LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Boston Monday Lectures. LABOR, WITH PRELUDES ON CURRENT EVENTS. By JOSEPH COOK. I am perfectly convinced that the real way to elevate the character of the working classes is to give them a command over the necessaries of life. Sir Robert Peel. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. ^^z Et^erfitiUe Press, CamirtH^e. //p / C6^ Copyright, 1880, By JOSEPH COOK. All rights reserved. Withdrawn Garrett BillLai Institute Stereotyped by C. J. Peters 4* Son, 7J Federal Street, Boston. INTRODUCTION. The object of the Boston Monday Lectures is to present the results of the freshest German, English, and American scholar- sliip, on the more important and difficult topics concerning the relations of Religion and Science. They were begun in the Meionaon in 1875; and the audiences, gathered at noon on Mondays, were of such size as to need to be transferred to Park-street Church in October, 1876, and thence to Tremont Temple, which was often more than full during the winter of 1876-77, and in that of 1877-78. The very capacious auditorium of Tremont Temple was destroyed by fire in August, 1879 ; and in November, 1879, the lectures were transferred to the Old South Meeting House, the most interest- ing of the historic edifices of New England. The audiences have always contained large numbers of min- isters, teachers, and other educated men. The thirty-five lectures given in 1876-77 were reported in the Boston Daily Advertiser, by Mr. J. E. Bacon, stenographer; and most of them were republished in full in New York and London. They are contained in the first, second, and third volumes of " Boston Monday Lectures," entitled " Biology," " Transcendentalism," and " Orthodoxy." The thirty lectures given in 1877-78 were reported by Mr. Bacon for the Advertiser, and I'epubli^hed in full in New York and London. They are contained in the fourth, fifth, and sixth iv INTRODUCTION. volumes of " Boston Monday Lectures," entitled " Conscience," " Heredity," and " Marriage." The twenty lectures given in 1878-79 were reported by Mr. Bacon, for the Advertiser, and republished in full in New York and London. They are contained in the seventh and eighth volumes of " Boston Monday Lectures," entitled " Labor " and " Socialism." In the present volume some of the salient points are : 1. A definition of Socialism by ite theories, as the legal and compensated or compulsory and uncompensated transmutation of private, competing, family, or corjM^ration capital, into pub- lic, collective, and uncompeting capital. 2. A definition of both Conlmunism and Socialism, by their tendencies in practice, as involving the abolition of inheritance and private property, and the expropriation of its present own- ers (Lecture I.). 3. A definition of natural wages as consisting of at least twice the cost of the unprepared food of the laborer and his family (Lecture VI XL). 4. A definition of natural profits (Lectures VIIT. and IX.). 5. A defence of the theory that natural wages and natural profits are not antagonistic to each other, or that profits do not necessarily lessen as wages increase (Lecture IX.). 6. A free use of the facts collected by the original investiga- tions of the Massachusetts Labor Bureau, as to the condition of working-people, male and female, in factory-towns (Lectures V.-VII). 7. A consideration of the moral perils of congregated labor in manufacturing centres (Lectures III. and V.). 8. A discussion of woman's wages, and of the relations of sex to industry (Lectures V. and VI.). 9. A consideration of the susceptibility of the United States to communistic aneo- ple. BoNAMY Price. V. SEX IN INDUSTRY. PEELUDE ON CURKENT EVENTS. There came yesterday from Windsor Castle a message, sent by what Tennyson calls " Thunderless lightnings smiting under seas," to the fourth daughter of Victoria at Montreal: "Delighted at reception. Say so. The Queen." Although Canada occupies so large a place in the minds of Britons, that the Marquis of Lome publicly affirms that Montreal is the best-known city on this continent, Boston is here ! I undertake to affirm that Americans in general have not heard of any thing happening in Canada since 1867, when the union of the provinces was formed. We are as ob- livious of what occurs on the other side of the St. Lawrence as Englishmen in general are as to what happens on this side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless Canada at this moment is the fifth maritime power in the world. The mouth of the St. Lawrence is shut fully five months of the year by ice. Commercial reasons, it 123 124 LABOE. was presumed by some, would lead Canada to seek annexation to the United States after the repeal of the reciprocity treaty. That agreement was nego- tiated by Lord Elgin in 1854, and abrogated in 1866. This city of Boston had a trade of more than twenty- seven million dollars annually, affected by its provis- ions. The union of the British-x\merican provinces was an accomplished fact fifteen months after the repeal of the treaty. Most urgent commercial forces hurried on this coalescence. Canada before the con- federation was an inland province. Its chief winter gates to the ocean were New York, Boston, and Portland. Now it has a seaboard. The country of Evangeline's Acadie, which Longfellow annexed to American hearthstones, is startled by the thunder of railway-passage . " This was the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stood like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic." At a public expense of twenty million dollars, the Intercolonial Railway has been undertaken, to secure free communication on Canadian soil to and from the inland cities and Halifax and St. John on the Atlan- tic. Various other means of intercommimication have been improved, so that the shutting of the mouth of the St. Lawrence in the winter does not prevent the access of Canada to the ocean. Tliat is never frozen. To-day Canada is a competitor witli SEX IN INDUSTRY. 125 the United States in the ports of the West Indies and of South America; and, in case of certain ar- ticles, in those of Great Britain herself. It is quite worth while for merchants to cast an eye toward the Dominion of Canada, even if politicians have no rea- son to look that way. The repeal of the reciprocity treaty has drawn the British Provinces closer to- gether. The interchange of traffic, which from 1820 to 1866 was largely in favor of the United States, underwent so great an alteration from 1866 to 1873, as to show a balance against the United States, and in favor of Canada, of $51,875,000. Lord Derby said, a few years ago, that everybody knew that Canada must soon become an independent nation. He has changed his mind since, and is now a representative of the rising tide of imperialism ; but at this hour not a shilling of British public money comes to Canada, although a vice-regal gov- ernment is accepted there with acclamations. As members of one political family, Upper and Lower Canada have led an uneasy life together. A proposition, first made in 1822, for the political union of these two provinces, bore no fruit until 1841, when the union of Upper and Lower Canada was effected. On the fertile banks of the lower St. Lawrence there is a French population living in a state of pro- longed childhood under Romanism ; a happy people, ignorant, industrious, social, but not progressive, and yet capable, when held together by the ties of race, language, and religion, and exploited by Romish 126 LABOR. ecclesiastical and civil politicians, of exerting impor- tant influence in politics. Lord Elgin once said that it would be easier to make the French Canadians American than to make them English. Lower Cana- da is a part of France unreformed by the Revolution of 1792. The Romish Church of Louis XIV. yet collects its tithes on the eastern St. Lawrence. The Jesuit is active there. Upper Canada, filled cliiefly by British emigrants, was often divided between the political opinions of Britons. There the English, the Scotch, and the Irish were not infrequently separated by old party lines. In nearly every case when a division occurred among the English-speaking populations of Canada, Lower Canada could have her way. The revenue came principally from Upper, but the disposal of it was often determined by Lower, Canada. Therefore, in the former, a demand arose for union with the other English-speaking provinces. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. During our American war, Upper and Lower Canada both felt that they would be stronger against attack if all the British provinces were united. Thus domestic political reasons, as well as commercial causes, originated the great act of union of 1867. Imitating the United States, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick became one political power, with independent local institu- tions. In 1870 young Manitoba, radiant with hope, stood up in the sunset, and was married to the Do- minion. In 1871 British Columbia, on the hoarse Pacific, came into the union. Prince Edward Island SEX IN INDUSTRY. 127 followed in 1872. Labrador is politically attaclied to Newfoundland, and a provision exists by which the latter can be admitted to the confederacy. The rights of the Hudson Bay Company now belong to Canada. The vast north-west territory waits for admission to the Dominion. All British America, in short, is practically a political unit, under a vice-regal governor-general and privy council, a Senate and an elective House of Commons. In Ontario and Que- bec, every male subject who is the owner or occupier or tenant of real 'property of the assessed value of three hundred dollars, has a vote. What are the divergencies of race in the different populations represented in this Dominion? What are the differences of religion? Fifty years ago there were only a million people in British North America. Now there are more than four millions. Of these, 1,082,940 are of French descent; 850,000 Irish; 700,000 English; 550,000 Scotch; 230,000 German and Dutch. Looking at the disparities of the religious creeds, you find 1,492,000 of the Romish faith, 567,000 Wesleyans and Methodists, 544,000 Presbyterians, and 494,000 Anglicans. (^Census of April 3, 1871. See Statesman's Year Book, 1878, p. 511.) Next after the Romanists, the Wesleyans and Methodists are the most powerful religious body in the Dominion at this hour. I am not discussing Canada with the purpose of raising the question whether its annexation to the United States is ever to take place. I believe aver- age American sentiment is now as careless on that 128 LABOR. topic as it is on most others that affect . Canada. We have not of late sought the annexation of Cuba. Since slavery was abolished we have not been mak- ing aggressions on our south-western frontier. We have borne with petty insult after petty insult from Mexico, without any military reply, and, indeed, without enough protest to protect our own inter- ests. The United States did not purchase Alaska: Mr. Seward bought that. We are the nation which refused to annex San Domingo. In short, the Amer- ican people understand perfectly well that despotic power may annex territory, but that a republic can only incorporate territory by its own free vote. [Applause.] K ever the day comes when Canada thinks that she can do better than to remain substantially an independent power, receiving nothing from Great Britain but a vice-regal governor, and protection in case she is attacked, Americans will undoubtedly welcome her to the Union, but only on her own free choice. I believe we are careless about the time when she shall come. Professor Goldwin Smith is very anxious to have the date occur early. The great forces in history prevail ; and these, he thinks, make for the political separation of the New World from the Old. "Canadian nationality being a lost cause, the ultimate union of Canada with the United States," he afl&rms, " appears now to be morally cer- tain." (SiUTH, Professor Goldwin, "The Polit- ical Destiny of Canada," Fortnigldly Review^ 1877.) His opinions on this topic are not popular in Canada. SEX IN INDUSTRY. 129 Sir Francis Hincks is not the only writer who op- poses them with vigor. I suppose that there is no politician in the Dominion who would dare risk him- self before the people with advocacy of annexation. It has often been asserted that if Canada had been a portion of the unsevered American Union, the civil war would not have occurred, so heavily would the votes and military power of the free States have been re-enforced. The United States rejoice to see the crescent power of the principles of self-government in Can- ada. They desire for the Dominion a long discipline in self-rule, such as our colonies had here before we separated wholly from the mother-country. There is no peerage in Canada, and only a shadow of the knighthood exists there. Canada has no State Church, although the Romish, having yet the benefit of many old arrangements existing before the treaty of 1763, is substantially a State Church in Quebec to this hour. Let Canada occupy her spacious western prov- inces ; let her open to the sunlight the black furrows of the Saskatchewan valley ; let her carry the farm- ing and forest populations far up the mild shores of that river ; let her found in Manitoba manufactures as well as agriculture ; let her bind together her heterogeneous populations from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the head of Lake Superior ; let her fill her forests with the sound of axes, and send her huntsmen along her streams toward the North Star, until the gleam of the bay to which Hudson gave 130 LABOR. his name comes in sight, and the last of the stunted poplars and birches are in view ; let her pierce the colossal spikes and bosses of the Rocky Mountains with another Pacific Railway, if she thinks it will bear the competition of two and perhaps three American railways south of her. If, by and by, when all or most of these results are accomplished, Canada concludes that she would have a better market with the United States open to her without any duties on the border ; if she shall conclude that parliamentary government in a dependency is likely to be one of faction or corruption ; if she shall con- clude that she would be less open to attack in case of difficulties between England and the United States, were she a part of the Union, there is a political party in England that withdrew military occupation from Canada, and would not risk a war to hold the Dominion within the British Empire. John Bright said in Parliament that Great Britain could be attacked by the United States only in Canada, and tliat Canada and the mother-country together could not keep American armies south of the St. Lawrence, were the United States disposed to move northward. Let Canada mould her differing provinces into some- thing like homogeneousness ; let her send common schools and open Bibles into Lower Canada ; let her break up the torpor of the lower St. Lawrence pop- ulations ; let her make herself, in short, a free State with a free church, and the probabilities of her ultimate incorporation with the American Union may not be increased, but certainly they will not ^" diminished. SEX IN INDUSTEY. 131 You say that the rustle of regal robes yet throws the Canadian people into acclamations. The French are not very enthusiastic ; the Irish are not. Of course politicians, coming to the front with the English population, are full of noise ; and God bless them in their blessings of the Queen's daughter ! [Applause.] I am ready to join their acclamations [applause], and am not prevented by envy from uniting in them, when I remember that these same robes rustle on the other side of the globe, and that an Empress of India has power in every zone. The haughty days of England are passing by. In twenty years the United States will have a larger income than the United Kingdom. Who knows but that the ultimate solution of this question of annex- ation or incorporation may be neither annexation nor incorporation, but the belonging of all English- speaking peoples to one commercial league, self- government the principle in each political division ! [Applause.] Let us look far on, and anticipate, with acclamation of the deep, thoughtful sort, the time when English-speaking nations shall keep treaties with each other. Let us adhere to what is practical. Let us pay the award arbitration has given Canada in a certain fisheries dispute ; let us enlarge the influence of arbitration between English-speaking nations; and by that principle form a commercial league sufficient to secure substantial peace for Eng- lish-speaking populations around the globe. What I desire is not the annexation of Canada, and not her incorporation into the American Union, but rather 132 LABOB. a day, such that, if England ever grows weak after her coal-mines are exhausted, if ever Russia takes possession of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and makes English rule difficult or impossible in India, if ever the inevitable approach of age comes to our parents in the British Isles, the shoulders of Amer- ica may be broad enough to provide, as the oldest son in the family, for the younger children, and for the parents also. [Applause.] Let it come, an American-Anglican alliance I THE LECTUBE. Your daughter is not at the looms, but her grand- daughter may be. Pace thoughtfully to and fro in the city slums, for your descendants may live there. In a republic, without the law of primogeniture or any artificial rank, personal position depends on per- sonal effort. In America the children of Lazarus may rise to the position of Dives, and those of Dives may sink to the level of Lazarus ; and therefore, in America, neither Lazarus nor Dives can understand himself until the two have changed eyes. Under republican institutions, the interests of the rich man are every man's interests, and the interests of the poor man are every man's also. Such is the mobility of American society, that the cause of the working- girl is the cause of the parlor on Fifth Avenue ; tlie cause of the paorest shop-boy is the cause of the mil- lion naire ; the cause of the woman behind the whirring wheels of trade, laboring under unspeakable circum- stances, and bringing into the world offspring tired SEX IN INDUSTRY. 133 from birth, is the cause of the most luxurious house- hold that to-day kneels about any family altar on Beacon Street, or lifts up thanksgiving in any happy New-England home. I did not see the battle of Gettysburg, but I have seen the rank grass above the graves of those who fell there. I keep on my table a couple of paper- weights brought from what is called the wheat-field at Gettysburg, where men were found killed with the bayonet, a rare occurrence even in a great battle. My most vivid impressions of the carnage at Gettys- burg come from the helavy growths I have seen above burial-trenches in the meadows, and from what I read there on the tombstones. We have all heard how a three-miles front of artillery cannonaded an- other three-miles front, and how the rebel battle-line, four miles long, charged on foot across the fruitful plain, and sunk, great parts of it, into the earth on the passage. Where the graves lie thickest, we must take our position if we would understand what Gettysburg was; and so, if in the carnage, for there is no other word to describe what is taking place, if in the carnage occurring among young women, and middle-aged women, along an industrial battle-line, extending from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, to say nothing of barbaric lands where woman is as yet only an animal, we would under- stand what the danger is, we must take our position above her graves. We must stand at the trenches, where she is buried six deep sometimes. They tell me that after Antietam, a great trench was opened 134 LABOR. in the corn-field, and ruddy youth and stalwart man- hood thrown in ten and fifteen deep, and covered with earth four feet deep ; and that weeks afterward, when spectators passed by, the earth was seen to rise and fall every now and then in places, billowing up and down with a bubbling motion under the action of utterly unreportable circumstances beneath the surface. Now, I am no agitator and no alarmist. I cannot open all that festers in manufacturing centres in the Old World, and begins to fester in the New, for you would not bear a frank discussion of it ; but I can bring you to these industrial burial-trenches. What are some of the rank grasses above the graves? what are some of the inscriptions on the tombstones of female operative populations ? Why, here is a report by Mr. Mundella, introdu- cing Von Plener's history of English factory legisla- tion (p. xvi.). Frenchmen are remarkable for exact military statistics. Napoleon taught them how to keep good tables on the origin and fate of soldiers. France lately drew 10,000 conscripts from ten agri- cultural departments. The number rejected was 4,000. She drew 10,000 conscripts fi-om ten indus- trial and factory departments. The number rejected was 9,900. There is an industrial battle-trench, and whoever will put his car on the ground above what is buried in it will find processes going on beneath the surface that cannot be publicly described. In the dei)artment of tlie Marnc and the lower Seine and the Eure, essentially manufacturing districts, against 10,500 adjudged to be fit for service, the SEX IN INDUSTRY. 135 number rejected was 14,000. If this is what happens to men, with their superior strength, what happens to women and girls, who constitute more than half of the modern operatives in textile factories? Well, but this is France, you say. Facts like these, you think, can be gathered only from Europe. But I hold in my hand a report of your Massa- chusetts Bureau of Health, and I find in it an able document on the political economy of manufacturing towns, written by Dr. Edward Jar vis of this Com- monwealth. I shall trouble you to listen while I read the inscription in this Massachusetts tombstone or, rather, it is not a tombstone : it is only what I saw at Gettysburg again and again, a rude, frail, memorial tablet simply, and the word " unknown " written across it. Who can tell the names of these beneath this burial surface ? In another generation they may be of your own blood. " In Massachusetts, during the seven years from 1865 to 1871, 72,700," says Dr. Jarvis, " died in their working period. In the fulness of life and the fulness of health, they would have opportunity of laboring for themselves, their families, and the public, in all 3,600,000 years. But the total of their labors amounts only to 1,700,000 years, leaving a loss of 1,900,000 years by their premature deaths." A million nine hundred thousand years of labor lost in Massachusetts between 1865 and 1871, by the premature deaths of 72,000 in their working period ! " This was an average annual loss of 276,000 years of service ! Thus it appears," continues this official 136 LABOR. document, " that in Massachusetts, one of the most favored States of this country and of the world, those who died within seven years had contributed to the public support less than half, or only 46 per cent, of what is done in the best conditions of life." QFifth Report of Massachusetts Board of Health.^ Does the earth rise and fall above this slaughter- trench ? Would you have me suggest what I would have done ? There has lately been called into heaven a brave physician from this city, who dared discuss Sex in Education. (See Prof. E. H. Clarke's remarkable monograph on that subject, Boston, 1875 ; also, T. A. Gorton, M.D., Principles of Mental Hygiene ; Henry Maudsley, M.D., Sex in Mind and Education.') His robe has fallen on many a physician now turning his attention to Sex in Industry. (See Dr. Ames's suggestive work with this title, Boston, 1875.) If I must uncover a little of what lies beneath this heav- ing surface, I shall do so by suggesting swiftly the change I demand ; and not I only, but the medical profession at large, the best manufacturers them- selves, and more than all the natural laws of the Supreme Powers who are not elective, and whose enactments are not likely to be repealed. Dr. Clarke writes : " There is an establishment in Boston, owned and carried on by a man, in wliich ten or a dozen girls are constantly employed. Each of them is given, and is required to take, a vacation of three days every four weeks. [Applause.] It is scarcely necessary to say that their sanitary condition SEX IN INDUSTEY. 137 is exceptionally good, and that the aggregate total amount of work which the owner obtains is greater than that when persistent attendance and labor are required." [Applause.] This, in brief, is what I want, and what the medi- cal experts want, what your board of health wants, and what I believe the Supreme Powers want, and ultimately will have ! [Applause.] Until they obtain it, these slaughter-trenches are to be filled, not by the agency of the Supreme Powers, but by your legislation. Standing yet at the side of these heaving sods on the wide industrial battle-field, I beg you to follow me along a line of propositions intended to emphasize the seriousness which comes to us as we study the rising and falling of this burial-surface. 1. The mortality among girls increases between fourteen and eighteen, and among men between twenty-one and twenty-six. This is a law for the two sexes wholly aside from any result of their occupations. How strong are your daughters to be when they go into this indus- trial contest? They are a part of a battle-front extending all the way from the Ural mountains to the Pacifk; seas. It appears that they must march out upon the Gettysburg charge at about the time when their strength is most uncertain. The mortal- it}^ of young persons of the female sex increases be- tween fourteen and eighteen, when boys are tough- est. In the yet sparsely settled United States you have two hundred thousand girls under fifteen in this 138 LABOR. battle-front. You have two million females in your industries ; and of these two hundred thousand are girls. Most of this number ought to be called cliil- dren. By a child I mean any one under fourteen ; by a young person, any one between fourteen and eighteen ; by a woman, a female over eighteen. Ex- perts of the jBrst rank tell us that a great physiologi- cal law is violated in the age at which we admit girls who are children to work behind the looms. There is no prospect that this violated natural law will be repealed. In almost entire disregard of notorious physiological facts, you are sending girls more fre- quently than boys into many forms of manufactures. You require almost the same amount of physical strain from each, and often pay the girl not more than half of what you pay the boy. [Applause.] Is there any meanness in that? [Applause.] I have an indignation that cannot be expressed when I think of the physical limitations of woman, and of the manner in which she is obliged, when standing alone in the world, to strain all her strength to obtain half a man gets for the same labor. [Applause.] 2. The strength of the female is to that of the male as IG to 26. That is Dr. Draper's opinion. (^Human Physiology^ p. 546.) There are various judgments on this point ; that is about the average estimate. Woman's mus- cles contract with less energy, and are more easily wearied, than tliose of man. Peculiarity of construc- tion in the bones of the pelvis and chest give rise in woman to characteristic methods of walking, and SEX IN INDUSTRY. 139 movement of the arm in attempting to throw a stone. We understand perfectly that in the foreground of this charging host the female operative has a strength only as 16 compared with 26 on the part of the male, and that the sickly period, from fourteen to eighteen, is a weight on this small strength ; and yet we expect that these weaker soldiers in the industrial army will, in some sense, keep step with the strongest. The natural law violated here is not likely to be repealed. 3. The change of insects from the primary to the perfect or imago state is not a greater one than occurs in both sexes between the ages of twelve and sixteen, but earlier in most cases with the female than the male. At the side of these burial-trenches you will allow me to mention, although I may not discuss, certain natural laws holy as the fire of Sinai. 4. By fixed natural law there exists on the jjart of woman, as there does not on the part of man, a neces- sity or need of a periodic rest. 5. On the part of the married woman, it is evident that the laws -of health forbid, at certain definite periods, severe mental or physical labor. 6. As those laws of health for the two sexes differ, and are not likely to be repealed, it is the wisdom of legislation to make its enactments coincide with those of the Supreme Powers. And, now, what would I have ? 7. As in France a council of salubrity, so public discussion in this country, and commissions of in- 140 LABOR. quiry, and advice of experts, and all the light we can obtain from every quarter, and not merely mediaeval custom, should determine what employments are suited to women. 8. No woman should be engaged in employment unsuited to her sex, and declared to be so by the council of salubrity. 9. No girl under fifteen should be employed in any of the occupations thus permitted to women. 10. Undoubtedly the human race would be the gainer if we did not employ a girl under eighteen in factory labor, unless by special permission from a surgeon. 11. In all employments opened to woman, or con- sidered advisable for her, she should be permitted a periodic absence, without pecuniary loss. [Applause.] Thank God that without my uncovering this slaughter-trench, you understand what is beneath its surface ! This proposition has been officially defend- ed by your Massachusetts Labor Bureau, which has made a series of investigations of unequalled value as to the special effects of certain forms of employ- ment on female health. (See report for 1875, Part II., especially pp. 70, 71, 76, and 111.) 12. Additional vacations should be the right of women employed in occupations requiring a high degree of mental concentration and pliysical exertion. 13. Sanitary supervision of all large factories should be furnished at the expense of the proprietors. 14. You must allow me to say, and to expand the proposition in a subsequent lecture, that in crowded SEX IN INDUSTRY. 141 rooms, where conversation is not interrupted by the noise of machinery, there may be a foul or a clean system of factory management ; and that the min- gling of the sexes, under careless overseers, and the filling of these rooms with profanity, and possibly with obscene conversation, from morning to night, is not calculated to improve the moral condition of fac- tory operative populations, containing, it may be, in time to come, your daughters and mine. [Applause.] 15. Married women should not be employed in factories without surgical certificates of fitness for the occupation. [Applause.] There is a proverb in England to the effect that whoever among the female operatives can manage four looms at once, is likely to be wed. " Hoo's a four-loomer, hoo's like to be wed," say the operatives on the banks of those canals in Manchester. I sup- pose that the concentration of attention required in the women who operate some of our most skilful machines is one source of the breaking-down of the female constitution. The physicians tell us that this close mental application at work is exceedingly inimical to female health, especially when the labor must be performed standing. The printer at the case, if a male, stands easily, and becomes accus- tomed to his position ; but go into your printing- offices, and ask whether the sexes are physically equal in the ability to face the compositor's toil. Woman must be seated when she sets type. The general experience is that a woman cannot bear to stand at a machine as long as a man. Even in 142 LABOR. the schoolroom, speaking to her pupils, the female teacher does well to be seated most of the time. There are deep reasons, not to be discussed here, for giving a periodic rest to female operatives, who must have brain in their finger-tips. She who sets the types the most swiftly, or she who manages the telegraph most sldlfully, may not need more mental concentration than she who manages four looms and is like to be wed. There must be no mistakes in her physical manipulations. There is penalty at once if a single thread breaks. I have seen, at Law- rence and at Lowell, machines so perfect that if a single thread is broken out of the multitudinous threads they spin, they stop like sensitive things of life until the thread is mended. She who is a four- loomer must have her mind upon every thread, and this ten or twelve hours a day, and day after day. Perhaps the summer day is hot, and she is at work under the roof. Perhaps the winter day is cold, and she must live in a poisonously vitiated hot atmos- phere. Some of our factories are models in their sanitary arrangements, but some are not all. Our first-class manufacturing establishments I believe to be the best in the world. The third-rate ones are as yet, however, the largest class. I am not assail- ing capitalists and employers as a mass. The third- rate men among tlie employers are careless, and have necessitated the factory legislation of the Old World and the New. I have on my side constantly, in this discussion of socialism and labor reform, tho best sentiment of the higher class of manufacturers. SEX IN INDUSTRY. 