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SOCIALISM AND LABOR

AND OTHER ARGUMENTS

SOCIAL, POLITICAL, AND PATRIOTIC

BY

RT. REV. J. L. SPALDING

Btsfjop of

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1902

COPYRIGHT

A. C. McCLURG & Co.
1902

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1902

UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. SOCIALISM AND LABOR i

II. THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. . 33

III. ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? . 51

IV. CHARITY AND JUSTICE 69

V. WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION . 96

VI. EMOTION AND TRUTH ir;

VII. EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM 128

VIII. ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY 137

IX. CHURCH AND COUNTRY 149

X. LABOR AND CAPITAL 160

XL WORK AND LEISURE 172

XII. THE MYSTERY OF PAIN 178

XIII. AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE . . 189

XIV. ST. BEDE 201

SOCIALISM AND LABOR

AND OTHER ARGUMENTS.

I.

SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

' I SHE interest which all who think take in
•*• the laboring classes, whether it spring
from sympathy or fear, is a characteristic feat-
ure of the age.

Their condition seems to be the great anom-
aly in our otherwise progressive and brilliant
civilization. Whether when compared with the
lot of the slaves and serfs of former times that
of the modern laborer is fortunate, is not the
question. He is not placed in the midst of the
poverty and wretchedness of a rude and bar-
barous society, but in the midst of boundless
wealth and great refinement. He lives, too, in
a democratic age, in which all men profess to
believe in equality and liberty; in an age in
which the brotherhood of the race is proclaimed
by all the organs of opinion. He has a voice
in public affairs, and since laborers are the ma-
jority, he is, in theory at least, the sovereign.

2 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

They who govern profess to do everything by
the authority of the people, in their name and
for their welfare; and yet, if we are to accept
the opinions of the Socialists, the wage-takers,
who in the modern world are the vast multi-
tude, are practically shut out from participa-
tion in our intellectual and material inheritance.
They contend that the poor are, under the pres-
ent economic system, the victims of the rich,
just as in the ancient societies the weak were
the victims of the strong; so that wage-labor,
as actually constituted, differs in form rather
than in its essential results from the labor of
slaves and serfs. And even dispassionate ob-
servers think that the tendency of the present
system is to intensify rather than to diminish
the evils which do exist; and that we are mov-
ing towards a state of things in which the few
will own everything, and the many be hardly
more than their hired servants. In America,
they admit that sparse population and vast nat-
ural resources that as yet have hardly been
touched helped to conceal this fatal tendency,
which is best seen in the manufacturing and
commercial centres of Europe, where the capi-
talistic method of production has reduced
wage-earners to a condition of pauperism and
degradation which is the scandal of Christen-
dom and a menace to society.

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 3

The present condition of labor is the result
of gradually evolved processes, running through
centuries.

The failure of the attempt of Charlemagne
to organize the barbarous hordes which had
overspread Europe into a stable empire was
followed by an era of violence and lawless-
ness, of wars and invasions, from which so-
ciety sought refuge in the feudal system. The
strong man, as temporal or spiritual lord, was
at the top of the feudal hierarchy, and under
him the weak formed themselves into classes.
The serf labored a certain number of days for
himself, and a certain number for his lord. In
the towns the craftsmen were organized into
guilds which protected the interests of the mem-
bers. The mendicant poor were not numer-
ous, and their wants were provided for by the
bishops and the religious orders.

Then the growth of towns and the develop-
ment of trade and commerce brought wealth to
the burghers, who became a distinct class, while
domestic feuds and foreign wars, especially
the Crusades, weakened and impoverished the
knights and barons. The printing-press and
the use of gunpowder in war helped further to
undermine the feudal power, while the discov-
ery of America, the turning of the Cape of Good
Hope, and the Protestant revolution threw all

4 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

Europe into a ferment from which new social
conditions were evolved. The peasants who
had been driven from the land by the decay of
the great baronial houses, and the confiscation
of the property of the church, flocked into the
towns or became vagabonds. The poor became
so numerous that permanent provision had to
be made for them, and poor laws were conse-
quently devised. It was the contemplation of
their misery which caused Sir Thomas More
to write the following words, which sound as
though they had been taken from some modern
Socialist address :

" Therefore, I must say that, as I hope for
mercy, I can have no notion of all the other gov-
ernments that I see or know than that they are a
conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of man-
aging the public, only pursue their private ends,
and devise all the ways and arts they can find
out; first that they may without danger preserve
all that they have so ill acquired, and then that
they may engage the poor to toil and labor for
them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them
as much as they please. And if they can but pre-
vail to get these contrivances established by the
show of public authority, which is considered as
the representative of the whole people, then they
are accounted laws."

The master-workman who in the middle ages
employed but two or three apprentices and as

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 5

many journeymen, gave way to a class of capi-
talists, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the
church, by the treasures imported from America
and the Indies, and by the profits of the slave-
traffic, who at once prepared to take advantage
of the stimulus to industry given by the open-
ing of a vast world market. As late as the
middle of the last century, however, manufac-
turing was still carried on by masters who em-
ployed but a small number of hands, and had
but little capital invested in the business; and
the modern industrial era, with its factory sys-
tem, properly begins with our marvellous me-
chanical inventions and the use of steam as a
motive power. Machinery made production on
a large scale possible, and threw the whole busi-
ness into the hands of capitalists, while laborers
are left with nothing but their ability to work,
which they are forced to sell at whatever price
it will bring. The capitalist's one aim is to
amass wealth, and he buys human labor just as
he buys machinery or raw material, at the low-
est rate at which it can be obtained. It is either
denied that the question of wages has an ethical
aspect, or it is maintained that the competition
among capitalists themselves, which under the
present system of production is inevitable,
compels employers to ignore considerations of
equity. Hence it comes to be held that what-

6 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ever increases profits is right. The hours of
labor are prolonged, the sexes are intermingled,
children are put to work in factories, sanitary
laws are violated ; wares are made in excess of
demand; and, in consequence of the resulting
glut of the markets, wages are still further low-
ered or work is stopped; and the laborers,
whether they continue to work or whether they
strike, or are forced into idleness, are threat-
ened with physical and moral ruin. The fur-
ther development of the system is, in the opinion
of many observers, towards the concentration
of capital in immense joint-stock companies and
syndicates, whose directors, by buying compet-
ing concerns and also legislatures and judges,
make opposition impossible, and render the con-
dition of laborers still more hopeless.

This brief sketch of the history and nature
of industrialism is sufficient to account for the
existence of the various socialistic theories and
movements of the present day. The word So-
cialism, which first came into use in the early
part of the nineteenth century, stands rather for
a tendency than for a definite body of principles
and methods, and this tendency is one of which
men of very different and even opposite opin-
ions approve: and a Socialist may be a theist
or an atheist, a spiritualist or a materialist, a
Christian or an agnostic. The general impli-

SOCIALISM AND LABOR, f

cation is the need of greater equality in the con-
dition of human beings. The aim, therefore,
is to bring about a social arrangement in which
all will receive a fair share of the good things
of life ; and the best way to secure this, Social-
ists commonly think, is to render the will of
the individual more completely subordinate to
that of the community. The methods by which
this may be accomplished are not necessarily
violent or revolutionary. In the opinion of
many serious writers, Socialism is the logical
outcome of tendencies which are held to pre-
vail throughout the civilized world. Our views
of liberty, equality, and fraternity, they say,
must necessarily lead not merely to the reign
of the people, to a universal democracy, but
must embody themselves in a State which will
own both land and capital, and will control
both production and distribution; for only in
this way can all be made free and equal, and
the brotherhood of the race become something
better than ironical cant. Already the State
has widened its sphere of action. It has passed
laws to regulate industry, it has taken charge
of education, and there are many indications
that the tendency is to assume that whatever
concerns the health, happiness, and morals of
the people should be subject to State control.
The massing of capital in great corporations is

8 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the beginning of a movement, it is thought,
which will end in the transference of all capital
to the one sole corporate State. The different
labor unions and cooperative societies are re-
garded as schools in which the working classes
are receiving the education needed to prepare
them for the task of universal intelligent co-
operation. The Socialists hold, also, that the
moral progress of the modern world points in
the same direction. There is a wider sym-
pathy, a new sense of justice, a desire to come
to the help of the weak and wronged, a con-
sciousness of the responsibility, not of individ-
uals alone but of society, which must lead to
a readjustment of the social order in accord-
ance with the sentiments of the more humane
temper which is characteristic of our age. And
is not all this, in part at least, a result of the
teaching and example of Christ himself, who
came to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal
the infirm and to bring relief to the overbur-
dened, and who thus gave the impulse which
has finally developed into our humanitarian
faith, hope, and love? A large number of So-
cialists, it is true, are atheists and material-
ists, but the earnest desire to discover some
means whereby justice may be done the people,
whereby they may be relieved from their pov-
erty and misery, and the resulting vice and

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 9

crime, is in intimate harmony with the gentle
and loving spirit of Him who passed no sor-
row by.

From the general principle that it is the duty
of the rich and strong to use at least part of
their wealth and strength in the service of their
fellow-men, and first of all in the service of
the poor and helpless, no good or wise man
will dissent. Here, then, is a common ground
whereon all, whatever their philosophic and
religious opinions and beliefs may be, can meet.
Disagreement arises only when we come to dis-
cuss how this may best be done. If, however,
the discussion is to be useful, it is necessary
that we first get a true view of the condition of
the classes to whose relief we wish to come.

Are the evils from which they suffer really
as great and desperate as the Socialist agi-
tators would have us believe? Are laborers
worse paid, worse fed, worse clothed, and worse
housed than, for instance, in the early part of
the nineteenth century ? Do they labor a greater
number of hours, and is their work more severe
and exhausting now than then?

Is the tendency of present conditions to make
them unintelligent, brutal, and reckless? Is the
actual economic system an organization of the
ruling classes to keep the laborers in poverty
and permanent subjection? Is it a fact, in a

IO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

word, that we are drifting towards a state of
things in which the few shall own everything
and the many nothing?

If these questions are to receive an affirma-
tive answer, then the method of production
by private competitive capital should be con-
demned, for it not only, in this case, works
injustice to large multitudes, but must, if per-
mitted to continue in operation, finally lead to
social ruin. It is easily intelligible that those
who believe that private capitalism is essentially
vicious, should look to Socialism as a ground
for hope, and that they should find in the sup-
posed tendencies of the present economic de-
velopments a reason for thinking that the reign
of individualism is nearing its end.

The democracy, upon which light is stream-
ing from many sources, which all the forces
and struggles of society are helping to organize
more thoroughly, and which is rapidly becom-
ing conscious of its superior power, could not
be expected to accept as permanent a system
which makes of the mass of the people a herd
of proletarians, dependent upon uncertain wage-
labor. Already, under democratic influence,
the State has assumed functions formerly per-
formed by individuals, families, and minor
communities, and under the pressure of the
growing sense of the responsibility of society

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 1 1

for the welfare of all its members, it tends to
widen the sphere of its activity and to take
greater control of the lives of citizens.

And as it always happens when the stream
of tendency sets strongly in a given direction,
those who oppose not less than those who favor
hasten the coming of the new order. Events,
in fact, solve the great problems, and our dis-
cussions are but the foam that crests the waves.
Thus, it is conceivable that the efforts of com-
petitive capital to save itself by forming colos-
sal companies and syndicates, may be found in
the end to facilitate the transference of the
whole to the collective management of society.

The era of the small producer, it is plain,
has passed away. Indeed, the greatest suf-
ferers among laborers, at present, are the vic-
tims of what is known as the Sweating System,
which is an unhealthy survival of the method
of domestic production. If the choice, then, is
between the massing of capital in a few hands
and its complete control by the State, there can
be little doubt as to what the final decision
will be.

But the question whether the Socialist view
of the actual condition of labor and of the ten-
dencies of the present economic order, is the
true view, still remains to be answered.

There are reasons which should lead us to

12 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

look upon the assertions of the Socialist agita-
tors with a certain distrust. The temper of re-
formers is enthusiastic, and hence they almost
inevitably exaggerate the evils they seek to
correct. The crowd is fond of reckless state-
ment, and its leaders not unfrequently win and
hold their preeminence by the boldness with
which they deal in passionate rhetoric. It is
well known, too, that when patients begin to
improve they become irritable; and this is true
also of suffering bodies of men. The hopeless
become resigned. The negro slaves began and
ended the day's work to the sound of their own
melodies; and when women were treated like
slaves the indignities they suffered called forth
no clamorous protests. The discontent and agi-
tation which now exist among the working
classes are not, then, a proof that their condi-
tion is altogether evil or that it is growing
worse, while the testimony of the leaders in
the labor-movements is, for the reasons I have
given, open to suspicion.

No enlightened mind doubts the superiority
of our civilization to that of all preceding cen-
turies, and yet when was there ever so much
fault-finding as now with the evils and short-
comings of political, social, and domestic life?

We have even a literature which proclaims
that life itself is worthless; and there are evi-

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 13

dently a number of readers who are interested
in arguments which go to show that marriage,
free institutions, popular education, civiliza-
tion, and Christianity have all broken down
and failed to bring the good they promised
and which the human heart craves.

Our gains seem to have served only to make
us more conscious of what we still lack, and
in the light of our intellectual, moral, and ma-
terial progress we easily persuade ourselves that
what has been achieved is little more than the
promise of better things to be. Then our im-
plements of almost magical power and delicacy,
and the ease and rapidity with which by their
aid we are able to overcome mere physical
obstacles, have made us impatient. We rebel
against the teaching which inculcates the wis-
dom of making haste slowly, and we imagine
that by teaching people to read and write, and
by proper legislative enactments, we may do
away with ignorance, poverty, and crime as
easily as we drain swamps or recover ex-
hausted soil. In this our temper is unphilo-
sophic and misleading. Social development
depends upon laws which legislation can modify
only to a limited extent, and a prerequisite to
all effective and desirable social transforma-
tions is a corresponding change in the character
of both the masses and their rulers and em-

14 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ployers. Now, alterations in the character of
a people are the result of slow processes, car-
ried on through successive generations, and
hence it is a mistake to suppose that a change
in the machinery of government will suddenly
produce an equivalent change in the thought
and conduct of men. The futility of mere
paper constitutions has been proven by experi-
ments which leave no room for doubt. Mexico,
for example, has had republican institutions
since the early part of this century, but the
condition of the masses of its people is little
better than was that of the slaves in the South-
ern States.

Putting aside, then, as impracticable all
schemes for bringing on an era of universal
comfort and contentment by mechanical changes
in the constitution of society, let us strive to
get a clear view of the results and tendencies
of the actually existing system of competitive
capitalistic production.

In the first place, it is a fact that, neither in
Europe nor in the United States, is there a
chasm between the enormously rich and the
very poor, but there is a gradation of posses-
sion from the beggar to the great capitalist.
Most of what is said about the poverty and
misery of the working class is applicable only
to what has been called the social residuum,

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 15

which may be compared to the stragglers and
camp-followers of an army; and the social
gulf is not between rich men and steady, thrifty
laborers, but rather between these latter and the
crowd of loafers and criminals. That the cause
of this disparity of condition is moral rather
than economic, whoever observes may see; and
this fact gives emphasis to the great truth that
all real amelioration in the lot of human beings
depends on religious, moral, and intellectual
conditions. Money does not make a miser rich
nor its lack a true man poor. The most com-
petent authorities, basing their opinion upon
exhaustive statistical study and careful obser-
vation, hold that the condition of laborers
during the industrial period has been one of
gradual improvement. In England, from 1688
to 1800, there was an increase of less than fifty
per cent in the number of laborers, and an in-
crease of six hundred and ten per cent in their
total earnings; and from 1800 to 1883 workers
increased a little over four hundred per cent
and their income about six hundred per cent.
Wages have risen both in amount and in pur-
chasing power. The hours of labor have be-
come fewer and the rate of mortality has
decreased. " Taken as a whole," says Profes-
sor Levi, who is a recognized authority on
questions of statistics, " the working classes of

1 6 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the United Kingdom may be said to be stronger
in physique, better educated, with more time at
their command, in the enjoyment of greater
political rights, in a more healthful relation
towards their employers, receiving higher wages
and better able to effect some savings, in 1884
than they were in 1857." And in England the
conditions are less favorable to the laboring
classes than in some other countries, far less
favorable than they are in our own. It is
densely populated ; it imports much of its food ;
nearly all the land is owned by a few thousand
families; its workmen have been crippled and
dwarfed by laws made in the interest of em-
ployers; and production and distribution are
regulated according to the principles of free
trade, which we here in America, at least, are
taught to believe has a tendency to lower
wages.

In the United States, it is plain, there is no
gulf between the very rich and the very poor,
but a gradation of widely distributed wealth.
More than eight million families are land-
owners, and of the thirteen million families
among whom the wealth of the country is di-
vided, eleven million families are said to belong
to the wage-earning class. We have, indeed, a
few enormously rich men, but it will be found
difficult to hold these great fortunes together,

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. \J

and if plutocrats should persist in abusing
the power which money gives, the people will
know how to protect themselves against the
tyrants.

If private property is not a crime, and that
it is not even radical Socialists admit, then
wealth however great, if it be honestly acquired
and justly used, must be respected. Much of
the material progress of our country is due to
the energy and foresight of men who, if they
have grown rich themselves, have made pos-
sible the comfortable and independent exist-
ence of thousands. Diatribes against wealthy
men oftener spring from unworthy passions
than from any sense of wrongs inflicted by
them. Duties and responsibilities are personal,
and the poor are bound not less than the rich
to do what they are able to promote the com-
mon welfare. The obligation of service is uni-
versal, and to encourage jealousy and hatred
of the rich among the poor is to do harm to
the interests and character of both. If the rich
are sometimes selfish and heartless, they are
quite as often generous and helpful. Like other
men, they are conscious of the irresistible lean-
ing of human nature to the side of justice, and
if a sort of all-embracing good-will is charac-
teristic of Americans, we may hope that all
efforts to cause class-hatred to prevail here will

1 8 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

prove futile. At all events, the condition of
laborers under the regime of competitive pro-
duction, whatever grievances they still may
have, are not so desperate as to make us will-
ing to run the risk of putting in jeopardy the
two things we have learned to value the most
— Liberty and Individuality.

