces. No 
 legislation can determine what constitutes a just distribution of the 
 rewards of industry between profits and wages. It cannot be stated 
 in the hard and fast terms of political economy. Let the desire to 
 “ do justly ” really work in the consciences of employers, and some 
 way will be found to reach a rude equation of equity. It is the 
 Church’s business not merely to preach, as of old, the duty of gen- 
 erosity in the use of wealth, but the duty of justice in the accumu- 
 lation of wealth. In one of our great cities there has lately been a 
 bitter strike against a great employer, some of whose hands were re- 
 ceiving four dollars a week, while he had but recently given $50,000 
 toward a church. Let the Church say to Capital : “ Keep back your 
 gifts and pay your debt of justice to your fellow partner, Labor.” 
 
 V. The State has much to do in pushing forward the prac- 
 tical solution of the problem. We need not here enter into any 
 elaborate discussion of the functions of the State. Experience 
 teaches more than books. Facts are more solid than theories. 
 Our older school of political Economy told us that the State 
 could do nothing in this problem except to muddle it. As a 
 matter of fact, however, legislation in the interests of labor has 
 been forced upon the English Parliament, despite of the theo- 
 rists, and that legislation has proven a most substantial aid in 
 the elevation of English workingmen. As a matter of fact, the 
 State is being steadily pushed, by the unconscious action of the 
 social organism, into the development of new functions, and 
 these are thus far working well. 
 
 In truth it is only in political economy that a headless organism 
 is counted a natural condition of life. Everywhere else, a living 
 body develops a head, with brain-power capable of co-ordinating 
 the complex activities of the organism. 
 
 Certainly such action of the State may be easily pushed too 
 far. Individual initiative may be repressed by State direction, 
 as in I 'ranee. Herbert Spencer’s nightmare- dream of “ the coming 
 slavery ” is a possibility, against w T hich we need to guard ourselves. 
 We shall have guarded ourselves effectively against this danger if 
 we clearly recognize it, and, with eyes wide open, appeal to the 
 State for nothing that can be effectively done without its direct 
 action. We must not ask of the State to direct the local functions 
 of the body but to see that the general conditions of the organism 
 are healthful, that no abnormal disorders check the natural auto- 
 
54 
 
 % 
 
 matic action of the social organs, and that, if such disorders 
 arise, wise remedial measures shall be used. 
 
 (1.) As the first step in this direction we have need to perfect 
 our political mad liner y — by which of course I do not mean per- 
 fecting the political machine. It goes without saying that our 
 political mechanism is to-day very defective ; that it needs to be 
 developed much more highly to realize the benefit of free institu- 
 tions. A true republic would provide the political conditions for 
 the solving of. our economic problem, in so far as the State is a 
 factor therein. We need to reform and develop our municipal. 
 State and National administration, to the end that there shall be 
 a government of the people, by the people and for the people. 
 There is room here for the co-operation of every citizen. 
 
 Capital and labor alike need to lend a hand vigorously in the 
 purification of our public life, in the perfection of our political 
 mechanism. Labor seems to me strangely blind to its opportu- 
 nities in this direction. Were it roused to the realization of the 
 evils of our present municipal administration, we might have a 
 government of New York in which, instead of the burdensome tax- 
 ation now imposed upon our community, there would be the 
 common sense, business-like administration of affairs which charac- 
 terizes many a German city. Cannot labor realize that the socialist 
 dream requires, as the prime condition for the vast responsibilities 
 which the State is to assume, a genuine civil service reform — a 
 government carried on as a great business ? 
 
 (2.) The State can aid in the working out of this problem by 
 developing her system of education. Capital understands well 
 enough how profits are affected by the intelligence of working- 
 men, and labor understands equally well how wages are affected 
 by its education. You can measure the relative wages of the differ- 
 ent States of our Union by their percentage of illiteracy. It is of 
 prime moment for both capital and labor that our people should 
 be as well educated as possible. 
 