143 It may easily happen that this poor woman works in a third-rate establishment. It may be that she is not allowed proper time for her meals. It may be that this intense mental concentration has no peri- odic rest. It may be that her own support and that of her family depends upon her steady labor in these unfavorable physical conditions. The result is, in seven cases out of ten, that she goes into this industrial slg^ughter-trench before she is fifty. The certainty is, as I have shown you, that in a multi- tude of cases, so numerous as to be absolutely ter- rific, the operative populations pass out of the world by premature deaths. It is said that for every one that dies prematurely, there are two sick most of the time. If you take the records I have read to you on these tom])stones of the dead ones who have gone under the sod, and multiply their numbers by two, you will obtain the record of the sick ones who lie on the couches of languishing more or less often. I speak, I think, wholly within bounds, when I say that the tossing of this earth above the slaughter-trench is not the whole horror. The tossing of the coverlets on beds of pain is another portion of the evil ; but the lar- gest horror of all is the coming into the world of populations not capable of sustaining the burdens likely to be put upon them from the very outset. The rising and falling of the coverlets which are spread over the already sick limbs of unborn gener- ations are what sicken me most. I am horrified by this heaving surface of earth above the trench. I 144 LABOR. am horrified by these sick-beds; but when I think that the citizen is taxed before he is born, and of what Edmund Burke used to say about the object of government being to make strong men and strong women and good citizens, and to educate them, and that nothing is worth any thing in government un- less good men and good women are the result; when I -think of the effect of these factory abuses upon factory populations, once become ^hereditary, I look up to Almighty God, and pray him, in the name of his own most holy laws, to fasten our eyes upon the slaughter of the innocents. The aged, you say, are not to be pitied ; but even the mediae- val baron had pity for his aged and infirm retainers. Middle age, you think, can take care of itself. But what of the unborn, and those that are to come in a long procession into this serried front of the in- dustrial battle-line in ages yet ahead of us ? Where is the old spirit of New England, that looked forward and founded institutions for genera- tions not yet visible on the verge of coming time ? Webster's eyes were always fastened on the respon- sibility of the present to the future. Advance, coming generations ! was his perpetual salutation to the ages before him. Where are his successors ? Where are the men, who, looking on the abuses in industrial populations, dare so reform them as to be able to gaze into the face of God, and say. Advance, future generations I to better conditions than hea- thendom gave you, and to better than the Old World allowed you. Advance to circumstances in SEX IN INDUSTRY. 145 which socialism can seem only a nightmare. Ad- vance to such treatment that you shall yourselves be convinced that Dives and Lazarus, God's hand on the shoulder of the one, and his hand on the shoulder of the other, have at last in the history of industry been brought face to face, and to the profit of both have changed eyes. [Applause.] VI. SEX IN INDUSTRY. THE ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEENTH LECTURE IN THK BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 9. Let U3 but shorten the term of daily labor, giving, thereby, to those employed the means of enjojing their inalienable right of time for self-improvement and domestic life, and I believe that, in the present state of the country, the factory system might thus be made the channel of comforts and blessings. "VThen I have contem- plated a multitude of twelve or fourteen hundred people, congre- gated under a single roof, governed by the revolutions of a single engine, all within reach of daily intercourse, of watchful care, of every happy influence, I have often said to myself: I wish to God I were a factory-owner. Lohd SnAiiTESBUBr : Speech at Manchester. Thou art a Man, I think; thou art not a mere building Beaver, or two-legged Cotton-Spider; thou hast verily a Soul in thee, as- phyxied or otherwise! Sooty Manchester, it too is built on the infinite Abysses; overspanned by the skyey Firmaments; and there is birth in it, and death in it ; and it is every whit as wonderful, as fearful, im^imaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City. Cabltle. VI. SEX IN INDUSTRY. PEELUDE ON CUEEENT EVENTS. Political prizes in the United States are now greater than they ever were in the Roman Empire, and are doubling in fatness and value every thirty years. Caesar, Antony, and Lepidus were never tempted by spoils as alluring as will dazzle and per- haps derange the American political future. We are as honest as most men can be expected to be under our present immensely mischievous customs as to the civil service. A hundred thousand men turned out and put in every time we change our national execu- tive ; and soon two hundred thousand to be turned out and put in, if you follow the accursed spoils system ! You expect men to be honest with this vast patronage to be won by purchasing a canvassing board in Louisiana or Florida, South Carolina or Oregon ! Statesmen of the first rank will be honest ; but to expect fourth-rate politicians to be so in the presence of these temptations, is to fly in the face of the teachings of all history. 149 150 LABOR. What are a few of the facts illustrating recent American ingenuity in frustrating the popular will expressed at the polls? Ghastly election frauds startle South and North, and achieve historical prominence from the discussion of them in a Presi- dential message. The ostrich hides her thin, wilful head in the sand, and thinks her whole body cov- ered. Great is the American eagle, greater the American peacock, but greatest of all the Ameri- can ostrich. Looking around the present national horizon from the point of view of the political party now in power, we see fraud, chiefly in the South and among the fifth-rate managers of the Demo- cratic party. But, if there were a Democratic Presi- dent at the White House, I am not sure but that the nation would have evidence before it of fraud among fifth-rate Republican political managers. Both politi- cal parties affirm that the deciding votes in a close national election were bought and sold ; that is, that the Presidency itself was on sale ! It is alleged that the cipher despatches which of late have been unearthed by the superb enterprise of the leading American newspaper, were exhibited to prominent men in Congress before the electoral commission was appointed. Both the Field and the Morton committee demanded at that time the tele- graphic despatches on both sides ; but Mr. Orton of the telegraph-company refused to surrender them. lie assured Senator Morton that the secret telegrams would compromise conspicuous men of both parties, and make a horrible scandal. He showed them to SEX IN INDUSTRY. 151 representatives on both sides, who saw that they would bring disgrace on prominent men, but who insisted, nevertheless, on their publication. Obliged to surrender the despatches to the congressional committees, Orton at last gave them up to Senator Morton, who used portions of them to overcome Democratic opposition to -the count after the decision of the electoral commission. The despatches, it is affirmed, were found among his papers after his de- cease, but some of them had been destroyed. This account, to which papers as widely contrasted as " The New York Herald" and "The New York Nation" (see the latter, Oct. 17, pp. 231 and 234) have given currency and substantial credence, agrees well with the version which has been current in well-informed circles in Washington since the two political parties, just before the electoral commission met, agreed not to examine each other's record any further. I know how frankly I am speaking ; but tliis is a place in which to speak frankly, for this platform is neither political nor partisan. [Applause.] The use which has been made of the cipher de- spatches by " The New York Tribune " deserves great praise, although the exposure has been a party- weapon chiefly. What we want now is all the despatches that can be obtained, and as full an account as possible of any that are missing. If it can be shown that only one political party has been implicated in secret fraud, great advantage will, of course, inure to the exonerated opposite party ; and so that party should be willing to bring forward the 152 LABOR. rest of the despatches, in case they are in existence. Thus the investigation would assist to bring about general purification, and would not be merely a party-weapon. What has been proved by the investigation thus far ? In spite of the partisan character of the expos- m*e nearly all good men are, as I judge, agreed : 1. That in Oregon five thousand dollars were offered for an elector, and Democratic money sent to pay for the fraud. 2. That in Florida fifty thousand dollars were thus offered by a responsible agent at Gramercy Park in New York. 3. That in South Carolina eighty thousand dollars were offered, and the money sent to Baltimore to pay for the fraud. 4. That in Louisiana the Republican record is not clean, and the Democratic far from being so. 5. That the " Tribune " exposure has received no adequate reply. The public keeps in mind the grave public de- nials by the principal character implicated, and the high honor he has received from a large portion of the American people. I think it fair to affirm that his explanations, in view of the great circumstantial- ity and coherence of the charges publicly brought against his agents, have not been wholly satisfactory. Perhaps they exonerate him in a slight degree ; but, if he knew nothing of what his agents were doing, liis indignation at their acts ought to be such as to cause him now to drop them from his employment. SEX IN rNDUSTRY. 153 which he has not done. The denials of the subsid- iary men in the conspiracy are still more lame than those of the principal. The chief of the subsidiary agents affirms that he has nothing to say on the sub- ject ; but whoever, in his position, has nothing to say about these charges, has much to say. [Applause.] But the most suggestive facts proved are these : 6. That the Presidency was for sale by a few cor- rupt men. 7. That third and fourth rate politicians offered to buy it, and came near doing so. 8. That our electoral machinery is now such that at any time in a closely contested national election the presidency may be for sale by a few politicians of the tenth rank in some State where the count is to settle the dispute. If we escaped from the existence of a fraudulent Presidency, it was not on account of any peculiar excellence in our electoral machinery or in the fifth and seventh rate politicians who managed it. It was not a result of the virtue of several prominent men in both parties. I believe that the leader of the Republican party now in the executive chair at Wash- ington is as clear from fraud as the undriven snow from stain. [Applause.] While we pride ourselves on this confidence, however, let us keep in mind the large and startling final fact proved by our memor- able experience in 1876. How far does bribery go in our Northern city elec- tions ? Here is Chicago, and she has just found out that a vote and a count are two things. All nations 154 LABOR. have heard of the existence in New York City of a Tweed ring, accustomed to stufl&ng ballot-boxes, mis- counting the votes, and various forms of intimidation by roughs at the polls. Portions of the Southern Democratic party have improved on Tweed's meas- ures. He never knew how to use tissue paper as adroitly as they do. He never employed the shot- gun, as they have done; he never dared strike off names from the registry-list, as has been done in the Southern States. We are peculiarly indignant over the gerrymandering of several Southern electoral districts, or the opening of polling-places in such locations as made them exceedingly inconvenient for black citizens. But that word, gerrymandering, I believe, originated in Massachusetts. We must go farther back than to the cipher de- spatches of 1876, if we are to reach the root of our difficulty. I suppose it to be true that a great num- ber of average voters in both political parties expect to sell their votes in closely contested elections. Riding down the Hudson the other day with a promi- nent politician, he told me that with his own e^'es he saw, in a city outside of New England, church-mem- bers going about with their hands full of currency, and paying two dollars, three, five, for votes on elcc- tionnlay. An important measure was up, and these church-members were determined to carry it through ; and in the case to which I am making reference they did carry an important reform in a city of fifty or eighty thousand inhabitants. They carried it by open bribery at the polls. Now, what are the churches SEX IN INDUSTRY. 155 to say in such a case ? Are you ready to indorse action of that sort in men who profess to look to the Holy of Holies for leadership ? I was told by a promi- nent politician the other day, not far from New York City, that, when he put the question to a Democratic manager, " How many of your day-laborers, minor mechanics, and men of small means, refuse to be bought?" the reply was, "Not over a third. In a close election we can buy two-thirds of all the votes cast by the unfortunate class. The wealthy do not sell their votes ; but those who need to exert them- selves a little severely to make the year's ends meet, sometimes put down among their assets their votes. Father and four sons in a family put down twenty- five dollars for their votes, among their assets." I have heard of that being done, and of a man being elected to Congress who bought two hundred and fifty votes, and was carried into office by them ; and he kept a list of the men he bought, and used to show it to his friends as a matter of pride. Political clubs of the lower order sell themselves in bodies in many city elections ; and this infamy we sleep over. We are not awakened by the yet more humiliating fact of the bribery of the pinched but usually honest country-side. We live in a kind of stupidity, a sort of jocose indifference, concerning average bribery at elections ; and even church-members who bribe escape any se- vere condemnation, but deserve to be smitten by the thunderbolts of church censure. [Applause.] I had almost said that the answer I should be tempted to make to the offer of a bribe would be a blow. 156 LABOB. The Rev. Dr. Dale, from England, in a public ad- dress at New Haven, defended the proposition that under a free representative government, any church- member who has a right to vote, and will not, deserves to be censured by the church ; and, without repent- ance, should be expelled from church communion. Now, I do not go as far as that ; but, in the presence of an audience which understands this subject in its relations to manufactures, and in a State which has been accused by the foremost orator of the Common- wealth of intimidating working-men, I undertake to say that when church-members are found with their fingers full of filthy lucre, peddling it out in the way of bribes around the polls on election-day, and their attention is called in private to the scandal they are bringing on God's house, and they do not repent, they ouglit to be ejected from church communion. [Applause.] You think that the young men's movement in poli- tics will purge the polls in cities, and that a good registry-law will bring us out of frauds at the ballot- box. Yes ; but our cities are growing faster than the rest of the country. We have heard over and over, from all kinds of public authorities, that a fifth part of our population now lives in cities, and that cities are the hotbeds of greed and fraud. The young men of Boston may take care of this city : it is a small place. Possil)ly the young men might take care of New York : it is a small place yet. But liow are we to take care of a couple of Londons in this country when our population has doubled once or twice more? SEX IN INDUSTRY. 157 Certainly, if we fail in a general appeal to the public, there is no reason why we should fail in an appeal to the ministry and church-members. The ministry are not politicians. We are at times a kind of arbitrat- ing board between extremes in politics. We are not seeking office. Everybody knows that we are not dependent on this or that political faction. It is time that the ministry of the United States should rise to its feet, and declare its right to be heard on this terrific evil of election-frauds. Let us bring into practice the principle that men guilty of receiving or of offering bribes shall not be kept in the church ; and, if out of it, shall be prevented from coming in. [Applause.] " Not lightly fall, -without recall, The written scrolls a breath may float ; The crowning fact, the kingliest act Of freedom is a freeman's vote." Whittier : Election Eve. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. It is the fortune of Massachusetts to have legalized more complete investigation concerning the condi- tion of working-womien than any other political com- munity known to history. The fact has been officially ascertained that in this Commonwealth the average pay for ten hours' labor by a woman is eighty- two cents. The statement was lately published in New York, that a dozen shirts can be made to-day in that city for thirty-five cents, and the assertion 158 LABOK. was verified, by a letter from a female operative. (^Trihine^ Dec. 6.) My object is not to direct your attention to the upper rank of female labor, but to those lower grades which you know must exist, if you take as authentic the official statistics. Aver- ages could not be brought down so low, were not the lower ranks extensive. It is out of the lowest ranks of low-paid female labor that some of the worst evils of cities arise. If you continue to squeeze the heart of girlhood by low wages, you must expect to find in the gutters of cities a good deal of red, clotted slime ; and, if you like to roll in it, remember that you have squeezed out the blood. [Applause.] With eyes open to notorious facts concerning low-paid female labor, I have at times an indignation that would not appear sober if it were fully expressed ; and yet these statistics burn with a hotter fire than I have ever found in my own heart ; and I believe that, if 3-ou fasten attention on them but for a moment, they will, kindle their own fire in yours. 1. Tliese propositions represent the condition of working-women in iSIassachusetts : (1) In 1875 the Massachusetts Labor Bureau re- ceived statements of personal earnings and expenses from 15,824 females depending for siipport upon daily wages. Many more than 15,000 returns were received, but the Board struck out of the account all the state- ments that were in any way imperfect. Over 15,000 good ones remained, complete in every essential par- SEX IN INDUSTRY. 159 ticular. I undertake to say the world never saw as many budgets of poor working-girls opened as were examined officially in this Commonwealth in 1875. (2) The average number of days these working- women were employed in a year was 258. (3) Their average earnings were 82 cents a day. They worked on the average more than ten hours a day, that is, more than sixty hours a week. (4) Only one in a hundred owned a house. (5) These females were paying on the average $93 a year rent. (6) The cost of living of the working-women was reduced on the average to $182.86 a year. You are not interested in these figures ? No ; but they may be family statistics for your descendants ! 2. These propositions represent the condition of working-men in Massachusetts : (1) In the year 1875 the same Bureau received returns from 55,515 males engaged in the industries of this Commonwealth, and depending for their sup- port upon daily wages. (2) The average number of the days they were employed in the year was 241. (3) Their average earnings were $2.01 a day, against 82 cents for women. (4) Only one in a hundred, however, owned a house. (5) These males were paying on an average $109 a year as rent. (6) The cost of living of the working-men was reduced on the average to $488.96 a year. 160 LABOR. You assure me, however, that it is useless to try to frighten an intelligent audience by mere averages ; for of course there are a few poverty-stricken dis- tricts even in Massachusetts. You tliink that by putting in the Cape and Nantucket and all the rural districts, and by allowing working men and women to make their own reports, and by manipulating the figures a little, these startling results can easily be brought out. But here I hold in my hands the offi- cial report of your Labor Bureau for 1876, and in it these return's are arranged by counties (pp. 49-64). Remember, also, that your Bureau was honored by being appointed to the work of taking the decennial census in this Commonwealth. In 1875 the labor of the State census and that of the bureau of industry were conjoined. There were returns obtained from employers as well as from working-men and working- women ; and here I have before me a table in which the employed and the employers are quoted side by side (p. X.). According to returns made by employ- ers for more than 250,000 employes, the average of yearly wages for the State is $413. According to returns made by the employed, this average is 8418, slightly above the estimate made by the employers themselves. The coincidence of these two estimates is one of the most striking things in this almost mathematically exact work of the honored chief of your Labor Bureau, Col. Wright. Each set of these returns was made distinct from the other ; and both refer to the same period, the year ending May 1, 1875. SEX m INDUSTRY. 161 But I turn now to a few details to convince you that the averages have not been manipulated. Here, for instance, is grand old Middlesex County, and I find that the average daily wages of woman in 1875, in that favored tract of Massachusetts, were 82 cents ; that the number of days she was employed, on the average, was 270 ; and that the annual cost of her living was reduced to -$178.82. I turn to Hamp- shire County, in the middle region of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts, and find that the average daily wages of woman was 78 cents. She was em- ployed there 260 days in the year. The cost of liv- ing was reduced to $169. I turn to Hampden County, on the fat meadows of the lower Connecticut Valley in this State, and find woman earning only 90 cents on the average, and employed only 172 days in a year, and the cost of her living reduced to $192. I turn to Essex County, the north-east county of this Commonwealth, and find the average daily earnings of woman 89 cents onlj. She was employed 257 days of the year, and the cost of her living was reduced to $203. I turn to Berkshire County, on the hills that look into the Hudson Valley, and find woman's average earnings 72 cents only. She was employed 266 days, and the cost of her living was reduced to $180.82. I turn to Barnstable County, which you say, by being thrown in with the general estimate reduces the average, and I find that there the daily earnings of woman were 66 cents, that she was employed 204 days, and that the cost of living was $130. I turn to Suffolk County, and find the 162 LABOE. average earnings 71 cents ; the number of days, 298 ; and the cost of living, $184 only. It is truly astounding to me to find public sen- timent slumbering over facts like these, with the additional certainty before it that New England is a factory, and is likely to be so more and more. The centre of territory in Massachusetts is within the limits of Worcester, on the easterly side, near Lake Quinsigamond. But where is the centre of population ? Is it Framingham ? Is it Lake Cochit- uate? The north and south line which cuts the population of Massachusetts in halves passes easterly of a point midway between Harvard University and the West Boston Bridge. The east and west line dividing the population into equal portions passes through the South Boston end of the Federal-street bridge. The two lines intersect at a point not two miles west of the State House. This, according to the State documents, was the centre of population in 1865. (^Abstract of the Cenms of 18G5, with Remarks on the Same^ and Supplementary Tables, prepared under the direction of Oliver Warner, Secretary of the Commonwealth, p. 274.) The centralization of wealth is even more remarkable than that of the population. The census everywhere reveals the fact that, through the aid of the wonderful increase of all means of intercommunication, the change which is constantly giving greater and greater power to cities, tliis added weight of the Atlantic slope of the State, is chiefly an effect of the extraordinary growth of the manufacturing centres of Eastern Massachusetts. Of SEX IN INDUSTRY. 163 these, Boston itself is one. I must be pardoned for considering it a suggestive circumstance, that, in spite of the remarkable advances of Central and Western Massachusetts, the circumscribing line drawn from the State House, and containing half the population of the Commonwealth, has contracted its radius ten miles in fifty years. All Eastern Massachusetts is a factory. In 1865 more than one-half of the popula- tion of Massachusetts, seven-tenths of the personal property, and two-thirds of the real estate, were sit- uated within twenty-five miles of the State House at Boston ! (Ibid., p. 275.) In the five years since these astonishing estimates were made, Lynn has in- creased thirty-six per cent in population, . Lawrence thirty-two, Lowell tliirty-one, Haverhill nineteen, and Fall River forty. Here is the incoming of an Atlantic tide. It is the roar of the industrial conditions of Old England coming into New England. I have lived for months within hearing of the roar of the ocean, and have looked daily upon the coming-in of the vast tides. It is little to say that I profess to have ' lived also within hearing of the roar of the human ocean which beats on the Atlantic slope of New England, and to have looked frequently upon the coming-in of these vast tides. Imagine the magnificent coast-line from Newfoundland to New York beaten in all its coves and headlands by incoming Atlantic waves. A feeble occupation this, compared with imagining the same coast beaten as it is, in all its coves and headlands, and likely to be beaten more and more furiously as 164 LABOE. the years pass, by these incoming human tides, and more and more complicated industrial conditions. Not discuss those conditions ! Not secure the best life that can be secured for the millions whose future is now being largely determined by the precedents which are to be set in the period of transition New England is passing ! Not turn public discussion and legislation early to the solution of problems more vital than any others in the secular life of New Eng- land, and sure to become more and more complicated as the tides rise higher ! He who says this is likely to be as little regarded as the rattling of rushes before the coming-in of an Atlantic surge. Discussing sex in industry, I have placed in con- trast the condition of working-men and that of work- ing-women in the most fortunate commonwealth of the globe, to show you what happens in favorable con- ditions. What if I were to go to Prussia ? What if I were to go to England? My topic touches the whole range of capital and labor from the Ural Moun- tains to the Pacific seas ; and I am here speaking at a great disadvantage by the use of Massachusetts sta- tistics. I must employ them, if I am to speak defi- nitely, for they are the only good statistics of this kind in the world. So has European sentiment, so has even English sentiment, slumbered over tliis topic, that to-day you cannot find authority for making statements as definite as these concerning the work- ing men and women of Prussia and of England. There is now in circulation a memorial to Congress and the President, asking that statistics like these SEX IN INDUSTRY. 165 be given us in the next national census, for all the United States; and may God give success to that petition ! [Applause.] 3. It is evident from these contrasted propositions, that unsupported and unmarried women are often so illy paid that with ten hours' labor a day they barely escape starvation, and do not escape illness and debt, and can lay up nothing for marriage, or for seasons when employment is not obtainable. 4. In cases where female labor earns six dollars, ten dollars, or sometimes fifteen dollars, a week, it is from sixteen to thirty-four weeks of the year only that these wages are earned. It never will happen to you to forget the distinc- tion between fluctuating and uninterrupted indus- tries if you have had a little experience in seeking employment. A good place obtained is not always kept for a year. Indeed, the uncertainty of employ- ment is one of the things most discouraging to female labor. You know that woman is not man's equal, quite, in pushing her own interests among rough people. She must go about, often alone, and seek occupation, and there is not everywhere a Young "Women's Christian Association to help her into busi- ness. Even if such an association exists, it cannot always supply what is wanted. A woman, a young woman, a girl, must get her own place often and again ; and, when she has obtained it, she may be in some fine industry where the fashions change, and where, in less than half a year, a new set of fashions come in, and the trade has to wait for orders. Many 166 LABOR. of our great industries can accumulate stock, and sell it without great risk. Iron-ore is always worth something ; cotton cloth does not go out of fashion. But your fine bonnets, your fine embroidery, your ready-made clothing, your finest articles of female apparel, change their fashions, and cannot be safely accumulated in advance. They are produced in, and they produce, the fluctuating industries. If it is your business, as it is mine, to study the political economy of cities, you will fasten attention upon the distinc- tion between the fluctuating and the uninterrupted industries as explaining a large amount of the distress which comes upon female operatives in our great towns. Their business is not steady. When manu- facturers tell you that ten dollars and fifteen dollars a week are paid to the best female operative, you must ask how many weeks a year these wages are received. Here I have statistics which show in detail that very considerable sums must be earned in some way outside of factory-work, if female operatives in fluctuating trades are to make the year's ends meet. That matter has been investigated in this State. It is fully ascertained that in most cases, unless these operatives wlio arc thrown out of employment by the lulls in a fluctuating industry get something else to do, they cannot support themselves, even at the low average cost of living. If they do not obtain some other employment, they suffer, or fall into debt, and may approach starvation, because in these brisk periods it is impossible to earn enough to keep body and soul together through the whole year. SEX IN INDUSTRY. 167 Let it be understood constantly that I do not assail manufacturers as a class. I am utterly without partisan feeling concerning capital and labor. But there are establishments in this city where young women are sometimes discharged in a body, and un- skilled young women brought in because they can be had cheaper. Skilled female operatives who have supported themselves during the time when they were learning a trade are apt to demand higher wages ; but some machines can be run by compara- tively unskilled persons ; light work can be done by girls ; and it happens in third and fourth rate fac- tories, even under the shadow of that State House, that skilled girls are dropped because their wages are too high, and unskilled brought in, so that these short seasons are thus further shortened. Every day there come to me, in my study of this theme, illustrations of the physical limitations of women. You know that in many manufacturing establishments a girl must be on her feet from morn- ing to night. Indeed, in some shops of retail busi- ness, the female clerks must be on their feet most of the time. It is against the rule to sit down in some establishments. I read in this document lying in that chair (^Report of Labor Bureau for 1871, p. 205), printed under official authority, of a girl in this city who was kept measuring cotton cloth from morning till night, and at last dropped in a fainting-fit. " It was three-quarters of an hour before the girl was able to resume her work, and for this loss of time her employer deducted a quarter of a day's wages." 