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Title: Yours or Mine
Author: Ezra H. Heywood
Date: 1869
Language: en
Topics: exploitation, property, money, equality
Source: Retrieved on November 24, 2022 from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.72809391
Notes: By E. H. Heywood, president of The New-England Labor-Reform League.

Ezra H. Heywood

Yours or Mine

Everything, from the body one wears, to the world he lives in, is

subject to the claim of ownership; an object of common desire, and the

means of universal comfort, property, is yet the source of such general

and ominous conflict, that an intelligent sense, both of its just and

unjust claims, should guide further steps towards order and progress.

Especially does an issue now interrogating us, an issue fraught with

gravest interests and threatening overturn, in comparison with which,

all former revolutions are insignificant—the labor question require

this. It is of little use to discuss “The Rights of Labor,” “The Rights

of Capital,” “Eight Hours,” “Demand and Supply,” “Free Competition,”

“Co-operation,” “Cheap Money,” “Specie Payments,” “Public Faith,”

“Repudiation,” or other war-cries inscribed on the banners of hostile

interests, until we have determined, with some degree of exactness, what

is right between these contending parties, on what grounds we may hold

or dispose of property, and what causes its unequal distribution.

Whether the labor movement turns out to be merely a new assault of

destitute assertion on vested interests; a raid of the have-nothings on

the have-somethings, to end in defeat, and the handing of the American

people over to the dark fate of masses in older nations; or a decisive

step towards fundamental equity,—depends much upon a correct answer of

this inquiry. Hardly hoping to succeed, when so many others have failed,

I yet am not at liberty to decline investigating a question which so

deeply concerns individual duty and social destiny.

Most people see truth, but see it so rarely with a sense of moral

obligation to obey it, that reform is still the battle of a few

believers with many unbelievers. That service is the source of wealth,

that labor creates all values equitably vendible, is so generally

conceded in political science, and the popular sense of right, argument

in its defence seems unnecessary. Yet struggle to make that truth the

basis of practical life,—perhaps the gravest moral issue which has

claimed the attention of men since Calvary—will stir all nations

profoundly. The claim of equality before God, in the sixteenth century,

followed by demand for equality before the law in the nineteenth

century, has now to prove its sincerity by establishing equality in law

and custom. What one finds in arriving on the earth,—air, light, soil,

sea, mines, forest, bird, quadruped, all objects of value or use,

unmodified by human skill, may be classed as natural wealth, the free

inheritance which beneficent Providence bequeathes to all His children.

What this immigrant from the realm of space' produces after landing

here,—hearth, hammock, food, church, town, mills, roads, post-office,

newspapers, telegraph, all matter penetrated and improved by mind,—is

artificial wealth. The work done, sharpening a stake, building a city,

having a dream, writing a poem, service contributed, comfort sacrificed,

originates the claim to ownership or property, and defines its nature

and limits. In equity, one owns what he has earned, or received as the

free gift of another’s earnings; to claim more. is an invasion of those

natural resources which justice holds free and common, or fraudulent

seizure of the fruits of others’ toil.

But this possessive case has also an objective form: others labored, we

have entered into the results. Every stroke of work is the resultant of

numberless preceding forces. Many fortunes were made by the use of

machinery, the inventors of which died in the poor-house. One builds a

house in a week; but in the materials, tools, and skill used, centuries

unite to construct and equip the carpenter for his work—the clothes on

his person, the food in his stomach—his body brought into the world, at

such cost of pain, that his mother experienced deeper meaning of the

word “labor” than he ever dreamed of—flesh and blood borrowed, for all

animal substances coming from surrounding elements, if plant, water,

earth, air, should lay bands on their own, they would leave him no body

to live in—the spark of life animating his house of clay—all derived.

Though he drove every nail, and bought every fibre of material, will the

man be impertinent, impious enough, to say he built the house? Still,

though many foreworkers may dispute his claim, he produced the concrete

result; and society allows him a title. The tenure of mere

pre-occupancy, or purchase, by shuffling the cards of “supply and

demand,” with little or no valid labor-claim, is so general, that

property is timid, fears questions, fears an interrogation-point more

than a thousand bayonets; goes into partnership with sin, with slavery,

war, forgery, speculation; so that, looking into any popular evil,

property slams the door in your face. But pre-ccupancy, as of land and

tools, to use them, benefits society and is acquiesced in.

Providence, however, holding stock in both men and things, teaches

individual self-sacrifice to the public good. In view of Deity being

omnipotent, avarice wonders how one can be so strong, and not steal. Yet

it is the essence of power to scorn appropriation; one is great in

proportion to his ability of self-support and to assist others; deeds

which live in history were voluntary and gratuitous; those who work for

money, cease when the pay stops; those who work for love of it, hold on.

God is God, because he works for all, and for nothing. To see poverty

successfully defied, strengthens one. I was sad one day, having no money

to buy shoes, but recovered on meeting cheerful faces going barefoot.

The loafer,—who is this free, fat, reckless fellow, in no anxiety about

where he shall get his dinner?

Our soldiers fought for the country, died to save property and

government; yet the “army-blue” covers poor men, and from lowest bog of

“Dismal Swamp” to highest peak of Rocky Mountains, nowhere can the

soldier’s widow rest her foot, but property, in the name of law, may not

order off. She may own a farm in dreamland, though not in the “Union” it

bereft her of all to save. That most useful of human beings, the farmer,

impresses a transient labor-title only on the surface, and a few inches

below, tills the mere rind, the mould of earth; but those who never

turn, or intend to turn a sod, claim to “own” land from centre of globe

to stars. “The land shall not be sold forever, for the land is mine,

saith the Lord.” Jewish theocracy, in behalf of natural right, which

existed before human government, and will survive it, every fiftieth

year, with trump of jubilee, proclaimed liberty “throughout all the land

unto all the inhabitants thereof,”—liberty of person, and also of

property; houses, lands, nothing could be sold beyond the day of

Jubilee, when contracts of sale ceased, debts were expunged, and “every

man returned unto his possession.” Lev. xxv. 10, 23. 27, and 28. One of

the earliest ideas received from a deeply religious father, was, when

overlooking our mountain-side home, he said to the slip of a boy at his

side, “Those buildings, the land and stock, custom and the courts call

mine; but I am only a trustee, holding them for others’ good, not merely

for the use of a family, but the world at large, as the Lord wills.” The

followers of St. Simon, of Owen, Fourier; the Perfectionists of Oneida;

the increasing and marvellously wealthy discipleship of Mother Ann Lee,

called Shakers,—wherever devout souls lift the standard of creative

right against usurping fact, they obey the same impulse with which

immediate Divine presence, in the Pentecostal scene, inspired believers

to be “of one heart and one soul, none of them saying that ought of the

things he possessed was his own, for they had all things in common.”

