derous machines of the new system. He was not able to be a possessor of the vast bulk of their products. Huddled with thousands of his fellows in wretched tenements, he begged for the leave to labor. The stern menace of dire necessity blanched him with an awful horror. The wail of starving babes drove father to bid against father for a pittance all too scant. The mother left her home to find employment and ward off the impending death from hunger. Frail bodies of stunted children were pressed into service to augment the dwindling wage. If humane souls asked why the awful competition?" they were rebuffed by the vile and brutal theory of overproduction of labor. the horrors grew and thickened. the dust of the great roaring factory the pitiful cry and little, pale faces of children marked the blighting of life before its bloom. Day by day the helpless laborers passed from their sleepless toil to an early but kindlier fate. Still In Have you ever thrilled with horror at the torrents of blood let loose in the French revolution? There is more of human misery and death crowded within six months of unregulated factory life than in twenty revolutions. The sufferings of labor baffle human description. The helpless soon succumbed; homes were left desolate; the future of the workingmen seemed hopeless. The wage of every laboring man was brought down to the level of that accepted by the most needy of his fellows. The wages for the best labor, under such inhuman conditions, sank rapidly to the level of the worst. Years of hunger and ceaseless toil palsied the arm of the skillful artisan and dulled the brain of the mechancial genius. To the workman the continuance of such a social order meant the extinction of his higher self, a uni formity of depression, the blankness of despair. In those days it was that the hidden germ of a new institution began to grow. There was the birth of the trade union. Out of the ghastliness of an anarchy that was destroying the workman, soul, mind and body, the labor union brought order, intelligence, prosperity, Christian brotherhood. It has lifted the workman for the first time in history to a place as one of the leading constructive and reformative factors in the upbuilding of civilization. Bitterly persecuted by its foes, and marking each new victory by the blood of its martyrs, it has pressed steadily onward. Conscious of its divinely appointed mission, it has borne tidings of joy and hope to the lowliest workmen of earth's furthest bounds. The downtrodden Neapolitan and the poor serf of Russia shout for joy. Marvelous and triumphant power! By it the chains of slavery to ceaseless, sleepless toil have been stricken away. By it the eyes of little children have been opened to the light of the schoolroom. By it the bruised and broken spirit of labor is revived in glad freedom. By it is seen the hope of the progress of all peoples upward to that day when every law shall be the golden rule. The trade union has few apologists, and needs none. Its enemies are the common enemies of progress and justice and humanity. We love it for the sentiments recorded in the speech and action of its foes. We love the labor movement for its attitude of protest when its assailants cry, "The function of the State is not to act as an exemplar in ethics philanthropy"; when they cry, "Away with law and order!" when they skulk in the guise of officers to violate the constitution of their State and every vestige of the rights of American citizens; when they soil with foul fingers the ballot of a free people. or We esteem it for the works that it has done, for the achievements it shall yet encompass. We love it as the promoter of peace, as the guardian of the public health, as the maintainer of the sanctity of human life, as the eliminator of civic corruption, as the protector of the home, as the upbuilder of the human race. Statistics show that as the outcome of labor organization 75 per cent of all the industrial disputes of Great Britain are today settled by arbitration. Strikes are common to every people and time. Moses led out the brickmakers of Egypt, and hosts have followed his example. But it has remained for the trade union to make possible the settlement of all differences with fairness and yet by peaceable measures. Thoroughness in the organization of labor unions means a corresponding decrease in industrial warfare. It means in the utmost consummation an universal peace. We boast of the sanitary precautions of our age. We point with pride to the lengthening span of human life. We rejoice to observe those baneful plagues that once swept from center to circumference of civilization fast losing their power. The attainment has been direct. Statistics show that great epidemics have always developed their fatal virulence in crowded settlements of squalid poverty; that from the world's sweatshops, where helpless laborers wear out their wretched lives in anguish, comes the deadliest infection of disease. Of the Sweatshop the labor union is earth's bitterest foe. With the sword and spirit of Nemesis it has entered a world where all industry was a sweatshop, and today its victorious arm hunts to their death the last relics of that brutalism in the crush of the crowded cities. What shall I say to you more? The stalwart heroes of labor union have met and vanquished a vandal horde of more dread foes than ever Roman legions saw. With their union shop and their label they press forward and conquer new evils with every passing year. It is organized labor which makes child labor laws effective. It is the unions who have demanded and compelled the introduction of safety appliances on our railways and in our shops. It is they who demand and are winning shorter hours of labor for the men upon whose steady nerves depend the lives of tens of thousands. It is they who have won for the city of Chicago alone more than half a million dollars a year in taxes that were formerly evaded. It is they who build cities without slums, who maintain sobriety without coercion, who overthrow despotism without war. persistent, heroic, self-sacrificing struggles for the welfare of humanity; in clean, temperate, orderly civic and individual life; in fearless, faultless, democratic education of the masses; in ardent, efficient, ethical maintenance of eternal truth, the labor union has shown itself the