168 LABOR. 6. During the acquisition of skill in any trade, the working-girl must usually support herself. 6. She is required by public law to be at school until she is fifteen, and is graduated without training in any industrial employment. 7. Developing-schools and school-shops should be open to girls as well as boys. 8. But the girl is always less incited by self- interest than the boy to learn a trade ; for at mar- riage she expects, as the boy does not, to make occu- pation conform to that of the person married. Flora McFlimsey, who has nothing to wear, is only a little more foolish and criminal than Bridget, if the latter is allowed by her own pride to cast herself upon the world without knowing how to do any thing. But it is not the pride of Flora McFlimsey that is chiefly to blame, but our own omission of the proper training of girls to industry. We take the boy and the girl from the father and mother up to the age of fifteen, and insist that the child shall be at school ; and then we give back both BO poorly educated that they find little or nothing to do, and, if they were left alone, would not have much to wear. You approved here, the other day, my proposition, when it was asserted that school- shops and the developing-school are a proper crown for cliildren's riglits in the trades. Surely if they are a proper crown for boys' rights, they are for girls' ; and yet I recognize the fact constantly that the girl cannot be helped as much as the boy. She never will be as enthusiastic as a boy in learn- SEX IN rNDUSTEY. 169 ing a trade, simply because she does not expect to be independent in its practice. Nevertheless it is a public shame for us to send out of common schools young girls above all manual labor, and fit only for the drawing-room, and utterly unskilled in any thing that would bring them a dollar. [Applause.] I would have the girl so brought up in school, that when she leaves it she may not be above manual occupation, and may not be so unskilled as to be unworthy of employment. [Applause.] 9. Woman has in general more pride of appear- ance than man, and, if in poor dress, is less easily than man drawn into the evening-school, the lecture- room, and the church. Discussing the condition of thousands now in New England, and keeping before you the future pros- pects of far larger numbers yet to arrive here on the shore of being, I am endeavoring to state in logical order the circumstances which determine the condi- tion of the working-girl and working-woman in manufacturing populations. 10. In the working-room, the girl cannot always choose her companions. In the fluctuating indus- tries, the door through which operatives are admitted to work-rooms is not a moral sieve. 11. The perils of work-rooms where unsifted, fluctuating, and floating populations are crowded together under careless overseers will often be great for young men and boys, and especially great for women, young women and girls, who constitute more than half of average operative populations. 170 LABOR. 12. A floating is usually a more or less homeless population, and so is less under the influence of family police than a stationary population. 13. Neither boarding-houses nor churches can do as much for a floating as for a resident population. What do I want? Perhaps you will allow me to assert that if I had a sister I should be very reluc- tant to put her into a room, say twenty by thirty feet square, filled with floating operatives in a fluctu- ating trade. Why should I be thus reluctant ? Be- cause I have seen repeatedly in this Commonwealth three, four, or five young women in a room with fif- teen or twenty men, and have had the best reason to know that, as the machinery did not make noise enough to prevent conversation, the effect of pro- fanity and utterly vile talk was as demoralizing and poisonous as might naturally be expected. If there be an evil girl there, she may do immense harm. If I had a son, I should not like to place him in that room. I have talked with riiany manufacturers on this theme, and never met a man of the first rank, managing liLs business in the Christian way, who did not say that this is an evil, and can easily be avoided. It can be diminished by securing fair oversight of the rooms. It is not always necessary to mingle the sexes ; perhaps sometimes it must be done, but most manufacturers tell me that there can be a clean S3's- tem of managing these work-rooms. I know how many exigencies arise in associated toil, and liow you cannot make up what is called a team in certain pro- cesses of industry, without mingling female and male SEX IN INDUSTRY. 171 labor ; but in general there may be two sets of work- rooms, and such oversight that this difficulty may be immensely lessened. When I go to physicians in manufacturing towns, and ask what is the moral effect of careless factory- arrangements, I obtain replies that cannot be made public. Go to the best factory-physicians in New England, where the floating populations are largest, I am weighing all my words, and they will tell you that some of the perils notorious in seaport towns are likely to arise in every quarter where thou- sands of people float in and float out without homes, and are massed face to face in these work-rooms of the factories of the fluctuating trades. Ominous enough in itself, the historic reputation of congregated labor is yet more ominous from the most important circumstances that many vast branches of manufactures belong to the fluctuating rather than to the uninterrupted industries, and must, on that account, give rise in large towns to large fluctuating populations. The perils of congre- gated labor in large towns are large enough ; but the perils of congregated labor in large towns with large floating populations have an established name that makes it impossible to speak too strongly of the worth of family life as a moral police in society. He who comes home at night to a circle that know him well, and watch his daily course, has a kind of daily appearance to make before a moral tribunal. The bliss of the home affections is a shield from vice, not only because it is bliss, but because it makes any 172 LABOE. conduct that needs concealment from the moral tri- bunal of the most intimate circle as painful as the bliss of ingenuousness and trust is great. From side to side of the globe, every place where a large floating population congregates is found to be a stormy moral coast. In face of universal experi- ence I need not pause to prove the moral perils of homelessness. Those centres in New England where large floating populations gather will always be found to exhibit peculiar moral perils. All the more to he honored and trusted for their endurance of the breakers, is that percentage of most worthy people to be found in evert/ floating population. Not only am I aware of the existence of hundreds of excellent people in floating populations, but also of the duty of receiving these with especial cordiality to our hearts and homes. But in a large town there is in a floating population not only an intermixture of the thoughtless and giddy and falling, but further down, and most to be feared, a percentage of the thoroughly bad. Men and women who have the worst reasons for leading a floating life need not be many in any floating population, to do immense mischief. New England is not so saintly in her cities that she can afford to forget that the exigencies of trade and the wonderful growth of means of intercommunication have brought into some of her inland large towns evils thoroughly analogous to the old and traditional evils of seaports. All kinds of people gather in fluc- tuating industries. In a large city, in a floating pop- ulation, it is not incautious to ask, not everv tenth SEX IN INDUSTRY. 173 man, but every tenth man who pretends to a peculiar interest in your affairs, " Have you ever been in jail ? " Every great city is a collection of camps. He who knows one stratum of the society only, does not know the city. He who knows dissipated Paris does not know Paris, but only a particular camp in Paris. So of New York and London and Berlin, and every lesser town in its proportion. The moral perils of homelessness, added to the perils of this bad per- centage from outside, put the solemn duty upon the resident population of these stormy moral coasts, to throw the moral light-houses of church, library, and school, but especially the light-houses of right indus- trial arrangements, far out upon the edges of the reefs. I have not suffered myself to take up a theme so complicated and weighty without an extended and most serious attention to it, not as exhibited in books merely, but as seen in the swarming life of manufac- turing-towns ; not as seen in the opinions of this class of men or of that, but as seen by men who have the most different interests involved concerning it, and the most widely separated points of view. I have been through more than a few of your factories. I have conversed with a large number of your lead- ing manufacturers. I have consulted carefully with many working-men. 14. The proposition I defend is, that the working- class of the manufacturing centres of New England have a right to ask of the employing class that the moral perils of the work-rooms under the factory sys- 174 LABOR. tern shall be made for themselves and for their chil- dren as few and small as possible. There is a foul and there is a clean system of work- room management in factories engaged in fluctuating industries, and likely to have many changeable opera- tives. To speak at once to the point, there are work- rooms in which men and women, boys and girls, gathered in large part at random out of a floating population, are sandwiched together like herrings in a box ; and, uninterrupted by the noise of machinery, it is not infrequently tobacco-smoke, profanity, and foul talk from morning to night ! I am not speaking of cotton-factories, nor of establishments in which the noise of machinery prevents free conversation between operatives. But in factories of many other kinds it is notoriously easy for a few foul mouths, not hard to be found in a floating population, to cor- rupt a whole room. The herring-box system I call a foul system. Foul mouths in factories are so well known that the expression is almost a proverb. There are nu- merous and most honorable exceptions, especially in the factories managed on the clean system ; but you would tliink me ill acquainted with tlie most essen- tial parts of the subject I discuss, if I did not refer to wliat the best class of working-men and working- women speak of to me at every street-corner. I have sometimes seen four or five young women crowded into the same room with twenty-five or thir- ty men ; or three working thus ; or two, or one. I do not assert that a majority of mouths are foul in the SEX IN INDUSTRY. 175 factories ; but I deliberately make myself responsible for the public assertion that a father who wishes the welfare of his daughter cannot be expected to put her into factory-life in a large proportion of the work-rooms in the fluctuating trades. There is no saying more common among operatives than that a father does not like to put his daughter or son into many of the factories. The common and permanent opinion as to what the answer would be to the ques- tion, Would you put your own daughter into work- rooms managed on such a system ? is a test of the character of that system. A management in respect to which the answer to this question is notoriously and always " No," I call a foul system. Perhaps I have put more than a hundred times this question, or its equivalent, and have been answered invariably in exactly these words, or their equivalent : " Before putting my daughter into work-rooms managed on that system, I would see her in some other place work her fingers to the bone." This is a terrible condemnation of a system wholly unnecessary in itself, affecting here and elsewhere a vast operative population, and likely to affect a population larger and larger. On the other hand, as the example of many of the largest factories abundantly proves, there is a clean system of work-room management in the fluctuating industries. In one of the best factories within a dozen miles of this platform, I have seen the sexes in separate rooms everywhere from basement to roof. Where this arrangement is made, and care is taken 176 LABOR. to appoint men of irreproachable character to over- see the work-rooms of the men, and women of irre- proachable character to oversee the work-rooms of the women, the answer to the test question is differ- ent. I have information as to single rooms in which there is every reason to believe tlie moral condition is good, because care has been taken as to the moral character of overseers ; and as to others, in which there is every reason to believe the moral character is bad, because there has been carelessness as to the moral character of overseers. When the character of a floating population, the effect of the floating on the resident population, the inflammability of human nature, the immense numbers likely to be affected by the varied influences of the work-room arrangements, are kept in view, all that can be said in respect to the foul system is simply that capitalists and manufacturers ought to have sense enough not to adopt it. One hardly feels like offering arguments in the case. It is, however, as a temporary arrangement, though not as a permanent, slightly cheaper to manage on the careless system than on the careful. There is, too, now and then, a man of theory, or some " Lily-handed, snow-banded, dilettante " critic, knowing nothing of manufactures, who, over- looking the immense distinctions between the influ- ences of the sexes on each other in the parlors of good society, or in a high school, for example, and their influences on each other in these rooms, filled SEX IN INDUSTRY. 177 from a floating population without any careful sifting of character at the doors, judges on general principles, without having examined the case in actual life, that the mingling of the sexes in these work-rooms from morning to night may be an excellent thing. And there are others, who, judging from some exceptional instance or instances, where the character of those engaged in particular rooms has been particularly good, and the overseers men of irreproachable char- acter, and the sexes mingled to apparent advantage, think that this is the best general rule for the large floating populations of the manufacturing centres of fluctuating trades, present and future, in New Eng- land and elsewhere. It is found by experience that it is in the work- rooms that a young woman coming into the fluctuat- ing trades, and not resisting as, thank God, hun- dreds and thousands do resist the morally unheal th- ful influences, loses that natural shyness and modesty which are her charm, and gradually acquires a repul- sive boldness. Suppose that a young woman falls into both an illy-regulated boarding-house and a room of unhealthful moral conditions in a factory. Which will do the more harm ? Which will begin the harm ? Where will the first indentation of ill occur ? Evi- dently she can choose her companions, to a great extent, in the boarding-house ; and, if she is of high principle, will choose the best she can. But she cannot choose her company in the work-room. She must there breathe the atmosphere of the company eight or ten hours a day. She may, in a large meas- 178 LABOB. ure, choose her own company in the former, except for perhaps an hour a day. Further on in the his- tory of deterioration, the illy-regulated boarding- house and the street-school may strip the flesh from the peach, but the down of the peach was brushed away in the work-rooms. This is found to be the history of the case in tracing almost any individual example of deterioration. The chances in any fluctuating trade in a large town are extraordinarily great that bad men and bad women will occasionally be found in the work-rooms ; and these chances arise from the four circumstances, (1) that the door of entrance to the work-rooms is not, and, on account of the number of changeable operatives, is not likely soon to be made, a moral sift- ing-machine ; (2) that the industry is likely to have each year two brisk and often painfully hurried periods, and two of comparative inactivity ; (3) that the percentage of operatives changeable within the year is large on account of these fluctuations, and is often estimated to be thirty-three per cent of the whole number; (4) that, on account of the fluc- tuations of the industry, the floating population is large, and it is out of this population, itself not sifted, that operatives, in the hurried periods of work, are taken into the work-rooms through a door that is not a sieve. Already New England has many cities with a population of five or seven or ten thousand swirling in or out of each of them, according as business is at its brisk period or at its lulls. How large will that SEX IN INDUSTEY. 179 population be in fifty years ? How large in a hun- dred ? I am in New England but for a moment ; but I profess to care enough for it to keep fifty and a hundred years of its future in view, and to put at hazard any popularity I may or might have, by ask- ing you to meet, as men, the complicated problems of your vast industries. Who is the man, and where is the man, who will say that you can have a tide of ten or fifteen thousand people swirling in and out of a city like this, and no moral perils arise, no sedi- ment be stirred, no grave responsibilities laid upon those whose business is the flood-gate through which these tides must mingle with the other tides of the population ? At the best, the filter that you can provide for the tides will be ineffective enough ; but to say that there is need of no filter, that you may safely take the chances of careless factory arrangements being con- tinued, is to say what time will disprove. If the present careless factory arrangements are continued fifty years, your floating populations in many manu- facturing centres will be full of moral ulcers. Laz- arus will lie at the gate of Dives in New England, and he will be full of sores. I throw my whole weight into the scale against the continuance of these careless arrangements. / know that the American Lazarus may to-morrow or in the next generation become a Dives, as the European may not ; hut, in spite of American institutions, the day is coming, unless fac- tory-life is studied and adjusted most carefully, when here and throughout New England, of which the whole 180 LABOB. Atlantic slope is a factory^ Lazarus will lie at the gate of Dives. Why discuss this subject publicly ? Because only a powerful public sentiment will correct the evil. In what method will public sentiment aid ? It is not diflBcult to point out the steps. Let it be made so- cially as unpopular for a man to manage a factory on a careless system, and mutilate souls, as to manage a railway on a careless system, and mutilate bodies. Then the better class of men will be influenced. Let a majority, thus gradually won, set right fashions, and even the money-gripes, and men lower down, will be reached. Business is a regiment. For indus- trial reasons men must keep step with each other in it. Let a majority of the board of trade of any city set right business fashions, and the inferior men who care only for money are usually brought sooner or later to respect the step of the regiment. If inks and silks must be packed together, they ought to travel in separate cases. [Applause.] 15. Under this combination of industrial and moral perils, the working-girl must bear also the perils to health arising from the physical limitations of wom- an's nature. 16. The statistics of infamy prove that most fallen women have been tempted to their fall by their poverty. It is impossible to deny that one of the forces which push women toward the pit of physical deatli, and also toward that of moral death, is low wages. [Applause.] I am not alono in that opinion. SEX m INDUSTBY. 181 It is the opinion of your Labor Bureau. It is the opinion of the best politicians in this State. It is the opinion of the soundest parts of our industrial populations. It is the opinion of many a pastor in a manufacturing town. For evident reasons these sub- jects cannot well be discussed in detail in the pulpit without dividing churches. This fact does not pre- vent preachers from studying them thoroughly, dis- cussing them in private, and wielding all the appara- tus of the church fitly to' save floating populations. Nothing brings the operative class to church more quickly than some discussion there of their interests. If topics like these are not to be taken up often in the pulpit, they can in many churches at least occa- sionally be discussed there, or in public halls. It ought to be shown by the ministry of New England that the great wheel of the factory does not turn the pulpit. [Applause.] The bondage of the pulpit, I believe, is not very great now. We can defend j ustice, and retain our parishes ; but the day may come when, unless we defend justice early, we cannot defend it, and retain our places, or retain united con- gregations. The expediency of discussing these top- ics results from the growth of manufacturing popula- tions in New England, and the use demagogues are already swift to make of the accumulating explosive social materials. Both the trenches of death, the moral and the physical, will be filled oftener and oftener unless the topic of wages is discussed sharply, publicly, resolutely, defiantly. 182 labobI " With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags. Plying her needle and thread. Stitch, stitch, stitch, Seam and gusset and band, Band and gusset and seam. Till over the buttons I fall asleep^ And sew them on in a dream." Eighty-two cents a day for female labor in Massa- chusetts emphasize even these well-known lines of Thomas Hood's : " Work, work, work. And my labor never flags; And what are its wages ? a bed of straw, A crust of bread and rags ; That shattered roof, and this naked floor, A table, a broken chair; And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank For sometimes falling there ! Stitch, stitch, stitch. Would that these tones could reach the rich! " Hood : Tlie Song of the Shirt. vn. WAGES AND CHILDEEN'S EIGHTS. THE ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 16. ""WTiat is to become of our Cotton-trade?" cried certain Spin- ners, when the Factory-Bill was proposed; " What is to become of our invaluable Cotton-trade?" The Humanity of England an- swered steadfastly: "Deliver me these rickety perishing souls of infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance. God Ilimself commands the one thing; not God especially the other thing. "We cannot have prosperous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping the Devil a partner in them! " Caklylk. There is a mighty stir now made in behalf of education, and I heartily thank God for it; but let me ask you to what purpose it is to take a little child, a young female for instance, and teach her for six hours a day the rules of decency and every virtue, and then send her back to such alxnles of filth and profligacy, as to make her unlearn by the practice of an hour the lessons of a year. When in early life these persons have been treated as swine, they are after- wards expected to walk with the dignity of Christians. Lobd Suaftesbuby: House of Commons. vn. WAGES AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS. PRELUDE OK CURRENT EVENTS. It is a cheerful sign of the times, that nearly all large temperance efforts in America have of late voluntarily put themselves into full sympathy with aggressive Christianity. Mr. Reynolds, Mr. Mur- phy, and especially the woman's movement, are in substantial accord with the heart of the churches. 1. So far as drunkenness is a vice, it is to be reformed, and the treatment of it belongs to the Church. 2. So far as drunkenness is a disease, it is to be cured, and the treatment of it belongs to physicians. 3. But the assertion that all or most of habitual drunkenness is a disease is not supported by the best physiological authorities, however loudly it may have been indorsed by the proprietors of inebriate- asylums. The theory that drunkenness is oftener a disease than a vice is going out of fashion among experts. Dr. Bucknill, recently a foremost visitor of lunatics 185 186 LABOR. in Great Britain, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, has lately made a vehement attack on that theory. Eight or ten years ago inebriate- asylums in the United States were held up as models to Great Britain. Mr. Dalrymple of Parliament took American testimony, which was supposed to prove that thirty-four per cent of the patients treated in our inebriate-asylums were cured. Dr. Bucknill came to this country in 1875, when the wave of popular excitement concerning inebriate-asylums had subsided to a large extent; and his book is intended to discredit the theory that habitual drunkenness is usually a disease. The attack is from the highest authority. This volume, from a great specialist in nervous disease, is a vigorous proclamation of the theory that habitual drunkenness in most cases is a vice to be reformed by moral measures, rather than a disease to be cured. Dr. Bucknill thinks practical Christianity is the best remedy for habitual drunken- ness. [Applause.] The Binghamton Inebriate Asy- lum, at one time deservedly a prominent figure in the public eye, was not long ago put on trial for a year, and told to its face by the New York legislature, that, unless it managed its affairs better, it would be suspended at the end of that period of probation. Pennsylvania found her inebriate-asylum at Media 80 badly manfiged that she abolished it. At Ward's Island, near New York, there was lately abolished an inebriate-asylum, at which a prominent physician from the City Hospital, according to Dr. Bucknill's testimony, once found five patients able to oflFer him WAGES AND CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 187 a choice of spirits in their own rooms. The asylum was on an island, but the boatmen from New York understood sig^nals from the windows. At Bingham- ton liquor could be obtained by a half-hour's walk in almost any direction. Upper Canada, now called Ontario, built a great establishment at Hamilton, with the intention of making it an inebriate-asylum ; but she has of late abandoned her intention entirely, and given, as a reason for doing so, the failure of the inebriate-asy- lums in the United States. She has turned now the whole establishment she opened at Hamilton into an asylum for the insane, and repealed her statute for the control of inebriates. (Bucknill, Dr. John Charles, Habitual Drunkenness and Insane Drunk- ards^ London, 1878, pp. 72, 73.) I am not assailing without qualification inebriate- asylums, for I believe there is a percentage of cases that should be treated in such establishments ; but it is a smaller percentage than the self-interest and avarice of some of the managers of private asylums, both in the United States and Great Britain, have often proclaimed it to be. A real case of insane drunkenness or dipsomania is accompanied by signs which expert physicians can usually read. Periodi- city is usually one of them ; heredity is another ; and, when both these mark a case, drunkenness is no doubt fitly called a disease rather than a vice. Seven cases out of ten of habitual drunkenness, however, our best experts tell us, are vice and not disease. If all vehement craving for drink is disease, 188 LABOR. then a keg of fire-water may convert a group of sav- ages into madmen before they have tasted it. The power of the pledge shows that in most cases drunk- enness is a vice, and not a disease. Dr. Bucknill tells the story of an eccentric at Rugby, who promised the school-physician that he would not touch drink for a year, although he had been what is called a confirmed drunkard. His case had been supposed to be one of disease ; but he kept his pledge, and won a wager from the physician. At twelve o'clock on the ending of the year, he began to drink again, and never ceased until he died. Very surly is the deep tone of recent science con- cerning what is called moderate drinking. Dr. Buck- nill writes : " Of late years the upper class of English has become sober, and its growing opinion stamps drunkenness more and more as a disgrace ; and that some small proportion of its members are left behind in the shameful indulgence of the old vice, is certainly not a matter of national concern. But they will ruin themselves I No doubt ; and why should they not? Their possessions will be better placed in sober hands, and their undeserved social position will be yielded to the advance of more worthy candidates. But they will kill themselves I And this also is more likely than lamentable, especially if they leave no offspring to inherit the curse of their qualities. It would be a national, nay, a world-wide blessing, if alcoljol were really the active poison which it is so often represented to be, that men who indulge in it might die off quickly. The French have somewhat WAGES AND CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 189 improved upon pure spirit in this direction by the invention of absinthe, which causes epilepsy ; and the Americans, with their vile compounds of raw whiskey taken into empty stomachs, are far ahead of ourselves. An American drunkard who sticks to his work has a much better prospect of finishing it within a reasonably short time than the English- man." Sixty years ago Lyman Beecher attended an ordi- nation at which forty dollars' worth of liquors were drunk by New England ministers. To-day Mrs. Hayes whom may God bless ! expels intoxicat- ing beverages from the Presidential mansion. 4. So far as drunkenness as a vice leads to drunk- enness as a disease, the Church, under the modern training of theological students, is likely to know, better than ever before, how to emphasize the truths of science for the warning of the middle-aged and the young. In 1867 there was founded at Princeton College a professorship for the discussion of the relations between Christianity and science. In the Princeton Theological Seminary there is a chair for a similar purpose. There is a professorship, with ten thou- sand dollars behind it, in Union Theological Semi- nary, for the discussion of the relations of the Bible and science. The Vedder lectureship in New Bruns- wick is devoted to similar themes. Willard Parker founded a professorship of hygiene in Union Theo- logical Seminary. At Andover there has just been established a professorship, with fifty thousand dol- 190 LABOR. lars behind it, to discuss the relations of science and Christianity. In view of these new endowments, I undertake to say that unless we, whose duty it is to teach religious truth publicly, inform ourselves on the relations of religion and science, we shall be behind the times fifteen years hence, or twenty, when the men come forward who have been trained in these improved courses of study. The relations of the church to temperance are therefore not unim- portant on the purely scientific side. Already the demand is growing loud for the introduction into common schools and sabbath schools of some instruc- tion on the natural laws of health in their relations to intemperance; and excellent text-books on this topic have been prepared by experts. (See Dr. Richardson's Cantor Lectures and his Text Book on Alcohol.^ Forbes Winslow, the celebrated English physician for the insane, once told a committee of Parliament that he could dip out of the brain of any habitual drunkard a fluid so full of alcohol that when put in a spoon, and a lamp placed beneath it, the liquid would burn with a blue flame. Perhaps the two most important physical circumstances which can be pointed out in relation to alcohol are that it hardens all the colloid or glue-like substances in the body, and that it lias a local affinity for the brain. Alcohol hardens the white of an egg. The brain, and much of tlie matter in the nervous system, is albuminous in chemical comi)osition, as the white of an egg is ; and as alcohol everywhere else hardens colloid sub- "WAGES AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS. 191 stances, so it does in the brain. The blue flame which Forbes Winslow emphasizes shows the affinity of alcohol for the brain, and should be kept burning as a pillar of fire before tempted men. There is a famous saying of Hyrtl, quoted lately in " The Sci- entific American," that he could tell in the dark whether he was dissecting a drunkard's brain or the brain of a temperate man, for the former would be hard under the scalpel. He used to explain to his pupils that the only way to obtain good brains for dissection was to harden them by alcohol, or to find brains that had been hardened before death. 