While these cases by no means prove communism a solution of the property

problem, they are most conclusive evidence against the validity of

individual or corporate claim to ownership beyond actual earnings. The

interests of living creators and present public welfare overrule

traditional titles; for the more complete right to property, which

present labor confers, is valid against the transient claims of

pre-effort and pre-occupancy.

Of our workers, one raises wheat, another makes shoes, another keeps

house, or washes clothes. Since all produce more of some values, and no

one creates the variety consumed, they exchange commodities. The farmer

needs a dinner, a bed to sleep in, whole and clean clothing for his

person. The cook, the chambermaid, the seamstress, the washer, supply

his wants; or the housekeeper, skilled in many ways, personifies all

these artists in one. The shoemaker desires to trade his goods for

provisions, clothing, or carpenter-work. How shall commerce occur, so as

to recognize the service of all, and defraud none? Evidently, the cost

of labor is the equitable basis of exchange. The farmer and carpenter

“change works;” sewing-girls, rich in skilled labor, say, “You trim my

bonnet, and I will cut your dress;” and presently, on the sidewalk, they

outshine daughters of luxury, who have nothing but money they did not

earn. One boy helps another pick chips, if he will help him play. The

exchange of flour from the West, for fabrics of the East; of cotton from

Carolina, for Massachusetts “fanaticism;” of tea from China, for English

rebellion; of American reapers and mowers, for German ideas, legitimate

trade, the world over, is barter of service for service in the concrete

form of commodities. Goods cannot be conveyed from producer to consumer

without labor; so merchants are as necessary as mechanics, or farmers,

and their service and risk must be included in the full ultimate cost.

Since it is the right and for the interest of purchasers to choose what

is cheapest and best, the most accomplished workmen will have a natural

precedence, while the unskilled will be ruled out of the trade in

question, and employed in what nature and culture fit them to do best.

To those, therefore, denying that “cost is the limit of price,” because

labor is sometimes misdirected, we reply, that while their objection is

valid against paying the full cost of incompetent work, it is more

potent against one’s right to take more than the full cost of skilled

labor. But this cost being arrived at, we have the maximum price which

may be equitably put upon any commodity, and find value in exchange,

like the claim to property, limited by moral law, to the amount of labor

invested.

Service being the primary title to property, we will now notice its

rights in the form of profit, rent, and interest; which may be termed

the secondary claims of labor, or the adjutant services of property.

Since products are distributed to consumers through wages, rent, and

profits, or dividends; and since the warmest partizans of capital admit

that the wages class, under the present regime, do not get any more than

they earn,—the elements of inequality we are in search of must be

concealed in the distributing agencies now to be examined. Not to go to

sea without a compass, to arrive at correct conclusions, we must test

them by the cardinal principle agreed to in the outset,—that all wealth

is the product of plıysical or intellectual labor. Whether the reader is

superfluously rich or “independently poor,” I ask him to join me in

flinging aside old opinions, and follow truth wherever she leads. Even

the noble desire to help others is sin, if it assumes to give what one

does not honestly own. The world needs justice, not benevolence;

“For he that feeds men serveth few;

He serves all who dares be true.”

The right of the strong over the weak, is the right to assist them; of

the well over the sick, is the right to cure them; of the wise over the

ignorant, is the right to teach them.

If profit means what force and fraud can clutch, the ancient

proverbs,—“Trade is war;” “As a nail between the stone-joints, so does

sin stick fast between buying and selling,”—become true. But as an

honest agent of distribution, the merchant is a powerful aid to

production, and illustrates the modern maxim, “Exchange is

civilization.” So the manufacturer, the banker, the landlord, each is a

source of immense good to society as a worker; but what sadder sight

under heaven, than a man of native ability, using the superior intellect

God gave him to overreach his weaker fellows! To “make” money, otherwise

than by earning it, is the business of counterfeiters. Hence profit is

inadmissable, except for work done, or risk incurred.

It often occurs that creators of value are unable to exchange products

directly, and some representative is necessary. The party in arrears

recognizes the unadjusted balance by giving an order on his own service

or property: the order is current, or will be received, in further

exchanges, so long as the issuer guarantees its redemption. In this way,

what is called “currency” legitimately originates. Money, therefore, is

an acknowledgment, a certificate of value rendered, for which the issuer

thereof (not community or government) is bound to pay equivalent for

equivalent, to the holder, on demand. It may consist of bricks of tea,

as in Tartary; red cloth, as in Timbuctoo; codfish, as in Iceland or

Newfoundland; nails, as in Scotland; tobacco, as in Virginia; bullets

and wampum, as in Massachusetts; iron, as in Sparta; leather, as in

Carthage; slaves and cattle, as among Anglo-Saxons and Greeks; or

silver, as now, in oriental, and gold and paper, in occidental nations.

No matter what the material, if the faith of the issuing party is kept;

if the thing promised, the value signified, is forthcoming when the sign

is presented. Since, in obedience to its derivation from the Latin verb,

moneo, to remind, money represents unpaid service, and also is used as a

standard of common reference, in estimating value, a unit of measurement

is necessary. This should have some relation to what is to be measured.

A bushel is a given quantity, estimated by the space it fills; a pound

is known by its weight or gravity towards the centre of the earth; but a

“dollar” is a legal fiction, having no definite relation either to

quantity or quality. It is named from the Swedish daler, from Dale or

Daleberghi, where it was first coined; or from the German thaler, from

thal, a vale; because thalers were first coined in the valley of

Joachim. Since, as Adam Smith well observed, “Labor was the first price,

the original purchase-money, paid for all things, and is the ultimate

and real standard by which they must be examined, and compared,”

evidently it should furnish the unit of measurement. A day’s labor, or

some other conventional amount of service, in the progress of monetary

science, will probably become that unit. But it is within the purpose of

this inquiry, to notice only the fact, that a dollar serves the uses of

business, just in proportion as it is a reliable representative of labor

or property ; and that the inherent value of the substance of which it

is composed, is of no ac- count whatever in its use as money, provided

it is portable, and so cheap and unmonopolizable, as to be within the

reach of all having value to represent.

