Morning journal and courier., 1881-10-27
A Weekday Sermon.


 What change would be wrought in our Massachusetts factory towns even in the brief space of a single year, if all our Massa- ehusetts factory owners saw certain things as clearly now as they will see them in the light of the judgment day! For instance: That the wage-payer has only begun to dis charge his duty to the wage earner when he has doled out to him the pittance coming to him for his weeks toil
 That the old law, older than Christianity, as old as the first stirring of the human con- science, which binds the strong to bear the weaknesses of the weak, has not been repealed or modified, but is in full force to-day, the teachings of sundry eminent political econo- mists to the contrary notwithstanding That the personal obligation growing out of this law cannot be transferred to the cor poration of which Dives is a member but rests upon Dives himself; and that he will have to answer in his own proper person for the manner in which he has discharged it to God who has said that when he comes to make inquisition for blood he will not forget the cry of the humble.
 That this obligation becomes heavier ill the direct ratio of the profits, wealth, education and refinement of the employer. That it covers the whole life of the employ ed-their intellectual and moral as well as their existence in this world. That the comfortless and unsightly brick barracks, wooden tenement-houses and novels of too many of our Massachusetts factory towns, with their unwholesomeness and squalor and lack, not only of all beauty, but all homelikeness and the starved souls looking out of the eyes of the men and women who herd in them, are graver indict- ments against the rich men of this Christian commonwealth than most that are drawn by grand juries.
 That the inarticulate complaint of the chil- dren who are gowing up in these unlovely and brutalizing surroundings as surely enters into the ears of the God of Sabaoth as did the cry of the laborers whose wages had been kept back through fraud by the rich Chris tian employers of St. James, day
 We invite such of the rich Christian em- ployers of our day as draw their wealth in whole or part from the manufactures of Massachusetts to consider seriously in their own minds the contrast between one of our typical factory towns Holyoke or Adams for instance, and Connecticuts South Manches- ter-that bit of Christ's gospel worked out in the homes and lives of men. We invite them next to seriously ask themselves how it hap pens that in this land of universal prosperity and contentment, the minds of the poor are becoming more and more embittered against the rich that the social democrat is treading on the heels of the trade-unlonist, and that the anarchist is already visible behind the social democrat We invite them to read again, and as they read ponder very serious ly, the prophetic warning of our best-beloved Massachusetts poet, no less true and timely now than when it was first uttered: 'sThere is a poor, blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel Who maS in some grim revel. raise his hand And shake the pillars of this CommoEweal, Till the vast temple of our liberties
 A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish ties."