5. So far as drunkenness depends on open tempta- tion to it, the interests of trade and politics require the shutting by law of all public doors to vice ; and in furtherance of this work the Church may well put forth its best energies, and invoke the aid of woman's vote. There are eight miles of legalized grog-shops in Boston. (^Report of the Advisory Committee of the Massachusetts Temperance Alliance., Oct. 18, 1877.) [Applause.] Take the licensed dram-shops of Bos- ton,' allow each one twenty feet of front, put them in a line, and you have eight miles of manufactories of madmen and paupers. [Applause.] Has Massa- chusetts, paying such taxes that her elections often turn on schemes for a reduction of the burdens of the people, nothing to say about the execution of temperance laws? Eight solid miles engaged in a business at war with every other traffic ! When the shrewd black angels watch cities at midnight, it 192 LABOR. must be that they laugh a little at the merchants engaged in honorable trades, to see how the latter are fleeced by the proprietors of whiskey-dens. The indictment to be brought against the liquor-traffic, in the name of trade, is that it can succeed only by standing on the ruins of other trades. It is a pirate ; it is a leech ; it is the enemy of all honest traffic. That citizens in the honorable pursuits of mercantile life are not to a man united against the unlicensed dram-shops in Boston and New York and throughout the world, is a puzzle, I think, to the acutest black angels that move to and fro through the midnights of the planet. Our church property in the United States, all massed together, is worth only three hundred and fifty-four millions of dollars. The drink-bill of the United States is seven hundred millions of dollars a year. That is an estimate by the National Bureau of Statistics. There is no accurate return even in the revenue department. It has been shown again and again that the finan- cial loss sustained by the sale of drinks amounts, every fifteen years, to a value equal to that of* the property destroyed in the five years of the civil war. Every one knows that statements of this kind are facts, and not declamation. A civil war for five years, every fifteen years, would destroy no more property than the rum traffic I It is said the church can do nothing with the gigantic Apollyon of the liquor-trade, striding across the whole breadth of the mercantile highway. The WAGES AND CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 193 ministry of the United States, without going out of their own houses of worship, have opportunity to reach with the living voice twenty-three millions of people. That is the number of sittings in the churches of the United States, and I suppose that on an average for the year most ministers address as riiany people as can be brought together in their churches. Probably twenty-three millions, who are old enough to go to church, are effectively reached by the voice of the pulpit in this land. What if the church should be as stern with rich proprietors of property used for dram-shops as the law of Massachusetts is at this hour? When the proprietor of a block of buildings at the North End lets a cellar there, if the tenant violates the temper- ance laws, and is convicted, notice is served on the proprietor, according to the Massachusetts law, as it now stands ; and he is required, under the old law of common nuisance, to eject that tenant under penalty. That is what the State requires of the rich proprietor of property. What does the church of the Heavenly Rest require of that proprietor, if he is a church- member? Why, that he should go on with his heav- enly rest, and pay his bills in the church ! [Ap- plause.] Do you believe that the world is likely to be deeply impressed by our temperance addresses when average church discipline on that point is laxer than the Massachusetts secular law of to-day? I have no church, you say, and can say these things with impunity. If I had a church, and could not say them with impunity, I should not have a church 194 LABOR. long. I had rather be penniless than a pulpit spaniel. [Applause.] There stands a noble State House in the cornfields near Springfield, 111., and Lincoln's grave lies under its shadow. Above his grave, a legislature will be petitioned this winter by ladies of Illinois to give women of legal age the right to vote in cases of local option under temperance-laws. The petitioners are not female-suffragists. They protest against being called by that name. The queen of lecturesses, Mrs. Livermore, a lady whose eloquence has had a larger public recognition than that of any other woman in ancient or modern times, is president of the Massa- chusetts Woman's Temperance Union, and informs New England that the seaboard and the Mississippi Valley are. to unite in asking a vote for woman in regard to the temperance-laws. The language of the West and that of the East are nearly the same. The Chicago women say, " We petition that by suitable legislation it may be provided that in the State of Illinois the question of licensing at any time, in any locality, the sale of any and all intoxicating drinks, including wine and beer, be submitted to and deter- mined by ballot, in which women of lawful age shall be privileged to take part in the same manner and under only such restrictions as obtain in reference to voting by men on the question of license." The Massachusetts Temperance Union passes this resolu- tion: "That, while we disavow any connection with the general movement for giving the ballot to women, we yet believe that woman should have the right to WAGES AND CHILDEEN'S EIGHTS. 195 vote on all questions relating to the legislation on the liquor-traffic, and we hereby resolve that we will petition the legislature for this right until it is granted to us." [Applause.] Let that thunder be heard in the General Court [applause], and heard loudly, for politicians are not likely to take the lead on this subject. After ten years of experience of woman's suffrage, Wyoming Territory, by the voice of three of her governors, proclaims it a success. (^Cheyenne Daily Leader^ Nov. 22.) In New Hampshire, the line has already been broken as to the exclusion of women from participation in the settlement of questions closely touching the home. Let it be noticed that New Hampshire, a conservative New-England State, has just given women the right to vote on all questions concerning the school-laws. [Applause.] I am not a woman-suffragist. Do not applaud this platform under the mistaken idea that I am a defender of extreme positions as to woman's rights. I am medi- tating on that theme. [Applause.] But this I dare say, that one of the fragments of self-protection for women namely, a right to vote concerning temper- ance-laws, when the question of local option is up I am willing to defend, and intend to defend, to the end of the chapter. [Applause.] Great natural justice is on the side of such a demand. Woman's interests are among the chief ones concerned; and as to family divisions, why, they come largely from temperance laxness. Woman has surely political intelligence enough to understand the difference 196 LABOR. between license and no license, especially when she has suffered under a lax execution of temperance- laws. The difference is so plain, between local free- dom and no local freedom to sell liquor, that woman, without any great participation in the turmoil of politics, might be expected to have an intelligent vote on this subject. I know that many cultivated and refined women say they do not want women to vote, because they do not want to increase the amount of ignorant suffrage. We all respect the in- telligence and the refinement of the ladies who make such remarks ; and yet I believe that on most moral questions, woman is likely to be more intelligent and certainly more disinterested than man. [Applause.] I am told by many of the best authorities, that women, who are opposed to female suffrage at large, are usually in favor of this modified measure. I am assured that a majority of the thoughtful, cultivated women of the United States, or certainly of the Northern States, can be expected to favor this demand for a vote to be given to woman in questions of local option concerning temperance-laws. If a majority of women want such a vote. Heaven grant their desire ! [Applause.] Women would be united on this topic. Woman's vote would be, to city vices depending on intemperance, what the lightning is to the oak. God send us that lightning I [Applause.] On the table of the chief of police of Boston, there lies a complete catalogue of all the mentionable and unmentionable dens of iniquity in this city. He does not close them, because you do not urge him WAGES AND CHILDIIEN'S EIGHTS. 197 into the work of doing so. Who is responsible? The hand, or the shoulder and the heart below the shoulder ? On that same table of the chief of police, there lies now a license-law, and how is it executed? In the county of Suifolk, in the year ending October, 1877, 1,667 cases of violation of the temperance-law were brought before the Superior Court ; 29 of them were tried, 14 only were convicted ; more than 1,100 were laid on file ; and the officer through whose oily fingers most of these cases slipped is renominated. ( Official Report of the Massachusetts Temperance Alli- ance. See also a speech by Mr. W. F. Spalding, in a hearing given by the Legislative Committee on the Liquor Law, Jan. 30, 1878.) That law, thus administered, lies on the table of your chief of police ; and what lies above it ? A proposal for a local-option law ; and that is weighted down by a veto, although there were cast in favor of such a law the votes of two-thirds of the members of one political party in your General Court. Massa- chusetts is Christian ; Massachusetts retires to her closet to pray. Can she ask God's blessing on a license-law ? Can she ask God's blessing on a cat- alogue of legalized dens of iniquity ? Eight miles of doors, and all the evil their traffic does in Massa- chusetts, exists according to law ! God paralyze my arm, if I ever lift it to cast a ballot in favor of the license of leeches on legitimate trade, or for the legalization of manufactories of pau- pers arid madmen ! [Applause.] God paralyze my arm, if ever I put into the ballot-box a vote in favor 198 LABOR. of any form of temperance legislation clamorously demanded by the liquor-traffic itself! [Applause.] " Drink no wine or strong drink," was the message to the wife of Manoah, from an angel whose name was secret and divine, and of whom the record is that he did wondrously. I undertake to predict, in the words of Henry Wilson, that what the people of Massachusetts, the great masses, cannot pray God for, cannot go on the statute-book of this Common- wealth, and stay there. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. American laborers are not expected to live like Chinamen ; and Chinamen, when they become Ameri- cans, will not live like citizens of the Celestial Em- pire. The way to lift the Chinese question out of being a puzzle to our politicians and philanthropists, is to change the habits of the Chinese, little by little, into those of American laborers. The progress of democracy has made inapplicable the standards of expense to which low-paid labor was accustomed in barbaric times. I do not discuss skilled labor, but the poorest of the poor. The cost of maintaining a hundred thousand paupers in the city of London, in 1875, was officially ascertained to be five times as great as that of maintaining a similar number in 1815. The difference arises almost entirely from the fact that the average popular estimate of what is humanly necessary to maintain even the poorest of the poor has risen. In fifty years Great Britain has lifted her estimate on this point so rapidly that she WAGES AND CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 199 spends five times as much for a given number of paupers now as she did fifteen years after the open- ing of the century. (Prof. Bonamy Peice, Prac- tical Political Economy, 1878, p. 237.) Using the scale of London expenses for paupers to show what necessary expenses must be, you will find that the modern world often exposes children as pitilessly to be crushed under the wheels of trade as the Spartans of old exposed infants on Mount Taygetus. 1. The expenses and earnings of 397 families depending on wages were oflBcially ascertained in Massachusetts in 1874. (Lahor Bureau Report for 1875, Part IV.) 2. . So far as can be judged by this large induction, the largest ever made in the world, only thirty-five per cent of the heads of working-men's families in Massachusetts were able by their individual earnings to supply their families' needs. 3. Sixty-four per cent rely on the assistance of wives and children. 4. Under low-paid labor one of the earliest in- fringements of the rights of children is that they are left at home under poor care while the mothers are in the mills. 5. Another infringement is the lack of household training for girls. What does this mean? To bring the matter at once to a point, let me cite a letter I received lately from one of the ladies leading in the management of our ind ustrial reformatory schools : " In every report of young woman and Christian associations and 200 LABOR. unions, as in every report of a young girls' home or industrial school, and every intelligence-office, thoughtfully conducted, and every other place in which girls seek employment, the lack of trained skill is the one ceaseless hinderance." How does this lack arise? Mr. Mundella, when he moved in Parliament, a few years ago, for a reduction of the hours of labor of married women, said that one hundred and eighty thousand mothers are in the factories of England, and that their children have little opportunity to learn how to conduct household work. The slat- ternly housekeeping of the daughters of the mothers who must be early and late at the looms, is a proverb. Although you say New England has very few of the difficulties Mr. Mundella struck at in his famous bill against the employment of married women in fac- tories, we are likely to have such difficulties in due time. The present transition state of New England is setting fashions for many years to come, and this audience is an outlook-committee for the centuries next before us. Already we have thrust in our faces the lack of trained skill as the ceaseless hinderance to employment even in domestic work of the young women who seek places through our intelligence- offices and young women's Christian associations and young girls' homes. My correspondent says: " The city public schools can, at their best, do but a partial work. The children of the very poor have no homes in which this partial school training is sup- plemented by training in good personal habits. The WAGES AJ^TD CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 201 girl if, indeed, any chance to learn by imitation were possible to her in the usual evil neighborhood of the poorest homes has not the out-door chance of the boy to learn better things. Many of these little girls who come into our industrial schools can- not set a stitch. How, then, shall they have the economy and neatness in attire essential to the first success in getting work of any sort? These poor little girls are not unknown as patients in hospitals for evil diseases before fifteen years of age." Silenus and other wild beasts wander yet over Mount Taygetus, on which the children are exposed to death ! What is the trouble here ? The answer is that sixty-four per cent of the wages class in Mas- sachusetts rely for the support of their families on the assistance of wives and children ! Dull statis- tics, you say ? As part of the family record of your descendants, they will not be dull ! 6. Of skilled workmen, fifty-six per cent get along alone ; of salaried overseers, seventy-five per cent ; of unskilled workmen, only nine per cent. 7. The skilled workman obtains five per cent of the money needed to support his family, and the unskilled nineteen, from the labor of children under fifteen years of age. This is not Prussia, nor France, nor Austria, nor England. This is New England, in its early manu- facturing career. 8. Children constitute forty-four per cent of the number of work-people, and produce but twenty-four per cent of the income. 202 V LABOB. 9. In families which the father is unable to support alone, sixteen and one-third per cent of the income is the result of labor of wives and of children under fifteen years of age. 10. In order that these wives may remain at home, and these children attend school, this sixteen and one-third per cent must be added to the wages of the father. 11. The unnaturally low remuneration of labor is a direct temptation to the violation of the rights of children, by the forcing of them into work when they should be at school, and thus fosters the growth of an ignorant class, which is likely to be also an unem- ployed, explosive, and perhaps criminal class. 12. The yearly average expenditure for the food of a working-man's family is four hundred and twenty- two dollars and sixteen cents. What are the necessary expenses, not of a Mexican in the tropics, but of a family in the climate of our Northern States; not of a coolie, but of an American citizen educating sons to become a part of our popular sovereignty under universal suffrage ? 13. If we are not to have an ignorant popular sovereignty, among the necessary expenses of Ameri- can working-men, besides food, we must reckon these dozen articles : rent, fuel, boots and shoes, clothing, dry goods, taxes, school-books, furniture, tools, news- papers, religion, and sundries, including sickness. It has been found, by official investigation in Mas- sachusetts, that the yearly average expenditure for the food of a family of the laboring class is four WAGES AND CHILDREN'S EIGHTS. 203 hundred and twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents. Food includes gi'oceries, meat and fish and milk. Kerosene-oil and lights are reckoned under the head of groceries. 14. These twelve other necessary articles will cost, on the average, nearly as much as the food. This deduction is not found in your State reports, for your overworked bureau cannot always press out from the rich grapes of its own statistics all the wine of truth they may contain. I have personally gone through the record given here in detail of the ex- penses of about three hundred families, and I am forced to this conclusion. 15. It follows that unless the head of a family, with children who cannot labor remuneratively, is paid about twice as: much as the cost of his un- cooked food, he is likely to fall into debt. 16. The purchasing power of a day's labor ought to be at least equal to twice the cost of the unpre- pared food of the laborer. Of course the price of food may vary, and so may wages. When food costs four hundred and twenty-two dollars a year for a family that cannot earn any thing except by the work of the head of the household, that family ought to have somewhere about eight liandred and fifty dollars coming to it, otherwise it will inevitably graduate members unfit to become part of our popu- lar sovereignty. Sound popular sovereignty will not be the result if you shorten in any considerable degree the list of necessities I have mentioned. Get along without school-books? Get along without 204 LABOR. newspapers ? Get along without attendance at church? You say these are not necessaries of life for Chinamen? They are for Americans. [Ap- plause.] 17. The relation of earnings to the cost of living in Massachusetts is now such that the fact stands out plainly that the head of a family who is " the recipient of a wage of less than six hundred dollars must get in debt." That is the language of your bureau (^Report for 1875, p. 380) in summarizing its investigation of the average condition of three hun- dred and ninety-seven families. Some of these con- tained only a few children, some had more ; but that was the average. 18. Without children's assistance, the majority of working-men's families would be in poverty or debt. 19. Children under fifteen years of age supply by their labor from one-eighth to one-sixth of the total family earnings. 20. Although the average saving is about three per cent of the earnings, only in a few cases is there evidence of the possibility of acquiring a competence, and in those cases it would be the result of assisted or family labor. These twenty propositions are the heart of my theme, and need much illustration ; but I have stated them in tolerably close serial order, so that their interdependence may be seen at a glance. There is in my hands a letter from a man of affairs in this city, and its topic is low-paid female labor. There is no red-hot gridiron here, otherwise I should "WAGES AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS. 205 like to grill upon it in a public presence the man who suggested infamy to a girl as a means of increasing her wages behind a counter. You would like to broil thus any man doing that. I suppose the case was a great exception ; but I have excellent evidence that there is no exaggeration in what I am about to read to you. This is not an anonymous letter ; but the writer, who signs it with his own full name, is re- corded in the directory of the city to which he be- longs, and his occupation is mentioned. " A young lady, whose family became reduced in worldly cir- cumstances, felt that she must try to do something for herself, and therefore she applied at a large retail dry-goods house for a situation. 'Yes,' said the proprietor, ' we will take you ; your salary will be ' (naming the price). ' Oh, sir,' said she, 'I can't live upon that.' ' I understand you, miss,' was the reply. 'Several of these girls don't live upon what we pay them. Do you see that young lady there ? We pay her just what I offer you : a young man pays her the rest.' " I wish the gridiron were here for the broiling. [Applause.] " I know whereof I affirm," continues this writer, whose letter aroused an indignation I dare not express here ; " and I think that when it comes to this, the matter goes a step beyond low wages." This is simply an illustration of one effect of low wages. "Please remember that this young woman was not only a person of high character and good family, but also a perfect stranger to this merchant." If you could see letters that come to me from 206 LABOE. many quarters, signed and bearing responsible names, you would not think that I am pressing the topic of low-paid labor to extremes. I have taken great pains to avoid being caught in any traps. That letter, before I read it, was shown to three or four experts ; and the signature I know to be authentic, and the character of the man who wrote it is vouched for in a great variety of ways to me. Let it be granted that this is an exception; but when an exception like this occurs, when there is a possibility of a class of low-paid girls coming into conditions of this sort, where is Massachusetts? Where is the spirit of the fathers, that we do not arouse ourselves to execute legislation like that of the old law of 1670? Our fathers had not been on this shore fifty years before they passed a law intended to rescue the coun- try from the barbarism of an uneducated working population. The earliest Massachusetts statutes are full of reverence for learning ; but here is a passage from an enactment of 1050 that has in it a trumpet- like prophetic tone for our day : " Forasmuch as the good education of children is of singular behoof and benefit to any common- wealth, a^Ld whereas many parents and masters are too indulgent and negligent of their duty in that kind, it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof, that the selectmen of every town, in the several precincts and quarters where they dwell, shall have a vigilant eye over their brethren and neighbors, to see, first, that none of them shall WAGES AND CHELDEEN'S EIGHTS. 207 suffer so much barbarism in any of their families, as not to endeavor to teach by themselves or others their children and apprentices so much learning as may enable them perfectly to read the English tongue and knowledge of the capital laws, upon pen- alty of twenty shillings for each neglect therein." Contemporaneous with the incorporation of com- panies for manufacturing purposes, the General Assembly of Connecticut, in its May session for 1813, passed laws to secure the elementary instruc- tion of children employed in factories and manufac- turing establishments. These early provisions were absorbed into the Connecticut statutes of 1838, and are claimed to be the first American legislation on behalf of factory-children. The deputy State constable of Massachusetts reported in 1875, that there were then " in this Com- monwealth upwards of sixty thousand children, of school ages, who are growing up in ignorance, con- trary to the ancient policy of the State, and in open violation of the letter and spirit of existing laws." (^Report on the ScJiooling and Hours of Labor of CJdldren, by Geoege E. McNeill, Jan. 11, 1875.) These numbers others think are too large for the facts, but look forward, and you will soon double the figures, at the rate at which manufacturing cen tres are increasing in population. These children grow up ignorant because of the low wages which require fathers to send the children into the mills. They grow up without knowing, if they are girls, how to set a stitch, because their mothers must be 208 LABOR. behind looms, and because a home left in the care of very young or aged persons is no place in which to teach housekeeping in detail. They grow up slat- ternly, and so find it difficult to obtain situations. They grow up open at various points to moral temp- tations which would not assail them if a higher spirit of self-respect had been fostered by giving the head of the family power to maintain his household. Advocating no socialistic proposition, and defend- ing no communistic dream, I yet believe the day will come when the cost of, its production will determine the pay of labor. The cost of production includes the support of a family. We cannot give the State the strength of its citizens on any* rule that starves men. We cannot produce a skilled class unless we bring our children up well. Unless we have a cer- tain regard for skill as well as for the mill, the mill itself will be without skilled operatives. In time there cannot be a fit laboring class provided, unless you give such wages as will enable an average head of a family to put among his expenses school-books, newspapers, and religion. There must be somewhere a lifting of the income of the lowest-paid class of laborers: otherwise we shall have monstrosity after monstrosity, and the heart of girlhood wrung until the gutters are full of the ruddy slime. My theme is not socialism so much as labor-reform as an antidote to socialism. My theme is, in short, justice as an antidote to the dreams of political heretics. Until justice is held up as a broad shield against the darts of all insane communists and infuriated socialists, we WAGES AND CHILDREN'S RIGHTS. 209 shall be pierced again and again with arrows like this poisoned one which I hold in my hand [holding up the letter cited above], and lift aloft for your execration. [Applause.] VIII. NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. THE ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEENTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 23. Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn. "We should always be with the former, against the latter. Tai/- l^YKAJS^D. "We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings ; we think, nothing doubt- ing, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. " My starving workers ? " answers the rich Mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last six- pence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more ?" . . . "When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where is thy brother?" he too made answer, " Am I my brother's keeper ? " Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me ? O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, Illustrious game-preserving Duke, is there no way of ' killing ' thy brother but Cain's rude way! Caaltlb. VIII. NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. PEELTJDE OX CURRENT EVENTS. Place before Mormonism the broad shield of State rights, and very possibly that defence will be vulnerable only by the bayonet. Utah once admitted to the Union will govern herself, and her peculiar institutions will be out of the reach of Congress. Polygamy imitates slavery in seeking to intrench itself behind the fateful bulwarks of State rights. Of course the clamor is becoming very loud for the admission of Utah, since she now has one hundred and thirty thousand people, and Nevada was admitted with forty thousand. That historic political party which denounced slavery and polygamy as twin relics of barbarism, and cut the former of these cancers off the breast of America by the long, deep plunges of the sword through live years of civil war, is no longer in power in Congress. In the exigencies of political strife a time may easily arrive when the prize of two senators and several representatives will induce the dominant party at Washington to admit Utah with polygamy. The agent of that territory is authorized 213 214 LABOR. to give the vote of Utah to the party which admits her with her peculiar institutions. Mormonism pos- sessed of State rights, and defying American law, is the blackest threat in the low, lurid vapor which lies behind Pike's Peak in the sunset. Beyond the Mor- mon cloud the Chinese question spreads itself across the deepest western sky, as a dull, thunderous, copper haze. So distant, however, are the lightnings which peer fitfully at the East from over the steru shoulders of the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, that we hear little of the local thunders, and dream that both the black and the copper cloud will dissolve soon, and without storms. In precisely this indif- ference of ours to these distant threats lie their chief dangers. UntU the stains of slavery and of Mexico and of Mormonism are erased from the American map, the Northern States, with their mismanaged large cities, are not safe. Wendell Phillips says that no thought- ful man can feel sure that one flag will rule this belt of the continent fifty years hence. (^Nbrth American Review^ August, 187C, p. 101.) The education of the South and of the South-west is the remaining measure which the North must execute for the preservation of the peace of the land. Every year it becomes more evident that America is to stand or fall according as she does or does not educate the South and Soutli-west. Until the dark mass of illiteracy is greatly whitened on tlie Gulf and along the Mexican border and in Utah, serious trouble may arise at any time in the United States from the collision of the uneducated portions NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 215 with tlie educated. The deepest shadows on that part of our territory which was once Mexican come from Romanism and a despotic government. The whole region of the lower basin between the Rocky- Mountains and the Sierras has been plonighed and sown by Romanism for hundreds of years. Into this territory Mormonism is spreading. What is Utah worth to the United States ? Bend a bow along the Pacific coast, its middle at San Francisco, one of the ends at Yellowstone Park and the other on the southern hills of New Mexico. This colossal arc represents a volcanic rift along which are found the best gold and silver mines of America. The Central Pacific Railway is the arrow, and the Rocky Mountain range is the drawn strand of this bow. San Francisco is the barb of the arrow, and Salt Lake City is the chief feather on the shaft. The string of the bow has twisted among its strands many threads of silver and gold. Utah, in short, has a central position in the most important mining region on the planet. A railroad is to connect Ore- gon with Mexico through the Basin States. One railway already crosses Utah from sunrise to sunset, and so she is at the intersection of two great ways. Men in Utah, whose judgment is to be respected, affirm that the Southern Pacific Railroad will be drawn into Southern Utah by the value of her coal and lead mines. My impression is that the silver and gold mines in New Mexico will carry that new rail- way south of Santa F^. But the Basin States, of which Utah is the heart, will ultimately have three in- 216 LABOR. tersections of the Oregon and Mexico Railway with three Pacific roads. President Tenney, in his breezy, keen volume on the New West, makes that title cover both the Basin and the Mountain States, or Ari- zona, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Utah is central in a group of undeveloped commonwealths containing nearly a third of the territory of the United States. The New West is a region apparently set apart by geological circumstances for self-rule. It is certainly destined to exliibit anomalous political and social traits, unless it is pierced with lines of intercommunication from both sunrise and sunset. What has happened between the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains in territory thus strategic in posi- tion? 1. In 1828 an ignorant, indolent, and not reputable young man, named Joseph Smith, born in 1805, at Sharon, Vt., began to claim that he was a prophet. 