Monogamy, like religion, requires no coercive policy for its preservation. If monogamy, and its constant shadow, prostitution, are indeed essential to the preservation of civilization, have no fears of toleration. The true remedy for the abuses of freedom, said Macaulay, is more freedom. Τ CHAPTER VII. WHAT IS THE LABOR MOVEMENT? HE struggle between the representatives of capital and labor is world-wide. All along the lines the din of strife is heard. In France, Decazeville and St. Quentin echo with the tread of strikers and troops. In Spain the workmen of Madrid flaunt their rags and demand employment, while their comrades of the rural districts, goaded to desperation, set fire to barns. Even Portugal awakens from its lethargy to witness the strange spectacle of imposing manifestations at various points against taxation, and at Oporto the workmen raised the ominous cry of "Long live the Republic!" In Italy the peasants of the mountain distriets are taking the administration of justice into their own hands and rendering the lives of the gentry insecure. In Russia new conspiracies are unearthed and new victims resignedly meet their fate. In Turkey, apparently buried in Asiatic lethargy, the street-sweepers of Constantinople astound the sleepy authorities by striking for their pay. In Germany the gory spectre of revolution is ever present before the statesman's mind. In England, the land of routine and commonplace, the great strikes in the North and the recent Socialistic mob in London makes even the optimist to pause. In America, strikes and disorders form the current news of the day; from the Atlantic to the Pacific the air seems charged with an exhilarating ingredient which inspires men's thoughts with new purposes. Day by day the lines are being drawn closer and closer. Capital, alarmed, seeks to deny to labor the right of organization. Labor, feeling the strength of partial organization, takes on a new and independent tone. As passions are excited and temper aroused, wisdom too often is unheard while ignorance cryeth aloud. Compare the public feeling to-day with that of ten years ago, before the Pittsburgh riot startled the country from its dream of centennial grandeur and peace; we seem to have passed into a new age. These signs are but sporadic manifestations of the growing discontent. As in all pre-revolutionary days they are indications of a coming struggle, and yet men talk of an equitable adjustment of the strained relations between capital and labor through the use of force. Any system requiring force to sustain itself, is already judged in advance. In the opening years of the French Revolution all statesmen were seeking an equitable adjustment between authority and liberty, striving to attain a happy twilight medium between light and darkness which would yet give satisfaction to each. None sought a republic, yet almost before the ink on the adjusting protocol was dry, the republic was proclaimed. The logic of events always leads men; the process is never the reverse. In 1775 the Colonists sought an equitable adjustment of their differences with the crown. The boycott on tea was deemed an extreme step. Then came the Boston Massacre, and as the smoke rolled away over the land, independence was born. Again in 1861, thoughtful men were seeking a new compromise between antagonistic principles in order to preserve the Union. A shot was fired at the flag on Fort Sumter and the North became solid. We are passing through similar scenes. The demands of the future are arrayed against the entrenched customs of the past. We are growing into a state where the arrogance of those who stand by the past and would repel progress, or the ignorance of those who while unconsciously representing the future are yet human in their passions, may precipitate a conflict which will stain the pages of the history of this century with the blood of slaughtered victims. As has been well said, compromises are incipient suicides. It behoves us to understand the fundamental principles involved in the conflict, for the contending forces in the seething crucible of social life are beyond men's control. What will be the outcome it were rash to say, but in what direction all the tendencies of progress lead is not a matter of prophecy. Let us make the subject a personal one. You work for wages. Are they increasing? Is your position a guaranteed one, or is it dependent upon uncertain conditions and a fluctuating market? Are you to-day satisfied, or are you striving for something better? In short, it is a personal question. A very few years ago such questions would have been idle; to-day they find receptive ears. Is there not in this fact a pregnant meaning? Do you not realize that times have changed since our civil war, if your memory goes back beyond that event? You are a mechanic: Have you the opportunities now that there were then for the man of small means to start for himself? Is not the small manufacturer, the small trader being driven to the wall? Can the capital of a few hundred dollars compete with that of millions? Is not your daily routine becoming a fixed one?. You feel the lines drawing yearly closer which hold you in the rut of wage