Many of our social arrangements are doubt-
less provisional only. In various ways our age
is transitional, and such an age is necessarily
one of exceptional hardship for the weak; but
in an era of change the last thing the wise will
counsel is the rushing into visionary and un-
tried schemes of reform; and such a scheme,
where there is question of a whole people, the
New Socialism certainly is. In small commu-
nities even the Socialist theory has been found
impracticable except where celibacy has been
made a condition of membership. The social
order is an organism infinitely complex, the
outcome of many forces, whose action and in-
teraction, beginning in the obscure and mysteri-
ous regions where life and mind first manifest
themselves, have been going on for unnum-
bered ages; and it has so intertwined itself
with man's very nature that we may say he is
what he is in virtue of the society of which he
is the product. By it our language, our litera-
ture, our laws, and much of our religion have

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. IQ

been developed. To make desirable, or possible
even, a radical change in this order, such as
that implied by Socialism, our nature itself
would have to become other. Until this changes,
man will continue to believe that he has the
right to own property, and he will continue to
look upon the possession of a home and of
other things whereby an independent existence
for himself and his wife and children is secured,
as among the chief boons of life. The owner
of the poorest cabin would not barter it for the
promises of the Socialist paradise. The pas-
sion for independence, for liberty, which, in-
born in our portion, at least, of the Aryan race,
has been strengthened and intensified by cen-
turies of heroic struggles, makes us averse to
social schemes which, if practical at all, can
succeed only by controlling and regulating all
the affairs of life, by turning the whole nation
into an industrial army, where each one is under
orders to keep the place and do the duties as-
signed him. There is nothing we so much dis-
like as interference — we who think it better
to be insulted than to have even advice prof-
fered. In America we know our politicians too
well to be able to believe that captains of in-
dustry, under the control of a supreme council,
to whom power vastly greater than that which
politicians and bosses have ever exercised would

2O SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

necessarily be given in a Socialist government,
could safely or wisely be entrusted with the
management of all our nearest and dearest
concerns.

If, indeed, the root-principle of the New
Socialism, as set forth by Marx, and before
him by Ricardo, — that labor is the sole source
of value, and that therefore capital is robbery,
— were true, it would certainly be a powerful
argument against the existing economic order,
and would drive honest men to look with ap-
proval upon projects to substitute in its place
some method of production and distribution
which would not be in open conflict with the
current ideas of morality. Neither religion nor
humanity permits us to acquiesce in a system
of organized plunder, and if this is what com-
petitive capitalism is, the transformation of
society, by revolution if need be, is an end for
which all good men might well labor. If we
assume, with the school of Ricardo, that all
wealth, all exchange value, is the result exclu-
sively of labor, then to the laborers all wealth
rightfully belongs, and capitalists have acquired
what they possess by the spoliation of the true
owners; and the collectivism of Marx, who
proposes to turn all land and capital over to the
State, which undertakes to pay every one the
full worth of his work, is a logical development.

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 21

Political economists, however, now generally
agree in holding that the theory of Ricardo,
which makes labor the only source of value, is
untenable; for capital, which is required for
production, must be accepted as a factor in de-
termining values, and its owner therefore is
entitled to a fair reward for the service his
capital renders. It may be said that capital
itself is the result of labor, but it must be ad-
mitted that it is also the result of abstinence
from consumption. While one man consumes
the equivalent of his entire work, another con-
sumes but part, and thus gradually accumulates
a capital, which he invests in some machine,
for instance, and thereby acquires a right to
whatever value the machine may add to manu-
factured products. His machine has become
his fellow-laborer, and if large and perfect
enough, will do the work of many men. What
right can the State have to take from him this
labor-saving instrument, which he has invented
or paid for with money honestly earned?

The fallacy of the Socialist assumption lies in
attributing to labor a value of its own, inde-
pendently of the worth of its product. The
labor spent in doing useless things has no value ;
at least, no social value. He who makes what
nobody wants has his labor for his pains. The
question is not what amount of labor an object

22 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

has cost, but what service can it render. A
man may devote years to learning to walk the
tight-rope, but if I do not care for such attain-
ments and exhibitions, I will not pay to see
him perform. Values, then, cannot be esti-
mated in terms of labor, which is nevertheless
the task the Socialists have set themselves.
How shall we determine the worth of the labor
expended in perfecting a plan such as that which
led Columbus to discover America? What is
the worth of Newton's labor in evolving the
theory of gravitation, of Shakspere's in writing
" Hamlet/' of Wagner's in composing " Parsi-
fal," of Gutenberg's in making his type, or of
Watt's in building his steam-engine? Without
the genius of inventors and discoverers, without
the foresight and enterprise of investors and
capitalists, there would be little for laborers to
do, and society would drift into general poverty.
Far, then, from being the sole source of value,
labor, to have worth, must be provided with the
raw materials and forces of nature; must be
stimulated and directed by intelligence, and must
produce things which human beings want; and
capital, which is not so much the result of labor
as of abstinence from consumption, which leaves
a surplus of the labor product to be invested in
profit-bearing enterprises, necessarily shares also
in the determination of values. The present

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 2$

economical system, then, is not, as Socialists
affirm, organized injustice, though it must be
admitted that it often leads to wrongs which
cripple the lives of multitudes, and produce an
incalculable amount of physical and moral evil.
Indeed, the present inequalities in the distri-
bution of wealth affect the moral sense so
painfully that we cannot look upon them as
irremovable. We may not, however, trample
on rights to secure greater distributive justice,
or approve of schemes which if they promise
a greater abundance of material things to the
poor, would lead to a general enfeeblement
and lowering of human life. In a Socialist
State, in which the universal ideal is that of
physical well-being and comfort, the sublimer
moods which make saints, heroes, and men of
genius possible would no longer be called forth.
If all should receive the same reward, whatever
their labor, spontaneity would come to an end
and progress cease, and such an equality would
finally come to be a universal equality in indo-
lence, poverty, and low thinking; while from
an ethical point of view, it would seem to be
unjust that the same reward should be given
to every kind of labor.

If different rewards are given for different
kinds of work, the practical difficulties in d
mining the social value of the different

24 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

of labor appear to be insuperable, especially
when we consider that in the Socialist State
there are to be no special payments, no money
to serve as a universal standard of value. What
shall be the basis of comparison for fixing the
relative value of the work of a carpenter, a
nurse-maid, a schoolmaster, and a minister of
religion? If it be said that each shall receive
according to the amount and social utility of his
or her productive labor, how is this rule to be
applied? Every product is the result of the
operation of many forces, natural, mechanical,
and human, and to decide what part of the value
is due to the labor of any special workman is
extremely difficult, if not impossible. If we
accept the formula, " To each in proportion to
the number of hours of his work," which is said
to be in the strictest sense the theoretical basis
of Socialism, then skilled and unskilled labor
will be paid alike; and since the acquirement of
skill is the result of long and painful processes,
who would take infinite pains when by so doing
he would gain nothing? And how shall we
apply this time-measure to agricultural labor,
to domestic service, to woman's work in the
family, where she has at once the offices of
wife, mother, nurse, and housekeeper? If
skilled labor receives a greater reward than
the unskilled the principle of equality is aban-

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 2$

doned, while the relative values of the two kinds
of labor must be arbitrarily assumed.

Not only, then, is the Socialist theory of the
source of value unsatisfactory, but the methods
by which it is proposed to bring about a more
equal distribution of wealth are either imprac-
ticable or, if applied, would lead to greater evils
than those from which we actually suffer.
There would, indeed, have to be a radical change
in man's moral nature before it would be safe
to entrust to any body of men such power as
the managers of the Socialist State would in-
evitably acquire. It is with power as with
money — those who love it never have enough ;
and in fact if the whole economic management
of society, together with the education of the
young, were turned over to a special governing
and directing class, its power would necessarily
have to be almost unlimited. The whole people
would be marshalled like an army, and unques-
tioning obedience would be demanded and en-
forced. The right of the people to elect their
officers gives no assurance that their favorites
will be worthy or capable. What universal suf-
frage does to bring the best and the wisest into
power is now well known. The policy and the
candidates of the people are the policy and the
candidates of wire-pullers and bosses. They
who should once get hold of the vast and com-

26 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

plex machinery by which it is proposed to gov-
ern the Socialist State would most probably
remain in power; and when we reflect that all
the printing-presses of the country would be
under their control, and that there would be no
reason for the existence of political parties, it
is difficult to see how they could be driven from
office. The selfishness which, under the regime
of competitive capitalism, makes so many em-
ployers of labor heartless and tyrannical, would
assert itself also in the new order ; for a change
of government is like a change of clothes, it
leaves the man what he was. It is incredible
that the perversity of human passion may be
corrected by mechanical appliances. Its source
lies within, where lie also the aids to noble life;
and until there is a universal change of heart, a
social theory which assumes that every man
loves all men as much as he loves himself is
Utopian. Observant minds belonging to differ-
ent schools of thought agree in holding that
in the modern world egotism is more intense
than it was in the middle ages, at least so far as
there is question of the love of money, which
now is the form all our selfish passions naturally
take; for money means power, it means self-
indulgence, it means the satisfaction of vanity,
it means honor and place. Mere intellectual
training is powerless to correct this vice or to

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 2/

bring about any great moral improvement. It
tends to change the form of vice rather than to
make us virtuous ; or, if we should take a more
hopeful view of what secular education is able
to do, the time is certainly distant when the
masses can be called educated, in any real sense
of the word.

Though we cannot accept the fundamental
principles of Socialism or Collectivism as true,
and though we are persuaded that society cannot
successfully be established upon them as a basis,
there are none the less bonds of sympathy be-
tween us and the Socialists. The desire, which
in the case of many of them is doubtless earnest
and sincere, to come to the relief of the poor, to
find some means by which their lot may be made
less miserable, springs from a divine impulse.
It is Christian and human; and the anti-reli-
gious spirit of modern Socialism comes from an
unphilosophic and unhistoric view of the forces
which create civilization and give promise of a
better future. Atheism and materialism fatally
strengthen and intensify man's selfish passions,
by merging life's whole significance and worth
into the present transitory existence. If there
is no order of absolute truth and right, no future
for the individual, then pleasure is the chief
good, and both instinct and reason impel to
indulgence and to the overthrow of society, if

28 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

society makes the enjoyment of life impossible.
Hence the socialism of materialists and atheists
logically leads to anarchy. Nothing could be
more sad than that the multitude should be
driven to look for deliverance from their wrongs
and sorrows to leaders who deny God, and
man's kinship with the infinitely true and per-
fect One; who tell them that there is no living
heavenly Father, but only an unconscious Earth-
Mother, on whose senseless body Life and Death
play their horrid farce. The grasping avarice
and heartless methods of employers and capital-
ists, who generally profess to be Christians, are
arguments against religion which the preachers
of atheism find effective in addressing the vic-
tims of our present economic system ; while the
decay of faith has greatly diminished the per-
suasive force of appeals in favor of resigna-
tion and submission. Those who lose faith
and hope and love, lose patience too; and it is
futile to preach the sacredness of wealth to the
poor when their miserable lives are the sad
witnesses to the immorality of the means by
which it is acquired.

Who can read the history of rack-renting in
Ireland, or the story of the Sweating System in
the " Bitter Cry of Outcast London," with-
out feeling that a social order which makes
such things possible ought to be changed or
destroyed ?

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 2$

Who can consider the mental, moral, and
physical state of certain classes of emigrants
who land upon our shores by the thousand, with-
out asking ourselves whether the countries from
which these people come are civilized and Chris-
tian? Has the passion for humanity which
Christ came to inspire, and which was a living
principle in his early followers, died in Chris-
tian Europe ? There the very poor certainly are
excluded from our spiritual and material inheri-
tance, and it would seem that the standing ar-
mies which are kept up by the various powers
are maintained rather for the purpose of holding
the impoverished masses in subjection than for
defence against foreign aggression. It is as
though the ruling classes in Europe had entered
into a conspiracy to foment national jealousy
and hatred, that they may have a pretext for
keeping intact their military organizations,
which, while they overawe the people, help to
reduce them to still greater poverty and wretch-
edness. There Socialism may have a meaning,
and since there are never wanting with us people
who think it the proper thing to take whatever
infection may prevail in Europe, it was inevi-
table that certain dilettants and idiosyncratics
should seek to persuade us that America too
ought to have its Socialism. We began, how-
ever, as the most completely individualist people

30 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

of which history makes record, and our experi-
ence has not tended to weaken our faith in the
power of freedom, intelligence, and industry to
solve the great social problems. Should our
plutocrats, instead of making themselves public
benefactors, become public malefactors, a mod-
ification in the laws of inheritance, together
with other legal measures which would readily
suggest themselves, would be sufficient to abate
the nuisance. For the rest, we are convinced
that the great aim should be not to provide
for all men, but to train and educate all men
to take care of themselves. The tendency of
good government is to make government less
necessary, and the influence of the religion of
Christ not only creates purer morals and sym-
pathies, but it also mitigates the conflict between
the Church and the world.

As men become more enlightened and human,
they perceive that the aims of the best civil
government are not really distinct from those
of true religion. Man's salvation here and
hereafter is the end for which all society exists,
and hence it is the duty both of the Church and
the State to labor for freedom, knowledge, and
righteousness; in other words, for humanity.
The nineteen centuries which have passed since
Christ was born have put new forces into our
hands, which, if we but use them with wisdom

SOCIALISM AND LABOR. 3!

and in the spirit of Christian love, may teach
that the Saviour came not to redeem the indi-
vidual alone, but to transform society. We
have at our disposal the vast treasure of science,
which is ever increasing, and which, if we but
have understanding and a heart, may be made
to bless alike the rich and the poor with greater
knowledge of the causes of physical evil, of
hygienic and sanitary laws, which shall become
more and more able to forestall disease. We
shall make education universal, but we shall
educate with a view to health of body and soul
quite as much, at least, as with a view to sharpen
the mental faculties. We shall gradually come
to understand that there is no conflict between
religion and science, but that both are mani-
festations of God's wisdom and love, meant to
console, strengthen, and save man. The min-
ister of religion will love knowledge and the
man of science will be reverent and devout.
When cooperation becomes universal not among
laborers alone, but when the men of wealth
and the men of toil, the men of religion and
the men of science, the spiritual guides and
the temporal rulers, all unite for the common
good of the whole people, a new era will dawn.
All will then recognize that intelligence and
morality are the basis of human life; and that
as right intelligence leads to faith in God, so is

32 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

that faith the fountain-head of the generous and
fervid moods which make righteousness pre-
vail. We shall understand more thoroughly
that the causes of vice and crime are the chief
causes also of poverty and all other social evils.

And while this truer view will weaken con-
fidence in the mechanical appliances and patent
remedies of reformers and empirics, it will
confirm our faith in the efficacy of pure religion,
of right education, and of whatever else nour-
ishes and strengthens the faculties within.

Then shall a more perfect society grow
round us — a society complex and various, yet
free and orderly, rich in art, vocal in literature,
strong in sympathy, victorious through the
power of holiness and love.

II.

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT.

Tj^ENELON spoke from his generous heart
•*• when he said, " I love my family more
than myself, my country more than my family,
and the whole world more than my country.'*
Unfortunately, the converse of this is true of
men in general, who love themselves first, their
families next, then their country, and the whole
world hardly at all. Hence the inefficacy of
arguments intended to show that abuses in
which an age takes delight will bring harm to
posterity. Those who prefer the lower to the
higher self will make no sacrifices for the good
of their descendants, as one who is indifferent
to the living will surely be unmindful of the
dead and the unborn. We care nothing for
ancestors who are a few degrees removed from
us, unless their lives furnish food to our vanity,
and it is not probable that any man is made
unhappy by pondering on the destiny that
may await his great-grandchildren. Declaimers
against the evils of the age, who predict the
3

34 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

not distant downfall of the State or of civili-
zation, alarm no one, because few have faith in
such forebodings, and fewer still care to trouble
themselves about the condition of mankind a
hundred years hence. The masses of Euro-
peans and Americans are little concerned for
the welfare of the populations of Africa and
eastern Asia; they are too far away. And
time separates even more than space.

Here in America, to within a quite recent
date, we have been so wholly under the influ-
ence of unreasoning optimism and youthful
self-complacency, that prophets of evil have
appeared to us to be simply men of unsound
mind. As a people we have been, and probably
still are, believers in the fundamental error that
denies the original taint in man's nature; and
hence we are persuaded that, in a society like
ours, where the restraints, oppressions, and in-
justices of past ages have ceased to exist, the
tendency to higher modes of thought and con-
duct, to purer and worthier life, is as irresistible
as the laws of nature. The enthusiasm with
which men hailed the advent of the rule of the
people, and the promise of boundless good to
the race with which the new order of things
was ushered in, together with a knowledge of
the terrible and indescribable evils that unjust
laws and tyrannical governments have brought

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 35

upon mankind, were sufficient to blind them to
the common facts of personal experience, and
to hide from philosophers a truth known to
every mother and every nurse, that man is born
not only weak and ignorant, but with such a
tendency to what is vicious that each genera-
tion of children, if left to the impulse of their
will, would inevitably relapse into barbarism.