2. In 1830 he announced that he had dug out of a hill in Manchester, in New York State, tlie Book of Mormon. Although his fellow-conspirators, desert- ing him, denounced this claim as a fraud, he pub- lished the book, and began to collect followers among the ignorant. Certain experiences like those familiar now in Spiritualism, which was not tlien known, were among tlie misleading supports of Smith's pretensions. (See Sten HOUSE, Rocky Mountain Saints, p. 33.) 3. lie and liis associates were driven in 1838 from Kirtland, O., where he failed as president of a bank. 4. Ilia debaucheries were denounced by some of NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 217 his followers; and in 1843 he pretended to receive a revelation in favor of polygamy. 5. Razing to the ground the office of a newspaper which exposed his immoralities, he was shot dead by a mob at Carthage, 111., in 1844. 6. Expelled from Nauvoo, 111., in 1844, the Mor- mons, under Brigham Young, reached Salt Lake in July, 1847. The territory then belonged to Mexico, but it became a part of the United States in March, 1848. 7. Originally denounced by the Book of Mormon, polygamy was introduced by Young as an institution in 1852. 8. Notwithstanding the death of Brigham Young in 1877, the despotic hierarchy which he founded, and which is supported by a severe tithing system, a mer- ciless secret police, and the powei of life and death, is successful in carrying forward his work, both in its political and its social aspect. There have been more Mormon marriages in Utah in the last two years than ever before in the same length of time. Polygamous marriages are contracted in temples called endowment-houses. These are being erected throughout the territory in large num- bers and at great expense. No Gentile is permitted to enter them. Even apostates will not reveal the oaths taken in the Mormon endowment-houses ; and, to maintain contracts made there, witnesses and juries perjure themselves. 9. Three or four hundred missionaries are con- stantly at work abroad ; and they induced some two 218 LABOR. thousand Mormon emigrants to come to this country between April and October in 1878. 10. The Mormons have the balance of power in Idaho, and are acquiring influence rapidly in Arizona and Colorado. 11. It is estimated that there are now two hundred thousand Mormons in Utah and its vicinity, and fifty thousand in other countries. 12. Thus it happens that between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras there is a district larger than New England, in which a majority of the popu- lation teaches its children that, (1) God has a bodily form. (2) He is the celestial patron of polygamy. (3) Jesus was a pattern to his disciples in this respect. (4) Polygamy on earth gives rank in heaven. (5) Mothers should be responsible for the support of their children. (6) Mother and daughter may be wives of one husband. (See the Mormon Catechism, passim^ and also President Tenney, Circulars of Colorado College^ December, 1878.) This is the Mormon ulcer, fattening itself on the iiitermurjil basin between the Rocky Mountains and tlie Sierras. Utah is the American Syria. Let the soil have due irrigation, and it needs only to be tickled with the hoe, as the proverb says, in order to langh into harvests. You say the sage-bush is a mark of desolation ; but irrigate the pastures covered with it, and you have bountiful harvests. As in Syria, NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 219 when you irrigate the Jericho plain, you have most vigorous growths, and as on the plain of Gennesaret there were originally growths reminding one of the vegetation on the borders of the Nile, so to-day irri- gation gives extraordinary fruitfulness to the culti- vated lands of Utah. What is the strength of Mormonism ? I find that this cancer has five roots, and the first is the hierarch- al organization of the Mormon ecclesiastical power. One in five of the Mormons is a church officer. The highest officer is not only a governor possessed of nearly absolute power, but also a prophet ; and he at any time may receive a revelation reversing all past revelations. If you could smite away the hierarchal organization of Mormonism in its lower ranges, it would still have power as long as the belief of the average Mormon in his prophet should continue. But pulverize that keystone, and you cause the whole arch to tumble. Let the average Mormon be convinced that his prophet is no more in communion with the Unseen Power than any man may be, let the pretension of the JNIormon hierarchy to enlight- enment by revelations from on high be once discred- ited, and Mormonism, so far as it is a system of thought, becomes a heap of nonsense. In smiting at this keystone, we need to use educational weapons. A second root of Mormonism is its connection with land-speculations. Go to Europe, enter the peasant homes of Norway and Sweden, and you will find jMormon agents whispering in the ears of credu- lous ignorance that Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, who 220 LABOR. were once neighbors of the peasants addressed, now have lands in Utah, and that the Mormon Church gave it to them. Pinched men and women are told that if they will go to America, and unite with the Mormon Church, they shall have land. The emigrant, harassed by poverty, finds that he does acquire property in land in Utah, and that he is indebted for his protection in his home and for his political privi- leges to the Mormon Church. In his ignorance, it may be years before he ascertains that the homestead law of the United States has been behind this Mor- mon trick. It is understood perfectly well that the Mormon agents abroad promise in their own name what the government promises to emigrants in the way of land. A third root of Mormonisra is its political self-rule. This root has been fed more tlian once with blood. Mormonism has lived in the wilderness, and has been able to do as it pleased because it was out of sight of civilization. Official investigations preceding the execution in 1877 of John D. Lee for the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857, sliowed that the larger part of tlie stories which have been told us in books, of cruelties to the Gentile emigrants into Utah, are substantially true. I credit the assertion that the avenging angels among tlie Mormons meant to keep Gentile emigrants out of the territory, and that they not infretjuently employed murder of unoffending set- tlers as a political weapon. I believe that if Brigham Young had had his deserts according to law, he would have passed into the next world earlier than he did. NATURAL AND STAEVATION WAGES. 221 [Applause.] So far away on the border behind the Rocky Mountains, and close under the Sierras, the power of the United States was so weak that Brig- ham Young once drove out every United States officer from his territory, and then said, " I am and shall be governor until God Almighty says, 'Brig- ham, you need be governor no longer.' " God Al- mighty has said that, but the American Church and American politics never said it. A fourth deep root of the Mormon power is igno- rance. Go into that tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and look into the faces of the people, and you will be reminded of what you see in Castle Garden. Go to the end of New York City, and look at the emi- grants in the great building there, and you will be reminded of what you see in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle. Mormonism recruits itself from an often illiterate emigrant population, and it forbids any but the most inefficient parochial schools. Mormon leaders have usually been Americans. I do not accuse all the ringleaders of being dishonest. I suppose that some of them are thoroughly sincere; but it would be a miracle, if, in a republic as large as ours, there were not eccentrics and fools enough to officer Utah, women, some of them. Thomas Car- lyle said there were thirty millions of people in Great Britain, mostly fools. In the United States, such is the condition of education, that it is no mira- cle at all, that women of the class which sees visions here should see visions in Utah, and that under religious excitement and the power of custom, some 222 LABOR. of them should at last crush out the deepest instincts of the feminine nature, and appear to be content in a life fit only for beasts. I am speaking very cau- tiously, I am weighing all ray syllables, when I say that there is at present in Utah no statute law against seduction or adultery. In Southern Utah mothers and daughters are often wives of one husband. This is the ghastly barbarism to which the Gentile ladies of Utah, in a petition to Congress, have lately called national attention, and I am speaking in support of their petition. Brigham Young once told an audience in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle that men are not to be required to take care of their children. The most odious and abominable form of the leper's philosophy is that which puts upon the mother the sole care of her offspring. Even our most loathsome cancer- planters commonly clamor for State aid in the sup- port of illegitimate children ; but Brigham Young and Mormonism generally stand on the proposition that it is the mother's duty to provide for her family ! A fifth root of Mormonism is its isolation; and, thank God, the progress of civilization westward is now cutting that root. Isolation, however, as we have now seen, is not the only root of Mormonism. If we are to remove this cancer from the great intermural basin, we must strike at the other roots, ignorance the chief one, and political self-rule. Congress is conspicuously riglit in keeping out of the Union the twin relic of barbarism. [Applause.] The American people, while in its senses, will never be ready to take into NATURAL AND STAllVATION WAGES. 223 the Senate of the United States, as successors to men who have glorified that place, Mormon representa- tives with six or twenty wives apiece. We have been sufficiently scandalized by the territorial agent now in Washington, and by his four wives. More than at any other root, however, we need to strike at the ignorance of the Mormon population. We must treat this territory with a style of Chris- tian charity like that with which we have treated other portions of the West, and with an even more sternly massed Christian front. You cannot carry Christian institutions into Utah without a much more compact massing of your soldiers than you had when you carried schools and churches into Illinois and Ohio. In Utah there is a linked and audacious hierarchy to meet you at every step. In New Mexico you are in the presence of the Jesuits and of a popu- lation long steeped in Catholicism. There and in Utah you must have schools as well as churches ; you must have the teacher as well as the minister, and you must support both more generously than you did in Iowa or even in Kansas. The conditions are very peculiar in Utah, and we need a peculiar sharpen- ing of our attack ; and unless we sharpen the attack, and push it boldly, Utah will be in the Union with her peculiar institutions, and then God knows wheth- er there may not be need of a civil contest to set the State in order. What are we to do for the educational institutions how springing up in our Western intermural basin ? What have we there already? Colorado College, 224 LABOR. an institution of which I cannot mention the name without petitions to Almighty Providence for its success ! It is not fully on its feet, but is slowly rising to a commanding position, and begins to lift up its hand in blessing over Mormon and Gentile populations. Mexico sees this rising angel as he stands on the Rocky Mountain ranges. Idaho, Ari- zona, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, see him. Mor- monism sees him and trembles in Utah, and so does Jesuitism in New Mexico. This angel, although not yet on its feet, has reached out his hand to Salt Lake City, and planted there an academy, and at Sante Fe has planted another ; and from Lowell, in this Commonwealth, a professor has gone to Salt Lake Academy. It* already has eighty pupils, al- though that school is not eight months old, and half of these students are Mormons. Presbyterians and Methodists have made an excellent beginning in pro- viding education for tlie Territory. There is an Episcopalian school in Salt Lake City, with nine teachers in it who were Mormons. Give the Mormon youth education enough to awaken their human in- stincts, and they will resent the destruction of the home. Pol3'gamy is becoming unpopular with the younger chiss of Mormon believers. Indeed, if I had liad a mother who was onl}' an eighth part of a wife, and had seen her abused under the tyrannies of the Mormon hierarchy, my impression is that I should have ceased to be a Mormon, liad I been brouglit up one. The subtle operation of the evil of Mormonism is to di.sgust the younger population with that insti- NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES.' 225 tution. If you educate the young Mormon genera- tions, it is not impossible that soon you may have a new revelation from the head of the Mormon hier- archy, and that it will be against polygamy. [Ap- plause.] Let us so support schools in the New West, that they will take no craven or apologetic attitude before either Romanism or Mormonism. Let us pour funds into the treasury of Colorado College, and Salt Lake Academy, and Santa F^ Academy, and other similar institutions in Utah and New Mexico. The Mormon problem, I, for one, do not expect to see settled, unless by the school or by the sword. The choice is between the keen edge of the sword and the keen edge of the Oliristian school. God give us such wisdom that he may not need at last to send the sword to cut the Mormon cancer out of our sun- set shoulder ! [Applause.] THE LECTUEE. One of the earls of Warwick Castle, a king-maker, was killed in a civil broil ; and the fierce old feudal spirit caused his body to be exposed naked for three days on the floor of St. Paul's in London. Rough as his age was, an earl of Kenilworth Castle founded on his great estate an establishment for the aged soldiers who had been with him in his wars. Feudalism once was so cruel that the baron had the right to kill two peasants in order to warm his feet in their blood ; but this cannibalism grew so soft at last, even in the dark middle ages, that it became social degradation to 226 LABOR. neglect the aged, to snatch out of life the strength of youth and manhood, and then leave advanced years to shift for themselves. The hereditary, ter- ritorial, feudal aristocracy thought itself bound by interest, or certainly by custom, to take care of age ; and it fixed the mark of social infamy upon any leader who did not protect those who had followed him in their manhood. Feudalism has vanished out of Europe. It has never planted its hoofs on American soU ; or, at least, if it hovered for a while over this continent, the impact of its split feet was so light that the tracery of the imprint is now almost removed. De Tocqueville ventures to affirm that the modern manufacturing aristocracy, which to a large extent has taken the place of the hereditary and territorial, differs from the old feudal aristocracy in that it feels no responsibility for the age of its de- pendants. Give us the best service of youth ; crush out the right of children to a fair education in pri- mary branches ; give us the strength of the girl be- fore her powers have been fully confirmed ; give us the strength of mothers when their lives draw near to dangerous physical crises; give us the strength of manhood up to the last hour in which it can labor remuneratively ; and then let the ruined girl, let the mother in her weakness, let old age in its dependence, shift for themselves. This is a terrific indictment against the modern system of wages, which I do not attiick, but which many do. If I put before you in outline some of the reasons why that system is attacked, you will have patience with me, perhaps, NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 227 while I go on to claim that natural wages must, at the least, be twice the cost of the unprepared food of the laborer. I have age in mind ; I have children's rights in mind; I have mothers' rights in mind. I have American standards of living and universal suffrage in mind. I arrive at the conclusion that justice is not dangerous to capital. As, in the old feudal aristocracy, justice was the glory of the order, so in the new aristocracy, justice is the glory of wealth and power. As, in the old aristocracy, infamy was inflicted on any leader who neglected the inter- ests of age, when the strength of manhood had served him ; so in the new aristocracy, more cruel than the old, social infamy ought to be imprinted on any legislation, and on any leader of politics or of manu- factures, that neglects the interests of age, when manhood has given its best strength to that leader. [Applause.] 1. The cost of producing labor should determine the price of labor. 2. The cost of producing labor includes that of rearing a family. 3. The cost of rearing a family depends on the standard of comfort and decency, below which labor- ers will not go, or ought not to go. Of course I recognize the -distinction between these two standards. What ought to be, however, is what in America must be, if our instikitions are to endure under universal suffrage. [Applause.] 4. In a republic under universal suffrage, the cost of living ought to include the expense of educating 228 LABOB. children in the common schools up to fifteen years of age. 5. It ought to include the expense of keeping "mves at home to take charge of little children. 6. It ought to include a fair support for old age, in case temperance, industry, and economy have marked the habits of the laborer. The slovenly spendthrift, the drunkard, ought to suffer. I make no plea for dissipation. Shiftless- ness deserves the workhouse in nine cases out of ten. 7. It will be found that wages less than twice the cost of the unprepared food of the laborer will not meet the demands of the American standard of living. 8. When wages are by any considerable degree lower than this standard requires, it is found that American populations of native birth do not increase fast enough to make up for the inevitable and inces- sant loss of labor from death and disability. 9. As a means of preventing such a multiplication of population as shall make the. supply of labor greater than the demand, it is politically and indus- trially prudent to build up in popular estimation a high and advancing standard of living. 10. There should be no interference by law with the rate of wages for adult males; but public dis- cussion and working-men's organizations are to be encouraged in the demand for natural wages. 11. Natural wages would prevent the formation of an ignorant class. 12. They would diminish the ; izo of the unem- ployed, discontented, and explosive class. NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 229 13. They would destroy the power of demagogues. 14. They would increase the expenses of the work- ing classes. 15. They would increase the gains of capitalists. 16. By removing the chief perils of universal suf- frage, and giving justice free course in the relations of capital and labor, natural wages would make America an organizing and redemptive political example to the world; and nothing else will. [Applause.] It will be noticed that in these propositions I am defining natural wages under the American standard of living, and not necessary wages under the Japan- ese or the Chinese scale of expenses. The definition given in these propositions accords, however, with the best authorities. In his superb work on " The Wages Question" (p. 112), you will find Professor Walker of Yale College maintaining that " the whole significance of the term ' necessary wages ' is, that, in order to the supply of labor being maintained, wages must be paid which will not only enable the laboring class to subsist according to the standard of comfort and decency, or of discomfort and indecency, it may be, which they set up for themselves as that below which they will not go, but will also dispose them to propagate sufficiently to make up the inevita- ble, incessant loss from death or disability." Your Labor Bureau affirms (^Report for 1875, p. 445) that "it seems natural and just that a man's labor should be worth, and that his wages should be, as much as, with economy and prudence, will com- 230 LABOR. fortably maintain himself and family, enable him to educate his children, and also to lay by enough for his decent support when his laboring powers have failed." (See also Professor Bonamy Price, Prac- tical Political Economy^ p. 225.) Dr. Engel of Berlin has shown that in Prussia a person with an income of seven hundred and fifty dol- lars a year spends fifty per cent of this sum for food alone. (See Walker, The Wages Question^ p. 117.) It was my fortune to maintain on this platform more than a year ago (^Boston Monday Lectures on Consciences Preludes I. and II.), that food unprepared costs nearly half as much as the other necessary expenses of a family living according to the Ameri- can -standard. I suppose I do not carry the assent of this audience when I take my stand on that prop- osition; and therefore I shall this morning occupy a few of your precious minutes in a dry analytical discussion in proof of that one assertion. You accuse this platform of using rhetoric ; but if, when delivering a statistical lecture, I am exceedingly dry and cool, you say the discussion is low and ordinary. Now, I wish it to be lower and more ordinary than ever for a quarter of an hour. Here is the official report of your Bureau of Labor for 1875, and it contains a list of the replies made by three hundred and ninety-seven families in this Commonwealth in 1874 to questions concerning their earnings and expenses. The replies were not re- ceived merely in answer to circulars ; but your agents went into manufacturing towns in this State, NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 231 buttonholed working-men, went home with them after tlieir hours of labor were over, gave the re- spondents opportunity to consult their note-books, and so obtained answers to questions on a great variety of points concerning the earnings and expenses of the class depending on wages. No commonwealth in history has gathered social statistics as carefully as has Massachusetts. I know that prices were higher in 1874 than they now are, and so possibly four hun- dred and twenty-two dollars is too large a figure for the unprepared food of a family to-day; but the relation between the price of food and the price of other articles, and that between the cost of living and the purchasing power of a day's labor, have not very greatly changed. It is the proportion to which I call attention, rather than to the figures on any one point. My topic is the lowest-paid labor ; but I accept a disadvantage in the argument by occasionally quoting examples from the ranks of skilled labor. I put before you the expenses and earnings of families out of several different trades in this Commonwealth; and, if you doubt the rec- ord in any case, you can go to the Labor Bureau, take the number of the record here, and find the signature of the head of the family. Every rec- ord here is paralleled with written records in the bureau at 33 Pemberton Square in this city, and can be verified legally, if you please, by sufficient trouble being expended upon the case. I regard the recent reports of the bureau as utterly unpartisan. They are as cool as the multiplication-table, and as un- t answerable. 232 LABOR. No. 1. BEICKLAYER. German. Earnings of father $810 00 Condition. Family numbers five : parents, and three chil- dren from eight months to seven years of age ; one goes to school. Occupy a tenement of four rooms, well located, and with good surroundings. The house is well furnished, and the parlor carpeted. Own a piano. Family dresses well. Food. Breakfast : bread, butter, meat, and coffee. Din- ner : meat or fish, potatoes, bread, pie. Supper : bread, butter, gingerbread, tea. Cost of Uving . . 8810 00 Rent . .8204 00 Boots and shoes . 3050 Fuel . . 49 GO Clothing . . 42 00 Groceries . . 330 49 Dry goods . . 24 00 Meat . . 81 22 Papers 8 00 Fish . . . 960 Societies . . 10 00 Milk . . 18 00 Sundries . . 12 59 Here groceries, meat, fish, and milk, as you uotiee, cost ^28, or slightly more than half of $810, the total cost of living. No. 3. CARPENTER. American. Earninga of father 8686 00 Condition. Family numbers four : parents, and two chil- dren from one to five years of age ; one goes to school. Live in a tenement of five rooms, pleasantly located and surrounded. The apartments are well furnished and carpeted. Have a sew- ing-machine. Family dresses well, and attends church. Food. Breakfast : bread, butter, meat, eggs, cake, and coffee. Dinner: bread, butter, meat, potatoes, vegetables in season, pie, and tea. Supper: bread, butter, cake, sauce, and tea. Cost of living JGSG O* Root 8100 00 1 Groceries . . . . 208 19 Fuel 43 80 1 Meat 101 14 NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 233 Fish $8 00 Milk 28 40 Boots and shoes . . 27 00 Clothing . . . . 84 00 Dry goods Papers Religion Sundries $24 00 9 00 12 00 40 00 In this case the food of the family costs $345, or almost precisely half the whole cost of living. No. 58. BOOTMAKER. American. Earnings of father $660 00 Condition. Family numbers five : parents, and three chil- dren from two to nine years of age ; two go to school. Occu- py a tenement of five rooms in a healthy locality, with good surroundings. House is well furnished, with the parlor car- peted. Have a sewing-machine. Family dresses well. Had sickness in the family last year, which was the cause of their running in debt. Food. Breakfast: bread and butter, meat or eggs, cake, coffee. Dinner: brown bread and butter, meat and potatoes, vegetables, pickles, pie, and tea. Supper: bread and butter, sauce, cake, tea. Cost of living $712 50 Rent $120 00 Fuel 42 75 Groceries . . . . 319 29 Meat 82 00 Milk 15 46 Boots and shoes . . 10 00 Clothing . . . . 47 00 Dry goods . . . . 20 00 Sundries, including doctor's bill . . . . 55 50 Notice that the food here costs $416, or more than half the total earnings of the father, and that the family in consequence has fallen into debt on account of a little sickness. No. 77. SHOEMAKER. American. Earnings of father $480 00 son, aged sixteen ....... 230 00 son, aged fourteen 180 00 $890 00 234 LABOB. Condition. Family numbers five : parents and three chil- dren. One goes to school all the time, and the other when business is dull. Father intends to let them have three months' schooling every year. Have a nice tenement of six rooms, about ten minutes' walk from the shop, in a good neigh- borhood and healthy locality. The house is well furnished, and parlor carpeted. Have a sewing and other labor-saving machines. Family dresses well. The father worked eight months last year, and earned from twelve to seventeen dollars per week. He hoped that the bureau would correct a false statement that had been published in several papers, that shoe- makers averaged eighteen dollars per week, as such a correction was needed. Food. Breakfast : hot biscuit, bread, butter, fried ham or eggs or cheese, cake, and coffee. Dinner: bread, butter, beef, mutton, or fresh pork, potatoes, vegetables, pudding or pie, and tea. Supper: bread, butter, cheese, cake, meat (if any left from dinner), and tea. Baked beans on Sunday, and fish one day in the week. Cost of living Rent . Fuel . Groceries . Meat and fish Milk . 8200 00 48 50 364 90 70 75 15 00 Clothing . Dry goods . Boots and shoes Sundries . S822 15 G8 00 18 00 17 00 20 00 Here is a son, fourteen yeai's old, earning $180. There is great temptation in that family to keep this son out of school. It is said that in Switzerland it costs ten pounds a year to keep out of school a child between twelve and fourteen years of age. The Swiss law requires that children should be in school, and poor families lose a considerable sum by obeying the law. In Massachusetts the law requires children to be in school up to a certain age ; and this family, for instance, would lose islSO by keeping that NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 235 son under fifteen at school all the while. But if you take out the earnings of that son, this family- will fall into debt. Which shall it do, send the son to school, or incur debt ? When we think how demagogues obtain votes out of an explosive and ignorant population to-day, we need look forward no further than 1880, and the possible Presidential issues, to prove that there is timeliness in every topic of this kind. President Woolsey has just begun in " The New York Inde- pendent " a discussion of socialism. There are signs all around the horizon that this topic must come up. Professor Hitchcock of New York has lately pub- lished on socialism a book fit to take the rank of a classic in the literature on tliis subject. The other night in Brooklyn Dr. Storrs's church was packed to the roof to hear discussions by Professor Hitch- cock and Dr. Storrs on this theme. " The Atlantic Monthly " opens its pages to the topic. Congress ap- points investigating committees concerning it. Hav- ing in mind the possible issues in the Presidential conflicts not only of 1880, but of the crowded twentieth century, you will pardon me if I try to dampen the powder which demagogues are sure to attempt to explode. [Applause.] No. 80. SHOEMAKER. American. Earnings of father $552 00 Condition. Family numbers six: parents, and four chil- dren from two to sixteen years of age ; the two elder go to school. Have a tenement of six rooms situated in a pleasant neighborhood. The rooms are well furnished and carpeted, 236 LABOR. and the house kept clean and orderly. Family dresses respect- ably and well, and attends church. On account of the shoe- business being very dull for the past two years, the family has had a hard struggle to pay bills ; and during the last year has run behind some seventy dollars, as there was work only eight months and a half. Had a little money in the savings bank, but was obliged to use it. The oldest child will begin work at the close of the present school term. This family is very eco- nomical. Had no sickness ; bought a few clothes. Food. Breakfast: bread, butter, hash or potatoes warmed from the day before, doughnuts or cake, coffee. Dinner: meat, potatoes, pie or pudding, and tea. Supper: bread, butter, sauce or cheese, cake, and tea. Buckwheat or griddle cakes occasionally for breakfast. Baked beans on Saturd&y night and Sunday morning. Cost of living 8622 00 Milk 18 00 Boots and shoes . . 16 00 Clothing and dry goods . 28 50 Sundries, taxes, &c. . 11 00 Here is a debt ; and how shall it be paid ? The expense for food is, as usual, about half the cost of living. No. 86. SHOEMAKER. Amsbican. Earnings of father $546 00 son, aged fourteen 102 00 ^ 8738 00 Condition. The family mi mbors four: parents, and two children from ten to fourteen years of age ; one goes to school. Live in a tenement of five rooms, in a good locality, with pkTasant surroundings. The apartments are well furnished, carpeted, and kept very clean. Family dresses well. With the assistance of the son, can make enough to suj^port the fam- ily. Work about nine montlis in the year. Impossible to save money. Rent 8200 00 Fuel 36 50 Groceries . . . . 260 00 Meat 62 00 NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 237 Food. Brealcfast : bread, butter, meat or eggs, cake, coffee. Dinner: bread, butter, meat, potatoes, vegetables, pie, and tea. Supper : bread, butter, sauce or fruit, cheese, cake, tea. Cost of living . . . $738 00 Rent . . 120 00 Boots and shoes . 12 00 Fuel . . 49 50 Clothing . . 91 00 Groceries . . 21G 33 Dry goods . . 27 50 Meat . . 99 02 Books and papers . . 12 00 Fish . . 10 40 Societies 8 00 Milk . . 17 60 Sundries . . 