Before considering rent and interest, it is necessary to observe, that,

since property is purely an artificial creation, it has no inherent

right or power to increase. The impressions of human effort upon

material substance soon fade out; left, alone, property decays; frost,

fire, rain, rust,—all its natural enemies,—so incessantly invade it,

that mere self-preservation requires constant nourishment from its

parent, labor. A house, a railroad, a carriage, a coat,—all objects of

human creation,—in a very few years, decay and vanish. Labor tends to

self-maintenance and increase, originates the causes of its own growth;

the effort of property even to breathe, kills it, for oxygen brings

dissolution. Labor begins naked, and becomes opulent; property begins in

wealth, and ends in ashes. Hence, however much may be credited to its

collateral service, property, by original motive-power, not only earns

nothing, but is dependent on labor for continued existence. The same law

of right which guarantees the owner his earnings to the uttermost

farthing, forbids him, even to keep his property alive, the use of

another’s industry, without paying for it. The claim to rent, therefore,

is reduced to this: The owner of a house, after it has paid for itself,

as most rentals do shortly, may charge for its use, the cost of his

labor, in transferring it to you, and the amount of wear and tear, minus

cost of insurance, the cost of defence against the natural enemies of

houses. That is, if you return it to him as good as you took it, and pay

him for the labor of leasing, you not only owe him nothing, but be owes

you for keeping the house in repair. The equitable rent of a farm, a

spade, a horse, or any other species of property, may likewise be

ascertained by the amount of service rendered.

Since money is the representative of property, it has no rights superior

to that of which it is the exponent; and interest, being the price or

rent of money, is subject to the same laws as property, which money

represents. Interest, therefore, like rent, contributes nothing to the

support of society; but is a tax on labor. It is said to be the share of

capital in the profits of business; but, truly speaking, it shaves

capitalists out of just earnings; for, as the demands of usury increase,

the scope and profits of productive enterprise diminish. When banks get

into marble fronts, labor is crowded into tenement hovels; as the

usurious few go up, the useful many go down. If Southern planters pay

twenty-five per cent on money, they cannot compete with Indian

cottonists, who have it from England for three. If land pays two per

cent, and usury asks eight, the farmer is one man fighting against four;

and is swept in among the “city poor,” of whom purblind philanthropy

asks, “Why don't you go to the country?” In life-insurance, interest

serves a direct and beneficent purpose. When the service and risk of the

capitalist, as manufacturer, merchant, or banker, are paid, what further

claim has interest? Evidently, none; for we have already shown profit,

except as 'it represents labor, to be only another name for plunder. But

has not one the same right to sell his money as his property? Certainly;

he may sell what he owns; and he owns what he has earned. I loan you a

hundred dollars on valid security for one year; if it is promptly

returned, when due, you owe me for passing it out, and receiving it

back—no more, since that is the cost of labor in the transaction. This

money, if honest, represents definite value, as a house, a farm, or a

year’s labor; but my loaning it to you does not, in the least, disenable

the property it stands for to perform its natural functions. The house

shelters its occupants; the farm loves and rewards husbandry the same,

while it is the basis of my credit which assists you. Luxurious mansions

and fragrant gardens, soft apparel and princely chariots, are beautiful

objects to look upon, which we do not envy owners’ possession of; would

that all who wish, could enjoy such ease and opulence, for that is

legitimate use of property. But in allowing these fine estates, through

interest, to enable their occupants to live without work, society

sanctions monstrous injustice; which will awaken profound indignation,

when once popular thought is fixed on it. Some oppose usury, or high

interest, and defend low rates; but the difference is in degree, not in

kind; for the labor and risk involved being paid; all beyond that is

extortion. As well argue that slavery was wrong in ten states, but right

and constitutional in two or three. Hence, as an invasion of abstract

justice, interest must be adjudged crime in the court of conscience; and

the right to meddle with it, carries with it the right to abolish it

altogether.

To prove a thing essentially wrong, is quite enough to convince those

whose moral sense is not perverted by legal and customary fraud;—but so

many find a rule of faith and practice in traditional authority, it is

well to show that inspired—writings condemn interest,—the most emphatic

among which, are the stern denunciations of the Christian Bible. “Take

thou no usury of thy brother; but fear thy God. Thou shall not give thy

money upon usury, nor lend thy victuals for increase (Lev. xxv. 36, 37).

“Thou shalt not lend on usury to thy brother” (Deut. xxiii. 19). “Lord,

who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy holy bill? He

that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness. ... he that putteth

not out his money to usury” (Psalms xv. 1, 2, 5). “He that hath not

given forth upon usury, neither taken any increase, hath withdrawn his

hand from iniquity, hath executed true judgment between man and man; . .

. he is just, he shall surely live, saith the Lord God” (Ezekiel xviii.

8, 9). “If ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have

ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love

ye your enemies, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and ye shall be

children of the Highest” (Luke vi. 34, 35). To those who quote in reply,

the parable of the usurious lord, and the example of Jews fleecing

strangers, I have only to say, that, in shielding sinful practice behind

scripture texts, they stand with defenders of chattel bondage, who thus

proveil slavery a “divine institution;” with advocates of war, who

preach Jesus, and practice Joshua; with polygamists of Utah, and keepers

of brothels in our cities, who are good “Christians,” because “the

wisest man,” Solomon, and other patriarchs, had many wives, and numerous

concubines, or “fancy women,” as they are now called. Interpreted in the

spirit of truth and humanity, the Bible sanctions no such immoralities;

but condemns alike, slavery, war, libertinism, and usury. The fellowship

of Bouddha, Zoroaster, and Mahomet, with the Greek and Roman churches,

who compose a very large majority of the professedly religious world,

all put usury in the category of forbidden sin.

Turning to philosophers and moralists, we first meet that profoundest of

human reasoners, Aristotle: “Money, a medium of exchange, is by nature

sterile, and should have no legal right to increase, except by passing

through some form of labor.” Cato: “Usury is murder.” Dr. Wilson, an

English writer of 1569: “Taking interest is a greater crime than taking

life; for while the murderer kills one, usury swallows whole families,

communities, and nations.” Masse: “God, nature, reason, scripture; all

law, authors, and councils, are against usury.” Fenton: “It was never

even defended, for fifteen hundred years after Christ.” St. Basil: “The

griping usurer gets his victim’s hand to paper, and completes his

wretchedness. How so? By dismissing him bereft of liberty.” Buxton: “The

tired earth becomes barren; only the usurer’s money, the longer it

breeds, the lustier; one hundred pounds, put out twenty years since, is

grandmother to two or three hundred children, pretty striplings, able to

beget their mother again in a short time.” Bacon: “It exists through the

hardness of men’s hearts.” Roman law decreed it an aggravated species of

theft, and punished it with the utmost severity. English law, from

Alfred the Great, down till the moneyed aristocracy subsidized the moral

sense of that people; and statutes in almost every American state, bear

the same testimony; reason, religion, history, and legislation, unite to

condemn usury wrong in principle and extortion in practice.