 The State must therefore make education compulsory, as in law 
 so in fact. The employment of children in our factories — for which 
 poor parents are responsible as well as rich employers — should be 
 effectively prohibited, in so far as such employment interferes with 
 that prime necessity of our people, the education of the on-coming 
 generations. 
 
 Our education must be made to bear more directly upon the 
 pressing industrial problem. At present our common schools do 
 not attempt to provide for the most common necessities of the 
 common people. We teach the children of the people everything 
 except the prime need — the knowledge which maintains life, the 
 skill which elevates life. If there is any justification for the 
 State’s taxing A to provide for the education of B’s children, that 
 justification is primarily to be found in the fact that such education 
 
55 
 
 is to make ont of those children £hat which they otherwise probably 
 would not become, self-supporting citizens, relieving A’s sons from 
 the burden of taxation for the support of B’s sons as paupers or 
 criminals. Clearly our common schools can lay the foundations for 
 industrial education ; adding to their present instruction in drawing- 
 such training in the various handicrafts — modeling, working in 
 wood, etc. — as will develop interest in those pursuits and capacity 
 for them. Thus, without making carpenters or machinists, the 
 public school can make the material for any handicraftsmen. 
 
 I see no reason, despite of all that has been said to the con- 
 trary, why the State should not provide training schools for special 
 industries ; since in the decay of the old apprenticeship system 
 there is at present little provision for the development of skilled 
 workmen. Certainly, however, it can foster the growth of artistic 
 industries, as many European countries are doing, with remarkable 
 success. 
 
 (3.) The State can aid in the education of thrift — the lack of 
 which we have seen is lowering the profits of capital and diminishing 
 the resources of labor. If political economy is right, as it un- 
 doubtedly is, in teaching that thrift is the basic virtue of an indus- 
 trial civilization, then the State is wrong in not making sure of 
 the culture of this fundamental virtue of our society. The child’s 
 attention should be drawn to the duty of practicing self denial for 
 the future. Habits of saving should be formed, and boys and girls 
 led to realize the rewards of abstinence. The more that the homes 
 of our poor fail to inculcate this virtue, the more should the State 
 see that her common schools train it. It is not needful that there 
 should be long lessons upon thrift or text -books about the duty 
 of saving. Let our public schools learn a lesson from many of our 
 industrial schools; wherein, by the simplest of machinery, children 
 are being trained in this important habit. What a boon it would 
 be to the country at large if our public schools secured for the 
 immense number of children gathered within them such an annual 
 saving as our own industrial school has done for its poor children — 
 a saving equivalent to a thousand dollars a year ! In France, since 
 1874, over 23,00f) school savings-banks have been opened, with 
 nearly 500,000 depositors, and with deposits amounting to 
 $2,225,000. 
 
 The State can carry on this training in thrift among its adult 
 citizens. There is a wide-spread suspicion among the poor of our 
 savings-banks, an unjustifiable suspicion surely, but one that is 
 natural, in view of the many and shameful failures that have taken 
 place among those institutions. Each broken savings-bank breaks 
 up habits of saving among a host of people. Through a large 
 portion of the South and West, there are no facilities for laying- 
 up small savings. The post-office stands everywhere, a branch of 
 the soundest financial institution in the land. No greater incentive 
 
56 
 
 to thrift could be devised at present than the introduction through 
 our land of the postal savings system. Let the State see that 
 her duty is discharged in this respect. Every depositor in the 
 National Savings-Bank will become a shareholder in the Government, 
 and will be made thereby a conservative member of society. His 
 interests will be opposed to everything that imperils the security 
 of the country. 
 