74 05 Mr. Senior (^Political Economy^ pp. 36, 37) says that " when a Scotchman rises from the lowest to the middling classes of society, shoes become to him necessaries. He wears them to preserve, not his feet, but his station in life." All Americans wear shoes to preserve not their feet, but their social position. No. 97. Earnings of father SHOEMAKER. French. . $39G 00 Condition. Family numbers six : parents, and four chil- dren from one to nine years of age ; two go to school. Live in a crowded tenement, of three rooms, situated in a very un- healthy locality, in the midst of filth and pollution. On out- side of building is a sink-conductor, badly out of repair ; and the sink-water, almost black, runs down the clapboards, causing an offensive stench, which can be smelled at a great distance. The inside of house is on a par with the surroundings ; it is poorly furnished, and seems the abode of poverty. Children pale-looking, sickly, and wretchedly kept. Father earns from twelve to fifteen dollars per week when he has work ; but on account of sickness, and dulness of trade, finds it impossible to keep out of debt, and live ; sees no hope of betterment of con- dition until children are old enough to work. Family dresses miserably. Food. Breakfast: bread, butter, sometimes salt fisher 238 LABOR. pork, coffee. Dinner: bread, meat three days per week, salt fish or pork the remainder, potatoes, sometimes pie, water. Supper: bread, sometimes brown bread or oatmeal bread, but- ter, tea, occasionally gingerbread. Cannot afford luxuries. Coat of living S483 40 Rent $96 00 Fuel 30 50 Groceries . . . . 244 90 Meat 23 00 Fish 18 00 Milk 12 00 Clothing, shoes, and dry goods . . . . 28 50 Sickness . . . . 19 00 Sundries . . . . 11 50 It is not always safe to visit the fever-dens and death-traps in this little city of Boston in the sum- mer. You had better go when the snow is on the ground. I had occasion to advise a most delicate lady the other day in respect to her visits among the degraded, and told her that ministers usually take a hearty meal before they go into desolate quarters. A Boston preacher informed me that at funerals in the slums he always took the precaution to stand between the door, and the bed on which the corpse lay. Circumstances of this kind are of course out of sight of the Board of Health. No. 215. LABORER IN MILL. English. Earnings of father $370 00 daughter, aged fifteen 249 00 $019 00 Condition. Family numbers five : parents, and three children from eight to fifteen years of age ; two go to school. Occupy a tenement of four rooms, with good and pleasant sur- roundings. House is moderately well furnished. Family dresses well. Food. Breakfast: bread, butter, sometimes eggs, or what was left from dinner, coffee. Dinner: meat, potatoes, vegeta- NATURAL AND STARVATION WAGES. 239 bles in season, bread, pie. cheese, cake, tea. Supper: bread, butter, sometimes Cost of living . . . . .$619 00 Rent . . $66 00 Boots and shoes . 14 00 Fuel . . 39 50 Clothing . . 37 50 Groceries . . 308 50 Dry goods . . 17 00 Meat . . 86 90 Papers 8 00 Milk . . 11 26 Sundries . . 30 34 Even with the help of the daughter, nothing can be laid up here for sickness or age. No. 346. Earnings of father LABORER ON STREETS. Ibish. . $436 00 wife 200 00 $636 00 Condition. Family numbers six : parents, and four chil- dren from two to thirteen years of age ; two go to school. Have a tenement of three rooms in a poor locality. The house is meanly furnished, and dirty. The mother goes out cleaning and washing, and therefore has no time to keep her own house clean. Family dresses poorly. Food. Breakfast: bread, butter, and coffee. Dinner: meat or fish, potatoes, and bread. Supper: bread, butter, and tea. Cost of living Rent . Fuel . Groceries Meat . Fish . $126 00 30 25 376 25 50 40 4 29 Milk . . . Boots and shoes Clothing . Dry goods . Sundries . $661 49 17 20 12 00 21 80 14 00 9 30 LABORER, OUT-DOOR. Irish. .$351 00 No. 306. Earnings of father CoNDiTiox. Family numbers five : parents, and three chil- dren from two to seven years of age. Have a tenement of three rooms in a large tenement-block, in which is an average 240 LABOR. of two and a half persons to each room: it is situated in a very unhealthy neighborhood. The father works only about nine months in the year, and the mother goes out washing. A part of the fuel is picked from the streets by the children, who do not attend school. This family is a little over fifty dollars in debt. It took more than the mother could earn to buy the clothes ; and, as there was some sickness, it ran them in debt a little for physician and medicine. Family dresses poorly. Food. As to how they live, they could not tell, as it varied according to their means. They have meat only two days per week. Cost of living $362 00 Rent $66 00 Fuel 23 00 Groceries . . . . 201 80 Meat 24 25 Milk 13 60 Fish 18 00 Boots and shoes . . 14 25 PoU-tax . . . . 2 00 This- case is too sad for comment; but it is a most just type of low-paid labor. 1. When wages go below a certain point, the in- crease of population is so diminished in many cases that you cannot fill up the gaps caused by death and disability ; that is, you cannot reproduce the labor. 2. Natural wages are such as will reproduce labor. 3. The true definition of value is not the cost of production, but the cost of reproduction. 4. As in regard to any other piece of property, so with regard to that piece of property wliich we call labor, there must be enough paid for it to cover the cost not only of producing it, but of reproducing it. What is Tremont Temple worth to-day? Any good salesman will tell you that its value is not measured by what it cost, but by what it would cost to reproduce it. Timber and other building-material NATURAL AND STAKVATION WAGES. 241 may have been cheaper when this temple was erected than they are now. Its value is the cost of its repro- duction. Labor is property, and its value is to be determined by the same rule. This is a natural law not likely to be soon reversed. Only the Golden Rule can bring the golden age. As long as an explosive class is in process of growth at the bottom of society, we shall have demagogues who will abuse universal suffrage. My conviction is, that American institutions cannot safely permit the formation of an hereditary poor class. Crip- ples and drones may sink into pinched places in the industrial world, and be kept in order there under free institutions ; but if men who are economical and industrious, and not intemperate, nor of poor physical capabilities, find that a little sickness throws them into debt, and that they cannot lay up any thing for advanced years, we shall have a sour mass of work- ing-men whom demagogues will make dangerous. There will be an unemployed and a discontented class ; and politicians of the fifth rank will ride on the just exasperations of that portion of society, into power. If we had the rule adopted, not by legisla- tion, but by general custom, that, when a man is willing to work, he shall be paid enough to make the purchasing power of a day's labor equal to twice the cost of his unprepared food,, or to twice the cost of the unprepared food for a family which cannot labor remuneratively, how could this powder explode? How could the powder itself ever be produced ? I hold that natural wages would increase the gains of 242 LABOB. capitalists by increasing the expenditures of the laboring class. I have in mind a time when America, by justice to labor, will give renewed strength to capital, and make the industrial arrangements of the United States a model for the other free, experiment- ing populations of the world. " Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible* locks ; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; pur- ging and unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance, while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means." (Milton, Areopagitiea.') [Applause.] IX. IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? THE ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, DEC. 30. < " A fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work : " it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of Governing. It is the everlasting right of man. Indisputable as Gaspels, as arithmetical multiplication-tables: it must and will have itself fulfilled; and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous difficulty, next- door to impossibility! Cablvle. Sooner or later I too may passively take the print Of the golden age why not ? I have neither hope nor trust; May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint, Cheat and be cheated and die: who knows? We are ashes and dust. Tbmnyson: Maud. IX. IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS? PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. The American Union has reduced its national debt eightfold more rapidly than Great Britain did hers. Resumption of specie payments by the United States begins with the new year [applause] ; and what, according to many popular prophets, ought not to be, and could not be, already is. You take up your newspaper, and read that gold stands steady at par. That is news you have not seen for seventeen years. It is great news. [Applause.] America kneels on the frosty sods above the tombs of the martyrs in the civil war; and, only thirteen years after the close of a conflict five years in duration, she lifts up her hands to heaven, and receives as a New Year's present a clean financial record. This gift comes from God, and not from seventh-rate poli- ticians. [Applause.] Surely a republic in which universal suffrage is sometimes said to be a failure has a right to point with abundant gratitude to Providence, and some 245 246 LABOR. honest pride, to a financial record unexampled in ancient or modern times. In 1860 the public debt of the United States was $64,000,000. In 1866 it was 82,773,000,000. In 1877 it was $2,060,000,000. The public debt of Great Britain and Ireland is $3,625,000,000. Before our civil war we knew little or nothing of internal taxation for federal purposes. During that conflict, such taxation was raised above every present and every past example. The interest on our debt was the highest in the world. After the close of the Napoleonic wars, the propertied classes in Great Britain refused to bear an income-tax for a single year. Americans have long borne voluntarily, under universal suffrage, the burdens of war taxation. In 1877 we exported so much more merchandise than we imported, that the balance of trade in our fav^r was $152,000,000. "In each twelve months," says Mr. Gladstone, " America has done what we did in eight years ; her self-command, self-denial, and wise forethought for the future, have been, to say the least, eightfold ours. An enfranchised nation tolerated burdens wliich in Great Britain a selected class, possessed of the repre- sentation, did not dare to face. The most unmiti- gated democracy known to the annals of the world resolutely reduced at its own cost prospective liabili- ties of the State, which the aristocratic and pluto- cratic and monarcliical government of the United Kingdom has been contented ignobly to hand over to posterity." (" Kin beyond Sea," North American Review^ September, 1878, pp. 188, 189.) IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 247 Most instructive have been the popular movements by which this resplendent financial result has been achieved, and almost equally instructive are those by which it has beien opposed. How has financial wick- edness in politics been prevented? How was good financial sense under universal suffrage secured ? The whole world has an interest in the answer to these questions. Eye-witnesses of our history for the last five years are frequently whispering that the newspapers and ministers, and not politicians and financiers, saved the nation from repudiation. This contemporary opin- ion will be of interest to the future historian. " The New York Nation," which has a peculiar fondness for the ministry, affirms that the ministers and the news- papers together have saved the nation from repudiat- ing its debts and swindling its creditors. It asserts roundly that if the ministers had not attacked the financial heresies of the last two years as sin, or a disguised attempt to cheat, and if the leading news- papers had not taught honesty unflinchingly, politi- cians would have been unable to resist the current of popular error on great questions of finance. With- out the combined influence of the pulpit and press on public opinion, probably some politicians would have led off in a great financial experiment that would have ended in wreck and repudiation. The act providing for the resumption of specie payments became a law Jan. 14, 1875. What winds burst forth out of Ohio and Indiana, and the Mississippi Valley generally, the moment it 248 LABOR. was determined to resume specie payments on the fii*st day of 1879 ! Strange storms, never known be- fore in American politics, were let loose. It ought not to be, and yet it will be, soon forgotten, how Con- gress was importuned to repeal the resumption act, and how the House of Representatives was widely supposed to have power to make ninety cents equal to an hundred. If a newly organized national party had achieved success, there would have been fastened upon us the searching curse of fiat money and a political cur- rency. A silver bill, which the President vetoed as incon- sistent with the national promise to pay its debts in coin, passed the House Nov. 5, 1877, by a vote of one hundred and sixty -four to thirty-four. A bill to repeal the resumption act, or so much of it as provided for the redemption in coin of the United States legal-tender notes, passed the House Nov. 23, 1877, by a vote of one hundred and thirty- three to one hundred and twenty. Mr. Gladstone says the facts to Our credit should be told out ; and so should these other facts to our shame. The Senate, however, operated as the saucer does upon the teacup. You remember that Washington saitl to Lafayette once at a dinner-table : " We need two bodies in our legislative branch. We want this hot teacup to represent the popular feeling. The House of Representatives should be close to the people's firesides. But we need the Senate as the IS JTJSTICE A PEKIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 249 saucer to cool the teacup somewhat." Neither the saucer nor the teacup would do well alone. We need the hotness, and we need the assuaged hotness also, and so must have both parts of this furniture of the table. This wisdom of Washington has again and again been justified by the discussions of the last two years. The Senate, at least twice, has crushed repudiation schemes of the lower House. Without indorsing the assertion that the news- papers and ministers together have saved us, I may be allowed to affirm that it appears to me capable of superabundant proof that the ministers and the news- papers, and the Senate and an honest Executive, have saved us. I am not discussing this matter from a point of view of partisan politics, but from that of American institutions, out of wliich we do see that good sense has some chance to come, even under universal suf- frage. We were told lately by a Southern senator that the time may not be far distant when the large representation of New England in the Senate will be attacked, on the ground of its injustice to other por- tions of the Union. Texas, which is larger than France, has two senators only. California, although larger than Italy, has only two. But Rhode Island, hardly large enough for a county, has as much power in the Senate as Texas or California. The group of six small New England States weighs as much in the Senate as the vast Commonwealths of New York', Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa put together. Our government is one of 250 LABOE. checks and balances. It is not a pure democracy. New England has always defended the checks and balances ; and, in the last two years, Providence has emphasized them, and justified their existence and activity ! [Applause.] If we had not had the two Houses, or if the basis of representation in the up- per House had been what it is in the lower, who knows but that financial heresy would have swept the good sense of the nation from its moorings ? The colleges in the Mississippi Valley were against the silver bill. In the centre of Iowa, I was told by President Magoun, one of the superb leaders of sound policies in the West, that, when the Bland silver bill was before the House, twelve or fifteen Western colleges sent a petition to Washington against it, and that the paper was signed by nearly every professor in those institutions. We know what excellent work the hard-money league of Chicago has been doing. I am not assailing the West for her position as to the silver bill. There were two parties in the Mississippi Valley ; and, if the schools and ministers there were sometimes misled, the best of them were not. The best parts of the newspaper press in the West were not misled, although the best in newspapers is a small percent- age there and here. The West reads Western daily newspapers, and not Eastern. It is easy to over- estimate the extent of the influence of our seaboard daily newspapers. Your daily is not a daily three hundred miles from the place where it is published, but a paper of the second day. We are not to at- IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 251 tribute all the turns of political sentiment in the United States to the peculiar inclinations the pens of the New York editors may have. A few New York monthlies, and one or two weeklies, reach the whole nation; but the average citizen of Chicago rarely sees the New York dailies. Our nation is not like England, where one newspaper can easily reach every coast of an island so small that when an Ameri- can walks in his sleep there he is in danger of step- ping off the land. Englishmen are proud of the fact that the very best discussions of the London dailies go to the remotest quarters of England and Scotland, and. they well may value this one excellent effect of the smallness of the British Islands. It is not the fact that the best American daily newspapers go to all quarters of our immense territory. Therefore we must give praise to several vigorous newspapers which in the West stood right on the financial ques- tion ; and to the newspapers in the South, and the half-dozen or dozen statesmen there, who stood right on that subject. It is not true that the seaboard led the whole nation. The West is very haughty on financial topics, if asked to accept without change the position of the seaboard from which she has borrowed so much. There is nothing subtler, I suppose, in the reasons which induced a part of the West to oppose a financial policy almost unanimously favored by the seaboard, than the fact that so much has been borrowed by the West from the East that it is often supposed capi- talists here have interested motives in all discussions 252 LABOR. of financial questions. Therefore let us give the more praise to the Western press, so far as it was right, and to the Western pulpit, and to any West- ern statesmen who were not misled by the popular clamor. There has been more than one occasion in the history of the United States when the ministry has given hope to the national executive. Commissioner Eaton told me in the educational bureau at Washing- ton, that one of the most impressive things Presi- dent Lincoln ever said to him was, that the sheet- anchor of the cause of the Union in the darkest days of the war clung to the pulpits of the Northern a.ud Western States. [Applause.] If the ministry had not taken a right position on financial issues in the last two years, we should have had trouble in the next Presidential campaign with these same issues. If the recent discussion has not saved the nation from the ultimate recurrence of such heresies in our politics, it has saved the next Presidential cam- paign from being carried by any apologist for social- istic opinions in finance. [Applause.] While, therefore, we take some credit to ourselves for diminishing rapidly our national debt, and exe- cuting a buffeted resumption act ; while we accept, with proper humility, the praise Mr. Gladstone has given us in his contrast of the American democracy with the British aristocracy ; while we look on the unexampled financial vigor of our nation at a date so near the time when some of us desj)aired of her life; wliilo we anticipate the not-distant day when IS JUSTICE A PEEIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 253 she will be the wealthiest of nations; while we remember how France has paid her crushing in- debtedness swiftly, and is a republic, let us not en- tirely give up hope as to popular suffrage ; and even here in Boston, where, as Mr. Phillips says, we do not believe in republican institutions, let us not quite despair, when a republic, with all its faults, honestly pays its debts, here and in Paris. [Applause.] THE LECTTJEE. It is a suggestive circumstance, that the first dis- course ever uttered in the world had a lie for its text, and converted half its hearers. The dismal science of political economy, when it discusses the question whether justice is a peril to capitalists, often takes \ for its text the lie that the relations between capi- ! tal and labor are a see-saw ; or that, as the laborer goes up, the capitalist will go down, and that, as the laborer goes down, the capitalist must go up. This is Ricardo's doctrine. This is to-day the theory of several universities, but not of the best ones ; and, thank God, it is a doctrine oftener and oftener as- sailed of late in the name of political economy itself, > as represented by Professors Cairnes and Jevons and Bonamy Price, and our own Professors Bowen and i Walker. Gov. Winthrop of Massachusetts tells a ' story which illustrates the average opinion of the political economists of the older school concerning the relations of. labor to capital. " I may, upon this occasion," he writes, "repeat a passage between one of Rowley, and his servant. The master, being forced 254 LABOB. to sell a pair of oxen to pay his servant his wages, told the servant he could keep him no longer; not knowing how to pay him the next year. The servant answered him that he would serve him for more of his cattle. ' But how shall I do,' saith the master, 'when all my cattle are gone?' The servant re- plied, 'You shall then serve me, and so you may have your cattle again.' " (^History of New Eng- land, p. 219.) This is the see-saw theory of wages and profits : 1. The amount of capital which in any country can be devoted at a given time to the payment of wages is a dividend. 2. The number of laborers who in that country, at the given time, ask for wages, is a divisor. 3. The rate of wages which can be paid in that country, at the given time, is the quotient obtained by dividing the amount of capital by the number of laborers. 4. There is no fighting against the rules of arith- metic ; and therefore there is no way to increase this quotient without enlarging the dividend, or diminish- ing the divisor. 5. The foregoing dividend, which is called the wages-fund, is a part of the aggregate capital of a country ; and tlie ratio between that capital and the amount devoted to the payment of wages may vary with the conditions of industry and the habits of the people ; but at any given time the dividend is a defi- nite part of the aggregate capital, and cannot be in- creased by law, or public opinion, or compassion on IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 255 the part of employers, or the efforts of the working classes. 6. The wages-fund is distributed by competition. 7. More than the amount of the wages-fund, the wages-receiving class cannot possibly divide among them. 8. That amount, and no less, they cannot but ob- tain. 9. The working-man who wants higher wages is to be told, that, as the wages-fund is fixed in amount, if he receives more, some other laborer must for that reason receive less, or be kept out of employment altogether. 10. Competition is so perfect that the laborer always realizes the highest wages the employer can afford to pay, or else, as consumer, is rewarded by the lower price of commodities. 11. Wages and profits are drawn from the same fund. 12. Profits depend on wages. 13. Profits and wages increase and diminish, there- fore, at each other's expense, and what is gained on the one side is lost on the other. 14. The industrial world is, therefore, a ghastly battle-field, on which capital and labor are of neces- sity ever at war, and where victory and its spoils must go to the stronger. Statements of the theory here summarized may be found scattered in detached form through many treatises of the older school in political economy. (See the doctrine of the wage-fund defended by Pro- 256 LABOR. fessor Fawcett, Economic Position of the British Laborer, p. 120; by John Stuart Mill, Fort- nightly Review, May, 1869 ; and Professor Perry of Williams College, Political Economy, pp. 122, 123.) In these accursed principles you have the veins and arteries through which circulates most of the black blood of the feud between capital and labor, and of socialistic and communistic discontent in modern times. Carlyle calls political economy the dismal science, because, up to a late date, it has taught propositions such as these. But it is the glory of the best recent discussions in political economy, to have ripped open these poisoned veins, and to have let out much of this black blood. It may be that on this theme I shall have great difficulty in obtaining a hear- ing with older men who have been taught in a school of political economy now obsolete or obsolescent, while we younger men have been brought up in a new school. If I seem to speak disrespectfully of Ricardo and of the theory of the wages-fund, remember that Bonamy Price and Cairnes and Walker do the same. Professor Bowcn, representing Harvard * University, explicitly rejects that theory. (See North American Review, cxx., pp. 93, 94, note.) I take up here Pro- fessor Walker's work on wages, as perhaps the best treatise America has given us on the subject, and certainly a book representing Yale College ; and you will find the whole volume employed in combating those very assumptions which may prejudice many here against my proposition that the see-saw theory as to wages and profits is as unsound in social science IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 257 as it is cruel in social practice. For instance, Pro- fessor Walker says : " I regret that this treatise should be so strongly- controversial in form; but the fact is, certain doc- trines which I deem to be wholly unfounded have become so widely spread, that one can make no prog- ress, by so much as a step, towards a philosophy of wages, without encountering them. These doctrines are, " That tliere is a wage-fund irrespective of the numbers and industrial quality of the laboring popu- lation, constituting the sole source from which wages can at any time be drawn. " That competition is so far perfect that the labor- er, as a producer, always realizes the highest wages which the employer can afford to pay, or else, as con- sumer, is recompensed in the lower price of commodi- ties for any injury he may chance to suffer as pro- ducer. " That, in the organization of modern industrial society, the laborer and the capitalist are together sufficient unto production, the actual employer of labor being regarded as the capitalist, or else as the mere stipendiary agent and creature of the capitalist, receiving a remuneration which can properly be treated like the wages of ordinary labor. " These doctrines I have found it necessary to con- trovert ; and in so doing have not cared to mince matters or pick phrases." These are, in substance, the doctrines of Ricardo. They were very nearly the doctrines of John Stuart 258 LABOR. Mill. Bonamy Price accuses Mill himself of intro- ducing utter confusion into the topic of profits. (^Practical Political Economy^ London, 1878, p. 135.) Mill, however, is said to have abandoned the see-saw theory in his latest and yet unpublished essays. A man is a man, even if his father was rich. I have defended the interests of working-men; and, if now I defend those of capitalists and manufac- turers, you will remember that many of the latter were working-men once, and that in America any man with the proper spirit of self-help may become a capitalist. Do fair wages drive employers into bankruptcy? Is justice a peril to capitalists ? Is it impossible to pay natural wages, and make reasonable profits ? A startlingly large proportion of the employing class does not escape financial distress. Here is a very suggestive pamphlet on " Common-sense Views in Political Economy," by J. H. Walker, Esq., of Worcester, Mass., who testified at their request before the Hewitt Congressional Committee. Mr. Walker discusses the fate of business-men (p. 10). He tells us that in 1840 there were four firms in Worcester engaged in the chief industry of the State, tlie manufacture of boots and shoes. They comprised seven individuals, and only one of these manufacturers died in comfortable circumstances in advanced age. Two of them were at work for Mr. Walker as journeymen when prostrated by their final sickness. In 1850 there were twenty-one firms manufacturing boots and shoes in Worcester, com- IS JUSTICE A PEEIL TO CAPITALISTS? 259 prising twenty-four members. All but four of these failed in business, and only two have retired with any capital.- In 1860 there were twenty-three firms engaged in the same business in Worcester, com- prising thirty individuals. Of these twenty-three firms, twelve have failed ; and, of the individuals who comprised the firms, only eight are now manufac- turing, and only two have gone out of the business with any capital. When I stand here, and assert that the labor of an able-bodied slave is computed to be Avorth twice his maintenance, and that the service of the meanest laborer cannot be worth less than that of an able- bodied slave, you remember the number of business failures, and the frequent financial straits of employ- ers, and you think I am teaching heresy ; that I am trenching upon the great rights of capital ; and that I am dropping out of the region of science in politi- cal economy. But these propositions were those of Adam Smith (see Wealth of Nations^ Book I. chap, viii.) ; these propositions are those of John Stuart Mill himself. Why, here is Mill, cool as an iceberg on this topic, but straightforward as a sunbeam : " Where the wife of a laboring-man does not by general cus- tom contribute to his earnings, the man's wages must be at least sufficient to support himself, a wife, and a number of children adequate to keep up the popu- lation, since^ if it were less, the population would not be kept upT (^Political Economy, Book XI. chap, xiv.) If this be indeed a natural law, who knows but these business failures come into collision with nature 260 LABOR. itself? Who knows but that Ricardo, after all, was right, and that the natural relations of labor to capi- tal are those of war? Occasionally manufacturers retain their operatives in employment at a loss. I know there are princes in our manufacturing estab- lishments, who sometimes suffer financially in order to be generous to their operatives in hard times. But nobody expects these exceptions to become the general rule. I am speaking not of the princes, but of the average condition of trade under the stern law of supply and demand ; and I wish to ascertain, whether, under that law, it is indeed true that the condition of capital and labor must be that of war. In England, at the town of MerthjT, a great min- ing-district, a strike occurred in which a desperate attempt was made to keep wages up to the standard of working-men. The laborers refused to believe that their employers could not pay them what they demanded. The employers said, " We will prove to you that we are sincere. We will put out our fur- naces, and inflict on ourselves a great loss, if you continue this strike. This loss will be less than that of paying the wages you ask." The workmen would not be convinced. They demanded the " minimum wjige," as it was called ; did not obtain opportunity to look into the books of their employers ; could not credit the assertion that the employers were unable to pay more without dropping into bankrui)tcy ; kept up the strike; and the masters put their furnaces out of blast, extinguished their fires, made work im- I)ossible for a long period, and so brought calamity IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 261 on the trade of a whole district. This was their proof that the wages asked could not be paid. The industrial world abounds with similar evidence that employers are often sincere when they say they can- not pay higher wages, and live. Of course, if they do not live, the working-men cannot be employed. What if we could give a majority of working-men employment at what I call fair wages? Can we bring all working-men into employment ? Must such as cannot find employment at fair wages go to the workhouse ? Is it not better to accept half a loaf as wages than nothing? If there is only a fixed amount of bread to be divided, and mouths are too many, must not some live on half-rations? Must not some die? Would it not be better if some were never born ? John Stuart Mill says society might possibly take care of all the laborers now on the planet, but that we cannot be called upon to take care of as many more human beings as they who are already here choose to bring into existence. Unless there be some check on population, there will be no safety for society, even if capital should undertake to pro- vide work for all. Philanthropy itself cannot promise to do that ; and therefore. Mill thinks, it looks as if Ricardo were right, and as if we must adhere to his dismal doctrines. I see no way out of the wilderness into which "our discussion of labor and socialism has led us, but through adherence to our fundamental maxim, definitions first, and then, following definitions, clear ideas in logical order as stepping-stones across every 262 LABOR. marsh. On my study table there is a collection of treas- ure or rubbish I hardly know which to call it on political economy: ten or twelve feet of volumes representing the best discussions in social science for the last two hundred years. Gather and examine in chronological order any such collection of books, and you will find that down to about 1840 or 1850, they are full of the see-saw theory of wages and profits, and teach a godless science ; a series of propositions utterly without piety, and having in mind no Chris- tian principles. About 1840 and 1850, after the re- form-laws in Great Britain had come into force, you find this series of books changing position ; and God be praised that to:day political economy does not deserve to be called the dismal science ! Here is a series of propositions which I have not extracted from any book, but upon which I am will- ing to put my feet in the tangle of this morass, out of which, perhaps, some of you have thought that we should never escape. Natural wages have been defined here, and I must now attempt a definition of natural profits. Face to face with the see-saw theory in political economy, our question is whether natural wages and natural profits are consistent with each other. 