greatest moral force of the present age. All of you who love the genuine, liberal, American spirit of our republic, the sense of common interests and of individual rights as men, to you I bear the thrilling watchword: Labor, unite! In A RAILROAD RHAPSODY. FROM RAILROAD MEN. The story of railroad development in America is more interesting than the average romance of fiction-from the crude beginnings of less than a century ago to the mighty systems of today, from twenty-three miles of steam railroad in operation in 1830 to nearly 200,000 in 1900. But in the early days of steam transportation the magazine writers could see but little romance in railroading, as the following extract from the New York Mirror, 1840, will show: "The poetry of traveling is gone-the romance of roadside adventure is at an end; in vain will the modern novelist attempt to distinguish his heroine in the passing train-forms and faces glide by like the mingled colors on a schoolboy's whipping top-an amalgamated mass of hues which the rapid motion seems to blend into one. Elopements may now be made in safety, if the lovers can only secure the first train; asthmatical old guardians can never give chase the rapidity with which the vehicles move will prevent the short-winded from breathing; no being overtaken by brothers; dueling and changing horses and separate rooms are at an end-our light literature must now become woven with steam-our incidents must arise from blow-ups, and love be made over broken legs; while here the novelist will have to record the falling in of a tunnel, the only chance left "for a touch at the sublime." The good old days of chance courtship have vanished; if a lady happened to let her glove fall from the coach, there was an opening for some gallant to leap off and return it with a good grace. But now there is no stopping; one might as well call upon the winds as upon the conductor to check the speed of his fiery dragon; 'tis as much as the guard can do to make him hear with his shrill whistle; ere one can say, "My hat's blown off," we have shot a mile ahead, and the conductor mourns the accident at the next station; and there is no lack of sympathy at the distance of thirty miles. The tables within the carriages are like those which held the feasts of the enchanters; whatever is laid upon them less weighty than a brick is whisked away by a viewless spirit, and carried you wot not whither. Woe be unto the wight that layeth down his gloves, handkerchief or umbrella-that unlooseth his pocketbook to spread out his letters, for they will be given as a prey unto the winds, unless he carrieth his own curtaining, or is rich enough to travel in a first-class carriage. Then there are those many gloomy tunnels opening their grim portals to receive us and darkening around us like the valley and shadow of death. You are immersed within the bowels of a black cavern-the groaning monster which has borne you away utters his most hellish moans in the darknessflakes of fire here and there flutter along the low-browed vault-the earth seems rocking beneath, while one dull, prolonged echo throws back the continued clatter. Perchance a solitary lamp is fixed in the roof of your carriage, and the sickly yellow light falls upon the face of some wrinkled old man who has closed his eyes from fear. All beside is darknothing is visible but that hideous face in the distance. At first he appears like a fiend, you cannot separate him from the lakes of red fire, darkness, and the bellowing of the monster. By degrees he becomes a bandit; you have seen just such a face in the caverns in Salvator Rosa's pictures; then he is dead-his face grows sharp and thin in the yellow light-his eyes move not under the lurid gleam you are in the tomb with him! By and by you feel the wind of heaven upon your cheek-the daylight breaks in upon you, and you are again rolling between upheaved banks, or on the brown backs of massy arches-rubbing the flakes of soot from your face, or writhing under some sharp particle which has chosen your eye for an abiding place; you seem as if racing against the wind, and that, out of sheer vexation at being beaten, it blows with all its might, as if it would lift the heavy train from the ground. 66 POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FAITH." BY JOSE GROS. One of the peculiarities of men is yet that of formulating important conclusions about the course of human development on different periods without sufficient data on the subject. To begin with, we assume to know all that is going on and has been taking place in the last twenty or thirty years, for instance, when there is not a prominent writer or talker who reads more than a fragment of what the bulk of such men have stated as facts pretty well established. We mean that not one of them has time or taste to see all sides of life-not one in any five hundred. We have tested that very often. Take for in stance any large city or town library provided with the bulk of the most solid publications of the day. Go there, overhaul what has been written in any six months on the most transcendent questions and problems more or less directly connected with the events of the last two, five, ten or more years in the principal nations of the earth. Make careful notes of the central thoughts and most sensible conclusions arrived at, even if incomplete. Go then and ask questions on those very subjects, and pick up the most eminent individuals for an opinion about such ramifications in the development of men for any length of time. You will seldom find any one or several individuals who have caught the waves of thought above indicated and can give you any cogent recapitulation of the data needed form any approximate sound conclusions of what we have accomplished or failed to accomplish in any twenty or thirty years, 50 or more, if you like; that is, they shall simply refer to such and such results, but not by any means to the new troubles and problems they have brought. to Each generation, just as well as each individual, refuses to do what would have been best to do, and does what would have been best to leave undone, in a multitude of cases, even when it actually accomplishes some partial good results in certain directions. Take, then, the 50,000 best and most intelligent men in each generation. Their combined grasp of what has been