Freeland tribune. (Freeland, Pa.) 1888-1921, 1893-03-23
pR. MGLYNN.
The Restored Priest ManfulIy Champion
ing the Cause of the Poor.

The Restored Priest Manfully Champion
ing the Cause of the Poor.
In close keeping with the newly
aroused consciousness and conscience of
the people concerning the land question
is the increasing distrust of and hatred
for spectators, usurers, monopolists
and the so called trusts. AS the condi
tions of life for large masses of people
become harder and harder, men are per-
ceiving that by improper social adjust
ments, and by unwise and unjust, and
not infrequeHtly corrupt legislation,
they are becoming juggled and swindled
out of the enjoyment of their equal right
to labor for living and to enjoy the
full fruits of what they produce by their
labor. They are feeling more keenly
every day that landlordism, usury, mo-
nopoly, special privileges granted by
charter and by law, are rapidly tending
to reduce the masses of the people to a
condition of industrial slavery, to make
the rich enormously richer, to concen-
trate the wealth of the country in vast
masses in fewer and fewer hands, to
make the poor poorer, and to reduce the
lowest and largest stratum of society to
a condition worse than that of chattel
slaves.
The strong language used by Pope Leo
XIII in describing the condition of the
working masses in his own Europe are
already, sad to say, largely applicable to
our own land. There are here already
not few who care not to sing at all, or
if they sing it, sing it much less Justify
than of old, Hail Columbia, Happy
Landw The words of Pope Leo are well
worth quoting: ''Workingmen have been
given over, isolated and defenseless, to
the callousness of employers and the
greed of unrestrained competition. The
evil has been increased by rapacious
usury, which, although more than once
condemned by the church, is neverthe-
less, under a different form, but with
the same guilt, still practiced by avari-
cious and grasping men. And to this
must be added the custom of working
by contract and the concentration of so
many branches of trade in the hands of
a few individuals, so that a small num-
Der of very rich men have been able to
lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke
little better than slavery itself"
simultaneously and in logical keeping
with the new. consciousness of men, that
they are wrongfully deprived of their op-
portunity to labor, and consequently of
the just wages for their labor, is the
growing consciousness that they are be-
ing robbed and oppressed by the turning
over to individuals and to corporations
of things that by their very nature should
be owned and controlled by the organ
lied people, or, in other words the gov
ernment, in trust for the whole people,
so that private individuals should receive
no special private benefit from them
without perfectly equivalent return.
Common workingmen, mechanics, tail
ors, sailors, printers, self educated jour
nalists who have in their earlier days
sailed before the mast around the world
and been doing their thinking in the
night watches under the silent stars and
later at the printers case, have been
and mentally controverting and
refuting the stuff that they were print
ing from statesmen and (save the mark)
political economists; have been COM
PEELED partly by their own poverty and
still more largely by divine enthusi-
asm for humanity and sympathy for
their still poorer and less fortunate breth-
ren either to tear to pieces and tostamp
upon some of the orthodox political econ
omies or to take from them the kernel Of
truth which they contained, and to make
such sternly logical application of them
as to frighten the now wealthy and hon
ored fashionable lions and pets Of aristo-
cratic drawing rooms from whose hon
est utterances of poorer and better days
they have been taken. - Edward Nc
Glynn.