The bent of human nature is toward what
is beneath, and the natural course of society
is downward. If we consider the history of
our race, we find emergence from barbarism
to be the fortunate lot of exceptional people,
who by some divine impulse are borne upward,
and, having reached a certain height of civili-
zation, hasten to descend, not, indeed, along
the rugged paths of heroic daring and self-
denial by which they mounted the summit, but
in the open and easy way of sensual delights.
Among the most privileged nations, only the
smallest number attain to excellence, and their
high endowments, whether moral or intellec-
tual, depend upon unceasing effort. The great
body of their fellow-countrymen are held to be
civilized on account of their association with
these better specimens of the race, just as a
vulgar man is called noble because he descends
from ancestors who are believed to have been
really so. Few men love the best, or seek the

36 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

highest, or strive to shape their lives upon the
model of exalted ideals; and the truly excel-
lent, whether in conduct, literature, or art, is
never popular. The crowd neither follow in
the footsteps of the noblest characters, nor read
the best books, nor love the master-works of
genius. It may, indeed, be said to be a law of
human nature that attraction from below is
stronger than attraction from above. The mul-
titude live in the senses, not in the soul; and
the life of the senses is contact with material
objects. Hence the fatal tendency to superficial
views of life and to low notions of conduct.
How long and patiently must not a man labor
to bring his natural endowments to some kind
of perfection? And the moment he ceases to
toil marks the beginning of degeneracy. But
this tireless struggle is hard to weak nature,
and the multitudes yield to the current, and
are carried farther and farther away from the
heights their young eyes looked up to with
hope, all aglow with the light of ideal worlds.
The same law prevails in families. But very
few rise to eminence, and they, having pro-
duced two or three men of mark, break up and
are lost in obscurity.

It is difficult to understand why we should
imagine that there is in human nature a prin-
ciple of indefinite progress. There is, indeed,

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 37

in the world to-day more knowledge than there
has ever been, more wealth, more comfort, more
liberty; but, apart from the fact that all this is
in great measure attributable to the influence of
Christianity, which was accepted as a super-
natural faith, supplying supernatural motives
and helps, the essential quality of human life
lies elsewhere than in knowledge, wealth, com-
fort, and liberty. Men and nations fail, not for
lack of these, but for lack of moral strength.
Conduct, to use a current phrase, is three-
fourths or four-fifths of human life; and man
is to such an extent a moral being that failure
in conduct is essential, hopeless failure. The
sense of life, of its goodness, its joyousness, its
inestimable worth, springs from right-doing,
not from fine thinking, or the enjoyment of
political freedom, or the possession of wealth.
Pure hearts are glad, and they who tread the
paths of duty find God's world sweet. This is
not a theory, but a truth that all men may
verify by actual experiment, and to it the un-
varying testimony of the past bears witness.
That moral life is joy, peace, gladness, content-
ment, fullness of life, is the teaching of all the
greatest thinkers of the world; and it is also
the actual experience of every human being
who walks obedient to the voice of God's stern
daughter, Duty. This is not to say that right-

38 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

doing necessarily makes people happy, but that
it gives them a deeper sense of the value of life
and of its sacredness, a better insight into the
goodness of all things, a knowledge that evil
is accidental, and in no way able to deprive
man of the blessedness that comes of being in
conscious harmony with the eternal laws of
God's universe. To be morally right is to be
absolutely right, because the infinite truth of
what is, is more nearly revealed to the con-
science than to the intellect; and the more
closely we conform to the law within, the more
God-like does the whole world external to
ourselves grow to be. In this way moral ex-
cellence, awakening the deep and boundless
harmonies that sleep within the soul, brings us
near to the heart of love and creates faith in
immortal life. When character is the result of
conformity with eternal laws, we feel that this
union is everlastingly true, good, and fair; and
hence that our real self belongs to an order
of things that is imperishable. Therefore the
good are strong, and so, happy, since weak-
ness is misery.

Just as right-doing leads to completeness of
life and to belief in life everlasting, so wrong-
doing begets a dis-esteem of life and unbelief
in man's God-like destiny. " Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die," are the words of

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 39

those who fail in conduct. The more we live
in the senses, the less becomes our faith in the
value and duration of life. Hence the reckless-
ness of those who have thrown aside moral re-
straint, and the fatal facility with which they
take their own and others' lives. Thought, to
be true and healthful, must complete itself in
act. It is not, therefore, its own end, but aims
at something beyond. In the same way faith,
hope, and love tend to action, to morality, to
righteousness; and thus from all sides the truth
is borne in upon us that the test of human worth
is to be found in character, and not in a culti-
vated mind, or a brilliant imagination, or in
beauty of body, and much less, of course, in
things that are purely material, as money and
machinery. Progress, then, is not possible
where there is moral decadence, since conduct
is three-fourths of life, and character the real
test of man's worth. The literary excellence
and refined civilization of the age of Augustus
and of the age of Louis XIV. were not only
wholly powerless to arrest the decay of Roman
and French society, but served rather to hasten
its dissolution; and history testifies to the truth
that the possession of wealth destroys the vir-
tues by which it is created.

If we turn to our own country, and to what,
unfortunately, we must still call an experiment,

40 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

to determine whether the best possible kind of
government may become an enduring fact, we
cannot fail to perceive that, to be able to form
an enlightened opinion as to the success or fail-
ure of this noblest effort at self-government
ever made by mankind, the truth that I have
here sought to develop must be borne in mind.
Human worth is moral worth; man's proper
measure is character; conduct is three-fourths
of life; right-doing brings the deepest and most
lasting content and gladness to the heart of
man, and thus creates a sense of completeness
and harmony that nothing else can give.
Righteousness is strength. As the physical
forces of the boundless universe work together
in every drop of water to give and maintain
its form and nature, so the infinite power that
makes goodness the best, cooperates with every
man who obeys conscience, to uphold and con-
firm his heart. Goodness of life tends to length
of days, to health, to success. Man lives by
faith, hope, and love; and fidelity to conscience
keeps him close to the clear-flowing fountain-
head of faith, hope, and love. To think finely
is well; to dream nobly is also good; and to
look with a glad heart upon the beauties of the
universe gives delight; but not in doing any
of these things, but in doing right, lies the
worth and goodness of life. And this great

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 41

principle affects families and nations as it af-
fects individuals. Conduct leads a whole people
along the rugged and difficult ascent of prog-
ress; and, without it, neither knowledge, nor
wealth, nor numbers, nor machinery, nor fer-
tile soil, nor healthful climate, nor all these
together, with whatever else there may be that
is good and helpful, can save them from deca-
dence and ruin. Whether alone or one of a
multitude, man fails not for lack of anything
else than virtue.

That a democratic form of government ought
to be the best, the proverb, " If you wish a thing
done, do it yourself," would seem sufficiently to
prove. Again : Since the end of government is
to promote the welfare of all the governed, and
since each man is more than any one else inter-
ested in his own behalf, and since interest in a
subject or a cause awakens attention and be-
gets intelligence in matters therewith connected,
it would seem to follow that to give to all men
a due degree of influence in the government is
the surest way to promote the welfare of all.
And this conclusion gains weight when we re-
flect that whoever hopes more from his own
industry and merit than from fortune and favor
is a natural republican. On the other hand,
there seems to be no doubt that the government
of the best men is really the best government;

42 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

and, since this is so, that a democratic govern-
ment, where the people are corrupt, is neces-
sarily a bad government, because the vicious
will not only not elect the best, who will not
stoop to their level, but, by virtue of the law of
affinity, will choose the baser sort of men. It
was this kind of democracy that repelled Landor,
— " Because," said he, "I have always found
it more jealous of merit, more suspicious of
wisdom, more proud of riding on great minds,
more pleased at raising up little ones above
them, more fond of loud talking, more impa-
tient of calm reasoning, more unsteady, more
ungrateful, and more ferocious; above all, be-
cause it leads to despotism through fraudulence,
intemperance, and corruption."

As the liberty of criminals means license, so
the freedom of the immoral means corruption.
Declaimers are fond of affirming that man nat-
urally loves liberty, when the truth is, he only
naturally hates restraint. Liberty is obedience
to law; and is it not absurd to assert that men
are naturally obedient to law, when religion,
education, civil authority, criminal codes, and
other means have to be continually employed
to enforce respect for authority? Do savages,
barbarians, and children love the moral re-
straint without which it is not possible even to
think of liberty? Have not men in all ages

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 43

called liberty the opportunity to seek their own
interests and gratify their passions by inflicting
wrongs upon their fellow-beings? All virtue is
rare, but love of liberty is a virtue, the flower
and fruit of a life-long devotion to rectitude, to
unselfish purposes and aims as large as the love
of Christ. Let us not imagine, then, that a free
government such as ours rests upon the natural
instincts of the human heart. We love the
highest when we see it, but the low cannot see
the highest, and only the best know the best.
Our great good fortune lies in our infinite
wealth of opportunity. Whoever feels within
himself force of mind or heart or body, finds
work to do that brings reward; and as he
moves forward, avenues open out at every step
that lead or promise to lead to much that men
most eagerly desire. Through these thousand
channels the flood of energy finds outlets, and
catastrophes are avoided. But opportunities
diminish with the growth of population and
the development of the country; and with the
whole world rushing in upon us, we shall soon
have to find a way to control destructive agen-
cies which our physical resources and sparse
population now render comparatively harmless.
We must prepare to meet this emergency. We
have seventy-five million people; our wealth is
greater than that of any other nation; our

44 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

machines are the most perfect; and the com-
forts of life are here within the reach of larger
multitudes of men than have ever enjoyed
them. All this has come like the leaves in
spring-time, and like the fruit in summer; but
numbers do not constitute excellence, and ma-
chinery does not fashion souls, and comforts
do not nourish heroes. If the outcome of our
civilization is simply to be the greatest possible
number of well-clad and well-fed human beings,
there is little need of giving serious thought to
such a lubberland of mediocrities; and we may
as well agree with Renan, who thinks us far-
ther removed from true social ideals than any
other people, or with Carlyle, who maintains
that the stupendous feat we have hitherto ac-
complished is to bring into existence in an in-
credibly short time more millions of bores than
have ever before made earth dismal.

To develop the highest man, and, if it may
be, multitudes of the highest men, is in every
way more desirable than to dig gold or build
railways; and if we are to stand in the van of
all the world, we must have other proofs to
show than our money, our corn, our numbers,
and our machines. " The end of all political
struggle," says Emerson, " is to establish mo-
rality as the basis of all legislation." It is mani-
fest that our politics have become essentially

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 45

immoral. Neither party dares to touch any
question that is higher or holier than that of
tariff or no tariff, looking upon a wretched
financial problem as the only vital interest for
a people who lack not money, but virtue. The
eternal principles of justice and morality are
ignored, and our electoral contests have degen-
erated into mere struggles for office; and to
suggest that conscience ought again to assert
itself in American politics is to make one's self
ridiculous. And all the while the evidences of
moral decadence stare us in the face. There
is the general decay of faith in God and in
the worth of life that is the unfailing mark
of weakening character and sinking morality.
Nothing is longer certain for us but what we
see or touch, so that the whole ideal world,
which is our only true world, is become a
dream ; and the young start out in life with no
higher aims than to get money or office. Noth-
ing is left among us that is venerable, or great,
or divine. We look upon God's universe with
the spirit of irreverence in which the author of
" Innocents Abroad " beheld the shrines of re-
ligion and art in Europe and Asia. Our smart-
ness renders us incapable of admiration, of
awe, of reverence. We know what the stars
are made of, and think them not more wonder-
ful than an electric light.

46 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

The press of our great cities is the
chronicle of our life. What does it record?
Murders, suicides, robberies, thefts, adulteries,
fornications, divorces, drunkenness, gambling,
incendiarism, fraudulent bankruptcies, official
peculations, with now and then a collision of
trains and destruction of life and property by
mobs. This fills the news columns. In the
editorials we meet with reckless assertion, crude
generalization, special pleading, ignorant or dis-
honest statement of half-truths, insincere praise
and lying abuse of public men, frivolous treat-
ment of the highest and holiest subjects — all
thrown into that form of false reasoning and
loose style which is natural to minds that have
not time to learn anything thoroughly. And
this half-mental and half-bestial brothel-and-
grog mixture, brought from the great cities by
special trains to every household, falls like a
mildew upon the mind and conscience of the
people, taking from them all relish for litera-
ture, all belief in virtue, all reverence for God
and nature, until one may doubt whether we
have not lost the power of intellectual and
moral growth.

We have no one institution great enough to
inspire the love and enthusiasm that are the
soul of national unity. Our public life regards
material interests alone; our theory of educa-

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 47

tion is narrow and superficial, aiming chiefly to
develop smartness, the least desirable quality
of mind, and more sure than any other to foster
vulgarity ; and thus we have no ideal to elevate
and guide us or fill us with faith in our des-
tiny. In the meantime, the manners of Europe
threaten us, and we are permitting the rapid
growth of social customs that are helpful
enough to tyrants, but pernicious in a demo-
cratic republic. Austere manners lead to polit-
ical liberty and uphold free governments; but
a people given over to sensual delights, to fool-
ish frolicking and dissipation, love license more
than freedom, and, if you but give them wine
and a show, care not what master rules over
them. The Puritans of New England had the
truest instinct of political liberty, and that
instinct made them serious, earnest, austere,
averse alike to childish gayety and to loose con-
duct. It were better for us, if our liberty is
dear to us, to have the Puritan Sabbath than
the Pagan Sunday of parts of Europe. There
must be brought into our public life something
to appeal to minds and consciences as well as
to interests; for it is the disgrace of a nation
that its chief concern should be a question of
money, and that the significance of political
contests should lie in the emoluments of office;
and while this state of things continues, the

48 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

best men will remain aloof from the struggle,
and leave the direction of public affairs in the
hands of the baser sort. We need an ideal to
which all noble minds and generous hearts may
rally, and this ideal here in America at the pres-
ent day can neither be intellectual nor religious ;
it must be moral. We are too essentially prac-
tical to be deeply interested in intellectual truth,
and our religious divisions are so various and
so far-reaching that a great national regenera-
tion springing from a common faith is not now
possible; but there is still left in the mass of
the people a deep moral earnestness, which, if
it can be called into action, may yet lift the
whole nation to higher and purer life. Our
two great parties are the principal obstacle in
the way of such a movement. It is not possible
to arouse the American people thoroughly, ex-
cept through political agitation, and both these
parties — which have become simply mills to
grind the people's corn to make bread for office-
holders — oppose the whole weight of their or-
ganized power to every honest effort to bring
about a moral reformation. So long as the
multitude is led by them, our worship of ma-
jorities will throw an air of quixotism over
every attempt to stem the torrent of corruption.
The welfare of the nation demands that the one
or the other cease to exist; that a new party,

THE BASIS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 49

springing from the deep yearning of multitudes
for purer and nobler national life, and upheld
by the enthusiasm inspired by high moral aims
and purposes, may take its place.

We will not here discuss the problems that
the new party will have to solve. They will
relate to moral rather than to material inter-
ests. There is, first of all, the question of edu-
cation. The avoidance of religious teaching in
the common schools has deprived them of moral
influence, and they cultivate a faculty instead of
forming men. Then there is the question of the
liquor traffic. The most hideous phase of our
political life is that which comes of its associa-
tion with bar-rooms, and the remedy for Ameri-
can pauperism is not a wage or rent theory, but
economy and sobriety. There is, also, the ques-
tion of woman-suffrage. tThe experiment will
be made, whatever our theories and prejudices
may be. Women are the most religious, the
most moral, and the most sober portion of the
American people, and it is not easy to under-
stand why their influence in public life is
dreaded. They are the natural educators of
the race, and they and their children are the
chief victims of drunken men; and since men
have been unable or unwilling to form a right
system of education or to find a preventive of
intemperance, there can be no great harm in

4

50 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

giving, in these matters at least, an experi-
mental vote to women. Then there is the ques-
tion of the licentious and obscene press, as
unlike a free press as a sot is unlike a true man,
which is a more deadly and insidious poison
than the adulterated liquor that a deluded people
pay for the privilege of drinking.

With us, material interests take care of them-
selves, since the whole energy of the people turns
upon the development of our physical resources ;
and hence the duty of those who have faith and
hope in the destiny of America lies elsewhere.
In the presence of a whole people thinking
chiefly of money ; talking of it, yearning for it,
toiling, lying, cheating, to get hold of it; adul-
terating food and drink to make it; displaying
it in all its vulgar glitter in their homes and
equipages and on their bodies; discussing and
solving all problems, even questions of the soul,
from a financial point of view; making money
the measure of the value of time; determining
the worth of education by the power it develops
to amass wealth, and even going so far as to
hold a man's money the nearest equivalent of
himself, — in the presence of such a people
there is need of power to proclaim, as with the
voice of God, that the goodness of life lies in
right-doing, and not in lucre.

III.

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION?

"DATTLES, conflicts, and dangers of all
-*-* kinds have a mysterious charm for the
mind, because life, whether animal, intellectual,
or moral, whether individual or social, is devel-
oped and attains strength and excellence only
through struggle; and it would lose half its
charm could we strip it of the element of danger,
the risk of loss, the hope of gain, which are
never absent where men contend for the mas-
tery. Though victory is the end of fighting, we
love the combat more than the victory, and when
the battle is won or the game is lost our interest
dies ; just as the story comes to an end when the
fretful stream of love merges into the tame
sea of marriage. The objects for which we con-
tend change, but our love of contention never
ceases to exist, in spite of the poet's saying that
repose is the central feeling of all happiness.
Effort, which is born of struggle and conflict,
is to life what motion is to water — it keeps it
pure and fresh; and an individual or a society

52 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

which gives over the battle for higher things,
fatally sinks to lower plains.

