Knoxville daily chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1882, 1882-06-18
The Labor Troubles.
MARYYILLE. June 9. Is

MARYvILLE, June 9, 1882.
| Mr.. EDITOR: l see from reports in the
papers that there is quite an army, seventy
five or one hundred Thousand men on
strike in the mines and factories up North
In view of this, the following from Ruskin,
on political economy, l think, will be of in
! terest
rs it employment that we want to find,
or support during employment? Is it idle
| ness we wish to put an end to, or hunger?
No doubt that work is a luxury, and very
great one. 1t is, indeed, at once luxury
and necessity; no man can retain either
| health of mind or body without it. So pro
| foundry do l feel this, that, as will be seen
| i'll the sequel, one of the principal objects |
| would recommend to benevolent and
practical persons, is to induce rich people to
seek for larger quantity of this luxury
than they at present possess. Nevertheless,
it appears by experience that even this
healthiest of pleasures may be INDUCED i'll to
excess, and that human beings are lust as
| liable 10 surfeit of labor as to surfeit of
meat, SO that as on the one hand, it may be
charitable to provide for some people,
lighter dinners and more work-for others
it may be equally expedient to provide
higher work and more dinner Whether So
clalism has made more progress among the
army and navy, (where payment is made
on my principle,) or among the manufac-
turing operatives, (who are paid on my OPP
ponent's principle | leave it to those oppo-
nents to ascertain and declare
MY principlesof political economy were all
involved in a single phrase spoken three
years ago at Manchester: Soldiers of the
ploughshare as well as soldiers of the
swor l." and they were all summed i'll sin
gle sentence i'll the last volume of "Modern
Painters" Government and cooperation
are ill all things the laws of life; anarchy
and competition the laws of death" And
with respect to the mode in which these
general principles affect the secure posses
sion of property, so far am L from invali-
dating such security, that the whole gist of
these papers will be found ultimately to aim
at an extension in its range and whereas, it
| has long been known and declared that the
| poor have no right to the property of the
rich, | wish it also to be known
and declared that the rich have
no right to the property of the
poor, but that the working of the system
which l have undertaken to develop would
Ill many ways shorten the apparent and
direct, though not the unseen and collateral
power, both of wealth, as the lady of
pleasure, and of capital as the lord of toll,
l do not deny; on the contrary l affirm it
III all joyfulness, knowing that the attrac-
ton of riches is already too strong, as their
authority is already too weighty for the rea-
son of mankind.
| said III my last paper that nothing in
history had ever been disgraceful to hu
man intellect as the acceptance among us
of the common doctrine of political econ
omy as science. 1 have many grounds for
saying this, but one of the chief NAV be
given in few words. L know no previous
instance III history of nations establishing
a systematic disobedience to the first
principles of its professed religion The
writings which we (verbally) esteem as di-
vine, not only denounce the love of money
as the source of all evil, and as an idolatry,
abhorred of the Deity, but declare mammon
service to be the accurate and irreconcilable
opposite of Gods service; and whenever
they speak of riches absolute, and poverty
absolute, declare woe to the rich, and bles-
sing to the poor. Whereupon we forth
with investigate a science of becoming rich,
as the shortest road to national prosperity"
"Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf,
Each does but hate his neighbor him.
self;
Damned to the mines, and equal fate be-
tides
The slave that digs it, and the slave that
hides"
RoDERRICK ROLKER