 (4.) The State can reform her system of taxation, so as to 
 lighten the burdens which it now imposes upon industry and to 
 undo the artificial restrictions with which it cramps trade. This 
 subject is so large and complicated that I shall do no more than 
 refer to it, though indeed it is one of the most important factors in 
 the problem. Many of the well admitted principles of taxation are 
 systematically ignored in our methods, which are often rather 
 barbaric than civilized. One need be no free trader to recognize 
 the fact that our system of protection is not a science but a 
 grab-game, in which “ infant industries ” stand as much chance of 
 being helped as infants would stand a chance of getting at a table 
 amid a rush of hungry giants. Luxuries should bear the chief 
 burden of taxation, rather than the common necessities from 
 which we raise the greater part of our revenues. A direct taxation 
 would disclose the fact of the oppressive tolls which we now lay 
 on the necessities of the poor, thus depressing the consuming 
 power of the masses of the people ; .but we veil this folly under 
 our indirect taxation and suffer blindly. In many ways a wise sys- 
 tem of taxation could favor a better distribution of wealth while 
 increasing production. 
 
 (5.) The State can see to it that whatever legislation she orders 
 shall be impartial. Whenever labor asks aid of the Government 
 a great cry goes up against interfering with, natural laws, from 
 the parties which have fattened on special legislation. There can 
 be no question whatever about the fact that, alike in our National 
 and State legislation, capital has been aided enormously while labor 
 has had the crumbs which fell from the table. Compare the ex- 
 tent of our labor legislation with the mass of spatial legislation in 
 the interests of private parties — corporations, companies and in- 
 dividuals — and the conclusion will be irresistible. Every facility 
 has been provided for the organization of capital, and scarcely 
 anything has been done to facilitate the organization of labor. 
 Every safeguard has been thrown round the financial operations 
 of wealth, and scarcely a provision exists to-day in this State for 
 securing the modest monetary transactions of poverty with its 
 banker — the pawnbroker. Partial legislation is as unwise as it is 
 unjust. The interests of individual capitalists may be fostered by 
 the depression of labor, but the interests of capital at large can 
 only be fostered by the elevation of labor. The mass of men are 
 the great consumers of the nation. Let their power of con- 
 
57 
 
 sumption be depressed by legislation and capital’s power of pro- 
 duction is restrained. 
 
 (6.) The State can control transportation in the interests of 
 the people at large. Exchange is an essential part of production. 
 Each should be thoroughly free, with no artificial restraints im- 
 posed upon it in the interests of the few. Modern transportation, 
 from the necessity of the case, tends to become a monopoly. It 
 should therefore be under the direct superintendence of the 
 State. The power given to a few of controlling our great lines of 
 transportation is too gigantic to be left in the hands of individuals. 
 I am aware of what Mr. Atkinson shows as to the surprising 
 reduction of through rates upon our great lines. There is, how- 
 ever, another side to the question. A few years since, a com- 
 mittee of our State Legislature found that one, at least, of the 
 great lines leading into our city was charging two or three times 
 as much as the roads into Boston for the freight of a prime article 
 of food, milk ; and, as a result of that investigation, there was a 
 large drop in the rates. Another committee of our own Legislature 
 stated distinctly that our railroads imposed an annual taxation on 
 the country which no government would dare to lay. In many 
 w r ays the natural, free action of exchange is cramped by the methods 
 of management used by some of these great lines of transportation. 
 Whatever excesses the Granger movement developed, it none the 
 less grew out of a real evil. The State should follow the example 
 set by several countries of the old world, and either own our rail- 
 roads or superintend their direction in the interests of the com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 (7.) The State should regulate our foreign immigration. Hith- 
 erto it has been absolutely free, and to our shores have turned the 
 needy and discontented of every nation of Europe. It has been our 
 glory that we had opened a place of refuge for the weary of the 
 earth. Perhaps we have been a little too generous in our hospit- 
 ality. Certainly immigration has been pouring in faster than our 
 power to assimilate it. We have received over 4,000,000 immi- 
 grants in the last decade. We have needed most of this immigra- 
 tion, and, if we could have distributed it wisely, it might have 
 been an unmingied benefit. It has, however, tended largely toward 
 our great manufacturing centres, which it thus still further clogged 
 with surplus labor, depressing wages, lowering the power of de- 
 mand on which production depends, and thus leading to the shrink- 
 age of profits. 
 