A knowledge of the means by which property may be equitably acquired,

now enables us to find the causes of its unequal distribution; to look

into this millstone of poverty which hangs about the neck of labor, and

learn why wealth revolves into cunning bands, which produce nothing;

while its creators are poor. Of the three million three hundred and

fifty thousand inhabitants of London, sixty thousand are beggars. In

New-York City, a careful observer, Peter Cooper, states that poverty

increases ten times faster than population,—a fact which cannot be

explained away by foreign influx, for our native population is breaking

down the most rapidly; and Commissioner Wells proves that immigration

alone has added not less than five hundred and eighty million dollars to

the wealth of the nation, in the last three years. In Boston, multitudes

of working-women are in such extreme penury, that life itself is a

burden; “they wait for death, and it cometh not; they rejoice

exceedingly and are glad when they find the grave.” The floating

statistics of life, in two of the richest and most enlightened nations,

reveal conditions and tendencies, which may well shake one’s faith in

accepted principles of justice. Social classes are made of one blood,

children of the same impartial Creator, who is no respecter of persons.

To say poverty and crime among willing workers, are “necessary evils,”

is a reassertion of the old infidelity to right, which declared chattel

bondage the natural state of a weaker race. The primary cause will not

be found in depravity and idleness of the industrial classes, for the

opulent few, whose business it is to get a living without work, have

their full share of these disabilities. Thriftlessness and vice cannot

be charged upon the great mass of the people; there are deeper and

subtler causes of their degradation. Every one sees that those whose

labor makes property, and whose votes make government, have little

enjoyment of either; that one rarely acquires a competence, unless he

escapes from the wages class, and somehow is enriched by others’

earnings. It is so natural an impulse to strive to throw off burdens of

poverty and debt, that one will not pay rent, interest, or profit to

another, longer than he can avoid it. By instinct, also, we help our

weaker fellows, unless some special bribe makes it for our interest to

assist in keeping them down. Hence, the inherent vitality of human

nature, and its robust reappearing individuality, which is at once the

pillared strength, on which social organism rests; and an explosive

protest against undue monarchism would prevent such centralization of

property as has occurred in older nations, and is rapidly taking place

in ours, were there not some special means by which speculative cunning

gets control of the main sources and channels of wealth, and forces them

to bring grist to its mill.

This injustice consists in reducing theft to the fine art of getting

more than you give; in the practical abandonment of the equitable title

to ownership labor. Substituting advantage for service, in accordance

with the questionable maxim, “a thing is worth what it will bring,” men

hold that might makes right; that one may justly take from another what

his necessities compel him to yield. On this principle, exchange becomes

a species of piracy where there is not only no intention to render

equivalent for equivalent, but studied effort to get the largest

possible amount of another’s service or property, for the least possible

return. Advantage-taking is erected into a system, a “science;” and

privileged parties, absolved from moral obligations, cease to exercise

the generous equity of rational beings, obedient to essential right, and

make cheating a matter of business. Justice and liberty, supplanted by

extortion and mastership, the producing classes become vassal to the

speculating classes; the creators of wealth, to its cunning possessors;

and prevailing fraud, infecting the whole body- politic, makes men doubt

even the possibility of honesty, and believe poverty, crime, antagonism,

and war, still in the realm of “necessary evils” where the powers of

darkness reign supreme. Hence political economists, in ignoring cost,

and attempting to build a science exclusively on “value in exchange,”

have chosen a basis unstable and treacherous,—a negation of honest

service and moral right.

The art of overreaching, enacted into law, makes inevitable a

progressive inequality of wealth, the chief guarantee of which is

enforced currency. Since money is the common and indispensable agency to

measure products and distribute them to consumers; and since most

contracts and exchanges must be made through the accepted currency, it

is apparent, that if the speculating classes get control of this medium,

and dictate its nature, amount, and value, they are masters of both

labor and trade, and can compel us to pay them a special tax on the

chance to do business, and also for the privilege of living. Assuming

that money represents all property in the nation, instead of the

property of those only who issue it, they bribe government to endorse

the gigantic usurpation, and thereby are enabled to produce hard times,

bankruptcies, panics, and wars to any extent. For, like thieves and

wreckers, who, on battlefields and desolate coasts, prowl about to

plunder the pockets and denude the persons of dead men, money-changers

reap their richest harvests in public disaster. Knowing, that, with an

exclusive and irresponsible currency (though it is not true when money

is free and reliable, as I shall presently show), prices will rise with

inflation, and fall with contraction, they favor large issues to carry

them up to a high pitch, when they sell their property, and cry

out:—“Money is redundant; contract the currency!” Banks refuse

discounts, prices fall with a crash, whelming credit, honest

accumulations, and well-built houses in general ruin. It is estimated

that ninety-seven per cent of business men, in cities, and eighty per

cent in the nation at large, fail at least once. Holding money, they

have withdrawn from circulation for this very purpose, these wreckers

now appear on the scene, attend forced sales they themselves have

compelled, bid in all property they can grasp, and then proceed to

“expand the currency,” until prices are again at the top-notch, when

they sell out, and precipitate another “panic.” Indeed, the

specie-machine is so arranged, that of its own motion it produces these

results; makes money scarce, interest high, and wages low, to suit those

who run it.

Such, in brief, is the history of commercial “crises” which occur at

intervals in America and Europe, but most frequently in Great Britain;

for there, exclusive money has assumed its most despotic form in a

“specie basis,” which, oscillating with every whim of the stock

exchange, like intermittent shocks of earthquake, inspires constant

terror and distrust. As India is the source of cholera, and Egypt of

plague, so England generates “panics;” and a few leading bankers, or the

single house of Rothschild, can start a system of manæuvres, which,

sweeping the earnings of millions into their coffers, will carry ruin

and destitution to merchants, manufacturers, and aborers, throughout

Christendom.

