The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1903-08-30
Overshadowing Evil of the
Age.
Continued from Ninth Page.)

will be pretty sure to follow 1T II the
legislatures and the courts permit, ~
also be economically righteous.
1t seems to us that the masses OF the
community outside of the comparatively
few who are exploiting it. are pretty
generally agreed that limit should be
put, and must be put, upon modern COM
binations for the following reasons:
l. Economic considerations, while i'm
portant, should not be controlling. The
first cost of a loaf of bread is not so i'm
portant to the community, outside of the
bakers, as is its selling price that the
community has to pay. A bread trust
that should control all the ovens in the
land might produce bread cheaper than
it is row produced, but it is quite doubt
full whether in the absence of competition
they would furnish it to the bread-eater
any cheaper than he gets it now.
9 The qestion OF the selling price the
purchaser has to pay for loaf Of bread
is less important than the question of
whether he has the money with which
to make the purchase. Two-cent bread
will do a man no good unless he can
raise the two cents. If the bread trust
became, by another combination, part
oil the General Industrial Company"
which controlled all the industries of the
land and was the only employer of labor,
it is questionable what wages the Gen
e1al Industrial Company" without any
competitor in the labor market, would
choose to pay the laborers who had no
other place or way to get employment.
Even if the bread department OF the
General Industrial Company" saw fit,
from economic or eleemosyDary consid-
erations, to sell bread cheaper than 1T
had ever been sold before, the benefit that
the community would get from this re-
duction i'm price might be neutralzed by
a general reduction in wages so that
the community would have less money
with which to buy bread than they ever
had before.
g. Money is not always the most I'M
portant thing Perhaps it or what it rep
resents is the most important thing in
the early stage OF civilization. There is
nothing so important to a child in its
first year as food. It has to have bones,
muscles and nerves and all the parapher-
ralia of a body before its intellectual and
spiritual nature can be developed; but
later on the child comes to need other
things which it is more difficult for it to
get than food In the infancy of the
race food was the important consldera-
tion. Industrial methods were so i'm
perfect that labor hard as one would, as
many hours as he could, the best he
could do was to get enough to eat. But
economic processes have improved SO that
the luxuries of one generation become
fhe necessities of the next, and the
wants which man. finds it difficult to sup
ply are not now ordinarily the wants
which pertain 10 the nourishment OF his
body.
Manhood is more important than
money. A nation of freemen must have
for it's citizens men who have higher
aspirations than to fill their stomachs or
to attain simply to a condition of bodl-
" comfort. A nation of free men must be d
nation of men; of thinking men who can
intelIigently solve the problems of HE;
of men of self-reliance who can work out
their own salvation; of patriotic men,
who are willing to devote their lives and
shed their blood, if need be, for their
country.
slavery is not a school for ereemen
Men who are not their own masters IN
their private life are not the citizens that
a great and successful state needs.
man who has no choice in life except
to work for master whom he did not
choose. for wages that he had no part IN
fixing. and under conditions over which
he has no control, so nearly resembles
slave that it takes a causit to draw the
distinction.
The men who followed Washington IN
the Revolution and won the independ-
ence of their country were men who were
brought up to take the initiative and de-
mend upon themselves They had always
been their own masters. If they worked
for another instead of for themselves,
II was because they chose to do so ana
moi because they must. If they worked
for wages. they had choice OF masters
and an opportunity to arrange tor them
selves the conditions and the wages OF
service. They were free, proud OF their
heritage and pricing their personal tree
dom as the choicest thing on earth. Our
naticn-great and rich and prosperous and
powerful as it has becomes not yet
through with its troubles. We have ques-
tons to solve and difficulties to overcome
quite as serious as any which confronted
Washington and our fathers of the Revo-
luton in the early days of the Republic
There are Tweeds and Czolgoszes. post
oIbce scandals, Delaware lynchings.
Evansville riots, and Strikes and labor
troubles of perilous importance that are.
in our generation, quite as dangerous
end quite as difficult to deal with as
we're the George the Thirds, the Lord
Ncrths and the tea duties of that day
The nation has need of the patriotism
and the intelligence of its self-reliant sons
today quite as much as it ever had i'll
the past. Would a nation composed of
the working men employed by one or
dozen or hundred great industrial COM
binations, which shall have absorbed the
industries of the land, become the sole ex-
ploiters of labor and the only furnlshers
of their necessities to its people, be
nation that could meet the great crises
that occur In the history of every nation?
Would such a nation as that have gone
through the trials and the troubles OF
the Civil War? Would such nation as
that have carried its flag as we carried
ours in the late Spanish War twelve
hundred miles farther east and seven
thousand miles farther west than 1T ever
went before? Would such a nation as
that have grown in power and IN pros