 Plainly, we need either to restrict our immigration or to organ- 
 ize its distribution in the interests of the nation. If we throw open 
 our doors to the world, we have the right to assign places to our 
 guests. We have certainly also the right’ to direct our invitations. 
 At present we fulfill the gospel command, and go out into the 
 highways and hedges and compel the lame and the blind to come 
 
58 
 
 in to the feast which we spread. We have made onr land the 
 dumping ground of the refuse of earth. Europe has found our 
 country a free almshouse for her paupers and a Botany Bay for 
 her criminals, costing her nothing. She has systematically shipped 
 to us the people whom she was glad to get rid of. This country 
 is somewhat large, but there is not room enough in it for Spiers 
 and Most. There ought to be a little more difficulty in importing 
 such precious specimens of humanity. We do not want free trade 
 in moral monsters. 
 
 There should be, in some form, stringent legislation as to the 
 financial ability and general character of those whom we ask to 
 become citizens of our great republic, if we desire that republic to 
 live. Already nearly 33 per cent, of our factory population are of 
 foreign birth — unaccustomed therefore to our institutions, un- 
 trained in the moral restraints which freedom imposes, creating the 
 raw material for corruption in politics and for violence in strikes. 
 The balance of power in Massachusetts is now held by the man- 
 ufacturing towns and cities, into which 140,000 Canadian French- 
 men have been imported in recent years. Among 15,000 of these 
 people in one town, not more than one-third can read in any 
 language. 
 
 Without question, it is high time that the law passed two years 
 ago by Congress, prohibiting the importation of cheap foreign 
 labor under contract, should be rigorously enforced. This is a 
 species of immigration which allows of no justification. It is a 
 monstrous wrong that unscrupulous capital should be allowed to 
 rake the cheapest labor markets of the old world for the material 
 with which to fight our American workingmen. Wages are thus 
 reduced, hosts of men are thrown into idleness, the standards of 
 life are lowered, bitter feelings are aroused, and an inflammable con- 
 dition gendered, out of which may readily come worse scenes than 
 those of the Hocking valley. 
 
 Mr. Wright, in the admirable report of the National Bureau 
 of Labor, thinks that there is no disposition on the part of capital 
 to violate this law. Some of our labor papers give another story. 
 There exists now 1 believe, in this city, a company incorporated to 
 carry on the business of importing low-priced labor. Only this 
 week one of our papers stated that 2,000 cheap Italian laborers were 
 on the way to our shores, under contract for a railroad enterprise. 
 If such facts exist, there is need for the enforcement of the 
 National law. It will prove here, as everywhere else, that the 
 interests of labor are the interests of capital — not of the individual 
 capitalists, who may have to pay the higher wages, but of capital 
 at large, for whose productive power there will be made a greater 
 demand, as labor is higher paid. 
 
 (8.) The State may well foster the colonization of the West 
 and South, as a means of relieving the overcrowded labor market 
 
59 
 
 of the East. Mr. Wright estimates that about a year ago there 
 were a million of people without employment in our country, and 
 he calculates the loss to trade thus caused at about $300,000,000 
 for the year. Fancy $300,000,000 worth of demand withdrawn 
 from our markets ! Is not this one item alone enough to create 
 our present depression ? Set this million of idle people at work, 
 and every one of them would begin to buy, and through a 
 thousand stores an increased demand would make itself felt, which, 
 inspiring confidence, would start up again our industrial mech- 
 anism, now paralyzed largely from the mental epidemic of 
 distrust under which we are suffering. The biggest boom our 
 country has known would begin to-day, if this million of idle peo- 
 ple were put at work. 
 
 It would seem to any reasonable man one of the most natural 
 functions of a true State to aid in tiding over such periods of de- 
 pression, by finding work for the unemployed. This task, how- 
 ever, is beset with so many difficulties that it is no wonder that 
 our Government shrinks from it. There is one way alone, as it 
 seems to me, in which the difficulty might be met, without in- 
 curring greater dangers than those escaped. The great nations of 
 the old world have always relieved the pressure of overpopulation 
 by systematic colonization. Most of our idle people in the East 
 are unprepared for life upon the land. To ensure their self- support 
 they need to be led and directed in colonization. This is too 
 large a task for private philanthropy. It might perhaps be organ- 
 ized by the State. 
 