Forced currency is not only the base of operations for sorties of

guerilla war and legitimate enterprise, but the direct and indispensable

means by which a universal and perpetual system of theft is organized in

the form of interest on money. What a stupendous fraud this is, few even

of those who oppose high rates seem to be aware. The net annual income

of all American labor, in the long run, is about three per cent; in

England, two. Our whole wealth in 1860,—slaves excluded,—was fourteen

billion one hundred and eighty-three million dollars; of which,

twenty-six and eight-tenths per cent was estimated to have been produced

in that single year. Crediting ten per cent to capital, which is enough

to allow its motive power in production, leaves sixteen and eight-tenths

per cent; or, one-sixth part of the wealth accumulated since the landing

of the Pilgrims, two hundred and forty years, was produced by labor in

that one year 1860. But such is the enormous consumption, the nation

devouring itself every six years, that the net average annual income is

but three per cent. Yet the income of bare money, which needs no food,

clothing, or shelter, is all the way from seven to thirty per cent. If

at six per cent interest, we double capital in the hands of its holders

every eleven years, at the expense of labor, think of the monstrous

swindle of our national-bank system, which nets ten, twelve, and even

twenty, per cent out of the nation’s credit. A capitalist depositing one

hundred thousand dollars in bonds, is constantly paid interest on those,

and also given the use of ninety thousand dollars in currency. If a

young man wanting to go into business can borrow one thousand dollars,

with wise use, it will be the making of him; yet lie must pay interest

on it. But government gives these banks the free use of two hundred and

seventy million dollars, gives outright annually, from twenty-five to

sixty millions to this monopoly. The thirty-five million dollars

capital, with exclusive privilege, of the old United States Bank,

alarmed the nation and revolutionized government. The wrath of an

aroused and defrauded people will create new Andrew Jacksons to abolish

the infinitely more oppressive system of today. Suppose bondholders

waive their present purpose to make the war-debt perpetual, and postpone

its payment only ninety years? It amounts now, in round numbers, to two

and one-half billions; doubles at present rates (ten per cent, including

tax exemption) every seven and a half years; would amount in three

generations to ten billion two hundred and fifty million dollars, and we

should pay it five thousand times over. But the profits which a special

class clear through the continuance of the debt, are a drop to the

ocean, when compared with the boundless system of extortion, which,

through usury, rents, and dividends, devour the peoples’ earnings.

Property in the Union now amounts to twenty billions; which, reckoning

the original land nothing, comprises the net earnings of American labor

during two hundred and fifty years. Yet, on present rates, interest,

which earns nothing, would absorb this whole property in nine years.

Thus, by the perpetual value and increase allowed money, capitalists

acquire a kind of supernatural power over laborers; so that a man of one

generation can tax all future generations with the support of his

offspring; and interest is the golden chain which binds the Prometheus

industry, in order that vultures of moneyed aristocracy may feed on its

vitals.

Furthermore, within this single word is coiled the mainspring of

monopoly and speculation, the motive-power of fraud and mastership,

which gives overseers and capitalists their despotic advantage, and

makes money only another name for tyranny. Legalized theft, interest,

consecrates robbery as a principle, and enforces the practice of it on

the community. Money being the exponent of property, the rate of

interest, which is the price of money, determines the price of

everything else; or, at least, the price below which things cannot be

sold, unless dealers break and their assets are knocked off under forced

sales. Real estate, rents, provisions, clothing all vendible

commodities, are now excessively high, chiefly because interest is

excessively exorbitant. Cost of capital is a part of the running

expenses, and must be added to the price of what one produces or sells.

When prices range above the means of people to buy; that is, when usury

takes more out of him than he can get out of consumers, he “fails,” and

money-dealers kindly devour him. Thus, from the usurer to the shoulders

of the manufacturer or farmer; thence, to the shoulders of the trader,

who passes it on to the consumer; this burden is shifted, until, like

poor Sinbad, bestridden by the old man of the sea, laborers, under the

whole weight of the swindle, appear the bowed and dilapidated creatures

you see in factories and on street-corners. It is estimated that

machinery in England does the work of eight hundred million men; that in

Europe, steam alone trebled human power during the last generation. Yet

the vast energies of inventive genius are compelled to serve class

interests by money monopoly. Interest now pays so much larger profits in

bonds and stocks, than in productive enterprise, that capital inevitably

flows there. A few wealthy manufacturers and merchants, in alliance with

banks, thereby secure immense incomes, but crush out smaller ventures,

intimidate young men from going into business, and impoverish people

generally.

Through systematic monopoly of land and money, English capitalists, for

centuries, have compelled Irish people to pay over most of their

earnings in the form of rent and interest. In extending the franchise,

Parliament took care to authorize “household,” not citizen,

suffrage;—land and money dominate, society is vassal; every blade of

grass and bank-bill votes, but no man yet. What England is to Ireland,

the cities of this and other nations, or rather the usurers, bondlords,

and stockholders residing therein, are to laborers,—absentee

capitalists, who reap where they have not sown, and gather where they

have not strewn. Hence, five per cent of our city population now own

more property than the other ninety-five per cent; and ten per cent of

the Union, more than ninety per cent. Factory corporations; coal, iron,

and copper mining; railroads; express and telegraph companies, are

avowedly controlled to enable absentee “owners” (who manufacture “supply

and demand” to suit themselves), to take all products above what is

barely necessary to keep alive the laborers thereon. Loud clamorers for

“protection,” practice free trade in human beings; for their agents in

Canada, Europe, Asia, collect and forward laborers to crowd down wages

here. In the stately mansion of the capitalist, crowning every desirable

eminence, with humbler dwellings of “the people” spread around its base,

we see dark barbarisms of the feudal ages resident among us. And if,

obedient to the same spirit which induced Luther, Hampden, and

Washington to resist wrong in their day, workers ask more pay, public

opinion branding it as a “strike,” allows the capitalist to go up to his

gorgeous mansion, and the laborer to go down to his hovel and his grave.

An English sovereign, invested by “the man in the moon” at six per cent

compound interest, in the year one of the Christian era, would amount

now to a mass of gold bigger than the earth; and our laws would

surrender this planet to him as his “property.” Slavery sold the body of

labor on the auction-block; interest gets the use of that body without

the responsibility or expense inseparable from ownership. The net annual

income of a man’s work is, say one hundred dollars. One thousand

dollars, “well invested,” pays at least one hundred dollars annual

dividend; hence the holder of a thousand-dollars investment owns a man;

smaller holders own women and children to the extent of what they will

“yield.” Thus, while we have freed four millions of one kind of slaves,

interest holds such an infinitely greater number of human chattels, that

to this complexion it has come at last, we are all negroes now. With all

its abominations, the Southern idea produced immense wealth; but

interest is a purloining system; for, just in proportion as absentee

capitalists flourish, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, industry,

in all its manifold relations, is crippled and defrauded.

