The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-11-29

taking Thanksgiving dinner at our home in Brooklyn. During a walk that after noon our guest made a statement which will never leave my memory. De Witt" said he to my father, for they were old school friends, If I live one year more I shall be worth a million dollars; if three years, three millions. But if die within six months my estate and investments are in such an involved condition that l shall be worth practically nothing" He died within six months, and his fears in ref erence to his estate were verified Now. our country has to be thankful for its blessings geographical during the past year. It has also to be thankful because it has been blessed industrially. Never since our government was founded have there been greater harvests or a vaster tide of transportation west to east and east to west; never time when our fac tories have been so overworked never a time when there has been so much money to spend and in circulation; never a time when labor has been receiving so much for its services So overcrowded are some of the factories with orders that, though they may work night and day, they cannot supply the demand for shoes, gloves, hats, linen, hosiery and overcoats and umbrellas, wagons and au- tomoblles and all the necessities and lux uries of life. only scarcity today in the business world Is the scarcity of men. \ ork? There Is plenty of work for every honest man capable of doing any meehan- ical work who Is not shirk, a loafer or an incapable Today ought we not be thankful that every man Is able to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow-that work, blessed work. is within the grasp of all?
 Our Industrial Prosperity. The opportunities industrial with which the Thanksgiving day of 1908 has been blessed are the more to be appreciated be- cause they have for a dark background the financial panics of 1895 and 1896 and 1S97 In business O extensive and diversi- fled as ours there have been losses and perils and ominous disturbances, but we have survived them, and the general trend has been prosperous. They tell us that our laborers receive two and one-half times as much as those of England, three times as much as in France four times as much as in Germany, five times as much as in Russia and six times as much as in Italy. They tell Us that in some parts of Europe the peasants wear wooden shoes and that there are countries where the wives and mothers and daughters of farmers are some times hitched together as cattle to drag the blows through the fields. They tell us that in India a capitalist can hire clerk or a laborer for cents a day to work for fourteen long hours, and upon that cents per day the poor wretch has to board himself. He lives for the most part upon a daily handful of rice, and when a time of scarcity comes unless charity saves him he starves to death. But. though foreign labor may receive but a mere pittance for its services, some of us can remember. during the panic days of 1896. when hundreds and thousands of men here could not get work at any price. We remember when at night the floors of the Chicago station houses were crowded with a half starved, unkempt mass of humanity, striving in every way to get work and yet unable to find 1t. If you have not fathomed any of the deep miseries of those dark years then read a tragedy as intense and vivid as William Shakespeare ever wrote. Read the pathetic autobiography of Walter Au- gustus Wyckoff the Princeton professor who wrote the two books called Workers East" and "Workers West" In order to learn by personal experience the condi- tion of the unsklled worker. he left his professorial chair during those dark years and tried to support himself as a day la borer. He plodded through the streets of our great cities day in and day out. He pleaded for work. He pleaded with starv- ing eyes and parched tongue. He lived among human brutes who were once men but who had become embruted by hunger and were wild because they were starving and could not find work. o my brother, on this coming Thanksgiving day be grateful. Deep down in your heart be grateful that there is now work, plenty of work for all honest, capable men who are willing to work.
 It's been hard times for the country
 Under the stripes of red,
 Giving us ,lorns for roses
 Giving us stones for bread
 But they're singing a song of promise
 That rings from the wales and hills
 And we're hoping to hear the music
 Of the wheels of the grinding mills.
 It's been hard times for the country
 And never the fault of the soil;
 The seed still followed the sunlight
 And climbed to the seythe of to
 And the fields were piled with plenty,
 But still by the vales and hills
 There was never the song of the turning,
 The hum of the turning mills.
 Hard, hard times or the country,
 But darkness has flown to the past,
 Is the song of the seas and the mountains
 The answer of God at last?
 Yes, at last the day is breaking.
 And the lights on the hills and rills,
 And the firm. fair world is shaking
 With the throb of the moving mills.
 A Nation of Happy Homes.
 Another cause for national rejoicing: We are as a nation, a great collection of hap DIV homes As a people, we love our own firesides The name that is most honorej in our ears Is not that of general or prince or king or cardinal, but that of father and mother, husband, wife brother, sister, son, daughter grandchild. So honored are the domestic terminoogies among us that one of the greatest encomiums ever