1. Natural profits consist of three parts, interest on capital, insurance against risk, and remuneration for superintendence. This is a difficult and yet a standard definition, and in its support both the authorities of the older and those of the newer school of political economists are agreed. (See Fawcett's Manual, p. 160.) IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 263 Whoever puts money into business of course ex- pects to get back as much as he would receive in interest if he were to lend his funds. In England, where the rate of interest is low, this portion of profit may reasonably enough be low; but in Australia, where the rate of interest is ten per cent, the profit ought to be higher, because money is worth more at interest. All these matters are parts of arithmetic. I am not here to appeal to you in the name of philan- thropy against the multiplication-table. Fair profits should include interest on capital ; but this portion of profits should not amount, as it often does, to twenty, thirty, and fifty per cent, in a country where capital can be borrowed for ten or six or perhaps four per cent interest. Fair profits also include insurance against risk, and this will be high or low according to circumstances in different cases. Remuneration for risk, capitalists estimate high enough if they have their own way. An author, publishing a book, is told he must not have any large percentage of the profit, because he does not take any risk. The publisher takes all the risk ; and so even a Longfellow, I suppose, obtains only about ten per cent on his copyright, although one would think there is no risk in many cases of publication. The rule is that the publisher taking the risk must be compensated. How shall we deter- mine how much this portion of profit should be ? This is, or ought to be, a matter of arithmetic, too. You go to the insurance companies, and ask for how much they will insure certain trades or certain kinds 264 LABOB. of property, and you will find that there can be a very exact calculation made here. 2. As the legal rate of interest shows what the first part of natural profits should be, so the average rate of insurance shows what the second part of nat- ural profits should be. You are not here to take the capitalist's word that his risks ought to have such and such remuneration. You will do better to go to the insurance companies ; you will do best to study competitions of capitalists with each other, and so ascertain what the second part of profits naturally should be. There should, of course, be remuneration for superintendence ; and 8ome political economists say that the way to find out how much should be allowed for this third ele- ment in natural profits, is to take the gross excess of earnings over expenditures, and subtract the first two parts of natural profits. What is left ought to go as pay for superintendence. That is a partisan plea. There is a way of ascertaining what is the just remu- neration for superintendence. What can you hire superintendence for? You are yourself, let us sup- pose, not able to manage your own business, and must have an agent. What must you pay liim ? He puzzles his head with your great enterprises. You are sick, you are withdrawn entirely, you are a sleep- ing partner in the concern, and somebody takes your place. What do you pay him ? 3. Wliat would be paid as wages of superintend- ence, is the just measure of the amount of the third element in natural profits. IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 265 Taking the legal rate of interest for the first part of natural profits, and asking the insurance compa- nies, and learning of the competitions between capi- talists, what the second part should be, and count- ing in for the third part what you would pay to an agent who should occupy your place, I say that add- ing these three things together you have what ought to be the profits of industry on the average. Some kinds of business have a high risk ; and, if that be surmounted, the profit will be very large, because the insurance against risk must be very large. Some have to pay large interest on capital, if they borrow from banks, and so the bank-rates will lift the size of natural profits. I will make allowance for all these circumstances; concede to the capitalist all just claims; and yet must affirm that it is fair to define natural profits as consisting of these three things, and of these only, interest on capital, insurance against risk, and remuneration for superintendence. Every thing in my argument depends on that definition. 4. The rate of profit in any business depends on the excess of earnings over expenses. This is a truism ; but, as Bonamy Price remarks, " Truisms have great place in political economy," and he might have said, in every other science. They are the self-evident propositions which are the sup- porting framework of all reasoning. As I could afford on no occasion, in the presence of scholars here, to put before you careless state- ments, so now, in the presence of men of affairs whom this subject has attracted to this hall, I dare 266 LABOR. not talk sentimentally. I must face the stem facts of trade ; I must recognize the power of the law of supply and demand; but do I not carry your assent to my next proposition ? 5. The excess of earnings over expenses depends on the rate of interest charged by banks for bor- rowed capital, the rate of insurance against risk, the cost of machinery, the state of the market, the rate of wages, and a multitude of other circumstances, chief among which is the efficiency of labor. 6. The rate of profit, therefore, depends on a variety of circumstances, of which the rate of wages is only one. 7. Ricardo's doctrine that the rate of profit de- pends on wages only, is therefore an inaccurate, because an inexhaustive, statement of the case. 8. }V7ien the efficiency of labor is increased by the improvement of machinery^ or any other cause, profits may be increased, although wages may remain the same. 9. It may happen from the same causes that both the rate of wages and the rate of profit may be increased at the same time. There is no see-saw in the relations between labor and capital, if these propositions are true ; and now let us test them. Here is a factory. It is supplied with machinery for making cotton cloth. Every ten men in the factory can make a hundred yards of cotton cloth a day. Now, some Edison invents new machinery, and by the use of this ten men can make a thousand yards of cloth a day. Let us suppose that the inventor of the machinery has been so skil- IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 267 ful as to make it cheaply. Let the machinery of the new sort cost no more than that of the old sort. If a hundred hours of labor with imperfect machinery produce a hundred yards of cloth, and a hundred hours of labor, with new. and no more costly ma- chinery, will produce a thousand yards, and you pay your laborers the same wages for running the new machinery as for running the old, is it not perfectly evident, that, by the use of the new machinery and the increased efficiency of the labor, you have doubled, trebled, or it may be increased tenfold, your profits, while yet wages remain the same ? But Ricardo says that as wages go up, profits go down, and as profits go up, wages go down. That is not the case, as this example shows. By the use of the improved machinery here, the factory produces ten times what it did before, with the same labor. The machinery costs no more, the wages of the ten opera- tives are no higher, but the efficiency of their labor is increased tenfold, and profits are increased many times in consequence. The price of cotton cloth may fall if you produce too much of it, but as it falls in price it will find more buyers. It is very evident that profits may be increased although wages remain the same. It is, moreover, perfectly conceivable, that the new machinery might be so much better than the old, that the wages might be lifted somewhat, and yet profits be increased at the same time. You paid these labor- ers a dollar and a half a day with the old machinery ; suppose you pay them two dollars a day with the 268 LABOR. new: your profits might yet be increased, for that rise of wages would not use up the margin created by the improved efficiency of labor. Where is the business-man who does not see that Ricardo's posi- tion fails in this case ? But this one example tests the problem. This case is typical of every steady employment. 10. It is a most mischievous falsehood to teach that wages and profits are a see-saw, that they are drawn from the same fund, and that they necessarily increase or diminish at the expense of each other. 11. It is this falsehood which misleads both capital- ists and laborers into the notion that under fixed natural law capital and labor must be at war, and that the industrial world is a battlefield. 12. Large profits do not come from low wages so much as from large establishments well managed. Improved machinery is only one of many means of increasing the efficiency of labor. De Tocque- ville tells us, and so do the political economists, that, other tilings being equal, the profits of an establish- ment are in proportion to its size. I add to my fac- tory floors square rod after square rod, until I luive acres filled with whizzing Jooms. In various ways I can now cheapen the cost of superintendence. I may have a railway opened to the market, instead of send- ing my goods by the broad-wheeled wagon. All tliis time, while my profits are increasing, wages may re- main the same. How is it we have lived under this lip so long, and have believed that all the capitalist gets, the laborer must lose, and that all the laborer IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 269 gets, the capitalist must lose ? It is that theory which makes the bitter blood between capital and labor oftener than you think ; and it is a lie, every syllable of it ! [Applause.] Here is a merchant on India Wharf in Boston ; and he sends his goods to India, and brings back cargoes from there. He may have a fair voyage, or he may have a storm, just as the agriculturist may have a wet season or a dry. Now, what have the wet sea- son or the dry, what have the storms or the calms, to do with the rate of wages? Undoubtedly wages are one element in the expenses of every business, but they are not the only element. They are only one finger on the palm. It may be they are the fore- finger ; but these other expenses accident, rate of interest for the capital you must borrow, access to the market, efficiency of labor, insurance against risk, a score of circumstances are the other fingers on the palm. And, after all, your own personal superintend- ence, your wise combination of details, is the thumb on that palm. Wages, even if they are the fore- finger, are evidently not as important a part of the problem as these other circumstances taken together. It is utterly false to go upon the supposition that the hand of industry is only a hook, and that wages are its only finger. Let us open our minds to the whole problem. Let us take into view, as laboring-men find it difl&cult to do at times, all the expenses of the em- ployer ; and let the employer take into view all his sources of profit ; and it will be seen that there has rarely been taught authoritatively a more mischiev- 270 LABOR. ous falsehood in political economy than the assertion that wages and capital are of necessity an eternal see- saw, putting the laborer and the employer into a state of constant war. 13. The prosperity of laborers increases their pur- chasing power, and so adds to the profit of capital. Where is the business-man who wants all the working-men of the United States reduced to the condition of the Japanese and Chinese laborers? Do you think it would add to your prosperity to grind down the working class to the condition of squalor and barbarism ? Everj^body knows that the way to get money is to increase the purchasing power of the people. You want to sell your goods, there- fore you want customers. You must therefore see that there is high commercial sagacity in keeping up the standard of living of the average working-man. Let him be able to buy, and you will make profit in selling. Let him not be able to buy, and very soon you must take care of him in the workhouse, or shut down your factories in part, and so reduce profits. 14. In the steady trades, it is historically true that wages and profits in the last half-century have usually risen together. Bread is cheaper now in England than it was fifty years ago ; sugar and tea are cheaper ; average prices for clothing are lower; but in most of the steady trades the wages of the laborers have risen in the last fifty years in Great Britain, and not merely their nominal wages, but their real wages, or the pur- chasing power of their days of labor. At the same IS JUSTICE A PERIL TO CAPITALISTS ? 271 time who does not see the prosperity of the manu- facturing class in Great Britain, if you take it on the average ? Great Britain is wealthy because she is a factory, and prosperous as such. Everybody will grant me the proposition, that, taken on the average, the manufacturing business of Great Britain is pros- perous, and that its profits have risen altliough the wages of operatives have risen. "- The vast increase of the wealth of rich men in England during the last sixty years," says Professor Bonamy Price, "is a fact perceived by every eye. How has it fared with the laboring classes? Do they receive, would they for an instant accept, the same wages now as they did then? The laborers have reached a far higher standard of existence. A much more elevated minimum of wages has been secured. This is the result of efficient labor, heartily applied with the aid of machinery, pro- ducing much work, cheapening commodities, enlar- ging the powers of consumers to buy, and diffusing enlarged property in every class. These results do not breathe a syllable about antagonism between masters and workmen." (^Practical Political Econ- omy, pp. 237, 238.) Before I close, let me draw a distinction which may clear up the remaining vapor of this theme. 15. In the fluctuating employments . the just rela- tions of capital and labor are difficult to ascertain, and have to be found out by the stern application of the law of supply and demand ; but the principles applying to other trades govern the fluctuating also. 272 LABOE. The trouble, I suppose, between capitalists and laborers, often is that the difficulties which arise in the fluctuating trades are supposed to belong to the very root of the relations of labor and capital. It is true that in the fluctuating trades there is a great chance for rascals to make money when they ought not ; there is a great chance to grind the faces of the shop-girl and the poor clerk and the average opera- tive. My discussion here in previous lectures has been concerning the fluctuating trades rather than the steady trades. When we prove, as we have done, that, in the steady trades, wages and profits are not a see-saw, we ought to believe that in the fluctuating trades they are not a see-saw, if we ascer- tain what justice is. Here is my hand ; I show you three fingers which shut toward the pahn. These are the steady trades, and they are the majority of the trades ; but the fluctuating trades belong to the same palm, and the other finger will be found to shut as the three fingers do. If I prove that in steady trades the interests of capital and labor are identical, I undertake to affirm, by the argument of analogy, that, if we could find out what true justice would be to the capitalist and to the laborer in the fluctuating employments, we should find the same principles governing those portions of our industries. 16. It is, therefore, evident both from history and from correct economical principles, that justice is no I)eril to capitalists, nor fair wages a diminution of fair profits. [Applause.] X. AEE TRADES-UNIONS A NUESERY OF SOCIALISM ? THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTIETH LECTURE IN THE BOSTON MONDAY LECTURESHIP, DELIVERED IN TREMONT TEMPLE, JAN. 6. The nineteenth is the centmy of the workingmen. Gladstonk. L'aristocratie manufacturi^re de nos jours, apr^ avoir appauvri et abruti lea hommes dont elle se sert, les livre en temjis de criae k la charity publique, poor les nourrir. De Tocqdbvuajl X. ARE TRADES-UNIONS A NURSERY OP SOCIALISM ? PRELUDE ON CUEEENT EVENTS. C^SAE could not drive his chariot around the Ro- man Empire in less than an hundred days. We can now send a letter around the world in ninety-six. There was a time when a traveller could start at Alexandria, in Egypt, and following the basaltic pavements of the Roman highways, broken only by brief trips on the sea, reach Carthage and the Straits of Gibraltar, roll across the plains and hills of Spain and France, sail over the surly English Channel, go northward to the barbaric borders of Scotland, then return through Leyden and Cologne to Milan, and thence drive his unmolested chariot under the shad- ows of the Alps and Balkans to Constantinople, and through turbulent Asia Minor to Antioch, and thence over the Lebanon range and along the Syrian plain and the green valley of the Nile to Alexandria again, a distance of more than seven thousand miles. Tlie circuit of these outmost roads of the Roman 275 276- LABOR. world could not be made in less than one hundred days ; but in less than that time the steamship and the locomotive, however unpoetic they may seem in contrast with the wheels on which Caesar rode, can now be driven around the globe. Throughout the empire, the majesty of Rome, as Pliny proudly declares, was the shield of the way- farer in every place. Epictetus and the Alexandrian Philo dwell with rapture on the security of the trav- eller and the facility of intercourse in the Roman world. " Cffisar," writes the Stoic philosopher, " has procured us a profound peace : there are neither wars, nor battles, nor great robberies, nor piracies; but we may travel at all hours, and sail from east, to west." Modern scholars are never weary of extol- ling the magnificence of the Roman Empire, and the unity it gave to the law and trade and political principles of the nations under its sway. Greek scholars kept school in Spain. The women of a Roman colony in Switzerland employed a goldsmith from Asia Minor. In the cities of Gaul were Greek painters and sculptors. Gauls and Germans served as a body-guard of a Jewish king at Jerusalem. (Fbiedlander, Sittengeschichte Roms.') In the reign of Claudius an embassy came to Rome from a prince of the island of Ceylon. Such was the ancient unity of mankind ; but what is tlie modern ? From Rome to the cataracts of tlie Nile there stretched a distance so vast that the an- cient imagination used to faint over it. This distance is only equal to that from St. Louis to San Francisco TEADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 277 Rome and Athens are not as far apart as New York and Chicago. Rome and London are not as far from each other as Boston and St. Louis. Plymouth Rock and Pike's Peak are farther apart than the Colise- um and the Pyramids. The surf of the Bay of Fundy and the waterfalls of the Yosemite are more distant from each other than London and Thebes, or than the Straits of Gibraltar and the frosty Caucasus. What was the effect of the ancient unity of na- tions? Assimilation in law, language, trade, and social customs. A vague feeling of human brother- hood. Terence, before a turbulent Roman audience, once happened to pronounce the line : " I am a man, and I regard nothing that concerns man as foreign to me ; " and the populace, accustomed to savage fights in the Coliseum, a populace degraded by a mythology in which the gods were represented as lepers, a pop- ulace sunk in the luxurious forms of barbarism char- acteristic of old Rome, applauded the strange senti- ment. Celsus, however, one of the early opponents of Christianity, when the question came before him whether any one religion could ever be adopted for the world, answered his own inquiry by a sneer : " Who- ever believes that such a religion is possible is insane." What is to be the effect of the modern unity of nations? What are the opportunities of Christian- ity now as compared with those it had in Caesar's vaunted day ? How shall the question of Celsus be answered face to face with a world girdled with achievements of which Rome never dreamed ? When Paul died, the Roman rim of land around the 278 LABOB. Mediterranean was the world. Scholars have been taught, and I think they have allowed the public to vest too long in, an enthusiasm concerning that ancient opportunity utterly out of proportion to its size. No one knows how many people were in the Roman Empire at its best, but the estimates vary from eighty to one hundred and twenty millions. Take the average, and Paul had an opportunity of reach- ing, under the shield of the Roman power, fewer people than will be in the United States alone at the second American centennial. We fall into acclama- tions over the achievements of the Roman Empire, and our scholars dwell with fervor on the influence of the unity of Rome upon the spread of Christian- ity in the first century ; but we are very inadequately moved when asked to contemplate the growing lines of intercommunication between modern continents on which there is now not a single foreign shore. Whoever will glance at a map of the routes of ocean traffic will see that the world is fast becoming commercially a unit. The vast interests of ocean transit, and the yet vaster of land transit, are every year more closely interwoven. The United States and Great Britain, if they unite against piracy ou the oceans, will be united against all war on the land. Pompey and Cajsar, it was once said at Rome, had cleared the Mediterranean of pirates. Great Brit- ain and the commercial interests of the United States, it may now almost be said, have cleared all oceans of pirates. Whoever looks at the lines of ocean transit shooting out in thick warp and woof from coast to TRADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 279 coast, will see the shuttles of Almighty Providence weaving the whole world into a commercial unity far closer than ever existed under Caesar in the Roman Empire. By a preconcerted arrangement, the shores of nearly every sea, and multitudes in the chief cities of the planet, were united yesterday in prayer for the evangelization of the world. Christian union was the theme of the hour. It appears to be also the theme of the Supreme Powers who govern the ages. Two points are incontrovertible, that prophecy has been fulfilled, and that we have reason, there- fore, to believe that it will be again. I open a book three thousand years old, and I read that the stone cut out of the mountain shall fill the whole earth. That prophecy has come to pass. I read that there will be a day when a kingdom shall be given to a religion founded in a specified centre of the world. That day has come. Here is a book, whether you call it inspired or not, which predicted the coming of this kingdom long before the first upstretch- ing aurora of its light was seen above the east. That book has kept its promise with the nations. It has other promises yet unfulfilled. It will keep those also. When I look at the map of the world, and see the shuttles of intercommunication among nations thrown out North, South, East, and West, I hear the unfolding of the leaves of prophecy. The time has come when knowledge is increased, and many run to and fro. It is within the power of the Christians now on the globe to cause the 280 LABOR. gospel to be preached to every living human creature before the end of this century. [Applause.] What has Providence meant in carrying forward all the years of human history according to a given plan? I believe that what God does, he from the first intended to do. When I sat under Abraham's oak at Hebron, I opened the Scriptures, and read that from a chosen man should spring a chosen family; and that from a chosen family should spring a chosen race ; and that from a chosen race should spring a founder of a new religious empire ; and that out of a chosen race should thus come a chosen religion ; and that this religion should embrace the earth. There stood the prophecies on the pages which I opened under the Syrian skies. No one doubts that these predictions were written ages before the date at which they began to be fulfilled. They are numerous, and full of details. Prophecies concerning the dis- persion of the Jews, rationalism drops like hot iron every time it dares to discuss them. As I sat three hours alone under Abraham's oak, and tead these statements concerning chosen man, family, nation, and religion, I could not but be impressed, I will not say with the feelings of superstition, but certainly with those of awe and terror and faith and hope. I revered straightforward thinking, and looked at the page of history. I could not but say that these mysterious prophecies have come to pass. There was a chosen man. There was a chosen family. There was a chosen nation. There has come from that nation a chosen religion. It is spreading over the TEADES-TTNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 281 world. When I looked upward toward the sky, through the boughs of the oak, and remembered how, under one of the progenitors of that tree, Abraham entertained angels unawares, I could not but feel that human history, casting out its boughs in every direction, in Asia, in Europe, in America, and in the isles of the sea, is under the control of a mysterious Providence ; and that God, who has for three thousand and four thousand years so conducted human affairs as to bring into power a certain set of religious opinions, will go on doing that in time to come. [Applause.] I shall not, for one, drop into anxiety at any little re-actionary eddy, when I find that an irresistible gulf-current, bursting out of the tropics of human history, is moving in one direction, and has been so moving for thousajids of years. [Applause.] Fasten attention upon the day when Abraham sat under the oaks at Hebron, and the day when Paul went out of the Ostian gate to die, and upon our present day. Three points determine the circumfer- ence of any curve. Draw a circle through these three points, Abraham's oak, the Ostian gate when Paul went through it, and the present hour, and I undertake to say that any man who loves clear ideas, and will stand at the centre of that historical circle, will be thrown into awe before the fulfilment of prophecy. I set no dates. Prophecy is, perhaps, never adequately explained except by its fulfilment. I will not attack the devout scholars who have lately, in a prophetic conference, discussed these topics with 282 LABOK. great learning and earnestness. Much mischief, no doubt, may come from mysticism on the topic of prophecy; but more mischief may come from our coldness, from our indifference on this theme, and from our unwillingness to look upon the absolutely overawing facts that prophecy has been fulfilled; that, as the past has been, so the future will be ; and that as God has kept, so he will continue to keep, his word with us. [Applause.] The same mysterious predictions which have been fulfilled to the letter for four thousand years foretell also the enswathing of the globe with a kingdom which now very nearly touches arms around it. Nay, I may affirm that the arms already touch. Suppose that Lord Beaconsfield obtains what he says he is seeking, a scientific boundary for India, or the Himalayas, as a barrier against attack from the north. England is now led by a political party greatly blind to what is just. When the pride of the average Briton is offended, his conscience easily goes to sleep. England fears attack from Russia, or it is the scheme of her present rulers to cause her to do so. The anticipation tliat some day a troublesome attack may be made on Britisli power in the East, by Russia, is causing not a few good men on the other side of the Atlantic to hold their peace, while what I call you may have your own opinion ; I do not ask you to adopt mine an unjust attack is made on Afghanistan. [Applause.] If, however, in time past, the evil that men have done has sometimes been overruled; if the mischief Crosar and Pompey did TEADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 283 was of indirect use in the production of peace around the Mediterranean ; if that peace was used as a plat- form on wliich early Christianity took its place, if in every age the purposes of the Supreme Powers have been approaching accomplishment, no matter how men have acted, we must regard it, I think, as probable, that out of the turmoil in the East will come in some way an advance of the divine plan to give the globe to Christianity. If there should be a scientific frontier obtained for Northern India, any attack on British power in the East will be rendered well-nigh impossible. It is not from little Cyprus that Great Britain is to resist Hussia ; it is not even from the Bosphorus that she can successfully protect herself against the great power of the North. Military men are Axry well agreed with Lord Beaconsfield in the opinion that it is from Afghanistan that British power in the East must obtain its security. Give England a firm frontier in the Himalayas ; let that gigantic mountain barrier prevent a land attack on her Eastern Empire, and then, since there can be no naval attack on her with any success, the future of Asia Minor, of Persia, of India, and of all the torrid seaboard of Asia, will be determined under British, and, I may say, under American, influences. We have a deep foothold of our own in Asia Minor. British and American fashions in politics, education, and religion, will be carried steadily on toward China, so surely as the scientific barrier is established in Afghanistan. Thus, as Homer said, the plan of the 284 LABOR. gods is advancing. Who dares stand in the way of that plan ? The unity of mankind is asserting itself more and more ; and who shall resist it ? A cabinet at Washington, it is said, talks haughtily to China, and desires to have the Burlingame treaty modified, or perhaps abrogated. Cliina may easily consent to its modification. If we choose to abrogate it, she cannot resist. Possibly there is danger that the Burlingame treaty will be abrogated, out and out, and that America, under the lead of a bloodthirsty mob on the Pacific coast, and fifth-rate politicians there, will shut our doors on the Pacific to emigrants willing to earn their own living. America has in California a door to China ; America, in Asia Minor, has already opened a door to the sunset side of Asia. If Provi- dence is proposing the regeneration of Asia by the increase of American and British influence along the Asiatic seaboard; if all the signs in the world, in short, show that there must be relations of justice between China and the United States, and our cabinet at Washington, wishing to save the vote of California in a national election, does differ from the Supreme Powers, and is ready to do an act of injustice, the ultimate result will be, that not the hoodlums of San Francisco, and not even the cabinet, will triumph over the plan of history. [Applause.] The unity of mankind will assert itself more and more. The day will come when there will be just relations l)etwoen the wliole Asiatic seaboard and America and England. When that time arrives, who does not know that the American school and the TRADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 285 British and American missionary societies will be welcome to the Asiatic coast? Who does not see that lines of steamships will bring labor there into new demand ? Who does not see a commercial re- generation slowly preparing for Asia? Who does not find in the gulf-current bursting out of the time of Abraham, through that of Paul and Ccesar, and down to our day, an indication of our duty, not merely to missions, and not merely toward Great Britain when she carries her power into Asia Minor, but also toward the hoodlums of California, and toward all who would lead us into a policy of in- justice, of narrowness, and of barbarity ? Let us not set ourselves against the Supreme Powers. When the gulf-current of history gathers its strength against any impediment, as in the case of slavery, and builds itself up behind the bulwark, we know how at last obstacles give way, and devastation follows. Let Americans place no obstacles in the way of the unity of mankind. If the plan of the Supreme Powers for the regeneration of Asia must dam itself up behind the barrier of American political exclusive- ness, or behind the bulwark of American penurious- ness in supporting schools at home and abroad, the overturn of these impediments will give us trouble. Let us make no attempt to place obstacles before the gulf-current of history. Let it have free course ; let it move out of the tropics in time to come, as it has in time past; let it flow to every coast of the globe ! Let us launch our fleets upon it, and float with it. The Christian world has now knelt down to 286 LABOR. pray seven days for the free course of a gulf-current proceeding from Abraham's time, through Caesar's, to our own ; and a sufficient reason for believing that the petitions will be granted is that there is prophecy that they shall be, and that prophecy in all the past has been fulfilled to the letter. [Applause.] THE LECTURE. "When once we are convinced that natural wages and natural profits may exist together, we have passed through what I call the see-saw swamp in political economy ; and on the firm land beyond the marsh, most of the questions concerning hours of labor, co-operation, and industrial partnership, adjust themselves without State interference. It is hardly more than fifty years since the first fully endowed professorships in political economy were founded in England. The history of the sci- ence dates in Great Britain, as every one knows, from the publication of Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations" in 1776. You remember that in Oxford in 1825, Mr. Henry Drummond, a member of Parlia- ment, endowed the first professorship on this subject. A similar chair was founded at Cambridge in 1828, but was not regularly established by the university until 18G3, when Henry Fawcett Avas elected the first professor. It should surprise no one, that political economy has exhibited something of crudeness in its youth. As a branch of university instruction, it can hardly be said to have attained maturity as yet, in spite of the labors of McCuUoch and Mill. Arch- TRADES-msriONS AND SOCIALISM. 