The Colfax chronicle., 1891-12-12

ZEN. wooDFoRD ON THE LAND
QUESTION.

CENT session at Albany, on THE Labor
Uroblem." He thus spoke Of the COM
mon declaration that the interests OF
labor and capital are identical:
Now, I know that there is q beautiful
euphemism, in which we all delight to
indulge, that capital and labor are one.
We are all pleased to say that the inter
ests of capital and the interests:of labor
are one. 1t is pleasing to state and re-
state the golden truth that capital is
best served when labor is best reward
ed. and pleasing to state the coro1iary,
that labor is happiest when in union with
capital. Now all this is true. and in
some milennial age pray thatthe sug-
gestlon of the clergyman, and the
dream of the poet, and the euphemism !
of the politician may all be realized
But when Lazarus, working eight or |
ten hours day, with back bent, goes |
out on Sunday afternoon, and. walking !
mp one of our great city avenues, sees
where Dives lives, it is very hard to get
the poor fellow to understand practical
ly that labor and capital are one. When
he goes back to the tenement house,
and up rickety stairs, and through fetid
atmosphere climbs his way to where
the wife and the babies are, brutalized
by compulsory associations with want,
or with drunkenness, or possibly with
crime, uncomfortable in the heat and
dirt, neither he nor wife nor babe un-
derstant how labor and capital are one!
They are one in the great sweep OF
Gods truth. They are one in the good
time coming; but to-day and now it will
be Christian, it will be wise, it will be
patriotic, for those of us who. thanks
to fathers, thanks to Providence, or
thanks to our own thrift have our own
places on the capital side of this ques-
fion-it will be well for us to under
stand that between the tenement house
and Fifth avenue there is great gulf
: fixed which you and ought to try In
some way to bridge over. And hence,
r1ot venturing even venturing to dream
that what suggest is exact positive
truth, conscious that all thought upon
this question to-day will need coutin-
nous revision, wish, in the few mo-
ments left me. to put to you three or
four simply questions. If can get
YOU, who are educated men and women,
to begin thinking practically about
these things, shall have more than
answered all the purpose had in COM
ing.
The general first took up the ques-
ton of great corporations, and insisted
on the vital necessity OF compelling
them ITO live absolutely inside the law,
with all that this involves" He next
took up the land question and spoke as
follows:
If all wealth is produced by labor
from the earth, If the land is at the basis
of the state, should not the law hinder
every attempt to aggregate land and
transmit It in great bodies to posterity?
= II presume this may be startling ques-
on to ask the conservative teachers OF
: our public schools; but yet remember
that in England to-day they have reach
ed the point where the state has had t.
step in between landlord and tensn
and fix the rate of rent What woult
be thought in this land of ours If ther'
was an attempt to tell the LANDLORD
what he should charge either for house
or factory, or tenement house or farm
And vet, Just as certain as that sixt.
millions of people to-day mean one hun
dred millions fifty years from now; a
certain as that one hundred million
fifty years from now means two hun
dred millions one hundred years frou
now; as certain as that two hundre'
millions one hundred years from nov
mean ultimately population that VII
startle imagination, / tell you, m
countrymen, sooner or later we hav
got to meet the problem that the me
and women to whom God gives LII
shall have chance in the soil and on tn
dust out of which they are made! Nov
do not misunderstood me. am nc
n going to talk any wild agrarianism.
recognize the right of man to labor
nay, / recognize and assert the duty.
recognize the right of a man to be 81
cured in the product of his labor, an
the duty of the state to protect him.
recognize that it is as natural for ma
to seek home of his own as for tn
bird to build its nest. pity the ma
who doesn't want soil of his own, nt
owned by the state but owned b
himself, as the home for wife and chi
dren But in our dealing with land
our laws inherited from old Englan
are we not just reversing the way th'
God deals with us? What is there
which you have greater property ths
in your body? Nothing. Wherev
Won go that body is yours "
may take it upon any mar
farm, and while you stand the
your body is absolutely yours, and Il
nse of the soil beneath your feet
yours. You pass, you take 1t with 20
- but when you die that which was mo
your property than anything else
{ world, under the providence OF Go
molders back into dust; passes into Il
earth, the sky, the air. Even the I
tempt of the old Pharaoh to make
mummy of it and keep it forever is
the last futile, and the body. which W