The bloody warfare, which is the delight of
savages and barbarians, has ceased to have any
charm for the civilized man of the nineteenth
century; but he finds himself in the midst of
keener and intenser conflicts, from which, if he
would live, he cannot escape. Among savages
and barbarians the life of the individual is
merged and lost in that of the tribe or horde,
but, as civilization advances, the individual does
not dwindle but grows. The tendency is to
enable him to choose his own mode of life and
to maintain himself in his position, to break the
bonds which hinder the use of his faculties and
to send him forth into the arena where the mil-
lions contend for wealth or place, and where
the better few strive for intellectual and moral
superiority. He becomes a reader, a thinker,
an independent agent; he helps to mold public
opinion and shape the destinies of his fellow-
men. In this way civilization brings on the
reign of the people, and makes it impossible
that any strongest man should control a nation.
But the reign of the people in setting mightier
forces at work renders more gigantic struggles
inevitable. Here in America, freedom of
opinion and of conscience has been won; the
battle for political and civil liberty has been

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 53

fought and gained ; and other problems present
themselves to the human mind which never truly
appreciates what it possesses, but by the law of
development, as by the hand of God, is led on
to new victories. Social questions are now
uppermost in men's minds, as political questions
absorbed the thought of the eighteenth century.
Hereditary privilege has vanished; there is
liberty of thought and expression; every man
has a right to vote ; and still the golden age has
not come. Man holds the forces of nature in
his hands; by their aid he has increased his
wealth to an incredible degree; he has brought
the ends of the earth together; and still there
are millions who are poor and wretched. What-
ever our condition may be as contrasted with
that of past ages, the world is still full of evil
and discontent. For the first time in their his-
tory the Christian nations have created a phil-
osophy of despair, so that it has become possible
to doubt whether life itself is not a curse. What
numberless patent remedies and panaceas for
our troubles have been blazoned forth ! The
alphabet was to be the key to the garden of Par-
adise; but the multitude have been taught to
read and write, and only clamor the more vocif-
erously that they perish in desert places and
quagmires.

Alcohol, it has been asserted, is the supreme

54 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

evil; and yet the countless millions of Moham-
medans and Buddhists are sober, but unspeak-
ably wretched. And so each sect raises its cry
affirming or denying, and in the confusion of
tongues reason grows bewildered. God is
solemnly called the Supreme Tyrant, society a
universal crime, property a boundless theft, and
marriage the worst foe of love. All faiths seem
tottering to the verge of shifting opinion, and
in their frenzy many would hardly think it a
loss if the earth itself were shattered. What is
it, anyhow, but an ant-hill lost in space?

Such notions as these find sporadic utterance
here, but they do not represent the thought or
sentiment of any considerable body of Ameri-
cans. We are not theorists and dreamers, but
workers, who are reasonably satisfied with our
work. This country, it may be said without
incurring the reproach of philistinism, is a
blessed land: nowhere else are such opportu-
nities offered to all men; nowhere else do such
multitudes find it possible to escape from igno-
rance, poverty, and the impotence of blind
endeavor, into the pure light of free, orderly,
and growing life; nowhere else is there more
general good-will and sympathy in spite of the
mingling of heterogeneous nationalities and
conflicting creeds.

How quickly the angry passions of our Civil

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 55

War have sunk to rest, however much dema-
gogues have sought to keep them alive! No
hatred can long flourish here. The poor do not
hate the rich, and the rich as a body are not
indifferent to the wants of the poor. Our
wealthy men are the children of the poor, and
their children or grandchildren will either perish
utterly or go to work again with the laboring
masses. Thus the money line, which is really
the only line with us that separates class from
class, is not a fixed boundary dividing hostile
armies. We have, after all, but a sprinkling
of very rich men, who have their uses, even
when they are unintelligent and narrow-minded,
or personally worthless. Capital is the army
of a commercial age, and capitalists are necessary
to undertake and carry on great enterprises;
they fill the places of the captains of warlike
ages. A railroad king may inflict financial ruin
upon individuals and be unjust to his employees,
but he will develop the country and bring ma-
terial blessings to thousands. Even stock-
waterers and railway-wreckers probably do
more good than harm to the general public.
But the great capitalists, as I have said, are
few, and in America pauperism is accidental.
The people are neither paupers nor millionaires,
but workers, whose energy and thrift secure
them a competence. Seven million seven hun-

56 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

dred and fifty thousand of these are farmers,
while only about half that number are engaged
in manufacturing. Three-fourths of these
farmers own the land they cultivate, and the
general tendency is to diminish rather than to
increase the size of farms. Our laborers, too,
receive higher wages and live in greater plenty
than those of any other country. The story of
our material progress reads like a dream, and
we who are now living see but the beginnings
of this incomprehensible work; and in many
other respects our course is forward. Each gen-
eration begins the life-struggle from a higher
plain. The multitudes who arrive here from
Europe feel the quickening influence of our life,
and their nobler faculties awaken. Thousands
each year revisit their native lands and feel like
strangers there, so thoroughly have they become
imbued with the American spirit. They are not
only satisfied with our political institutions, but
find it difficult to imagine that they were ever
able to bear the shackles and restraints of less
liberal governments. If ours is the country of
rich men, why do the poor, from the ends of the
earth, flock to our shores? If capitalists exer-
cise here a tyrannic power, why do the oppressed
of every land seek refuge with us? In truth,
we occupy the foremost position among the free
nations of the world, and wherever political

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 57

development is taking place it is in the direction
in which we are leading. Our people either
know this or feel it instinctively, and they really
have no fears at all as to the fortune of the
Republic.

There is no other government which rests so
completely upon the assent and approval of the
governed, and that is the strongest foundation.
Shall they who know and feel this grow alarmed
because a fanatic has thrown a bomb into a
squad of policemen? Or shall they have mis-
givings as to the future of democratic govern-
ment because, now and then, here and there, in
times of excitement mobs gather and deeds of
violence are done? If such things can be a
serious danger to the Republic, our condition is
indeed pitiable. What peculiar forms of fanat-
icism may develop in individual cases no one can
foresee, but anarchical doctrines must die out
here from lack of a suitable environment. They
have not sprung from our soil, but have been
imported from social conditions wholly dissim-
ilar to ours, and the masses of our laborers have
as little sympathy with them as the wealthy
classes have. The preaching of such doctrines
is undoubtedly criminal, and ought to be pun-
ished by law; but our society must undergo
radical changes before this fanaticism can be-
come a menace to our institutions. Our politi-

58 SOCIALISM AND LABOR..

cal life lies in the supremacy of the law, and
any party which attempts to defy its sovereign
majesty will be mercilessly crushed; for the
supremacy of the law means internal peace, the
protection of life and property, and the freedom
of the individual, and it is precisely to secure
these objects that our government exists. A
fanaticism such as that of the anarchists can
grow and extend itself only under an arbitrary
and tyrannical power. Only the sense of the
most terrible wrongs can create so unnatural
and extreme a temper. The destructive tenets
of the Nihilists and German Socialists are the
correlatives of Siberian dungeons and military
despotism; but they cannot become contagious
here, because the food needed for the propaga-
tion of the germ is not supplied.

Our labor troubles are of an altogether dif-
ferent nature from this scarecrow of anarchy
and socialism, and they are more serious. It
is our mission to give larger liberty and fuller
life, not to a privileged class but to the whole
people. That the race should live for a few men
is not tolerable from our point of view, and our
destiny compels us to strive to bring about a
social condition in which all men shall live for
every man. Now the lot of the laborer is not
here or anywhere what we know and feel it
might be and ought to be. The laborers, who

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 59

in proportion as their minds have been awak-
ened, have become conscious of the hardships
and limitations to which they are subject, feel
this more keenly than any other class, and hence
they have formed innumerable organizations to
protect their rights and promote their interests.
It is utterly futile to make an outcry against
these trades-unions and combinations of unions.
They exist, and the ends for which they exist,
in spite of incidental abuses connected with their
working, are praiseworthy, and there is no
power which can put them down.

To attempt to resist or thwart the legitimate
claims of working men, is to provoke a state
of things which might become a serious menace
to the prosperity of the country. The problem
is complex, and to look for some easy, ready-
made solution is idle. In virtue of a law which is
inherent in human nature, the poor are bent upon
getting rich, and the rich on growing richer.
To get money, and as much money as possible,
is the aim and end both of the employer and the
employed, and hence there arises between them
an inevitable conflict. The capitalist is ready
to take advantage of every opportunity to lower
wages, the workman of every opportunity to
demand higher pay; and thus the almost irre-
sistible tendency is to form themselves into op-
posing armies, whereas the only hope of a better

60 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

state of things lies in their being friends. Labor
creates capital, and capital gives labor a field
to work in.

But of what avail is a truth like this when
there is question of controlling passions which
are stronger than reason ? High and vital prin-
ciples must be kept in view, and above all, the
question must be examined without anger or
partisan bias. We should not grow weary of
telling rich and poor that there are better things
than money ; that the best things, as love, virtue,
intelligence, cannot be bought; that he whose
chief aim in life is to get money and its equiva-
lents is an inferior sort of man ; that the truest
and the deepest contentment comes of the con-
sciousness of right-doing, and not of the knowl-
edge that we have so many dollars; and that
with but little a true man may lead a not un-
worthy life, and escape the weariness and fears
inherent in the possession of riches, which wean
the heart from the heavenly fountains of admi-
ration, hope, and love. Truths like these to be
effective must be taught by religion and litera-
ture, and we who find it impossible to escape
the commercial spirit, with its single standard
of value, must look to these spiritual powers to
give us ideals which may lift us above the flat
wastes of materialism. They also alone can
properly teach that beauty is useful, that admi-

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 6 1

ration and reverence are essential to noble life,
and that to rest in sin or ignorance is the sign
of death. Let us also not cease to proclaim that
neither God nor churches nor states will save
the vicious and the idle from the consequences
of their crime and folly ; that it is of the nature
of right conduct and true work not only to
bring success and sufficiency, but to give health,
contentment, and strength as well. If the one
good is money with what it will buy, then feuds
and hatreds must be perpetual. Our wants are
infinite, and if you take from man the ideals
given by religion and literature, a hundred mil-
lions will leave him still a beggar. A false view
of life is our radical defect. Our political prob-
lems always hinge on some money problem, our
educational system looks primarily to the fitting
men for money-getting, for our young men
success means riches, and our very worship im-
plies that the poor are unfit for the kingdom
of heaven. Thus we lose sight of man and
think only of money; we increase our wealth,
while faith and hope and love and intelligence
diminish; we build great cities to be inhabited
by little men; we are keen to drive a bargain
and slow to recognize a noble soul; we have
eyes for bank-notes, and we move dumb and
unraised beneath the starlit heavens. If it were
possible that a great philosopher or poet should

62 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

arise among us, some foreigner would have to
point him out to us ; but we know our own, our
men of boundless wealth, whom we envy and
despise. So long as our whole national life-
struggle continues to be carried on around this
single point of finance, what hope is there of
avoiding fatal conflicts? The rich will worship
their god Mammon alone, and the poor will plot
and scheme to shatter the idol; and mechanical
contrivances, such as arbitration boards and
legislative enactments, will leave the root of the
evil untouched.

It is essential that we should know that the
real and final test of a government, as of a re-
ligion, is the kind of man it produces, and not
the amount of money. We must return to the
ideals of our forefathers, who preferred free-
dom, intelligence, and strength to wealth, and
who dedicated this land to higher manhood, and
not to fatter mammonhood. Our politics, our
literature, our whole national life, must be more
concerned for man than for his money. No one
doubts the importance of the interests of trade :
we all desire that our manufacturers should be
able to compete with other nations in the markets
of the world; but if the interests of trade and
competition involve the degradation of millions
of our fellow-citizens, we shall cry out that the
Sabbath was made for man and not man for the

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 63

Sabbath. The interests of the working man are
primary; the interests of capital are secondary.
If the trades-unions shall succeed in forcing
politicians to recognize that financial interests
are not the only or principal human interests,
they will have conferred a benefit upon the
nation. Men, and not measures, are the first
need of every society, and therefore all social
schemes should look first to the forming of true
men. But, in truth, only men create and educate
men, and one of the delusions of the age is that
this can be done by some sort of mechanical
contrivance. Hence we look to legislation and
government control to do what only vital forces
can effect, and after the failure of each enact-
ment some new scheme is tried, until law itself
is in danger of falling into discredit. Better
laws are desirable, but a true view of life is
indispensable, and no state mechanism can prop-
erly take care of full-grown men and women
who have not learned how to take care of them-
selves. The growing disposition to look to the
general government for aid in every emergency
is a symptom of disease; it is an outgrowth of
habits and principles contrary to the spirit of our
institutions.

The tendency of good government is to make
government unnecessary, since it trains people
to habits of industry, self-reliance, and order.

64 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

The strong and energetic love freedom. A
social state in which the whole life of the indi-
vidual is absorbed and controlled by some ex-
ternal ruling power, can seem good only to the
feeble and inactive; and this is the aim of the
modern Socialists, and their theories. These
have sprung from false and exaggerated senti-
ment, or from lack of mental soundness and
breadth of view, and are a menace to all that is
most healthful and manly in human nature and
Christian civilization. The end of society is not
to secure to all men the highest possible amount
of physical comfort and sensual enjoyment, but
to give to all men the best possible opportunities
of developing their physical, intellectual, moral,
and aesthetic endowments; and this is done by
stimulating individual energy, and by leaving
the highest prizes to be won by effort and
struggle. Paternal government is, no doubt,
best for children and slaves, but the nobler races
have preferred freedom even to the tenderest
care.

There is in innumerable minds, who have a
horror of the current socialistic doctrines, an un-
conscious leaning toward socialism, which is
seen in the tendency to enlarge the powers of
the State. The founders of the Republic held
that the State should assume no authority over
the individual, save such as is indispensable to

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 65

the general welfare; and how far we have de-
parted from this wise and generous view!

The State has taken control of education, and
is thereby weakening one of the most essential
and vital social forces — the sense of responsi-
bility in parents. It has, in consequence, been
led to exclude religious instruction from the
process of education; has, indeed, abandoned
the work of education, and contented itself with
some sort of mental training which sharpens the
intellect but leaves the moral nature untouched
and unraised. As a result, the young lose rever-
ence, lose the power of discerning what is high
and noble, and are only a more enlightened sort
of barbarians. Had the State confined itself to
encouraging and assisting the religious denomi-
nations to found and maintain schools, and to
giving aid to private educational enterprises, it
would have acted in harmony with our theory
of government, and we should be to-day a
worthier, more religious and not less enlight-
ened people; while, from an economic point of
view, education would have been made vastly
cheaper. In the same way the tendency is now
to give the State control of public charities and
works of reform, whereas the proper method to
pursue is to have the State encourage and assist
denominational and private beneficence.

The recent labor agitations serve to show how
5

66 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

naturally our thoughts turn to State socialism
whenever danger seems to threaten. If the
State owned all railroads, it is asserted, troubles
such as have disturbed the peace and prosperity
of the country during the last few months would
not occur. But in thus enlarging the functions of
the government, we would double the number
of its officials, and greatly increase the influence
of professional politicians, who in various ways
are doing more than all other classes combined
to bring discredit upon democratic institutions.
They are the men who praise the people and
betray their interests, who flatter the working
men and take the bribes of capitalists and
wealthy corporations. They make possible the
wholesale gambling, the stock-watering, the
railway wrecking, the corruption of the judi-
ciary and the legislature, which are in so many
instances the agencies used in accumulating
colossal fortunes. And the knowledge of this
scandalous state of things, more than any other
cause, favors the propagation of socialistic doc-
trines, and leads the people to hold the govern-
ment in slight esteem, and to think there would
be no great harm in taking from the money
barons their ill-gotten goods. Thus the politi-
cians are helping to undermine respect for law
and belief in the sacredness of property. If
there is no hope except in them, then there is no

ARE WE IN DANGER OF REVOLUTION? 6/

hope at all. Politicians work through major-
ities, whereas minorities shape the higher des-
tinies of nations; and it is all important that
we should learn that a man is not necessarily
visionary, or weak in mind, because he does not
run with the crowd. Gordon writes, in his
" Memoirs," that the British Empire has been
built up by adventurers, and not by the gov-
ernment. The principle involved in this fact
lies at the root of our social faith. The blood
which courses in our veins impels us to put our
trust in God and in our single might ; and hence
the normal tendency of our institutions is to
increase the worth and influence of the indi-
vidual, and to narrow the sphere and action of
government. If we lose confidence in ourselves,
and in every emergency look to the government
for help, how shall we escape the slavish mind
and coward heart?

The greatest peril to be feared from labor
organization is that the working men will be
led to put overmuch trust in these mechanical
contrivances, and will cease to look to the vital
sources of strength. When they have learned
to confide their dearest interests to a trades-
union, it will not be difficult to persuade them
to surrender themselves, body and soul, to a
socialistic State. Good government may secure
freedom and opportunity, but the effort, sobri-

68 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ety, and intelligence of the individual can alone
give worth and dignity to human life. Let
political economists still insist upon their iron
laws of wages, of supply and demand, but let
us not lose our faith in free-will; for so long
as we believe that there is an element of freedom
in the individual, we shall feel that social evolu-
tion is not wholly fatal; and if much depends
upon inexorable laws, much also depends upon
the faith, hope, love, knowledge, pity, and
courage of man. Sympathy, the spirit of hu-
manity, the Godward mind, have wrought the
miracles which political economy cannot even
explain. Having done much, not for ourselves
alone but for all nations, let us keep a brave
heart, and believe that where all men think and
act, the common sense of most will prevail, and
wisdom, virtue, and nobler manhood be the
result. It is a religious duty to work for the
good of this country, and it is not easy to
imagine that any one can love God or man and
hate America.

IV.

CHARITY AND JUSTICE.

F^HE love of self is the radical passion of
human nature. It is the love of life and
of that which constitutes the good of life, and
it is strongest in those who are most alive, in
whom the vital current is deepest and might-
iest. It is the inner source of strength in high
and heroic souls, whether they seek to utter
themselves in word or in deed, whether they
strive for fame or for power or for union with
God, through faith and devotion to truth and
righteousness. Whatever the aim and the
means, the end all men propose and follow is
their own happiness, a more intense and enduring
sense of their own life. Personality is enrooted
in the love of self, and the higher the person the
more completely does he identify himself with
all that is other than himself. Savages, in their
feeble attempts to think, consider things to be
self-existent, each standing apart and indepen-
dent, and hence the love of self is in them a
selfish love. As they are incapable of perceiving

7O SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

that their relations to nature and to society are
essential elements of their being, they imagine
that the good of life for each one is separable
from the general welfare. Hence they easily
become false, cruel, treacherous, and revengeful.
They lack humanity; they are the victims of
instinct and impulse. They have the kind of
social sense which is found in gregarious ani-
mals, but they are unable to ascend to the con-
ception of the universal law which binds the
whole race into a brotherhood. The degree in
which individuals and societies rise above this
separateness of childish and savage thought is
a measure of the degree of their progress in
religion and civilization. All advance is an
ascent from the primitive and superficial self
toward the true self, which is born of the union
of the soul with truth, justice, and love. It is
a process of self-estrangement, of self-denial, of
self-abandonment. They alone enter the land
of promise who quit the low and narrow house
of their early thoughts and desires, and struggle
with ceaseless effort and patience to reach the
kingdom that is founded on the eternal principles
of righteousness. They believe and know that
peace, joy, and blessedness, which are the end
to which the love of self points, can be attained
only by those who seek and find the good of
life in the service of the Father who is in heaven,

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. *]\

and of His children who are on earth. Self-
seeking is transformed into self-devotion; a
little world of petty cares and sordid interests is
abandoned, and the enduring world wherein
alone souls are at home opens wide its portals
to receive us. In isolation, the individual is
never great or impressive. To be so he must
identify himself with truth and justice, with
beauty and love. He must feel that he lives and
battles in the company of God and in that of the
noble and good, in some cause which is not
merely his own, but that of mankind.