287 bishop Whately, as ministers will remember, expressed his opinion of the interest the science onght to have for the clergy, by himself founding a professorship of political economy at the University of Dublin. In 1871 a school of political science was founded at Paris by Boutmy ; and its graduates are commonly at the head of the lists of successful aspirants in the competitive examinations for places in the civil ser- vice of France. Young as it is, the philosophy of political science, as treated in the universities, has seen two or three revolutions. There are three or four schools of polit- ical economy ; and it happens that the best American and German schools are agreed in denouncing what 1 have here called the see-saw theory, and that only the older school in Great Britain supports it. The younger British school, represented now by Bonamy Price, Professor Cairnes, and Professor Jevons, do not adopt the dismal theory that the relations of capital and labor are a see-saw, and that what one gains the other must lose, and that the two must therefore live in an internecine war. These teachers reject the theory of a wages-fund. It is very important to notice that Lasalle, the father of modern German socialism, obtained his im- pressions of political economy largely from Malthus and Ricardo, the leaders of the dismallest sort of discussion in the dismal science. Lasalle used to say that if the English school of political economists, who had all the knowledge of modern times, was right, there was nothing for the working classes but 288 LABOE. slavery, or a revolt against capital as the natural enemy of labor. In Germany, the school represented by Sehulze-Delitzsch founded itself on the improved positions of the new political economy, and they were American rather than English. He founded him- self largely on the American Carey and on the Ger- man List. Sehulze-Delitzsch proclaims no attack on property. He escapes the see-saw marsh in which Lasalle was choked. He did much to cause work- ing-men's savings banks aud co-operative societies to be founded throughout the German Empire. At this hour Sehulze-Delitzsch divides with Lasalle the hearts of German working-men. Lasalle represents the early mistakes, Sehulze-Delitzsch the growing maturity, of political economy. I congratulate this audience that it has passed through the ooze of early crudities in political sci- ence, and has found firm land on the other side. As we look back, however, we see trades-unions up to their knees in the fateful see-saw marsh. Trades- unions are most of them built on the fallacious theory that capital and labor must of necessity be at eternal war, because they draw their reward from the same fund. 1. This is the creed of most trade-unionists: (1) Capital and labor are in direct antagonism, because they divide the wages-fund between them, and what one gains the other loses. (2) Capitalists can combine, and enforce lower wages than the state of the labor-market warrants, and they often do so. TEADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 289 (3) Laborers therefore must combine, and resist coercion by coercion. (4) Trade-unions througbout a nation should as- sist each other by organizing contemporaneous strikes, or by assisting strikers to maintain themselves when not at work. (5) Trade-unions should act as benefit-societies. (6) Trade-unions must lay down and abide by certain economic principles, the chief of which are : Limitation of the length of the day's work. Abolition of working by the piece. Limitation of apprentices. A uniform wage to be given to all laborers. Refusal, to work with non-unionists. (See Professor Bon amy Price, Practical Political Economy^ chap, viii.) 2. It thus appears that average trades-unions are founded on the mistaken principles of an outgrown school in political economy ; that is, on the theory that the relations of capital and labor are a see-saw. 3. This lie needs eradication from the minds of trades-unionists as well as capitalists. 4. Trades-unions are mischievous so far as they tyrannize over employers and non-unionist working- men. 5. They are useful so far as they inspirit laborers to self-help, and take the shape of benefit-societies. 6. Trades-unions are now nearly omnipresent in England and the United States in all the great branches of industry. 7. They tend to become national. 290 LABOR. 8. They tend to become international. 9. They tend, under universal suffrage, to become political. 10. Many of the objects of trades-unions are iden- tical with the objects ought by socialistic political parties. 11. When the members of trades-unions and the members of socialistic political parties have the same political objects, their political alliance is natural. 12. Under universal sufirage, it is likely to be for- midable. Among the trades-unions in England and Wales there are 32,000 friendly societies, with 4,000,000 members, and more than $55,000,000 accumulated funds. These societies save to the poor-fund $10,- 000,000 a year. (^Fourth Report of Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on Trades- Unions, 1874.) Nobody, in America at least, pretends to complain when' working-men combine for the fair and just protection of their own interests. Capitalists may combine to protect their own interests, and so, of course, may working-men. The notorious evil in trades-unions, however, is the tyranny frequently exercised by their members over non-unionist working-men. Open the regula- tions of some of the trades-unions in Great Britain, and you will find them prohibiting the employment of one's own brother or son, unless he is in a trades society. The mason who is called to do a job, and finds he needs a carpenter, must not so much as saw off one plank, but must wait for the carpenter to be TEADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 291 summoned to do the work. If the carpenter finds a brick in the way of his saw, he must wait until the mason changes the place of the impediment. You must never act as your own assistant. I do not say that a majority of British trades-unions enforce these rules ; but some of them do, and they are character- istic of the system. In Leeds the rule is that you must not carry more than eight bricks in a hod. You may carry ten in London, and twelve in Liver- pool. If trades-unions wish to bring themselves into universal contempt, let them go on legislating against their fellow-workingmen who are non-unionists. Some years ago a cartoon in Punch represented a British working-man in his hovel, without work dur- ing a strike, and his wife cowering over an empty grate, while a well-dressed officer of a working-men's trades-union was berating the husband for his inten- tion to go to work : " You mean to work, do you ? You mean to give in, do you? Not if I know it.'' There is no form of tyranny worse than unionists have sometimes exercised over non-unionist working- men. Mr. Gladstone, discussing this topic once, and defending the right of four men who had been per- secuted because they were non-unionist laborers, said, "If Great Britain has become a place where the majority can oppress the minority in this way, it has come to be a place of which I should say that the sooner we get out of it, the better," In re- gard to the United States, under a suffrage wider than that of Great Britain, we may say with more emphasis than Gladstone's, that if trades-unions ob- 292 LABOR. tain the political power they are seeking, and act as they usually have done when able to have their own way, the United States will soon be such a place that the sooner we get out of it the better. [Applause.] A New York citizen, who wanted papering done in his house, ordered it of a society-man, as he was called ; and the bill brought in was ten dollars a day. " Well, but your work is not worth this," said the employer. " Yes, but you cannot get anybody to do it for less. I belong to a trades-union, and we have all agreed to ask a certain price. You will find on investigation that I am asking you what any one else will." This case of shameless extortion is t}'pical of whole ranges of facts that I might put before you. While I denounce these evils of trade-unions, how- ever, I must not be understood as denying the right of working-men to combine. May working-men combine in a strike? That is a very rude measure, and usually does more harm than good, but it is the chief weapon of trades-unions. You say that strikes do not generally succeed ; but make a distinction. On a rising market strikes often succeed ; on a falling they usually fail. Half the time working-men do not know when to strike. If the prices of goods are rising, and working-men strike, manufacturers, of course, cannot afford to shut their mills. But if men strike on a falling market, capital can I'old its arms, and say, " We can make more money by shutting our mills than by keeping them open," and sometimes profitably answer the strike by a lockout. Capital does not starve by waiting, but TRADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 293 labor ma3\ Capital does not diminish by waiting. Time unsold cannot be brought to market a second time. It perishes in postponement. ]\Ir. Thornton, in his elaborate book on "Labor," defends the opinion that in Great Britain the majority of strikes, both on a rising and on a falling market, have suc- ceeded. Certain it is, that the average of wages in trades where strikes are frequent has been raised in the last fifty years, if not by strikes, then by the fear of them. Very often when manufacturers do not yield at the time of a strike they raise wages after- wards. Strikes have probably succeeded in the majority of cases on a rising market, and yet they are the most barbaric of all the weapons that labor employs. Are trades-unions a nursery of socialism ? Go to Chicago, go to the door of Tremont Tem- ple, and you may purchase socialistic newspapers of a type of which this is a specimen [holding up a newspaper]. In this official socialistic sheet, nearly half a page is taken up with a trades-union directory : "Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners," "Brother- hood of Loeomotive Engineers," "Miners' National Association," " Brotherhood of Locomotive Fire- men," these are a few out of scores of titles re- printed every week in this publication. I turn to the official announcement of the object of the paper, and find that : " ' The Socialist ' will re- cord the proceedings of all trades-unions, especially of amalgamated and centralized unions, whenever sent us. We shall discuss all the various phases of 294 LABOR. the labor movement. We expect all unions and sections, as well as individual members, throughout the country, to promptly send us reports and items upon all matters of importance to the labor cause." What is the socialistic platform ? In this country it is somewhat altered in shape from the form it has in the Old World, but here is the platform which this paper prints in connection with these lists of trades- unions: "We demand that the resources of life the means of production, public transportation and communication (land, machinery, railroads, telegraph- lines, canals, &c.,) become, as fast as practicable, the common property of the whole people through the government ; thus to abolish the wages-system, and substitute in its stead co-operative production, with a just distribution of its rewards." [Applause.] Why have I demanded education for working- men ? Why have I insisted, as if on a question of life or death, on the rights of factory-children ? Why have I been taking your time by giving reasons for the execution of the school-laws which provide for compulsory education ? Because, if trades-unions are filled with an ignorant set of workuig-men, social- istic doctrines will take root in that soil. The results of socialism in the United States, were it to spread here, would be more disastrous than in Germany, simply because popular suffrage on the Hudson and the Mississippi has more power than on the Elbe and the Oder. The truth is that trades-unions, all over the United States, are seeking political power, and are tlierefore likely to be frequently under temp- TRADES-UNIONS AND SOCIALISM. 295 tation to form alliance with socialistic labor parties. American trades-unions are now not socialistic ; but let an ignorant, hereditary operative class come into existence here, and they may easily fall a prey to socialistic demagogues. Once give socialists in the United States a majority of votes, and you will speedily learn the distinction between voluntary and compulsory socialism. An unforced agreement of men to go into a socialistic community is one thing : compulsory socialism is another. Under universal suifrage, with political primacy once grasped by the hands of working-men, who are seventy or eighty out of every hundred of voters, there may come a time when socialism, instead of being voluntary, will be compulsor}^, and nationalization of the lands, the railroads, the canals, the telegraphs, be forced upon you by the suffrage of an ignorant population. Com- pulsory socialism is the chief danger in the future of universal suffrage ; and from that peril, which means nothing less than spoliation and anarchy, may God and discussion in the Church and State save us! [Applause.] BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. By JOSEPH COOK. The Boston Monday Lectures are now included in the following eight works : Vol. 1. Biology, with Preludes on Current Events. (IGth edition.) Vol. 2. Transcendentalism, with Preludes on Current EVents. (13th edition.) Vol. 3. Orthodoxy, with Preludes on Current Events. (7th edi- tion.) Vol. 4. Conscience, with Preludes on Current Events. Vol. 5. Heredity, with Preludes on Current Events. Vol. 6. Marriage, with Preludes on Current Events. Vol. 7. Labor, with Preludes on Current Events. Vol. 8. Socialism, with Preludes on Current Events. K^~ Price of each volume, $1.50. For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by the Publishers, HOUGHTON, OSGOOD & CO., Boston. /. AMERICAN OPINIONS. The Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1880. The Boston Monday Lectureship is now in its fifth year. One liundred and thirty-five lectures on abstruse and difficult topics have been delivered to noon audiences of extraordinary size, and containing sometimes two hundred ministers, with large numbers of teachers and other educated men. Each lecture has been pre- ceded by a short address, called a Prelude on Current Events, and discussing some topic of urgent political or religious importance, like civil service reform, temperance, fraud in elections, Mormonism, the Chinese question, the Bible in schools, the Indian question, or the negro exodus. In revising the stenographic reports, both the lecture and the prelixle are usually somewhat expanded by their author, so that a prelude in print is often more than thirty minutes in length. The lecturer has thus treated two important topics on each occasion ; and the contrast of the practical matter of the prel- ude with the more speculative and scientific substance of the lec- ture, has assisted in fixing public attention upon both. Mr. Cook has been the first speaker to employ preludes in this contrast with theological and metaphysical lectures. Great pains have been taken to secure the fullest information for the preludes from official sources at Washington and elsewhere. The committee in charge of the Boston ;Monday Lectureship em- braces thirty-six members, of whom twelve are an Executive Board, representing different evangelical denominations in Boston, and twenty-four are scattered through the country all the way to Call- BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. fomia. "Written permission to add their names to the committee has been given by such men as President McCosh of Princeton Col- lege, Professor Hitchcock of New York, Dr. Storrs of Brooklyn, Bishop Huntington of Syracuse, Professor Mead of Oberlin College, Professor Curtiss of Chicago Theological Seminary, Dr. Post of St. Louis, and Drs. Gibson and Stone of San Francisco. It will readily be seen that consultation from time to time by letter with so large and distinguishetl a committee, and with other public men with whom the lecturer forms acquaintance in his extensive travel, together with the opportunity of wide personal observation, makes the pjeludes an important source of suggestions as to current reform, and a most useful means of discussing popular evils as they arise. The independence of the platform adds to the effect of its treatment of living issues. It is noticeable, that, in both the Scotch and Eng- lish repul)lications of Mr. Cook's volumes, tlie preludes are included in full. It is believed that no leading articles in any newspaper in England or America are so extensively copied by the jircss as the preludes of the Boston Monday Lectureship. Each one is intended to be a compact prose sonnet, discussing current events from the religious point of view. The thirty lectures delivered in the second year of the lectureship, which was founded in 1875, are comprised in the three volumes entitled " Biology-," " Transcendentalism," and " Orthodoxy." The results of the third year of the lectureship are embraced iii the vol- umes entitled " Conscience," " Heredity," and " Marriage." Those of the fourth year are summarized in the books called " Labor " and " Socialism," now in press. It is understood that the present series of lectures will make two more volumes, to be entitled " Culture " and " Miracles." During the third year of the lectureship, Mr. Cook gave six lec- tures in New York City, besides sjieaking in most of the prominent cities of the North-eastern States. In the sea.son of 1878 and 1879, he conducted a Boston Monday-noon Lectureship and a New York Thursdaj'-evening I/ccturesliip at the same time. In his course of the preceding year in New Y'ork City, he had been introduce5, first in philosophy and rhetoric of his class. He then joined Andover Theological Semi- nary, went through the regular three-years' course there, and lin- gered a year longer at that place, pondering deeply the relations of science and religion, which continued to be the theme of his thoughts and his study for the next ten years. At this stage he received much impulse from Professor Park, who requires every student to reason out and to defend his opinions; and many sound philosophic princijiles from Sir William Hamilton and other less eminent men of thi Scottish school. He spoke from time to time at religious meetings, and was for one year the pastor of a Congregational church, but never sought a settlement. In September, 1871, ho went abroad, and studied for two years, vinder special directions from Tholuck, at Halle, Berlin, and Heidelberg ; and received a mighty influence from Julitis Muller of Halle, Dorner of Berlin, Kuno Fischer of Heidelberg, and Hermann Lotze of Gottingen. He then BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. travelled for a time in Italy, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Turkey, Switzer- land, France, England, and Scotland. Returning to the United States in 1873, he took up his residence in Boston, and became a lecturer in New England on the subject to which his studies had been so long directed, the relations of religion and science. For a time he lectured at Amherst College; and, while doing so, Jie was invited to conduct noon meetings in Boston. Mr. Cook did not take up the work he has accomplished, as a trade, or by accident, or from impulse ; but for years he had been preparing for it, and prepared for it by an overruling guidance. I regard Joseph Cook as a Heaven-ordained man. Ho comes at the lit time; that is, at the time he is needed. He comes forth in Bos- ton, which is undoubtedly the most literary city in America, and one of the great literary cities of the world. I am not sure that even Edinburgh can match it, now that London is drawing towards it and gathering up the intellectual youth of Scotland. It has a character of its own in several respects. I have here to speak only of its religious character. Half a century ago its Orthoiioxy had sunk into Unitarianism a re-action against a formal Puritanism led by Channing, who adorned his bald sj-stera by his high personal char- acter and the eloquence of his style. People could not long l)e satis- fied by a negation, and Parkerism followed ; and a convulsive life was thrown into the skeleton of natural religion by an a priori speculation, derived from the pretentious philosophies of Germany, in which the Absolute took the place of God, and untested intuition the place of the Bible. The movement culminated in Ralph Waldo Emerson, a feebler but a more lovable Thomas Carlyle, the one coming out of a decaying Puritanism, the other out of a decaying Covenanterism. But those who would mount to heaven in a balloon have sooner or later to come down to earth. Tlie young men of Uar\'ard College, led by their able president, have more taste for the new physical science, with its developments, than for a visionary metaphysics. As I remarked some time ago in a literary organ, Unitarianism has died, and is laid out for decent burial. Mean- while there is a marked revival of Evangelism, and the Congrega- tional and Episcopal churches have as much thoughtfulness and culture as the Unitarians. Harvard now cares an little for Unita- rianism as it does for Evangelism simply taking care that Ortho- doxy does not rule over its teaching. But the question arises. What are our young men to believe in these days when Darwinism and Spencerism and Evolutionism are taught in our journals, in our schools, and in our colleges? To my knowledge, this question is as anxiously put l)y Unitarian parents of the old school, who cling firmly to the great truths of natural religion, and to the Bible aa a tea<;her of morality, as it is by the Orthodox. Such was the state of thought and feeling, of Iwlief and unl>olief, of apprehension and of desire, when Jasepli Cook came to Boston witliout any flourish of trumi>eta preceding him. Numljcrs were prepared to welcome him as soon as they knew what the man was, ami what he was aiming at. Ortholox ministers, not very well able themselves to wn^stle with the new fonns of inrtdelity, rejoiced in tlie appearance of one who haeople were in the Tal)ernacle at the same hour. The Temple audience consisted chiefly of men, and was of distinguished quality, containing hun- dreds of persons well known in the learned professions. Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett Hale, Bronson Alcott, and many other citizens of eminence, sat on the platform. No Injtter proof than the character of the audience could have l)een desired to show that Mr. Cook's popularity as a lecturer is not confined to the evangelical denominations. (Feb. 7.) It is not often that Boston people honor a public lecturer so much as to crowd to hear him at the noon-tide of a week-day; and, when it does this month after month, the fact is proof positive tliat his subject is one of engrossing interest. Mr. Cook, perhaps more than any gentleman in the lecture-field the past few years, has been so honored. (Feb. 14.) The Independent. We know of no man that is doing more to-day to sliow tlio rea- sonableness of Christianity, and the unreasonableness of unboliof ; nor do we know of any one who is doing it with such admirable tolerance yet dramatic intensity. Professor Borden P. Bowne, of Boston University, in the Sunday Afternoon. In the chapters on the theories of life, these discussions are, in many respects, models of argument; and the descriptions of tlio farts under discussion are often unrivalled for both scientific exact- ness and rlietorical adequacy of lanpiage. In the present state of the debate there is no better nianualof tlie argument than the work in hand. The emptiness of the mechanical explanation of life was never more clearly shown. T/ie Bibliotheca Sacra. Then* is no other work on biology, there is no other work on the- '^'"Ky. with which this volume of lectures can well be comi)nreo<)k that no biolopist, whether an originator or a mere luiddle- triiin in Kciencc, would ever have written. Traversing a very wide field, cutting right acro.ss the territories of rival six-cialists, it <'on- t.iins not one imiHirtant scientific misstatement, either of tact or theory. Nf)t only tlie pro|>ositions, but the datejt, the references, the names, and the histories of scientific discoveries and speculations, are pn-seiited as they are found in the soun-cs whence they are taken, or, at least, with only verlml and minor changes. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. The Eclectic Magazine. It may be said unqualifiedly that the pulpit has never brought such comprehensiveness and precision of knowledge, combined with such loj^ical and literary skill, to the discussion of the questions raised by the supposed tendency of biological discovery. The Advance, Chicago. This Boston Lectureship is altogether unique in the recent history of poiiular exposition of abstruse themes. One has to go back to the time of Peter Abelard, of the University of Paris, for a parallel to it. II. FOREIGN OPINIONS. Rev. R. Payne Smith, Dean of Canterbury. The lectures are remarkably eloquent, vigorous, and powerful, and no one could read them without great benefit. They deal with very important questions, and are a valuable contribution towards solving many of the difficulties which at this time trouble many minds. Rev. Dr. Angus, the College, Regent's Park. These lectures discuss some of the most vital questions of the- ology, and examine the views or writings of Emerson, Theodore Parker, and others. They are creating a great sensation in Boston, where they have been delivered, and are wonderful specimens of shrewd, clear, and vigorous thinking. They are moreover, largely illustrative, and have a fine vein of poetry running through them. The lectures on the Trinity* are capitally written; and, though we are not prepared to accept all Mr. Cook's statements, the lectures, as a whole, are admirable. A dozen such lectures have not been published for many a day. Rev. Alexander Raleigh, D.D., of London. The lectures are in every way of a high order. They are pro- found and yet clear, extremely forcible in some of their parts, yet, I think, always fair, and as full of sympathy with what is properly and purely human as of reverence for what is undoubtedly divine. Rev. John Ker, D.D., of Glasgow. My conviction is, that they are specially fitted for the time, and likely above all to be useful to thoughtful minds engaged in seeking a footing amid the quicksands of doubt. There is a freshness, a jiower, and a felt sincerity, in the way in which they deal with the engrossing questions of our time, and, indeed, of all time, which should commend them to earnest spirits which feel that there nuist be a God and a soul, and some way of bringing them together, and which yet have got confused amid the negations of the dogmatic scepticism of our day. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Cook four years ago, when he was visiting Europe to make himself acquainted with different forms of thought; and I could see in him a power and resolution which foretold the mark he is now making on publio opinion. BOSTON MONDAY LECTURES. Rev. C. H. Spurgeon. These are very wonderful lectures. We bless God for raising up such a champion for his truth as Jaseph Cook. Few could hunt down Theodore Parker, and all that race of misbelievers, a.s Mr. Cook has done. He has strong convictions, the courage of his con- victions, and force to support his courage. In reasoning, tlie infidel party have here met their match. We know of no other man one- iialf so well qualified for the peculiar service of exploding the pre- tensions of motlern science as this great preacher in whom Boston is rejoicing. Some men shrink from this spiritual wild-boar hunting; but Mr. Cook is as happy in it as he is expert. May his arm be strengthened by the Lord of hosts! London Quarterly Review. For searching philosophical anaJysis, for keen and merciless logic, for dogmatic assertion of eternal truth in the august name of science nuch as fills the soul to its foundations, for widely diversified and most apt illustrations drawn from a wide field of reatling and ol)ser- vation, for true poetic feeling, for a pathos without any mixture of sentimentality, for candor, for moral elevation, and for noble loyalty to those great Christian verities which the author aftinns and vindi- cates, wonderful lectures stand forth alone amidst the contemporary literature of the class to which they belong. The British Quarterly Review. Mr. Cook is a man of wide reading, tenacious memory, acute dis- crimination, and great jxiwer of popular exposition. Notliing detr8 him. He plunges in media.'* res, however aljstruse the sjx-culation, and his vigor and fire carry all before them. He has intuitive genius lor pricking wind-bags, and for reducing over-sanguine and exag- gerated hyi>otheses to their exact value. He has called a halt in many an impetuous march of science, and exjKJsed a fundamental fallacy in many a triumphant argument. The London Spectator. Vigorous and suggestive; interesting from the glimpses they give of tli(^ present jjIiu-scs of speculation in wliat is emphatically the most thoughtful community in the United States. Professor Ulrici, University of Halle, Germany. His object is the foundation o< a new and trne metaphysics, rest- ing on a biological bjisis; that is, the pr .^^