Year: 1877

Courier-Journal.l


Movement among the working
men deserves to be encouraged. 1t
can have the serious opposition of
nobody. All of US, more or less,
are, or have been, workingmen; and
no reasonable public policy could,
or does, desire the workingmen to
sit, like bump on log, making no
progress. But what kind of move
ment? There's the rub. Hitherto
such movement as the laboring
classes have had has been mainly
useless to themselves, because it
has been violent and misled, leav-
ING them in the end, like Ramsey's
calf, sto suck the hind tit" There
isn't any sense or wit or good in
that.


The truth is, there is a great deal
of confusion in classifying the pop
ulation in city like this. Who are,
in reality, the laboring men? Is
not a Main street clerk, who gets
five hundred dollars year for ten
or twelve hours close application,
a laboring man? What is the diff
ference between the night editor of
the Courier-J ournal, the foreman
thereof, and any one of our steady
typos? Each is a working man,
and each makes just about enough
to keep body and soul together.
Suppose they struck for more wa
ges than the exising owners of the
paper could pay, and these latter
should be unable to supply their
places, what would be the result?
Why other owners would come in,
the present owners, impoverished,
would become as poor as the rest,
and, during much disturbance and
confusion, the business would go to
pot. To whose profit? Surely not
to that of the workingmen, each one
of whom-as he is capable, energet-
ic, industrious and aspiring-hopes
to mend his condition, become a
prooertv-owner himself and end his
davs, not as a laboring man in the
primitive sense in which all of us
are laboring men, but as an employ
er who has earned what he has by
the force of his will and the sweat
of his brow. Workingmen should
remember who it was that perpetra-
ted the wisdom of cutting the limb
off betwixt himself and the tree. 1t
was Moses Cox.


In a country like this nothing can
be more absurd than to .alk of the
sorrows and troubles of the work
ingman, distinct and apart from the
sorrows and troubles of society at
large. The laboring classes, man
for man, are a part of that society.
Each one has his vote, each his
ouantum of power according to his
capacity to use it. The ittest sur
vive and move forward in every
Craft. One poor devil gets to be a
section boss; another poor devil
gets to be n foreman; another poor
devil rises to be a superintendent;
another poor devil promotes him
self into a capitalist, and so on.
Success in life, advancement, is
work, well directed work, brain
power Joined to manly power. The
man who does not get on, high OF
low, college-bred or factory-bred
may charge it to himself. Nobody
else is to blame. The world is full
of examples of the humblest opera
tives-from George Stephenson, the
inventor of the locomotive, who was
an llliterate collier and rose to be ar
| English GrandCe, to Henry Wilson
\ poor shoemaker, who rose to b'
Vice President of the United State:
who began on nothing, or worse
than nothing, and rose to pre-eml
nence.


In this country all men start ever


in the race. The fool who happens


TO have inherited fortune is a


poor of, aye, poorer of, than tn


man OF purpose and talent, who ha