He could never become man at all were it
not for the society and help of his fellows. The
human child would perish at once were it not
received, at birth, into the arms of intelligence
and love ; and its prolonged infancy would issue
in nothing higher than savagery, were it not
fostered by beings in whom instinct has been
superseded by reflection and the sense of respon-
sibility. In Christendom the individual enters
the world as the heir of all time. For him the
race has suffered and groped and toiled through
ages that have sunk into oblivion. For him
countless generations have fashioned language
— the social organ — into an instrument fitted
to express all that he can feel or know. The
clothes he wears, the home that shelters him
and makes him self-respecting, every implement

72 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

he uses, every contrivance that ministers to his
comfort and security have been fashioned in the
process of unnumbered centuries, by the pains
and privations, by the sufferings and deaths, of
tribes and peoples to whose labors he gives no
heed.

If he is born into a world where religion,
science and morality, law, order and liberty,
make it possible that he should lead a life of
reverence, wisdom, and purity, and have rights
and possessions which are defended by pub-
lic opinion and the power of the combined
strength of all ; where his home is sacred, where
his conscience is respected, where opportunity
for the exercise of every talent is given, he owes
all this not in any way at all to himself, but to
others. And if in the midst of this world he
himself is to have worth and significance, joy
and peace, he must turn from himself and seek
a better self through devotion to his fellow-men,
whether they be in his home or in his church
or in his nation or anywhere on God's round
earth. He can have no real importance unless
he ally himself with truth and justice and love,
the knowledge and practice of which are within
his reach because he is a member of a social
organism. He is not self-made, he is a product
of all the forces which have been at work in the
universe from the beginning. He partakes of

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 73

what nature provides, and he gathers the fruits
of the seeds that saints and sages and heroes
have sown up and down the world from imme-
morial ages. He is made strong and enduring
by the struggles and labors of the race to which
he belongs.

For him the martyrs have died, for him the
poets have sung, for him the patient, tireless
investigators have revealed the secrets which
have given to the mind control of the forces that
lie in the heavens, and in the earth. Mankind
has lived for him; it is his duty to live for
whomsoever he can help. His proper home is
above nature: in the domain of reason, in the
realm of freedom, in the kingdom of righteous-
ness, in the spiritual world; where that which
we communicate becomes doubly our own,
where knowledge begets knowledge, where love
kindles love, where charity burns the more, the
more it becomes self-diffusive. A man cannot
be wise or good or strong for himself alone.
He is formed and confirmed by the virtues he
imparts even more than by those he receives. If
his heart be set on material things, he may
gather them for himself, may grow hard and
exclusive, ignoble and base; but if his supreme
desire be for the things of the soul, he must
communicate the blessings he gains, or they will
vanish. In the home, in the church, in the

74 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

nation, the important thing for each one is
the help he gives, the benefits he bestows. He
who is not a source of faith, of courage, of
joy for those about him, has no well-spring
of divine life within himself. He must educate
if he would be educated; he must ennoble if
he would be made noble; he must diffuse reli-
gious thought and love if he would become
religious.

Every worthy form of individual activity is
altruistic. The money paid is never the equiva-
lent of the work done ; and whether the laborer
be farmer or builder, physician or teacher, he
must look beyond the price he gets to the good
he does; he must interfuse good-will and the
desire to be of help with all he does and with
all he receives for what he does, or he will
shrivel into something that appears to be alive,
but is dead. It must be his object to realize him-
self, not chiefly in his primitive physical self
with its material needs and sordid interests, but
he must bend all his energies to rise from the
low bed whereon nature has laid him to the
sphere where God manifests himself as Truth
and Love, as Beauty and Righteousness, as Life
Everlasting. Then he shall find himself in ac-
cord with the things that are permanent, with
the good that is absolute; then shall he learn
sympathy with all who live and are hard pressed

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. J$

and beset with doubts and temptations, who are
overburdened, whose feet are caught in the
meshes of sin, whose hands hang helpless be-
cause joy in work is denied them.

Then shall he forget altruism and awaken to
love — to the love that poised the heavens and
holds the stars in place ; that speaks to us when
we look on flowers and ripening harvests and
the faces of the fair and innocent; when we
think of home and country and the graves of the
dear ones who have fallen asleep — to the love
which drew the Eternal Father from the infinite
unseen to clothe himself with flesh, to walk with
His children, to die for them, that henceforth
every soul might understand that Love is the
absolute fact behind, above, and beyond all that
appears; that it is the charity of God; yea,
God himself. What is a way of believing and
thinking may be made also a way of feeling and
acting. A passionate devotion to the salvation
and welfare of men is aroused in innumerable
souls, who, smitten with a sacred enthusiasm,
leave father and mother and home and country
that they may become the servants of the out-
cast, the abandoned, the fallen, of all whom
inevitable circumstance and pitiless law over-
whelm and crush.

To this new mood and temper no condition,
no state in which a human being may be placed,

76 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

appears to be hopeless. The saving power ot
infinite love is infinite. When reason despairs,
the heart still believes and hopes; and the best
and the noblest are not those who calculate, but
those who with divine confidence yield to the
impulses which descend from worlds to which
the understanding cannot rise. This is the
power which moves and consecrates the lives of
mothers and of all true lovers, of patriots and
saints, of virgins and martyrs. Life is not a
balance sheet — it is a breathing of God, awak-
ening souls to service and to love. When a man
is prepared to live and to die for some good
cause that is all the world's, and not alone his
own, he has become a dweller in realms which
lie beyond the reach of the mere intellect. To
these heights the life and teaching of Christ
have lifted innumerable souls, enabling them to
love and serve not merely the beautiful, the
brave, and the generous, but to love and serve
those who have nothing amiable in themselves,
who are stricken with poverty, vice, and disease,
who distrust and hate us, who are our enemies
and their own. His coming is like the coming of
spring. The snows melt, the icy bands break,
the waters leap and sing, the earth awakens
from its death-like lethargy and clothes itself
in many-tinted vesture, the young are joyful,
and the old grow young again. So in the hu-

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 77

man world of faith and hope, of thought and
conduct, of love and service, Christ unseals the
fountains of sympathy and helpfulness and
mercy which lie in the heart of man, tut which
cruelty and greed and tyranny had congealed.
In the ancient world, patriotism, which was its
special virtue, consecrated the instinct of hatred
for the foreigner. The earth was divided
among savages, barbarians, and civilized men
whose moral code was founded on a philosophy
of selfishness. Man's divine origin and destiny
were forgotten, the sacred meaning and worth
of life were ignored. The gods were not be-
lieved to take interest in human morality or
human welfare, and for the best of men there
was no refuge from the ruin wrought by greed
and lust and tyranny, save in a kind of stoic
indifference and despair. The virtues of mild-
ness, mercy, serviceableness, chastity, and lowly-
mindedriess were considered weaknesses and
defects. When Christ embodied in His deeds
and words the vital truth that God is a Father
who verily loves His children; that He is all-
holy; that righteousness is life; that only the
pure in heart can know Him; that those who
hunger and thirst to do His will enter His
kingdom, which is open to the meanest and most
abandoned, if they but repent and have faith
and charity, there was a revelation from heaven,

78 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the opening of a fountain of immortal life in
time and in eternity.

Enthusiasm, devotion, and love have no real
object, no meaning, no worth, if man's life is
but an apparition, an exhalation from a charnel
house, a pathological growth, a mere dream of
life in a universe essentially and eternally dead.
One who believes not in God must cherish a
thousand lies to save himself from despair.
How can he who beneath the universal appear-
ance that lures him sees but the deception, the
trickery, the vileness, the vanity, which it veils,
have a great mind or a loving heart? But this
is what he must see if in all and above all he
sees not God. Now, in Christ, the Eternal
Father is made visible, and henceforth all may
know that He is and that He is Love. The more
we love one another the more plainly is this truth
revealed to us. Love is the vital element of holi-
ness, the spring and secret of righteousness, and
there is no blessedness except in living and
serving in the spirit of Christ.

Whatever change time may have wrought in
opinions and in social conditions; whatever
progress may have been made in scientific
knowledge ; whatever new machinery, whatever
hitherto unutilized forces may have been placed
at the disposition of man, it is still and must
forever be true that nothing but the spirit of

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 79

Christian love can give us the power rightly
to cheer, console, strengthen, guide, uplift, il-
lumine, and purify one another. The money
man spends on his lusts and vices might abolish
poverty and fill the world with beauty, but not
unless it were administered by hands of intelli-
gence and love. None of the many schemes to
overcome the misery and degradation which
spring from vice, crime, and pauperism can
attain the end without the ceaseless aid of right-
loving men and women. Love not only bears
all things, hopes all things ; but it rejoices with
the truth, and is quick to discover how help may
be given.

Let the lovers of God and of man stand forth,
and let the first word we speak to them affirm
that without knowledge and science and wis-
dom and skill they can do little, are more apt,
with all their zeal and fervor, to do harm than
good. They do not love truly who neglect any
means whatever whereby they may make them-
selves more able to be of service. It is easy to
give money, but love cannot be bought, and the
giving of money is not sufficient proof of love.
Men spend lavishly to gratify the animal pas-
sions, which are the destroyers of love.

They alone love who take a personal in-
terest in those whom they would benefit, who
reinforce their failing lives, not with bread

80 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

alone, but with sympathy and affection, with
faith and courage, with joy and gladness. We
feed domestic animals, but we are useless ser-
vants if we do nothing more than feed God's
poor who are our brethren. We must put our-
selves in their place. Like students, we must
acquaint ourselves with their origins and en-
vironments; like friends, we must enter into
their failures and sorrows; like true men and
women, we must consider that whatever afflicts
them concerns us also. Love overcomes all,
subdues all things to its own divine purposes.,
It makes use of the sciences and the arts, of in-
stitutions and mechanical contrivances, to pre-
vent or cure disease, to mitigate suffering, to
make the air and the earth wholesome, to con-
struct and build, to irrigate and drain, to im-
prove in all possible ways the conditions and
environments of human life. We may not be
able, like the apostles and early disciples, to
work miracles, but centuries of Christian
thought and endeavor have, as the Saviour
foretold, given us the power -to perform even
greater wonders. Knowledge has increased the
efficacy of faith ; science has widened the boun-
daries of the empire of love. The change which
has taken place in our attitude toward the crimi-
nal is but an instance of a general transfor-
mation of opinion with regard to all who are

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 8 1

bound by the chains of ignorance, vice, and
poverty.

We do not, like the savage and the barbarian,
deal with the violators of law in the spirit of
retaliation and vindictiveness ; nor do we think
it enough to immure them and render them
harmless, but we hold it to be our duty to re-
form them; and above all, so far as this may
be possible, we consider it a sacred obligation
to do away with the causes which breed crime
and misery. To do good to enemies is now
recognized to be the duty of society not less
than that of individuals. We have come to
understand that the real criminal is often the
social body itself rather than the man or woman
it corrupts and then punishes. Here is an as-
cent into the world of reason, mercy, and right-
eousness, an unfolding of the divine purpose
as made known by the Saviour, who revealed
the sovereign nature of truth and love. His
influence, more than all other causes, has lifted
the multitude to a higher plane, where the spirit
of sympathy and helpfulness breathes unhin-
dered. We hold at least in theory, however we
may fall in practice, that mankind are a family,
that both the Church and the State are a home
where all should be cherished, that the greater
the weakness and misfortune the greater should

be the care. We have abolished legalized slav-
6

82 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ery, and the better among us are urged as by
a divine voice to think no sacrifice too great
whereby the condition of multitudes of toilers
may be made more tolerable, more hopeful. We
recognize that the rights of man are the rights
of woman also, and slowly we are gaining in-
sight into the truth that whatever is wrong for
her is wrong for him. As it is our duty to pro-
tect children because they are weak and help-
less, it is our duty to protect all who are weak
and helpless. The young are by nature incap-
able of caring for themselves, and therefore the
home, the Church and the State accept the re-
sponsibility of providing them with nourish-
ment and nurture. The adult man and woman
should not be weak or ignorant or vicious, and
we feel that it is not their own fault chiefly, but
the fault of the home, the Church and the State
if they are so. We would therefore make help-
lessness, ignorance, and vice impossible. Reli-
gion inspires love, confidence, and courage, and
science lights up the way of life with the torch
of knowledge. As disease is largely prevent-
able, we believe that vice, pauperism, and crime
are also preventable. The law of causation is
universal, and the cause being known, the find-
ing of a remedy ought to lie within the reach of
intelligence and love. Our progress consists
largely in the discovery of remedies for igno-

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 83

ranee and impotence. Quinine, drainage, and
sanitation have made vast regions habitable,
where hitherto healthful life had been impos-
sible. The discovery of the causes of many of
the worst diseases has shown us how they may
readily be prevented or cured. The knowledge
of the causes of evil, whether physical or moral,
necessarily leads to the inquiry how they may
be suppressed or controlled. The cosmical and
geographical conditions which interfere with
the normal development of human endowments
we can hardly hope greatly to modify. In the
tropics the race is and probably will always be
indolent, ignorant, weak, and sensual. Hered-
ity, too, plays a great part in the destiny of each
one. We are in mind, as in body, largely what
we have assimilated or what heredity — which is
the outcome of endless assimilations — makes us.
Those who are born with a taint in the blood,
with perverted instincts and enfeebled wills,
not only fall into vice more easily than others,
but they are also more difficult to reclaim. If
man shall ever learn to do for his own kind
what breeding and training enable him to do
for various strains of domestic animals, he will
have discovered an effective means for prevent-
ing crime and misery. But what he calls his
rights, which often are but his prejudices and
passions, will probably continue to keep him

84 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

from treating his own species with the wis-
dom with which he manages inferior creatures.
Reckless and senseless marriages are an inex-
haustible source of evil. Many of our people
enter into wedlock as thoughtlessly as they take
a stroll or fall asleep, and the result is quarrels,
contentions, divorces, and children reared in
an atmosphere which blights their tender lives.
Hence crime among the young is increasing far
more rapidly than the population grows. So
long as this poison fountain remains open, so
long will vice and pauperism continue to breed
degradation and wretchedness. Homes that
are hells thwart the wisest efforts to reform
abuses. They hinder the school, weaken the
church, and undermine the social fabric. Our
chaotic and lax marriage laws encourage and
facilitate imprudent marriages, but the origin
of the evil lies deeper. Institutions, it has been
said, are in the control of men; public opinion
in that of women. Women decide how we shall
build and furnish our houses, what we shall eat
and wear, what we shall find beautiful and en-
tertaining, where we shall live, what we shall
read, whom we shall consider friend or foe,
what beliefs or prejudices we shall hold, what
religion we shall have. From them we learn
our mother tongue, from them our notions of
right and wrong, of propriety and justice. If

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 85

they were more large-minded, more intelli-
gent, more unselfish, more serious, more lov-
ing, three-fourths of the depravity and sin
which make life a curse would disappear. The
fountain-head of social good or evil, of vice
and crime, or of honor and virtue is in the
home; and the wife and the mother make or
unmake the home. Whatever view we may
take as to whether man or woman was the
more guilty primal offender, woman bears the
greater responsibility for the wrongs and mis-
eries which afflict and oppress the modern
world, since the force of public opinion, which
is in her keeping, is mightier than riches and
armies and laws. More than any age since the
beginning of time we have given opportunity
to woman, have placed her in the seat of influ-
ence and power; and shall she prove false, or
frail, or ungrateful, traitorous to the vast con-
fidence which all that is noblest and most chiv-
alrous in man has led him to repose in her?