 If it were found possible to stimulate colonisation by any sys- 
 tem of loans, secured by the land and its improvements, this 
 would be a clear duty for the State. When there is local inflam- 
 mation in any part of my body my head suggests at once the 
 application of measures which will tend to restore the normal cir- 
 culation. Let the head of the body social do likewise. Certainly, 
 the State should facilitate individual immigration from our ; over- 
 crowded centres, in every practicable way. 
 
 Because of this duty of furthering a better distribution of the 
 population, the State should have held as a sacred trust our mag- 
 nificent domain of public lands which it has lavished so recklessly 
 upon speculative railroads. Our National Bureau of Labor de- 
 clares that two thirds of odr public lands have been already deeded 
 away and that the greater portion of the remaining third is unavail- 
 able for cultivation at present. A few years ago, when interested 
 with some of you in a private enterprise on behalf of colonization, 
 I wakened with a start to realize that our limit of available free land 
 was already reached. The shadows of the old-world problem are 
 thus stealing rapidly upon us. It is not yet too late to retrieve 
 our mistake, in part at least. It is estimated that 100,000,000 acres 
 are reclaimable to-day by our National Government, from railroad 
 
6d 
 
 companies which have failed to bomply with the conditions on 
 which their grants were made. Here is a clear case for legislation. 
 
 (9.) The State should hold all mineral resources hereafter 
 opened as the property of the people at large. 
 
 If it were not for our conventional customs, how monstrous 
 would seem the notion that the natural resources of the earth could 
 be monopolized by individuals. In the bosom of the earth are 
 stored treasures beyond the dream of man. No human toil has 
 wrought that wealth. It lies there ready-made for man, waiting 
 only to be lifted to the surface and disengaged from its alloy. The 
 Creator has stored this treasure-house with his gifts for his chil- 
 dren. Some of these treasures are absolute necessities for their 
 life. It would seem to be the simplest and clearest ethical principle 
 that such a provision by the Most High for man’s needs should be 
 the common possession of the household of the. earth. 
 
 Whereas, we have let it come to pass that chance or superior 
 knowledge may place in the hands of a few individuals the control 
 of these subterranean treasures. A man may buy a few acres of the 
 surface ,of the earth, and, lighting upon a rich vein of mineral, 
 may lay unchallenged claim to whatever vast resources are thus 
 opened by accident to him. Bound him myriads of people may 
 stand shivering in the cold of winter, and he has the right to tax 
 them at his pleasure for the coal with which they shall keep life in 
 their bodies. A few years ago, in our city, a coal magnate was 
 asked what the price of coal was to be for the coming winter. He 
 replied with a smile : “ As high as Providence will permit and as 
 low as necessity compels.” During this present winter a company 
 of estimable gentlemen, over a supper table in a Murray Hill 
 mansion, settled between themselves the amount of coal that 
 should be mined during the coming season. Do you, with child- 
 like innocence, imagine that this quantity was determined by the 
 needs of their fellow beings ? Round them a few hundred thou- 
 sand people were buying coal by the basket full, paying at the rate 
 of from $15 to $20 a ton. These excellent gentlemen, however, 
 had no eye upon this aspect of the case, but were simply consider- 
 ing how to gain the largest dividends for their companies. 
 
 The State has thus left in the hands of a. few individuals the 
 power of imposing a most oppressive taxation upon a prime neces- 
 sity of life ; the power of lowering the real wages of labor and 
 shrinking the profits of capital, through the depression caused in 
 the general demand by this needless taxation. Coal is but one of 
 the mineral resources of the earth. Copper, lead, iron, oil — 
 indispensable all to our industrial life, are thus the monopolies of 
 individuals instead of being the common wealth of the people at 
 large. We may not perhaps be able to make any retroactive 
 legislation concerning the properties already allowed to pass into 
 private hands, but there are vast treasures of nature yet to be 
 opened. 
 