The effect of tariffs and other indirect revenues is to exempt property,

and throw the burden of taxation on labor. But the startling facts and

cogent arguments of our free-trader friends are even more potent against

our financial and private revenue laws. The annual sales of merchandize

alone in the States are reported to be ten billion dollars; reckoning

two per cent as the amount which, over and above service and risk, is

paid for the use of capital, we have two hundred million dollars annual

tax assessed on trade by a moneyed aristocracy, for which not one

dollar’s worth of actual service is rendered. In chartering railroad

companies, government, by its right of “eminent domain,” generally

limits their dividends to ten per cent; but all leading lines pay

immensely more than that. Fares and freights have, of course, been

reduced accordingly, or the surplus paid into the public treasury; not a

bit of it. The companies, by a process of “watering,” as it is called,

or in plain English, by forging new stock, have pocketed the surplus,

and now collect ten per cent tax, both on the original and the bogus

stock Thus the Boston and Albany road are reported (N. A. Review,

January, 1869,) to have stolen two million dollars on which travel and

transportation now pay them an annual tax of two hundred thousand

dollars. Vanderbilt forged some twenty-two millions of stock on the

Hudson River, Harlem, and New-York Central roads, in which the annual

income at the same rate would be two million two hundred thousand

dollars. The Second, Third, Sixth, and Eighth Avenue Horse-Railroads of

New York City are said to have thus increased their stock fourfold, and

thereby net from thirty to fifty per cent annual profit on the original

investment; while wages paid to their conductors and drivers for twelve

and sixteen hours daily service, are not sufficient to feed and clothe

their families decently. An humble employe steals a nail; Massachusetts

law lays hands on him. A president or director plans and shares the

theft of two million dollars; we pay him an annual premium on the amount

stolen, send him to Congress, or make him governor. These illustrative

items, with the vast amount, annually gathered in cities and towns from

rent of land, tenement, and warehouse privileges, not for work done, but

on property which has paid for itself many times over; with the legal

right of money to even one per cent as interest, opening a wide and

effectual door to speculation, and increasing the price of commodities

on an average five per cent; with the moral sanction thus given to

Vanderbilt, Fisk, Jr., Belmont, and lesser operators, to “make” millions

in a day, furnish a glimpse of how the single wrong principle, that one

may take more than he gives, masses currency, banks, lands, mines,

railroads, factories, coerced labor, all the sources and

instrumentalities of wealth into one gigantic system, to compel our

people to pay tribute to the centralizing power of usurped property.

Having discovered the true basis of property, and the causes of its

unequal distribution, we will now glance at methods and measures of

reconstruction. When the popular god gets into a tight pinch, good women

and men are usually on hand to help him out; when traditional

expressions of truth—the church, the state—are captured by invading

evil, natural right, the ever-living Overruler, incarnate in human

forms, goes forth again to redeem the world. Intuition and memory,

idealism and institutionalism, competition and co-operation, vigilant

self-interest and collective right, these are the two feet on which the

race gets forward, the two hands with which we wrestle that good not

understood, called “evil.” The devil himself is said to be the great

“second best,” and “evil, the cold end of good.” It is probable that the

cruellest instances of social injustice are the fruit of wrong

relations. Of course, Deity understood the business of creation, made

law right at first, and has never changed His mind. How prison and

poor-house could be sincerely thought “institutions,”—permanent

apartments in the social establishment,—how God could have created men,

masquerading in the livery of progress, depraved and infidel enough to

say, enforced poverty and degradation of labor is “necessary;” that is

the mystery. Had we not enshrined covetousness and theft in church and

state, paupers would be unknown, and men “would not steal, even if you

should pay them for doing it.”

Since the privilege of association is a fundamental necessity of free

institutions, no one can disprove the right or duty of workers to form

unions for their own protection; but they should not waste their

strength in abortive expedients. What revolutions are in government,

strikes are to business, sometimes serviceable, often necessary, but

never justifiable, except as the last resort of invaded right. Even

then, if successful, the gain is temporary, for the battle must be

fought over again next season. Hence combinations of laborers to raise

wages, or combinations of capitalists to reduce them, but aggravate and

perpetuate existing antagonisms. The effort to reduce the hours of labor

is founded in justice, beneficent in purpose, but can permanently

succeed only by abolishing the legal usurpations of property, and

securing to all parties a free contract. Co-operation, the most

beneficent word this age has contributed to literature, as generally

interpreted, means only a widening basis of advantage-taking capitalism,

introduces no new principle, and is powerless to solve the labor

problem. You oppose “capitalists;” and yet, to become a capitalist, to

join the enemy, is victory. If we are to be swindled, why not by one as

well as by a hundred men? Like the old protective union-store movement,

which spread over New England years ago, it will succumb; for monopoly,

as now entrenched, is master of the situation. While gambling is the

underlying principle of business, Jay Cooke and John Morrissey will

outwit smaller operators. The partnership of labor, recognizing natural

leaders in business, making men responsible in proportion to their

power, and allowing all to share results in proportion to their

contributions of labor or property, is more likely to succeed. A new

party on old principles, whether of the people or “working-men,” could

it succeed, would prove only a change of masters. In the falling out of

rogues, some honest men might come to their own; but that would not

destroy the principle of roguedom. Since the evil we seek to eradicate

is fundamental, the remedy must be radical and comprehensive. When

William H. Sylvis, the honored president of the National Labor Union

admonished the Working-men’s State Assembly of New York that they would

fail, unless they addressed themselves to the great problems of finance,

he uttered grave truth, eloquently and impressively stated. We present

issues to which people will leap like dust of iron to magnet, and

ultimately be marshalled in the coming labor party. But you cannot pick

a newly-furnished house out of a lumber-yard, or find broadcloth suits

in a wool-sack; artistic processes must convert the raw material into

desired results. So a revolution in the ideas of trade, of finance, and

of honesty itself, must prepare the way for party action. First the

blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. While, therefore,

the time for general success in politics has not come, the time for

moral action, the time to move on the enemies’ works, has come. By

petitions, conventions, lectures, tracts, newspapers, and concentrating

our votes on measures and men favorable to productive service, we make

right public opinion, and stereotype it into statutes, But no

organization can or ought to succeed until you have an honest idea to

run it.