done in good results during the fifty years, if as many, in which they have been the presiding factors of civilization-that grasp does not amount to much. Yet it is from the knowledge and data they can give of their own generation that the future historians can write about. Our readers would be dazzled, bewildered, if they could go over the fifteen large books of notes we have made in connection with the facts published in the last thirty years in our nation alone, and they themselves represent but a small portion of the grand total in census reports and outside of them, and that total is but in itself a fragment of what has hap pened, of some importance, in that period. And everything that takes place in human life has its value, represents a contribution, if accurate or approximate sound conclusions are to be had, on real human growth or actual retrogression. Let us now descend to the level of some positive, concrete facts, as illustrations of our preceding considerations. About 75 years ago, the important men of the day in this nation of ours could only see one danger in the social horizon of our own development. It was the slavery of the blacks, concentrated, intrenched in the Southern states. They could not see the economic blunders we had inherited from all previous generations. We cannot see them now. Perhaps it is worse than that. We know all about such blunders, but we love them more than ever. They are flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone. They constitute the refined wisdom of the best nations that ever lived, retouched and improved by our own national wisdom in the last 120 years. Nobody has ever dared to disprove the fact that all forms of direct slavery have come from the economic wrongs that have placed all nations under the perpetual bondage of legalized selfishness. That bondage, in forms direct or indirect, has touched everybody, workers and capitalists, sinners and saints, top men and bottom people everywhere under the skies. That comes from our own human wisdom placidly taking the place of God's wisdom, today as much as ever, to say the least. A simple process of mental analysis based on the divine logic of the universe will tell us that the longer we proclaim the need of mixing good and evil in our own human development, in our laws, the greater the wrong effects shall be in the life of everyone of us. Each compromise, every contract, so to speak, between good and evil, shall make the latter more supreme than ever. Do you know why? Simply because evil cannot stand alone for any length of time, and good means to stand alone and cannot bear any idiotic compromise with wrong. The good would not be good at all, if it could not stand alone. Any mixture of good and wrong means men despising God's goodness, God's wisdom, and the beauty of divine law. Trying to escape that logic, as humanity is yet doing that is just as foolish as attempting to dispense with the force of gravitation in our physical existence. Hence every ten additional years of disobedience to God makes men greater sinners. That stubbornness of ours, in the mixture of good and evil, is made more criminal than ever, at least every thirty or forty years, from the fact that God is constantly sending new revelations to every generation. Every fragment of historical development does that. Every new experiment in such a mixture of right and wrong makes men more criminal in the new mixture they manage to have, so that to escape the actualization of the good alone, so that not to have to add the important duty of having honest laws in each nation, to the multitude of petty duties we are willing to have and thus consider ourselves fairly good men. Goodness in mere incidentals, badness and wrong in fundamentals, that is the net result of any crooked progress. If we need a God, on earth or anywhere else, He must necessarily be a complete artist in all the ramifications of the universe and the sentient, living creations everywhere, and the higher they rise in perceptions and consciousness, the more adapted they must be to live an artistic life, in accord with the simple artistic laws of that God. Are we taught to apprehend God in that way? Is not our faith in God yet negative from the fact that we practically deny Him all willingness to give to men the power to legislate righteous laws on the plea that He will do it himself when he likes? That is what we actually say in our acts as long as we are satisfied with our own laws of injustice and monopoly. What we then need, and need badly, is a positive faith in God, a faith enjoining upon us the imperative duty to rapidly suppress all selfishness in law and to simply have unselfish laws reflecting the beauty and simplicity of all divine law. Nothing short of that shall ever do any positive, permanent good to our poor deluded humanity. Anything short of that is but trying to cheat God out of His righteousness and men out of all real peace and manhood. In a recent sermon from that modern Isaiah, Mr. Bigelow of Cincinnati, he said: "Blessed is the man who has a job that he likes and is not afraid of losing." No civilization, however heathenish or rotten, has ever perpetrated any greater social crime than that such an utterance implies. And we have millions of workers everywhere to whom our civilization denies that simple blessing by divine laws granted to all men. Does not that prove the negativeness and poverty of what we call religious faith, faith in God? In another recent sermon the same preacher said: "Why not to have free labor for all, that all may know the joy of work and none may wear the yoke of drudgery!" The answer is: Because we have no faith in the beauty of God's laws. We only have faith in the ugliness of our own precious monopoly laws. We love injustice, if it is only incorporated in our own glorious legislation. Some may do that without meaning it, but God does not mean it should be so. He has given us the power to think sound thoughts. Deem not, O son, that glory once attained Will last forever, spotless and unstained; Neglected laurel speedily grows dry; Unwatered, soon 'twill wither up and die. Not Fame's mere work can make Fame stand alone, Nor keep its name on the remembrance stone; To cut the weeds and brush the mold away. Plant thou the mem'ry in the human heart, Thus shall thy glory and thy fame endure |