Imagine what immense resources the State would command for 
 the people at large if the profits drawn from the mines of the future 
 were to pass into its control. Every higher need of the nation, 
 which now languishes, would be richly fed. We should be able to 
 put education upon foundations such as it has never known ; to 
 endow scientific research, and thus stimulate the growth of wealth 
 beyond even our dreams, to provide for the people free museums 
 and libraries and art galleries and parks and advantages of every 
 kind such as have hitherto only been found in Utopia. 
 
 If any one objects to entrust such large resources to the State, 
 as we may all well do at present, the danger could be avoided by 
 the Government’s running mines on a cost basis, and thus lowering 
 the prices of coal and other necessities immensely — whereby a 
 better distribution of wealth, would be facilitated while stimulating 
 a larger industrial productivity. And if we fear to cumber the State 
 with such large affairs, the working of the mines could be let out to 
 individuals or companies, on terms securing the interest of the 
 people at large. 
 
 My interest in this special suggestion grows not alone out of 
 the immense benefits to be derived directly from its adoption, but 
 out of the more immense benefits to follow indirectly in its train. 
 The right of the people at large to the control of the mineral re- 
 sources of the earth holds the principle of the right of the people at 
 large to control the tenure of land — the raw material of all wealth. 
 The natural resources of the earth in every form need to be held 
 in the interests of the commonwealth. 
 
 Land is the prime factor in the production of all wealth. 
 Capital and labor alike are dependent upon it. It thrives upon 
 the growth of capital and labor, and in industrial centres tends to 
 absorb the profits of both. This is a simple fact which can readily 
 be tested by any study of our present society. Land is a limited 
 quantity. There is just so much of it — about thirty acres for every 
 man, woman and child in this country to-day. You cannot increase 
 that land, though of course you can make it more highly produc- 
 tive. It does not therefore come under the regulation of competi- 
 tion. It is necessarily of the nature of a monopoly. As every other 
 monopoly, it demands therefore the control of the State, that the 
 monopoly may be that of the people at large and not that of indi- 
 viduals. 
 
 Society has the undoubted right to revise its laws at any time, 
 as the interests of the people shall demand. The time is coming 
 rapidly in the old world for such a revision. We have a longer day 
 of grace in this country, but sooner or later we shall find that pros- 
 perity for the people can be secured alone by the control of the 
 tenure of land in the interests of the commonwealth. 
 
 Facts are more suggestive than any amount of talk. In 1802, 
 the Mechanics’ and Traders’ Society of New York purchased from 
 ex-May or Varick the 25 x 99 lot on the northwest corner of Broad- 
 
way and, what is now Park Place, The cost of this lot at that 
 time was $11,500. To-day, with the same improvements which 
 it had in 1802, it is worth $200,000. Rented at six per cent, net on 
 this valuation, the society has an income on its investment of over 
 100 per cent, per annum. A one-roomed store at the corner of our 
 street rents for $3,000 per annum. More than half the arable land 
 of California is owned by one hundred men. Take now a State mid- 
 way between the geographical extremes and we shall find that 
 Illinois, with a smaller population than Scotland, has nearly 20,000 
 more tenant farmers. In Springfield there are some 200 residents 
 living upon their rent-rolls as landlords of farm properties. One 
 man who lives in England owns 40,000 acres in one county of 
 Illinois, from which he draws a rental of over $100,000 per annum. 
 It would seem that the time had already come for us to control 
 speculative dealing in land, and at least to raise the question of 
 regulating the normal rate of rent, as we now regulate the normal 
 rate of interest. 
 