Doubtless her increasing dominion has helped
to arouse in our public life greater sympathy
and tenderness, a more complete revulsion from
cruelty, whether to man or beast. But more
than pity we need justice, which is the first and
greatest charity. The most grievous injustice
which oppresses us, of which the weak and the
poor, the laborers and their wives and children,

86 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

are the chief victims, has its source in the politi-
cal corruption which taints our whole public
life, and more especially the conduct of our
municipal affairs. It not only stamps upon our
name a brand of infamy in the eyes of foreign
nations; it disheartens the best among us, and
makes reform seem impossible. It not only im-
poverishes, but it disheartens and dechristian-
izes the laboring populations of our cities. It
is the foe of civilization, of religion, of moral-
ity; of God and of man. It thrives in the
mephitic air of saloons and brothels and gam-
bling hells. It makes the rich its accomplices
and compels the respectable to connive at its
iniquities and infamies. It perverts the public
conscience, it destroys the sense of responsibil-
ity, it renders efforts at reform abortive. In
the presence of this moral plague even the
wisest and the bravest are bewildered and dis-
couraged. No subject is more worthy of the
attention of those who are interested in the im-
provement of social life and conditions. Legis-
lation can accomplish little unless it be supported
by a more humane, a more enlightened, a more
Christian public opinion. Here again, there-
fore, we need the assistance of noble-minded and
educated women. If in the home, in the school,
and in the church, where woman's influence is
potent, if not paramount, the sentiment that cor-

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 8/

nipt politicians are more criminal than convicts,
be awakened and fostered, good will have been
done. Were it possible that the daily press
should take a sincere and serious interest in
whatever concerns the public morals, what a
beneficent power it might exert! But this can-
not be hoped for while the newspaper continues
to be chiefly a commercial enterprise ; for when
the primary consideration is pecuniary profit,
it will be deemed proper to publish whatever
may excite curiosity, even though it pander to
morbid cravings and prurient propensities. In
the actual conditions, the machinery and insti-
tutions created to deal with the violators of
the laws are, in a large measure, the agencies
whereby vice and crime are produced and dif-
fused. The delinquents who are incarcerated
are chiefly the poor, who had they money to
pay the fines would escape imprisonment. The
heaviest punishment is inflicted on the most
helpless, and frequently on the least guilty ; and
thus the morally weak, the victims of unfortu-
nate environments, are degraded, hardened, and
made habitual offenders. Nearly one-half of
the several millions annually arrested become
chronic criminals. In the face of the theory
that punishment should be reformatory and
preventive, the fact remains that in our hands
it is still largely a cause of corruption and of

88 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the spread of vice. Our city prisons and sta-
tion houses are often nurseries of crime, and
this may be affirmed also of many of our county
jails and poorhouses. A recognized authority
on this subject has said that if there is an in-
iquity in the land to-day it is the county jail
system; that there is no greater iniquity in the
world than the jail system of the United States.
But the discussion of this and analogous ques-
tions would carry us beyond our present aim.
It is enough to have called attention to the fact
that it is the part of wisdom to refuse to yield
unreservedly to our American spirit of opti-
mism. All past ages when compared with our
own were, in a sense, ages of ignorance, and
there may be reasons for thinking that the man
of the future will place our century in the same
category. A dark age certainly it shall be called
when considered from the point of view of con-
duct, when character is held to be the only suffi-
cient test of enlightenment. The immature and
the degenerate prefer pleasure to virtue and
power, and those who prefer money to truth
and love are also immature or degenerate.
Greed, not less than sensuality, marks epochs
in which all things are verging toward ruin.
We are at present under the tyrannous sway of
the spirit of commercialism and. expansion, and
our very thought is made subservient to the

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 89

ideal of vulgar success; but those who have
best insight have a fine scorn of current opin-
ion. They are able to do without its approval,
and they end by receiving it.

Emerson says that America is God's great
charity to the race; but true religion working
with the added power which science gives is
greater than America: it will purify, ennoble,
and transform our life into some likeness to the
divine ideals, which as yet we but vaguely dis-
cern. We have already learned that a man's
chief value does not lie in his ability to conquer
with sword and shell, and we are coming to
understand that it lies just as little in his ability
to manipulate machinery or to get money.

Comte thinks that Christianity is the conse-
cration of egoism; and it is a fact that it re-
gards primarily the individual and asserts the
supreme worth of personality. But it also in-
sists that the individual can rightly develop and
find himself only in devoting his thought and
life to the love and service of God and his fel-
low-man. It would found on earth a kingdom
of heaven in which obedience to the will of the
Eternal Father (which is good-will to man)
shall be an all-controlling constitutional prin-
ciple and law ; and beneficence the universal
means of personal and social advancement. We
must be benefactors that we may become able

9<D SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

to love our fellows, for if we incline to hate
those whom we wrong, more surely are we
drawn to love those to whom we do good.

They who live with whatsoever things are
true, just, gracious, pure, and amiable, continue
to grow in mental and moral power; and the
good of life lies in the mental and moral dispo-
sitions which a spiritual faith and disinterested
conduct create and foster within us. As matter
is but life's setting, not its substance, so if we
would go to the succor of those who fail in right
living we must give them our interest, sym-
pathy, confidence, and affection more than our
money. The special vice of the thriftless and
delinquent is heedlessness and recklessness. We
must train them to forethought, attention, and
consideration ; and personal influence, not alms-
giving, is the proper means whereby this may be
accomplished. If we would save them, we must
save them from themselves. The purest charity
consists in doing the spiritual rather than in
doing the corporal works of mercy, since the
essential good is the good of the soul. Let us
have confidence in whatever increases the power
of the soul ; confidence therefore in the virtues
of religion, which are faith, hope, and love;
confidence in knowledge, science, freedom, and
labor, persuaded that riches are good only when
they are the possessions of the wise and good.

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 91

It is easier to be generous than to be just. The
generous win approval, while the just are often
misunderstood and suspected of lack of heart.
The poor love the poor because they give their
thought and time to one another. They do not
love the rich because the rich give them only
money. Mere advice has little efficacy, for what
we all need in nearly all situations is not so
much a clearer view of right, as a more fervent
desire, a more determined will to do right;
and advice cannot supply this. No system of
dogma or morals, however much it be preached,
can regenerate the world. If men are to be
converted and transformed, they must be
brought close to Christ himself, must learn to
know and love Him, as St. John and St. Luke,
St. Francis and St. Vincent de Paul knew and
loved Him ; they must be brought to believe and
feel that as He is one with the Father, so are
we all verily God's children. If reason alone
controlled us the world would be a waste. If
the universe of metaphysics and of science were
not an abstraction, it would be a hell where faith,
hope, and love would become impossible; for
these are nourished and kept alive, not by specu-
lation and research, but by unselfish service,
generous deeds, and heroic endeavor.

Among the ancients the unfortunate were
held to be accursed, hateful to the divinities, and

92 SOCIALISM AND LABOR,

consequently without title to the pity of men.
In nothing has Christ wrought a more radical
change than in the world's attitude toward the
weak and heavy laden. He withstood the super-
stition and mercilessness to which centuries had
given a kind of religious sanction, and taught
by word and deed that the more sinful, the more
ignorant, the more abandoned our fellows are,
the greater their claim on our attention and
service. His life and doctrines have produced
a mighty and beneficent revolution in their be-
half; and yet much of the old hardness and
injustice still survives both in society and in
innumerable individuals who call themselves
followers of the all-loving and all-helpful
Saviour. What multitudes there are who pass
by and ignore the misery and suffering they
cannot but see, who despise the poverty-
stricken, who are hard and bitter toward the
erring; how many who imagine they serve
God by hating and maligning one another ; who
are hindrances to the spread of the kingdom
for whose coming they pray! As when we
look in a mirror we try to see ourselves in a
favorable light, so when by introspection we
attempt to get a glimpse of our inner being,
we instinctively take the points of view which
best reveal our qualities and hide our defects.
If we should strive honestly to see ourselves

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 93

as we are, self-complacency would quickly die
within us.

If we were true Christians we should be able
to labor for our fellows with such confidence
and enthusiasm that nor baseness, nor ingrati-
tude, nor faithlessness, nor apostasy from light
and love of however many of those we seek to
help would have power to cool our ardor or
diminish our zeal. Though the world about us
should appear to crave for nothing but money
and sensation, we would none the -less dedicate
whatever of ability God has given us to redeem
our brothers from themselves; and if in the
end we should have accomplished nothing, we
should at least have escaped an ignoble life.

The purest pleasure is to give pleasure, and
the highest glory belongs to those who labor
earnestly, both by thinking and by doing, to
make truth, justice, and love prevail. The uni-
verse was made for every one of us, and for
each one the world will be fair and pleasant in
the degree in which he strives to make it so
for others. It is not possible to respect one's
self and to make no sacrifice for one's fellow-
men. In coming closer to one another to help
those who need help, we shall make ourselves
more capable of seeing and confessing the truth
which the life and work and words of Christ
reveal.

94 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

What is true of us as individual men and
women applies with equal force to our national
life. The ends to which as a people we are called
to devote ourselves are religion, education, jus-
tice, and charity. If we fail in this, wealth and
numbers and the conquest of distant lands will
have no power to save us from ruin and shame.
Nothing but a civilization resting on a basis of
righteousness and morality can make popular
government permanent. If we are to look, not
to the triumphs of the moment, but to lasting
results for which the whole world shall be grate-
ful, we must trust to the largest thought and the
purest love; for so surely as God is, so surely
are they destined to prevail. Tyranny is the foe
of liberty; greed, of justice; brute force, of
mercy and goodness; and wars, which spring
from the barbarous passion for conquest, from
covetousness, from the savage's delight in vic-
tory won by cunning and physical strength,
pervert judgment, destroy right feeling, and
foster the vices which weaken, harden, and blind
the people, and lead the way to destruction.
Unless we remain sensitive to moral distinctions,
unless we prefer justice and mercy to dominion
over the kingdoms of the earth, we shall enter
the open ways along which the republics and
empires of the past have rushed to shame and
destruction. If, then, we love America; if we

CHARITY AND JUSTICE. 95

believe in the brotherhood of mankind, in equal
opportunity and freedom for all of God's chil-
dren, let us turn from dehumanizing greed, from
vainglory and pride, to follow after truth and
justice and love.

V.

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

man can write worthily of woman who
does not approach his subject with a kind
of religious reverence; and a true man will
ever treat woman, both in life and in litera-
ture, not with justice merely, but with gener-
ous sympathy. Into her arms we are born, on
her breast our helpless cries are hushed, and
her hands close our eyes when the light is gone.
Watching her lips, our own become vocal; in
her eyes we read the mystery of faith, hope,
and love; led by her hand, we learn to look up
and to walk in the way of obedience to law.
We owe to her, as mother, as sister, as wife,
as friend, the tenderest emotions of life, the
purest aspirations of the soul, the noblest ele-
ments of character, and the completest sym-
pathy in all our joy and sorrow. She weaves
flowers of heaven into the vesture of earthly
life. In poetry, painting, sculpture, and reli-
gion, she gives us ideals of the fair and beau-
tiful. Innocence is a woman, chastity is a

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 97

woman, charity is a woman. And yet, true as
all this is and is felt to be throughout Christen-
dom, such views and sentiments, when consid-
ered in the light of history, seem to be little less
than absurd. The poets have sung divinely of
woman, but man has treated her inhumanly.
At the origin of society she is everywhere a
drudge, a slave, a chattel. Among the Baby-
lonians, we know from Herodotus, it was the
custom to offer women for sale to the highest
bidder, and every woman was required, at least
for a time, to put a price on her virtue. With
the Lydians this was a universal practice. The
Syrians, to the immolation of children to idols,
joined the compulsory sacrifice of woman's
honor. Strabo affirms that even the most
distinguished families among the Armenians
presented their daughters to the goddess of de-
bauch in the temple of Anaitis; and the same
writer tells us that a law of the Medes required
every man to have not less than seven wives.
That polygamy and infanticide were common
among the Persians is a fact to which Herodo-
tus testifies, who also says that the Scythians
were promiscuous in their relations with women,
were conjugal despots, and immolated widows
on the graves of their husbands. And Strabo
asserts that the ancient Hindoos bought their
wives, treated them as slaves, and burned them

7

98 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

when their husbands died. Among the Mon-
gols, community of women was consecrated
both by law and custom. In Egypt, Diodorus
tells us, unlimited polygamy was lawful to all
except the priests; and the support of the
family, by the rudest labors, and often by the
sale of virtue, devolved upon woman, while
the men stayed at home to nurse and knit. In
Greece woman held a less degraded position.
She was not the slave of her husband, but, with
the exception of a certain class of public women,
she was reared in ignorance and confined to the
nursing of children and to domestic drudgery.
When her husband entertained his friends, she
was not permitted to sit at table. The Grecian
view of marriage is physico-political. Even in
the heroic epoch of Homer, there is no trace
of the sentiment of love as it is known to us. Of
the many suitors of Penelope, not one seeks to
render himself worthy of her love. The famous
passage in which Homer describes the parting
of Hector from Andromache, depicts the great
hero's concern for his son, rather than for his
wife; and Andromache is embraced by Pyr-
rhus, the son of the slayer of her husband.
Menelaus takes Helen back in complete indif-
ference, after she had lived ten years with Paris.
Telemachus rudely tells his mother to go back
to her spinning-wheel, and that to speak among

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 99

men belongs only to man. The husband bought
his wife, and the woman taken captive was re-
duced to slavery and sold as a chattel. Woman's
work in the Homeric period was to draw water,
to wash, to grind corn, to make the fire, and to
perform all the most menial and even indecent
labors for men. Hesiod, who probably belongs
to this period, calls women " an accursed brood,
and the chief scourge of the human race." And
^Eschylus, at a later date, declares that woman
is the direst scourge both of the State and the
home. The daily prayer of Socrates was a
thanksgiving to the gods that he had been born
neither a slave nor a woman; and Aristotle
teaches that woman is by nature the inferior of
man. Plato, in his " Republic," takes a purely
political view of woman, and would have the
propagation of the human race made subject to
the principles that guide stock-raisers in the
breeding of animals. In the historical age of
Greece, a slight improvement in the legal posi-
tion of woman was accompanied by her social
degradation. Virtuous women were kept ;n
ignorance and seclusion, and the place of honor
was given to courtesans. The companionship
of Socrates and Theodota, and Plato's presence
in the house of Aspasia, without even the re-
motest suspicion that such a state of affairs was
reprehensible, make it unnecessary to use other

TOO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

arguments to show the ineffable degradation to
which woman had been brought in the most
brilliant epoch of Grecian civilization.

In the earliest days the Romans bought or
captured their wives ; and women were not per-
mitted to own or inherit property. Romulus
gave the husband absolute authority over the
wife, even to the right of life and death. Eg-
nacius Menecius was scarcely blamed for kill-
ing his wife, though she had been guilty of
nothing more grievous than merely tasting
wine. " Slacken the rein/' said Cato, speak-
ing of woman, "and you will afterwards strive
in vain to check the mad career of that unrea-
soning animal." The Romans habitually con-
trasted the majesty of man (majestas virorum)
with the imbecility, frivolity, and weakness of
woman (sexus imbecillis, levis, impar labori-
bus). As they drowned weak and deformed
children, so they treated woman as an inferior
and a slave. In Rome, as in Greece, as the
laws were made more just to woman, her moral
and social degradation was intensified. There
is nothing sadder in human history than the
condition of women during the decline of the
Roman State. A depravity of which it is im-
possible to speak without becoming indelicate
grew like a leprosy into the lives of women of
every class, until, as Plutarch says, they seemed

WOMAN- AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. IOI

to have been born only for luxury and sensual-
ity. Asiatic slaves of surpassing beauty were
introduced into every patrician house, and
Roman matrons, throwing aside even the ap-
pearance of decency, delivered themselves up
to the most revolting vice. Seneca says, "They
vied with men in licentiousness." There was a
universal aversion to marriage, and a weariness
of life itself. The Roman Empire had become
a slough of blood and filth.

If we turn to the barbarous populations from
which the modern Christian nations have been
developed, we find no marked change for the
better in the condition of woman. Certain
authors, in their zeal to deny all beneficent in-
fluence to the Christian religion, have sought
to make it appear that the present position of
women in the civilized world is, in a great
measure, to be ascribed to the reverence in
which it is supposed woman was held by the
Teutonic tribes that on the downfall of the
Roman Empire gained control of a large part
of Europe. They form this opinion upon in-
formation derived from Tacitus, who, in his
account of the manners and customs of the
Germans, says:

" They think there is in women something holy
and prophetical ; they do not despise their counsels,
and they listen to their predictions. In the time of

IO2 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the divine Vespasian we have seen the greater part
of them regard Velleda as a goddess."

But Tacitus here alludes manifestly to a
superstitious belief in woman as a sorceress
and prophetess, and any conclusions that we
may attempt to draw from his words as to
woman's social position among these barbar-
ous tribes must be valueless. Similar beliefs
and analogous customs, as Guizot has remarked,
have existed among many savage and barbar-
ous peoples. Tacitus, indeed, expressly says in
another passage, that the authority of Velleda
was due to a superstition among the Germans
that led them to look upon many women as
prophetesses; and the witchcraft of the middle
ages, and even that of New England, at a later
day, for which Christianity has been held ac-
countable, was the survival of an ancient pagan
superstition, which it required centuries to erase
from the popular imagination. It must be borne
in mind, too, that Tacitus had never crossed the
Rhine, and that his knowledge of the social
customs of the barbarians was derived from
others, whose accounts may or may not have
been trustworthy. Again, Tacitus wrote in the
mephitic air of Roman corruption, and the in-
dignation with which the moral degradation of
his countrymen filled him must have led him to

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 03

paint in brighter colors the life of barbarians
who could not have been so depraved as the
civilized men whom he knew. We know, at all
events, that the lot of woman among the Teu-
tonic tribes was what it has always been among
barbarous peoples. The slayer of a woman cap-
able of bearing children was made to pay a fine
of about six dollars; if she was too young or
too old to become a mother, the fine was put at
two dollars. It is the old Greek view, in which
woman is valuable because without her it is not
possible to have man. The husband bought his
wife, and if she became unfaithful he drove
her with rods through the village in a state of
nudity. The sentiment of modesty and holy
shame, which is so essential a part of Christian
reverence for woman, could hardly have existed
among these populations, since we know from
Tacitus that custom permitted the men and
women to bathe promiscuously. Polygamy was
conceded in principle, since kings and nobles
were permitted to have several wives. " A
slave," says Strabo, " woman was compelled to
toil for her husband during his life, and at his
death she was immolated on his grave, that she
might continue to serve him in another world."
Among the other barbarous peoples of Europe,
woman's lot was still more deplorable. Caesar's
account of the tribes that inhabited England

104 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

gives us an insight into a state of depravity to
which history can hardly furnish a parallel.

It is not difficult to account for this world-
wide inhumanity of man to woman. Through-
out all pre-Christian history the law of superior
strength was the rule of conduct. The strong-
est governed, and governed in virtue of their
strength, and not in virtue of any moral sanc-
tion or divine authority.

