The labor world. [volume] (Duluth, Minn.) 1896-current, 1897-09-18

Boston in 1925 he made a speech from
the balcony of.an old house, still stand
ing, at the corner of Park and Beacon
streets. Looking round over the we'll.
ordered multitude of free men who
blocked all the open Spaces the hon
ored guest said, "Where are your poor?'
He repeated it: "Where are your poor?
In this assemblage see them not. Why
have they not come also?" Some one
said, I'VE are all here, rich and poor to
gether." Lafayette replied: mo; the
poor are not here. They are not any,
where in America! They are in Eu-
rope" And that makes the difference
between an assembly of fres men in
1925 and an assembly of inchoate
paupers in 1897.
Down to the middle of this century
the condition of equality, of common
happiness, of free industrial pursuits, of
fairly equal distribution of wealth, with
plethora for none and poverty for none,
still prevailed in our country. Men now
in middle life can we'll recall that happy
and free condition Of ambitious citizen
ship which existed in all parts of the
United States as late as the outbreak of
the Civil War. The cry of the poor was
nowhere heard. Even in the great val
leys Of the Ohio and Mississippi and
around the farstr etching frontier of civ
ilization, no wall of distress from want
came up to vex the soul of philan-
thropY. The humble homes of the COM
mon people abounded with the essen
tials of human happiness. One must
needs have seen in his boyhood, as the
writer saw and is now contemplating
with fearful Remembrance, the plenty Of
the old-fashioned country homes.
around which young fathers cleared
new fields, and young mothers, the an
gels OF the wilderness-God bless their
memory rocked the cradles in which
fat boy babies, with the spirit of the
gods upon them, slept or crowed as the
swelling ripple of life flowed through
stheir healthy souls.
B It was only after our great struggle,
after our day of battle and devastation,
after the sad enlargement of the South
and North, after the chasm had opened
with dreadful animosity to close with
indivisible reunion, that the condition
Of poverty in the United States .ap-
peared. Indeed, it was not in the first
period after the war that this condition
came. It is within the easy memory of
mon that full decade nearly two de-
cades- passed after the day of peace be-
fore the coming Of the day of poverty.
], Nothing is more manifest than that
this condition this return of the old
European and Asiatic fate to our Amer
ican shores-was the result of some un-
toward and fatal break in the remedial,
methods by which we set about to re-
store ourselves after the Civil War. Had
there been nothing abnormal, nothing
criminal in these methods, we should
have got we'll again. After the storm
the calm would have supervened. Our
wounds would have healed. The grass
would have grown green over the hal
lowed graves of our Union and Confed-
crate dead. After. the wreckage and
turmoil, the elements would have. sub.
sided, and the people would have been
more free, more cheerful and hopeful in
their subsequent abundance than in
their preceding plenty.
It was the destruction of natural con-
ditions that sent our woe upon US. It
was the malevolent genius Of man at
work among the then silent forces of our
forward movement that, in the seventies
and eighties, brought about the condi-
tions which we are now obliged to face.
There were men-a large group of men
who were then alert while the nation
was asleep. They began to intrigue be-
fore the smoke of battle had cleared
away. They got hold of the industrial,
economic and financial forces of this re-
viving nation and deliberately turned
them from the course of nature and JUS
tice to the course of injustice and
iniquity. They purchased the war-debt
of the United States and cunningly con-
verted it into an instrument with which
to torment the people by paralyzing
their power to pay. They invented a
method by which to make impossible
the payment of that debt. They trans
formed it into a fanged desmodont.
They tampered with the contract exist
ing between themselves and the nation.
They made fraudulent law in their
own interest They inserted a false
counter into the money system of the
United States, by which, when the peo-
pie paid, they paid nothing; by which,
when they paid one half, the other half
was greater than the whole; by which,
when the robbers had extorted more
than five thousand million dollars from
the hard earnings of the people and had