Most men were unoubtedly born, but few ever get into the world.

Imprisoned within the four walls of ignorance, poverty, superstition,

and prejudice; shut up in factories, in shops, stores, or serfs on land,

the mass do not share the life free institutions were intended to

afford. The most atrocious claim of slavery was its asserted right to

sacrifice men to property. Abolishing one form of that claim, it is but

the initiative step in a revolution which will strip property of its

purloining power, and make it the loyal servant of creative

intelligence. Before the war, an able-bodied, intelligent laborer at the

South, would “bring” two thousand dollars; under our conscription law,

the commutation-fee was three hundred dollars; those lacking in

patriotism, or having too much of it, could pay that, and be let off;

that is, the price-current of an honest able man North, was three

hundred dollars. If a fat, handsome factory horse dies, to the whole

corporation it is an expensive bereavement. If a man tumbles from the

fifth story, to be taken up dead, or is drawn and quartered in the

machinery, a dozen others will beg for the chance to be killed the next

day at one dollar and a half each. Human life is cheaper, under the

capital system, than it was under the chattel system. Omnipresent,

irresponsible property, is a many-headed master, empowered to increase

illimitably at labor’s expense. To talk of free competition under

present laws, is as absurd as it would have been to expect free labor

inside the old slave system. If a new railroad is chartered for the

“public benefit,” the old lines combine, buy it up, and raise fares all

around. If a new express starts, it “co-operates” with the old If a man

opens a provision-market or coal-yard, old dealers conciliate, or drive

him from the field. Over all is a banking-system, able to crush any

enterprise, large or small, and make money out of it. What are free

speech, free press, free trade, in the presence of Vanderbilt with his

railroads, backed by seventy millions? What is a feudal baron, or an

English landholder, compared with the superintendent of a corporation,

who, president of a national bank, and wanting to go to Congress, can

say to his four thousand “hands”:—“Break up your trades-unions, vote for

me, or leave the mill and go home to starving families!” What papal

domination was to Luther; what the Stuarts were to Puritans; what George

III. was to the colonies; what slave oligarchy was to

republicanism,—that our money-system is to legitimate enterprise.

Approved by morals, defended by political economists, consecrated in law

and public opinion, overreaching makes society a conspiracy against an

honest man.

Though he never studied mechanics, an ox yet understands the fact of

gravitation, as well as Newton, and cannot be driven off a precipice.

Constructing its cell strictly according to the principles of solid

geometry, a bee three months old, knows higher mathematics than most

college students ever climb to. So, surely, will the instincts of men

gravitate towards law, order, and fair-dealing. If they can be trained

to peril life and limb in fire-companies, if they can be trained in

armies to stand up and be shot at for thirteen dollars a month, can they

not be trained to be honest? When we meet as brothers, lovers, friends,

who does not scorn to take advantage of another? who would not blush, if

he charged anything, to take more than the bare cost of service? These

necessities to cheat, exist by statute, not by nature. Broadly stated,

the objects of labor-reform are opportunity and reciprocity; to “live,

and let live,” co-operation, based on the utmost liberty to create, and

on equity in the exchange of products, the world over. If society exists

for anything, it is guarantee the security of persons and property; that

one who works for a thing shall get it, and hold it, if he chooses. But

the right of men in multitude or unitude to hold or sell what they do

not earn, the genius of fraud and mastership which overrules and

falsifies all human affairs, must be exterminated from off the planet.

writes a book, or invents a machine, government allows the patent or

father ceases to control the earnings of his daughter at eighteen; of

his son, at twenty-one. Yet property compels working-people to pay

perpetual tribute to its unrighteous usurpations. As is well known, most

of the government bonds were purchased at from forty to sixty cents on a

dollar, in gold; and have drawn on the full currency amount, interest in

gold equalling from eight to twenty per cent in currency, on the

original gold investment. Not to mention that interest being essentially

extortion, all claims to exact it are morally wrong, and therefore void;

not to urge that, according to the laws against usury, above certain

rates at that time, in almost every state of the Union, both principle

and interest, are forfeited; consider the fact, that the full amount

originally loaned to government will soon, in interest, have been more

than paid. When labor has been fully returned for labor, those who think

that debt can be perpetuated, know little of the claims of justice, or

of the spirit to resist oppression which lives in the hearts of the

American people. That recent purchasers of bonds may not suffer, it

should be assessed upon the whole property of the people, and discharged

at once. These empires of mining and prairie lands “given” by Congress

and states to corporations, must be returned to their rightful owners

those, and those only, who can till them. One failing to show a deed

from the Creator, that is, a labor-title, has no more right to hold

land, than to hold slaves.

But since, under present money laws, those given lands cannot live on

them, the one indispensable means to enable all to create and hold

property, is free currency. The use of one’s credit, as of his

conscience, or his vote, is a natural right, antecedent to, and

independent of, government. The evil of existing systems does not reside

entirely in that delusive cheat, a “specie basis,” but also in enforced

paper currency. The right to make any kind of money a legal tender,

which is not natural tender, receivable on its own merits, is purely

imaginary. For government to issue all money based on the property of

the people is a usurpation and a fallacy; it is usurpation, because the

people never have, and never can place their property, except in cases

of extreme public peril, at the disposal of government; it is a fallacy,

because such money is irresponsible, representing neither the whole

property of the people, nor that of any one citizen. “The government” is

composed of one class of men this year, and another next; the capitol,

the department buildings, forts, arsenals, custom, and post.

offices—these comprise its “property.” But to the extent of its

legitimate business, government has right to issue money based on

service; and we therefore favor the withdrawal of the notes of the

national banks, and the issue instead of treasury certificates of

service, receivable for taxes and bearing no interest. These would never

depreciate, because, like postage stamps, always good for the purpose

proposed, and would answer the uses of a national currency. To render

monopoly of them impossible, to demonitize gold and silver, and as the

exercise of a natural right, the privilege of states, communities, and

individuals to issue money on their own responsibility, and to any

extent they deem best, must never be surrendered. Whether this would be

“constitutional,” I do not pause to ask; having amended the Federal

constitution to abolish one kind of slavery South, we can, if need be,

amend it to abolish other kinds of slavery North.