This is at all times true of savage and barbar-
ous hordes ; and it is, in a general way, true of
the pagan States of Greece and Rome. The
notion that man has duties to his fellow-man,
even though he be wholly in his power, did not
enter into the view of human life. Captives,
therefore, might be put to death, or reduced to
a state of slavery worse than death. The slave
was a chattel; the master was free to treat
him as he treated his ass or his dog. Among
pagans, the later stoics were the first to teach
that masters are bound by ties of moral obliga-
tion to their slaves, and how far these views
may have been the result of Christian influ-
ences it is not easy to determine. When
strength is made the measure of right, woman
is inevitably driven to the wall. Nature, in
making her a mother, makes her weak — takes
a part of her blood, her mind, and her heart to
give it to another. Child-bearing and child-

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 105

rearing place her at a disadvantage. Were she
even physically stronger and mentally more
capable than man, the infirmities and the duties
inseparable from her sex would make it im-
possible for her to cope with him in the life-
struggle. Hence, wherever the law of strength
has been accepted as the rule of life, man has
treated woman as Petruchio proposed to treat
Katherina :

" I will be master of what is mine own,
She is my goods, my chattels ; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything."

The savage went wife hunting, as he went wolf
or bear hunting, and brought the captive home
to be his slave. The barbarian, too, captured
his woman in war, or bought her. The civi-
lized pagan was a polygamist, or at least looked
upon himself as wholly free from all obliga-
tions of marital fidelity.

If this is, in general outlines, the history of
woman except in Christendom, it is pertinent
to ask whether the Christian religion bears any
causal relation to her actual position in the civi-
lized world. When Christ came, woman, like
the slave, was everywhere without honor, with-
out freedom, without hope. Men, bearing the
curse of their own depravity, sank into the

106 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

depths of moral infamy to which they had re-
duced the poor and the weak. Surrounded by
human herds to whom vice in its most degrad-
ing forms had become a second nature, they
breathed an atmosphere of corruption, in which
the moral sense perished. Life grew to be a
kind of remittent fever alternating between lust
and blood. Here and there a stray voice pro-
tested, but only in tones of despair. The masses
of mankind — the slave and the woman — had
been reduced to a state so pitiable that possibly
nothing short of the coming of God himself, in
sorrow and in weakness, could have inspired
the courage even to dream of better things.
Hope had fled; the world was prostrate; in
the mephitic air of unnatural sensual indul-
gence the soul was stifled; woman had lost
even the attractiveness of sex, and a thousand
slaves could hardly feed the stomach of Dives.
To such a world Jesus Christ came, and took
Lazarus in His arms, and called upon all who
believed in God to follow Him in the service of
outraged humanity. Before any moral progress
could be hoped for, new ideas had to be grafted
in the human mind, ideas as to what man is in
himself, as to what is due to him in virtue of
his very nature; new doctrines concerning the
duties of all men to all men, and especially of
the strong to the weak, of the rich to the poor,

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. IO/

of man to woman. Christ sees the soul. The
soul determines the value of human life, and
the soul of the child, of the slave, of woman, is
as sacred as the soul of Caesar. " There is
neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond
nor free ; there is neither male nor female. For
you are all one in Christ Jesus." That which
is supreme in Christ is love. He pours the
boundless love of God into the channels in
which human life flows. In His presence up-
glows the purest, the strongest, the most un-
quenchable love that exists or has existed on
earth; and He turns this stream of divine
charity into the desert of human wretchedness
and woe, to refresh and gladden the hearts of
the poor and the forlorn, of the slave and the
beggar, and of woman, the great outcast of
humanity. He sends those who love Him to
feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to
clothe the naked, to ransom the captive, to visit
the sick. Wherever a human being suffers
wrong or want, there is Christ to be loved and
to be served. Homer is not so much the father
of all our poetry, nor Socrates so much the
master of all our intellectual discipline, as is
Christ the fountain-head of the humanitarian
love that makes men helpful to the weak and
the wronged. In lifting the soul into the full
light of God's presence, He not only gave a new

IO8 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

measure of the value of life, but a new meaning
to authority. The supremacy of force is sup-
planted by the supremacy of truth and justice,
of love and mercy. Slaves and beggars will
now appeal from emperors and senates to God,
in the name of the soul, redeemed by Christ.
Henceforth, to be man is to be God-like; to be
an emperor is to be human. In the light of
this truth, woman becomes the equal of man.
Hence polygamy is abolished, and marriage is
of one with one, and for life. Wedded love
becomes sacramental love, and the tenderness
with which Christ loves His Church becomes the
symbol of the love of husband for wife. " He
that loveth his wife," says St. Paul, " loveth
himself. For no man ever hated his own flesh,
but nourisheth and cherisheth it, as also Christ
doth his Church." Thus the family becomes a
lesser church, the home a sanctuary, and woman
is God's providence, sitting by each man's
hearth-fire. Eve withdraws, and the Virgin
Mother is made the ideal woman. No Amazon
here, no Spartan mother, no stern mother of
the Gracchi, no goddess of sensual love, no fair
slave of man's animal appetites; but woman,
pure, gentle, tender, lovhig, patient, strong; the
world's benefactress, because, through her, di-
vine manhood lives on earth, and peace, love,
mercy, and righteousness prevail. With this

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. IOQ

new ideal of womanhood, the exaltation of the
beauty and moral worth of perfect chastity is
intimately associated. The selfishness of man,
which is chiefly shown in the indulgence of
his sensual passions, is woman's most terrible
enemy. Love is pure and gentle ; lust is coarse
and brutal. Love is born of the soul, and not
of the senses; and when this celestial flower
first blooms under the eyes of a pure youth and
a fair maiden, they are lifted to infinite heights,
and the sad side of love is the disenchantment
that comes when they are awakened from their
dream. Nothing tends more to exalt the pas-
sion of pure love than reverence for virginity,
real belief in the sacredness of womanly
virtue. Those only are worthy of the love of
woman who, like King Arthur's knights, bind
themselves —

" To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds."

This exaltation of perfect chastity is the most
emphatic assertion of the truth that woman does
not exist simply for man; that the sphere of
her activity is not bounded by the duties of wife
and mother. She may love Jesus Christ, and,
with no man for her husband, become a minis-
tering angel of light and love to the wide world.

IIO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

Purity, meekness, patience, faith, and love —
which are the virtues that our blessed Lord
most emphasizes — are, above all, womanly vir-
tues. He does not exalt intellect, courage, and
strength, but gentleness, and lovingness, and
helpfulness. The Christian hero even, like all
heroines, shows his supreme strength in suffer-
ing rather than in doing. To the most wretched
phase even of woman's existence the Saviour
has brought the healing of His heavenly grace.
In all literature, sacred and profane, there is
nothing so touching, so tender and consoling,
as the Gospel episode of Magdalene; and he
who looks with more complacency upon Aspasia
with Plato at her feet than upon Magdalene at
the feet of Jesus is self-condemned. If we take
a view of Christian history in the light of the
ideals that Christ has given us, there is, of
course, disappointment. The ideal never be-
comes real in this earthly existence, and since
even the best reach not these heights, the multi-
tude, of course, remain far below. Ideals are
like the mountain-peaks that gleam amid the
azure heavens; we look up to them with de-
light, but the ascent wearies, and when on the
summit we find the air too fine for our coarse
breathing, and in the solitude we miss the crowd
and grow lonely. Nevertheless, on these snow-
capped heights are born the spring showers and

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 1 1

the summer rains, which nourish the growing
corn and the ripening grain. But if Christian
society has not realized its ideals concerning
woman, it has never been without their elevating
and refining influence. To the action of the
Church in the middle ages we are indebted for
the monogamic family, which lies at the basis
of our civilization and is the stronghold of all
that is best in our social life. Had not popes
and bishops withstood kings and barons when
they sought to continue the polygamous prac-
tices that among the German barbarians were
lawful, monogamy would have perished among
the ruling classes of Europe; and with the
development of popular power, had such devel-
opment then been possible, woman would have
fallen to the place that she to-day occupies in
Mohammedan countries. Indeed, the preserva-
tion of all western Europe from the blight of
Mohammedanism is due to the action of the
Church, which united and was alone able to
unite the warring factions of western semi-
barbarians, and to hurl them, century after cen-
tury, against the strongholds of the hordes
whose dream of heaven was a place of sensual
delights.

The objection has often been urged, that in
making man the head of the family the Church
is unjust to woman. But the family is an or-

112 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ganic unity, and cannot exist without subordi-
nation and authority. Either the husband or the
wife must be the depository of domestic author-
ity, and unless it can be shown that woman is
better fitted than man to exercise this power, no
injustice has been done. Physically man is
stronger than woman ; he is better able to con-
front the world and to do the work by which the
members of the family are maintained in health
and comfort. Historically, society grows out
of a .warlike and barbarous state of life ; and
since women are less fitted for war than men,
the defense of property and rights is naturally
intrusted to those whose hands hold the sword.
But it is not necessary to examine into the
genesis and evolution of society to find reasons
for giving the headship of the family to man;
we need but look into the heart of woman to see
there an impulse as strong as life to look up to
and follow the man she loves. Between man
and woman there ought to be no question of
superiority or inferiority; they are unlike, and
in nothing do they differ more than in their
relative power to escape from their impressions.
A woman understands only what she feels,
whereas a man may grow to be able to look at
things as they are in themselves, remaining the
while indifferent to their relations to himself.
Hence women are superior to men in those vir-

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 113

tues in which the essential element is right
feeling. They believe more, hope more, and
love more than men. They are more compas-
sionate, more capable of remaining faithful to
those who are unworthy of their love, because
they consider only the love they feel, and give
comparatively little heed to its object. Men, on
the other hand, are superior in the virtues that
spring less from sentiment and depend rather
on the nature of things, — their eternal fitness,
— as justice, fortitude, equanimity, wisdom, pru-
dence. This difference in character determines
their position in domestic and social relations;
nor would there be gain for either man or
woman if they could be made less unlike. The
charm, as well as the helpfulness, of their rela-
tions lies in their differences, and not in their
likenesses. They are complementary; each
needs the qualities of the other, and their wants
are the bond of union. The opposition of men
and women to so-called woman's rights comes,
doubtless, in many instances from a belief that
to throw woman into public life is to make her
less womanly. Nor gods nor men love a man-
nish woman or a womanish man. The un-
fairness with which woman is treated in the
legislation of the mediaeval epoch may be traced
to the barbarous ideas concerning woman that
partially survived in Europe centuries after our

1 14 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

ancestors had been converted to Christianity;
nor has this injustice even yet disappeared from
the statute-books of the civilized nations. The
causes that have led to the improvement of
.woman's condition among the Christian nations
are, in general, the same that have developed
our civilization. Whatever influences have been
active in the abolition of slavery, in securing
popular rights, free government, protection for
children and the poor, in bringing knowledge
within the reach of all, and thereby spreading
abroad juster and more humane principles of
conduct, have also wrought for the welfare of
woman ; and it is not necessary to point out how
intimately all this progress is associated with
the social action of the Christian religion. The
spirit of chivalry is the outgrowth of the Chris-
tian ideal of womanhood. To maintain that
Christianity crushed out " the feminine element,
and, more than all other influences combined,
plunged the world into the dark ages," is to
indulge in a kind of declamation that, for the
past half-century at least, has become impossible
to enlightened minds. To say that the doctrine
of original sin throws the guilt exclusively or
chiefly on woman, is merely to affirm one's igno-
rance of Christian teaching. St. Ambrose, one
of the four great doctors of the Western Church,
declares that woman's fault in the original fall

WOMAN AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 1 1 5

was less than that of man, as her bearing was
beyond question more generous. And then the
Catholic Church at least teaches that Mary has
more than made good any wrong that Eve may
have done. To assert that in the Christian reli-
gion " the godhead is a trinity of males " is to
be at once ignorant and coarse. God is neither
male nor female, as in Christ there is neither
male nor female. To proclaim that the Chris-
tian religion teaches that " woman is an after-
thought in creation, sex a crime, marriage a
condition of slavery for woman and defilement
for man, and maternity a curse," is to mistake
rant for reason, declamation for argument. In
fact, the advocates of woman's rights too often
take this false and therefore offensive tone.
They speak like people who have grievances ; and
to have a grievance is to be a bore. They scold ;
and when women scold, whether in public or in
private, men may not be able to answer them,
but they grow sullen and cease to be helpful.
To be persuasive, woman must be amiable ; and
to be strong, she must speak from a loving heart,
and not from a sour mind. Whoever is thor-
oughly imbued with the spirit of Christianity
must sympathize with all movements having as
their object the giving to woman the full pos-
session of her rights. No law that is unjust
her should exist in Christendom. She sh«

Il6 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

not be shut out from any career that offers to
her the means of an honest livelihood. For the
same work she should receive the same wages
as a man, and should hold her property in virtue
of the same right that secures to him the pos-
session of his own. For wrong-doing of what-
ever kind she should not be made to suffer a
severer punishment than is inflicted upon man.
The world will continue to be unjust to her
until public opinion makes the impure man as
odious as it makes the impure woman.

The best interests of mankind, of the Church
and the State, will be served by widening and
strengthening woman's influence. The ancient
civilization perished because woman was de-
graded, and ours will be perpetuated by a pure,
believing, self -reverent, and enlightened woman-
hood. Woman here in the United States is
more religious, more moral, and more intelli-
gent than man ; more intelligent in the sense of
greater openness to ideas, greater flexibility of
mind, and a wider acquaintance with literature ;
and whatever is really good for her must be
good for our religion and civilization. She
" stays all the fair young planet in her hands. "

VI.

EMOTION AND TRUTH.

[Address delivered on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
establishment of the diocese of Peoria.J

TITTHATEVER stirs emotion disturbs judg-
ment. This most beautiful May time, a
great concourse of people, a throng of bishops
and priests in symbolic vesture ; music, pleading
for power to utter the thought and love of the
Eternal, or bursting forth in swelling volumes
of sound that roll and rise, borne on viewless
wings, to the throne of God; rites and cere-
monies, hallowed by association with the divin-
est faith and the noblest memories, with the
heroic sufferings and triumphs of millions of
men and women — the fine flower and fruit of
humanity — who century after century for more
than fifty generations have taken their stand on
the world-wide battlefield, steadfast until swal-
lowed in the vortices of visible things, to re-live
in the ever-enduring universe of pure spirits —
all this exalts the imagination and lifts to
spheres where feeling is spontaneous and delib-
eration difficult.

Il8 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

For most of us who are gathered here the
day itself brings recollections which for each one
are tender and moving, as with varying shade
and circumstance they twine around the found-
ing of parishes, the building of churches and
schools and homes of mercy and beneficence,
that in more than a hundred towns and villages,
and on wide prairies amid the growing corn and
the ripening harvest, have risen at the call of
faith and at the promptings of a generosity that
seems to annul selfish impulse, so long as there
is good to be done — recollections of youthful
courage, high hope, and pertinacious labor un-
dertaken for what each one believed to be most
divine, and endured for the love of what is
holiest. It is inevitable, therefore, that emotions
swell within us, which dispose us to accept as
truth words which sober reason is reluctant to
approve. But best reason rests in Love, from
which the universe has sprung, of whose deepest
heart certainly our religion is born; and since
from this same source the sentiments which in-
spire us to-day rise like a fountain's pure, light-
seeking waters, why may we not believe and
affirm that what such emotion has awakened and
bodied forth in word and deed is very truth?
Not indeed logical or scientific truth — a skele-
ton of formulas and facts — but the truth which
is borne in upon the soul when mothers sing

EMOTION AND TRUTH. 119

their children to sleep, when lovers sitting side
by side watch the sun sinking beneath the hori-
zon, and the stars as one by one they smile from
infinitude on the homes of men; such truth as
the flowers speak, when from their lowly beds
they look up and laugh before us ; such as chil-
dren reveal and impersonate when heaven is
mirrored in their pure eyes and innocent faces.

If truth were but the naked fact, where should
there be found room for the ineffable charm
which interfuses itself with the glow of dawn
and sunset, with the light that falls from starlit
skies and from the countenances of those we
love; for the passion and patience, the trust
and longing, the sacrifice and aspiration, which
impel the soul to transcend the limitations of
time and space and which give to human life
its power and blessedness?

When we recall the years that are no more,
the paths we trod in childhood, the concert of
voices that in the long ago made the woodland
ring with music, the quick current of youthful
blood athrill with high hopes and noble resolves,
and suddenly are made aware that it has all
dissolved into emptiness and become as though
it had never been, it is not possible to remain
cold and impassive. When we turn to the be-
ginning of our early manhood, as issuing with
sublime self-confidence from the portals of

I2O SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

our Alma Mater, we vowed to walk and work
with Christ, to illumine, to guide, to strengthen,
to console, and to save men, and are made
deeply conscious how little our purposes have
fulfilled themselves in deeds, we are softened
and sobered, grow lowly-minded and meek,
like those who contemplate ruins which the
centuries have wrought. In such mood all
vanity and self-complacency die within us, and
words of praise and commendation sound like
mockery.

The achievements of even the genuinely
great, if they be considered in the light of the
Eternal, are insignificant.

Were God not, the whole race of man would
be no better than the parasites that batten on
decay. But God is, and they who have best
insight best know that man's worth is meas-
ured by the degree of his kinship with Him,
without whom he would be but a semblance and
unreality.

If in any one of us there be aught that may
win approval or awaken admiration or thankful-
ness, whether it be truth, or honesty, or mildness,
or intelligence, or strength of mind, or rectitude,
or courage, or perseverance, or humility, or
love, or piety, or unselfishness, it is of, through,
and for God, from whom all life springs, to
whom all hope looks, toward whom all yearn-

EMOTION AND TRUTH. 121

ing moves, on whom all faith rests, in whom all
hearts find repose.

In the twenty-five years on which we now set
the seal of eternity, whatever may have been
well done by any one of us has been done for
Him and by His help. The field is His, the
seed is His ; His the rain and the sunshine ; His
the vital force that has built unto itself a body
and brought about the harmonic play of all the
members of the organism. We have been but
His servants, and had we not been at all, He,
had He so willed, would have found others and
better. Our only merit is that of servants, and
true service is our only blessedness.

The service we have chosen is that which the
Eternal stooped to earth and wore human flesh
to perform. It is the most beneficent, the holi-
est, the helpfullest, the most needful which it
can fall to the lot of man to do. The task set
us is to make ourselves and others Christ-like
and God-like.

