Montana news. [volume] (Lewistown, Mont.) 1904-191?, 1907-08-29
Labor D ay !; ,;''''' ''':s
Address
To the Working Men and Women of
Montana who Are the Back.
bone of Civilization

set aside as Labor Day. On that day
you have been in the habit or parad-
ing ,romping about and in general
way making merry. But has the day
had no other significance TO your
Rightly interpreted, it should mean
more than this. 1t should be day
set aside to commemorate a movement
for the upbuilding of the working
class.
Fellow workers, it behooves you to
remember that you are the backbone
of human life and civilization. Men
and women, who have toiled to spin
and weave the fabrics, the silks and
satins, make the clothing and shoes
and all the details of garb and fashion
of the wealthy, VINO build their houses,
their mansions, their castles; who till
the fields, harvest the minerals from
bowels of the earth, mann the great
trains and ships of our modern com.
merce, and, after deducting small
portion representing the bare necessi-
ties Of life, lay the balance of the pro-
ducts at the feet of those who never
spin, who never till, who never go
down into the bowels of the earth to
WELD pick, who never pull throttle
or, in short, who never utilize their
brain or Drawn in any useful avoca-
ton in life, men and women who do
these things, l say, are much too apt
to give themselves little credit for the
fact that they alone nave made it pos
sible for other human creatures to
shine.
God in his infinite goodness has Law
ished intelligence of the highest type
among the workers; for labor must in
elude those who work both with hand
and brain. Compare man who de-
signs great complicated modern in
dustrial machine, and 60 down the
scale of usefulness until you arrive at
the man who performs the almost en-
tirely physical operation of ligging
ditch, compare a man like any Of those
with an effgy of man like John ID.
Rockefeller who admits that for the
last eight or ten years that the only
useful thing he has done in the Stan
dard Oil company was to pocket some
where around twenty millions of dol
lars a year. And do you fondly mag
inc that Rockefeller, because he has
had the courage or Whatever you might
call it to let the public know his graft
in plain terms, is not representative
of his classf Do you imagine that
Carnegie sits up nights on his Scotch
estates working out the mathematical
problems in relation TO steel (speit
steal)f Well, we wonder. And has
not God in goodness given forms just
as graceful, faces just as beautiful and
dispositions just as lovely to many of
his children who are not inheritors or
accumulators Of millionsf Many and
many a time the Cinderella of the
kitchen would grace household with
far more becoming modesty, purity Of
spirit and q just appreciation Of the
bounties heaped in profusion by the
sometimes lavish hand of fortune, than
the misfit incumbent who affects the
peacock stride and vain-glorious
self-evidence Of a pseudo superiority.
We often notice some poor maiden in
calico, budding out Of that cheap raj
ment, shining in all the beauty Of a
God-given glory-a queen indeed
a queen whose natural charms could
never be duplicated by all the arts
known to French maid or a valet de
chambre. AS Gray says:
Full many gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves Of ocean
bare;
Full many flower is born to blush
unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert
air.
And 1t is said that beauty Is but
skin deep. The mere physical beauty
pictured by the painter and moulded
by tho sculptor may be but skin deep,
but the beauty of innocence and mo.
desty, the beauty Of affectionate wife.
hood and motherhood, the beauty Of
true friendship, of happy disposition
the beauty Of truth, all are attributes
that cast halo deeper and more last.
ing around womanhood than the mere
outward form Of Venus Of Milo. Yet
how often are these attributes dwarfed
or swept away entirely in the sordid