Thus, marching on Wall Street in two columns, one under the banner of

“Union,” the other of “State Rights,” we shall abolish interest, by

making money so reliable and plenty, that no one can get more than the

bare cost of issuing it. A letter dropped in a Maine office is carried

across the continent to San Francisco, up four flights of stairs, and

delivered, for three cents; because that is the average cost. Containing

news from a sick friend or urgent business informa- tion, a letter would

" bring” one hundred or one thousand dollars; you would pay that, rather

than not have it. What an injustice to speculate on letters! Yet that is

nothing compared with the incalculable fraud government authorizes and

sanctions in speculation on money. With an exclusive currency, usury

laws are not worth the paper written on. The only way to protect slaves

was to abolish mastership; so we shall remove the necessity for usury

laws, by annililating despotic money. But they asked, “What shall we do

with the slaves?” We replied, “Let them employ their masters, and pay

honest wages.” So now, the question is not; whether it is safe to trust

people with their earnings; safe to allow farmers, mechanics, and

merchants, to issue and manage money—for none but those lacking faith in

liberty and honesty, will ask that—the real question is—what shall he do

with those who uphold, defend, and fatten on this slave-money system?

Based on actual values, issued under free banking laws, or by voluntary

associations, on principles of mutual insurance, where individuals draw

against property and labor, registered and guaranteed, as banks now draw

against bonds deposited; and cumulative credit is represented in great

central clearing-houses—money will be backed by, and convertible into,

the only thing it was ever entitled to represent,—service in the form of

commodities. Gold, like gravel, can go for what it is worth. If it has

the merits claimed, it will stand on them; but the fact that bullionists

urge the intrusion of law to make it legal tender, is confession that

they have no faith in those merits. All agree that the price of money,

like that of other things, ultimately must be the cost of production.

The cost of ours will be that of clerk and office hire, paper and

printing, from one-fourth to one per cent. That it will encounter and

put to flight, both in argument and practice, the expensive swindle of

bullionists, we have not the least doubt.

A. T. Stewart’s note is good; the note of any solid man in your midst is

good; because, known and definite, value backs it. A bill of exchange,

drawn by one leading house on another, is good; every new indorser

increases its reliability in geometrical ratio. We propose to make the

note of hand and bill of exchange universal. Drafts, checks, and bills

of exchange already constitute the wholesale currency of the world;

bank-bills and coin, the retail. Gold, between nations, is commodity,

not money; the government-mint stamp merely shows how much bullion it

contains. Whatever may be said of its intrinsic utility,—which is far

less than that of iron, and the world could much easier get on without

it,—its exclusive use, as money, is born of fraud and unscientific

confusion. In “panic,” the assets of merchants are more reliable than

those of banks; government coming to the rescue of business by allowing

banks to “suspend specie payment,” is simply the intervention of

commodity credit, to save the sham credit of bullionists, when their

“specie basis” drops into the hoarder’s strong box. Even in “specie

times,” there is barely more than one dollar in coin in the vaults, to

five or ten paper cheats flying about the country. Gold fails just when

it has a duty to perform. When more needed than in 1862? Yet just then,

this Mr. “Specie” deserted, and has not been seen since. Mr. “Hard

Dollar” snuffs a battle further than a war-horse, remains or flies, as

victory inclines, to or from the flag; because, by hypocritically

assuming to have both representative and intrinsic worth, he does not

honestly, as money, have either. It is high time government cease

inflicting misery on peoples by “antiquated prejudice for bits of yellow

dross.” Were there less noisy tongues, and more thinking heads at

Washington, there would be an end of this talk of “regulating currency.”

Regulate wind and tide, tornado and earthquake; limit the amount of air

for the lungs, and blood for the veins, of forty million people, but

talk not of-regulating money, which must obey the higher laws of

creative energy. Under the exclusive system, whose avowed purpose is

speculative control, increased currency goes into speculation, and

carries up prices. But pay off the bonds, abolish interest through free

banking, and you force money into legitimate enterprise, make increase

impossible, except as it passes through some form of labor. That

increases production; increase the supply, and prices fall, excepting

that of labor, which will go up; for the more production, the greater

the demand for workers. Depositors in savings-banks would lose their

small gains; but putting their earnings into business, they would gain a

hundred dollars where they lost one in interest. Hence, without further

entering the discussion of finance, which is not the object of this

essay, it is evident that free money, giving full play to the beneficent

laws of supply and demand, would offer all a chance, bring machinery to

the side of labor, enlist vast and varied energies of man and nature

lying idle, and make wealth so abundant, and accessible, as to almost

shame us out of the weakness of calling anything “ours.”

That Mecca of sharpers, the city, now a desperate scramble of well-

dressed gentlemen to get more than they give, will become an equitable

agency of exchange, a free public market, where producers and consumers

can meet without the expensive intrusion of advantage-takers, who now

combine to plunder them both; that monument of unjust taxation, the

custom-house, be sent down to keep company with British taxed tea, at

the bottom of the harbor — our protectionist friends will not, of

course, hesitate to put their principles on their own merits, and

collecting the needed amount by direct tax, like the “Freed-men’s

Bureau” for poor negroes, furnish a manufacturers’ bureau to aid

destitute capitalists; travel and transportation, now invaded by

numberless by way and highwaymen; railroad, express, and telegraph

lines, all must cease to enrich special interests at popular expense,

and serve the general welfare at cost. Thence, we will reach that grand

consummation to which civilization tends,—free land and free homes; so

that one can not only “read his title clear to mansions in the skies,”

but to ground to stand on, and a roof to live under, in these States.

Free contracts, free money, free markets, free transit, and free land,

these five points of our creed, not idle theories, but asserted as what

we believe, and for no other reason than because we believe them, are

living issues, to be test-questions at the ballot-box. United on the

central question of honest money, the mediator between capital and

labor, knowing these ends are a common need and a common right, great in

numbers, strong in reason, national labor union will level every barrier

to reach them.

But it is union to liberate, not to coerce; no class movement, it fights

the battle of the manufacturer, of the merchant, of the farmer, of

legitimate enterprise in all its manifold relations; promotes that

coincidence of interests, which, uniting all by giving each back to

himself, weds individual right to general welfare, and makes it its most

powerful coadjutor. A reform to conserve; at once “a return to the past,

and effort towards the future,” it overcomes evil with good, succors the

weak with the creative energies of the strong, inspires the greatest of

all to serve all, and hastens the day, when men will have neither the

power nor the wish to own more than they earn.