 The so-called Mosaic legislation leads us back to the ultimate 
 factor in the solution of the social problem. The land is Jehovah’s. 
 It must vest in Him. It must not be allowed to become the mono- 
 poly of the few. It must be the common heritage of Jehovah’s 
 people, “ to the end that there be no poor among you.” As Seneca 
 long ago said : “ While nature lay in common, and all her benefits 
 were promiscuously enjoyed, what could be happier than the state 
 of mankind, when people lived without avarice and envy ? What 
 could be richer than when there was not a poor man to be found in 
 the world ? So soon as this impartial bounty of Providence came to 
 be restrained by covetousness, so soon as individuals appropriated 
 that to themselves which was intended for all, then did poverty 
 creep into the world.” 
 
 These are some of the suggestions which I offer, not as being 
 at all novel but as having for the most part a higher value than that 
 of originality — the authority of a growing consensus of the thought- 
 ful students of our social problem. 
 
 Such seem to me to be some of the points for which we are 
 to make, if we would find the way out of our present serious situa- 
 tion. I may be doubtless confused in my look ahead and may 
 mistake the bearings of the true pathway over the mountain ; but 
 the general trend of the course 1 think has been truly indicated. 
 In some such direction lies the way out. As we push on we shall 
 correct whatever mistakes we may have made in looking ahead. 
 Let us then push on with a mighty will and an unfaltering assurance 
 that there is some pathway over the glaciers and precipices into the 
 sunny fields of the promised land. 
 
 Not in vain, O Humanity, hast thou cherished through long 
 ages of darkness this high hope of a good time coming ! Not in 
 
63 
 
 vain hast thou heroically toiled onward, as toward some better 
 country, through blinding mists, against chilling winds, over flinty 
 pathways where every step has been a wound ! Not in vain have thy 
 prophet-sons climbed ever and anon some projecting summit, and, 
 with eyes lighted up with the vision of the land beyond, sung down 
 to thee their strains of joyous reassurance! Sure instinct of the 
 human heart — the day is coming when its purpose shall be vindi- 
 cated ; as over the desolate mountains the weary hosts of earth’s 
 toilers descend and find themselves amid the vineyards and the olive 
 groves of the land of peace and plenty. 
 
 Behold the seal of this hope, the sacrament of this faith in the 
 memorial of the man who came upon our earth preaching this 
 gospel : “ The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of 
 God is to come upon our world — his will is to be done here on 
 earth as it is done in the heavens. The Holy Communion of the 
 children of the All-Father is to grow around it the Free Common- 
 wealth of the human brotherhood — that true Communism of which 
 we are led to think of in this Whitsuntide ; of which the prophecy 
 was written in this ancient record : “ and the multitude of them 
 
 that believed were of one heart and of one soul : neither said any 
 of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own ; 
 but they had all things in common. Neither was there any among 
 them that lacked : for as many as were possessors of land or 
 houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were 
 sold and laid them down at the apostles’ feet : and distribution 
 was made unto every man according as he had need, 2 ’ 
 
The Sermons of Rev. R. HEBER 
 
 ON 
 
 APPEAR EACH WEEK IN 
 
 THE STAR, 
 
 PUBLISHED AT 
 
 338 FOURTH AVENUE, 
 
 NEW YOKE CITY. 
 
 Early in the fall a volume of essays upon various aspects of 
 the social problem will be issued by Mr. Newton, covering among 
 others the following topics ; “ A Bird’s-eye View of the Labor 
 Question : ” “ The Story of Co-operative Production and Co-opera- 
 tive Credit in the United States,” “ The Story of Co-operative Dis- 
 tribution in the United States ; ” “ Old time Guilds and Modern 
 Commercial Associations ; ” “ Is the State Just to the Workingman ; ” 
 “ The Religious Aspect of Socialism ; ” “ Communism.” Copies may 
 be ordered through The Day Star. 
 
 THE DAY STAR, 
 
 An Independent, Liberal Family Journal. 
 
 ISSUED -WEEKL-S'. 
 
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 The Sermons of Rev. R. Hebeb Newton, and articles by advanced thinkers 
 on religious, moral and political questions. Also departments on Science, 
 Hygiene, Household and Agriculture. Yearly subscription, $2.00. Single 
 
 number, 5 cents. 
 
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 335 Fourth Avenue, New York City.