labor; you realize more and more the lack of opportunity to escape by raising yourself above your fellows; you look ahead to old age and can see no relief unless it be a seat beside a son's or daughter's hearth to eat the crumb of dependence, while they are following the same weary round where your strength was worn out. On every hand you find gigantic changes going on in production, as in the startling fact that in the past fifteen years the whole power of mechanism in our country has doubled, having risen from 2,300,000 horse power in 1870, to 4,500,000 in 1885. As an American, you of course read the papers. You read of strikes and lockouts; of suffering communities struggling for better remuneration. In your walks you meet with idle men who would work as gladly as yourself if the law of demand would permit, and you read with a pang the statement of the National Labor Commissioner that over one million men are in enforced idleness. You are familiar with the tenement-house quarters of our cities, perhaps necessarily so. You know its influence on health, on the morals of your children, on the happiness of your family circle. As an American, I ask you is this continued discontent the necessary outcome of our republican institutions? Is there virtue in the constitution to heal the existing antagonism between the representatives of capital and labor. Is there power in political legislation to remove the economic cause which compels you to bring up your children in a human bee-hive? Will the ballot restore the faded cheek of your wife or preserve the bloom of health on the faces of children doomed to factory toil? In other words how can political remedies secure economic results? Let us weigh existing remedies before considering new ones. Was your father a wage-worker before you in this land of the free? Is your condition better than his was? If so, has it been acquired by reason of your political freedom? You may attend church. Whatever religion may have done for your moral nature, has it done aught for your economic condition, other than too often inculcating contentment and submission? Whatever may be the love and veneration you entertain for the church of your fathers for spiritual consolation, you know better than to look there for this relief. Is it not equally true that political freedom has done absolutely nothing to better your economic condition? You feel that neither the realm of religion nor politics intersect that of economy under our present industrial system. You have mental freedom, but long years of conflict and blood shed were necessary to establish it. You fully recognize the right of every one to the free use of his reason; that there can be no greater blasphemy than the denial of freedom of thought; that what was once deemed the sacred prerogative of God is now the treasured right of self. In the realm of mental relations you deny coercive authority and proclaim liberty. You also inherit political freedom. Our fathers achieved it with their swords. It is a legacy of which we are proud, nor would I undervalue it, nor, on the other hand, should we overvalue it. These are acquired. We Mental freedom! political freedom! need not contend for these; they are ours. Ah! here we attain to a glimpse of the lines of progress. Since the sixteenth century humanity has been tending to wider personal freedom. It is the trend of progress, and there has been a consequent restriction of authority of man over man. Since then political questions have largely replaced religious ones in the governments of the world until the present century. To the men of the seventeenth century religious freedom seemed all that could be desired, and that the line of progress henceforth must be towards its greater extension, by extorting new safeguards, establishing new guarantees. So thought men; not so Humanity. Toleration once secured, the logic of events would prevent reactive measures from being successful. A principle once victorious, the standard is ever pushed on to new fields of conflict. The eighteenth century presented political questions for consideration, free, largely, from the religious phase in which they had been clothed; questions not to be settled by religious methods. Men read Junius, Rousseau, Paine. Political freedom was the spirit of the age, and the great thinkers of the times were those who best caught its meaning and translated into intelligent speech, rendering explicit that which had been unconsciously implicit in the human mind. Washington and Kosciusko in two continents gave it voice. In France the beating hearts of men long used to repression felt a new thrill. When the head of Louis XVI. rolled from the guillotine, the descending blade severed the fiction of divine right to govern. Could not force arrest the cause of progress? Could man used to oppression dare to resist authority sanctified by "divine right?” In vain in vain! The advancing tide could not be checked. The dykes were broken! The flood came and the empty fiction was swept away. The people triumphed over authority because they gave voice to the spirit of the age. The fitting occasion was offered and success attended the effort. The Bastile, that |