If those who profess to lead a religious life
have the morals of the crowd or worse, they
are the most contemptible and are, in fact, the
most despised of men; but those who have the
soul, and not merely the name of priest, are
divine men — are, in word and deed, God's
faithfullest witnesses to the Truth that liberates,
to the Love that saves and beatifies.

122 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

" Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest
Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny ;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on this side, for on that am I."

No unworthy thought has impelled us to
commemorate this day with solemn rites and
grave words. Few of us are so immature as
to attach importance to a mere demonstration.
None of us are so frivolous as to imagine that
what is said of a man has meaning or value
other than that derived from what he is; and
what he is, not himself even, but God alone
knows.

There may be merit in collecting so many
thousand dollars and in paying mechanics for
fitting together so many stones and so many
pieces of wood, but where the aim and end are
spiritual, praise for doing such things is not to
the purpose. Neither the heart nor the proper
work of such a one is in matter, which has mean-
ing for him only in so far as it is made to serve
higher interests, by becoming the nourishment
or the symbol of the soul. He knows that what
each one, and the social body as well, most needs
is not wealth, nor privilege, nor cunning, nor
favor, but larger, braver, holier, sweeter life —
more sympathy, more courage, more wisdom,
more love. Those prevail who are stronger than
their fellows — stronger through faith and de-

EMOTION AND TRUTH. 123

sire, through knowledge and virtue, through
self-control and devotion to truth and justice.
God is a Spirit, and those whose character is
built on the principles which faith and hope
make certain, which best reason approves, are the
powers by which His reign is established and
made perpetual. His servants conquer, not with
the sword, not with money nor with the things
money can buy, but by the soul, which, enrooted
in Him, contemplates all things in the light of
Eternity, and is calm and unmoved while the
pomp and pageantry pass by to sink forever
beyond the reach of all-penetrative thought.
Men, like children, are attracted by a world of
shows; they are busy with vanities, and attach
importance to trifles. But from the central
heart of religion the divine voice declares that
only the things which minister to the soul's wel-
fare have worth; that there is no genuine life
but that which unfolds itself heavenward, and,
like the tendril for the solid stem, reaches after
God. Had we temples built of gold and adorned
with every kind of precious stone; though the
music of the masters, uttered by masters ap-
pealed to us ; though from canvas and stone and
high-raised pulpit genius spoke to us, it were
all but show and sound if it did not lift the soul
nearer to our Father in heaven. God's men are
spiritual men, and the only religious progress

124 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

is progress in faith and love, in wisdom and
virtue.

What we commemorate to-day, we of the
diocese of Peoria, bishops and priests, brothers
and sisters, and the people whose servants we
all are, what this company of distinguished men
have come from many sees to help us to cele-
brate worthily, is our labors for the moraliza-
tion, the purification, and the spiritualization
of human life, is our devotion to the things
that make for righteousness and peace and life
everlasting.

If we have built churches, it is that the people
may gather there, and through worship and the
reception of the sacraments and the hearing of
the Word may be refreshed, nourished, and
renewed in their innermost being. If we have
established schools, it is that the little ones,
whom the blessed Saviour loved, who are our
joy and our hope, may grow up in an atmos-
phere in which learning blends with piety,
knowledge with faith, true thought with chaste
life, love with obedience. If we have founded
homes for those whom loss or sin or age or
poverty has made helpless or miserable, it is
because we know that they are our brothers and
sisters, and that we do best for our Heavenly
Father and for ourselves in serving them.

This is what we cherish most and most love.

EMOTION AND TRUTH. 125

If Peoria and the diocese of Peoria are dear to
us, — and God and we all know they are, — it
is so not chiefly for the beautiful site, the health-
ful climate, the fertile soil from which the corn
bursts like song from happy hearts; it is so
above all for the spirit of freedom, of good-will,
of helpfulness, which breathes here as unhin-
dered as the gentle wind that kisses the prairie
into life and bloom; they are dear for the op-
portunity which is given here to all alike to
upbuild character, to confirm will, to cultivate
the mind, to follow after the better things of
which faith and hope are the heralds.

If to-day for a moment, even in thought, I
may separate myself from any one of those who
during the twenty-five years that have now be-
come a part of the unchangeable past have gath-
ered about me in still increasing numbers and
with hearts ever more willing, I will say that
the affection I bear them and the joy they give
me — which, like the ripening fruit and the
mellowing wine, grow more precious as time
lengthens — are born, not so much of the suc-
cess with which they have accomplished what-
ever they have been asked to do, as of their
spirit of disinterestedness and self-sacrifice, of
their courage and ability, their magnanimity
and single-heartedness, their never-slumbering
watchfulness over the good name of the diocese

126 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

and that of its priesthood. When the office of
bishop was offered to me, if I hesitated to accept
the burden and the honor, it was largely (if my
memory deceive me not) from a dread lest my
opinion of man's high estate, as revealed in the
lives of priests and nuns, should be lowered by
the more intimate knowledge of them which
necessarily comes to those who are placed in
authority over them. A personal experience of
twenty-five years is a broad basis for the judg-
ment of an individual, and it is a source of
inner strength and freedom to me to be able to
feel and to say, in perfect sincerity, that, though
priests and nuns are not exempt from the infirm-
ities which inhere in all that is human, I have
found them to be the kindliest, the most unsel-
fish, the most loyal, the most pure-minded, and
the most devoted of men and women. Never
have I appealed to them in vain, when I have
appealed to the God-like in man. They have
confirmed my faith in human nature, and in the
worth and sacredness of life.

They have made me more certain that we are
all the children of an Almighty and all-loving
Father, from out whose thought and care we
can never die.

Let me conclude, in my own name and in
that of the whole diocese, with the expression
of sincere thanks to his eminence, the Cardinal

EMOTION AND TRUTH. 1 27

Archbishop of Baltimore, to the most reverend
archbishops and bishops, and to the reverend
clergymen who have done us the honor to be
our guests to-day and to heighten by their
presence and sympathy the significance and the
joy of this celebration.

VII.
EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM.

A S they alone are Christians who strive
"**• earnestly to lead a high and worthy life,
so only those who are seriously intent on mak-
ing themselves wise, strong, and virtuous are
patriots. Words are idle unless they are filled
with meaning by the deeds of those who utter
them. A soldier may die in battle, and be only
a mercenary; but he who so lives as to make
men thankful that he is their fellow-citizen is a
patriot. By making use of the opportunities
which liberty offers, one may amass vast wealth,
and be an enemy of freedom ; but he who frees
himself from within by overcoming ignorance
and greed makes us think well, not only of
himself, but of his country also. Children love
their parents, not when they praise them, but
when by their intelligent and virtuous behavior
they make them happy : and so those who boast
of the greatness of their country do not there-
fore love it; but its true lovers are those who
strengthen and glorify it by their wisdom, hon-

EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM. 129

esty, unselfishness, sincerity, and courage. If
in a foreign land we see an American who is
drunk, or loud and vulgar, we are forced to
confess that he is not a true, but a false and
traitorous American; and here at home the
miserable victims of greed, who offer and take
bribes, who combine to crush the weak, who
to increase their trade make war on a defense-
less people, are not true Americans, but false
and traitorous Americans. The characteristics
of a true American are good-will, sympathy
with the helpless and oppressed, intelligence,
uprightness, energy, courage, and industry ; and
if we love our country and desire to make its
institutions permanent, we must labor to cul-
tivate these virtues in ourselves and in those
whom we are able to influence. The love of
education, in the deep sense of the word, and
the love of country are one and the same love.
Nothing but education, domestic, religious, and
scholastic, can form the virtues which make
patriots.

Primarily, education is growth; and growth
is made possible and promoted by nutrition.
The food we take and assimilate makes us what
we are. In the case of the body this is plain.
We grow and maintain strength, by throwing
day by day into the life-current the substances
of which the body is composed. If this ceases,
9

130 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

we cease to grow and begin to decay. The tak-
ing of nourishment is not something which is
done once for all — it is a habitual process,
which goes on whether we eat or abstain,
whether we wake or sleep. This is also true
of our spiritual being. The mind grows by
what it feeds on habitually, day by day; and
the kind of nourishment it assimilates, and the
thoroughness with which it assimilates, deter-
mine its quality and power.

The proper nourishment of our spiritual being
is not knowledge or speculative truth. What
we merely know hardly enters into the fiber of
our higher nature. Hence the information we
get in school about the surface of the earth and
the stars, about kings and wars, about algebraic
and geometric problems, about philosophies and
literatures, neither makes a deep impression nor
is long remembered. Such information does
not so attract us as to cause us to live with it
and find in it our habitual nourishment. It
has therefore little to do with the formation of
character. When we ask what kind of man
one is, we do not mean to inquire about his
information or his possessions, but about his
character; and to get insight into his charac-
ter we wish to learn, not what he knows, but
what in his inmost soul he believes, hopes, and
strives for — his tastes and preferences, his

EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM. 131

bearing and behavior, the breadth and depth of
his love, the largeness and fullness of his sym-
pathies, his attitude toward the temporal and
Eternal.

Thus character is primarily moral — it is
what a man is, not the kind of clothes he wears
or the kind of information he possesses. It is
a result of nutrition and growth, and can no-
wise be formed by mechanical processes; and
since character is the man himself, it is pre-
cisely this moral growth which it is the chief
business of the school to promote; and if it
fail in this, it fails radically. A characterless
man is neither good in himself nor good in his
relations to any part of the social environment.
Character is formed by cultivating a taste for
what is true, good, and fair, — a love for jus-
tice, honesty, and kindliness, for reverence, mod-
esty, and courage; a loathing for dirt, physical
and moral, in thought, word, and deed ; a scorn
of lies, hypocrisy, and cant, — by rilling the
young with profound faith in the worth and
sacredness of life, by helping them to feel how
divine a thing it is to be alive when one has
hope and enthusiasm, is chaste and loving, wise
and helpful. In learning to know their teachers
the pupils should be able to perceive and love
in them the fairest and noblest virtues. Heroic
and saintly men and women also, as they are

132 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

portrayed in literature, should be often brought
before them. Thus they shall come to live not
only in an atmosphere of high thoughts, but
in the presence of the worthiest whom history
makes known; and they shall little by little
gain insight into the truth that life . is more
than its circumstance, that right and honorable
life is the only prosperity, the only wealth, and
that the worst misfortune and punishment is to
be base. When the vital strength which issues
in right conduct has become habitual with them,
instinctive, a second nature, then we may urge
them with all confidence to build on this foun-
dation whatever else may exalt, refine, and en-
rich human life; we may push them, according
to their endowments, to make themselves ora-
tors, poets, statesmen, captains of industry, men
of science, inventors, discoverers, leaders in re-
ligious and social movements, confident that the
more they upbuild their individual power the
more shall they become general benefactors and
true patriots, men who shall find their happiness
not in hoarding money, but in diffusing good,
in promoting religion, morality, education, and
whatever else tends to the common welfare.
Without misgivings we may seek to inspire
them with faith in the worth of intellectual
culture, with the confidence that they shall be
able to compass it, and with the love of the ex-

EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM. 133

cellence which it procures. We may point out
to them that the noblest work is that which man
performs with his noblest faculties; that if
the vicious are slaves, the ignorant are bond
servants, fatally doomed to do the world's
drudgery; that the chances of success, even in
the ordinary affairs of life, are as two hundred
and fifty to one, in favor of college-bred men
and women. We may show them how a culti-
vated mind is a perpetual invitation and oppor-
tunity to raise one's self to higher and more
profitable occupations, to acquaint one's self
with the best thought contained in the best lit-
erature, and thus to make one's self at home
with the noblest minds of all ages and coun-
tries ; how in thus opening up an inexhaustible
supply of spiritual nourishment, it gives one
the freedom, not of a city, though the most
glorious, but of the world, from the dawn of
history, even to the present hour. We may go
on to explain how much longer vigor of mind
endures than vigor of body. The manual
laborer is, I suppose, in his prime from the
age of twenty-five to thirty-five years; he is
old before he is fifty. The mental worker does
not reach his prime before he is fifty, and, if he
is a serious student, his value may increase till
he is seventy and more. His period of growth
(and growth is gladness) is very much longer

134 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

than that of the uneducated; and his work
has greater worth both for himself and for the
social environment.

If the average of moral and intellectual cul-
ture were higher, we should be able not only to
procure the needs and comforts of life with
less effort, but we should have the wisdom and
strength to deny ourselves many things which
are harmful and mere waste of individual and
collective force. All the luxuries involve dissi-
pation of vital energy and deterioration of the
quality of life; but among the luxuries no sen-
sible man will place the great works of art,
which spring from the highest activities of the
soul, and without which our whole existence
must sink to lower levels. What more strik-
ing instance could there be of the crude kind
of thinking in vogue among us, than that a
university professor should deem it not absurd
to place a great money-gatherer on the same
footing with a great poet? The one is a me-
chanical, the other a vital man. Riches are
akin to fear, to cowardice and death; but the
highest thought rightly expressed is the fine
essence of the purest life stored up for all who
are able to appreciate and admire, even to the
remotest age.

But however high we may place genius
and intellectual culture as educational powers,

EDUCATION AND PATRIOTISM. 135

when there is question of patriotism we must
come back to the moral element in human
nature, to the sense of duty, to character. The
essential is not what we know, but what we
believe and love and do with all our hearts.
George Washington was not a man of genius
or of the best intellectual culture, but he was
a great character — honest, simple, true, dis-
interested, incorruptible. He thought not of
private gain, nor of personal glory, nor of the
aggrandizement of his country, but believing
with all his heart in the right of the people to
govern themselves, he gave his time, his wealth,
his life, to make such government actual and
permanent. It could not have occurred to him
that Americans should ever seek to conquer a
people struggling for independence — to him,
who had inscribed upon his victorious banner
the Declaration of Independence. He could not
have dreamed that the extension of trade and
the enriching of trusts should ever be deemed
by Americans a justification of wars of con-
quest. He had a noble soul, he had a great
heart, he had honest convictions, he had the
courage of his opinions. Lf we compare him
with Julius Caesar, he is altogether inferior in
intellectual grasp and power, but wholly supe-
rior in character — in the qualities which make
a man wise, helpful, and beneficent. The one

136 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

overthrew a Republic to build an empire,
which quickly became the shame and ruin of
the world; the other founded a republic which
has been a refuge and blessing for all the vic-
tims of tyranny in the whole wide world, a re-
public for whose prosperity and continuance
all pure, gentle, loving, and Christian souls in
the whole wide world must pray.

VIII.

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY.

[Address delivered in Peoria at Mass-meeting in memory
of the death of President McKinley.]

TN the presence of the grief and humiliation
•*• of a great nation, one would wish to be
silent. Words cannot give right utterance to
what we feel. They are apt even to strike us
as but noise and sound, to distract and disturb
rather than to strengthen and console. There
is not question here of the passing of a man,
however true, however good, however noble he
may have been. The occasion does not call for
clamorous denunciation or vulgar abuse; much
less for appeals to the beast of prey that ever
lurks in the human breast. Crime is not a
remedy for crime; lawlessness is not a correc-
tive of lawlessness. A great people and petty
thoughts or revengeful feelings go ill together.
The strong do not rail ; the brave make no out-
cries. In proportion to one's power should be
his forbearance and self-control. If our dead
President was great, he was great through his

138 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

kindliness, his forgiving spirit, his desire to be
of help, his modesty and lowly-mindedness.
His greatness sprang from his Christian faith
and character, rather than from any surpassing
intellectual endowments. If we grieve for his
sad taking away, let our thoughts and senti-
ments be such as he would approve. To die as
he died can hardly be deemed an evil for him.
For more than half a century he had led a life
of honesty, purity, and honor; he had served
his God and his country from his earliest years ;
he had reached the topmost height to which an
American citizen may aspire. He had the re-
spect of the whole people; and those who dis-
agreed with him in matters of policy were glad
to accord him the high merit of a disinterested
patriotism. In the midst of a whole world
who thus honored him, while still in the full
vigor of manhood, untouched by the palsying
and blighting hand of age, he is suddenly
stricken by one whose mental and moral nature
had been wholly perverted. He dies in the ful-
fillment of kindly offices ; he dies in the midst of
the people who loved him and whom he loved;
he dies after many years of life of noblest ser-
vice and without stain. His task is done; his
fame is secure; and his example remains with
us to show us what a true American should be.
When the generous and the good have been

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY. 139

placed on the summit of earthly things, their
memory abides as a possession forever. The
calamity which has befallen, has befallen not
him, but the nation. When dire misfortunes
overtake individuals or a people whom inner
power makes great, they convert what might
utterly destroy baser natures to means of good.
We shall therefore seek to find the uses there
may be in this adversity. The cry of shame and
rage which has been heard throughout the whole
land is intelligible. It is the instinctive utterance
of the love we bear our country and of the in-
finite abhorrence we feel for whoever or what-
ever may do it hurt. Within our inmost souls
we are persuaded that America is God's greatest
earthly gift to His children; that He has des-
tined it to be the training ground of a nobler
race, the home of a more Christlike and diviner
humanity, whose beneficent influence shall be
as self-diffusive as love, and as wide-spreading
as the unending globe. When, therefore, a
crime is committed against the one man who is
the symbol and the representative of the whole
national life, we are filled with amazement, we
are* confused with astonishment, we are roused
to indignation, and in our mad bewilderment
we lose sight of the fundamental principles on
which our government rests. Declaimers and
demagogues think to win favor by violent Ian-

I4O SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

guage, and even from the chairs which have
been established to teach wisdom, rash counsels
are given. When shall we acquire that repose
which is a mark of maturity, the imperturbable
mind which belongs to those who have faith in
an overruling Providence and are certain of
themselves ?

There are no patent remedies for social evils.
What we sow we reap, whether there be question
of individuals or of nations. We cannot remain
habitually indifferent to the supreme interests
of religion and justice, and when emergencies
come upon us, save ourselves by devices and
contrivances. We do not need more or new
laws : what we need is a new spirit — a more
real faith in God, a more real love of our fellow-
man, more honesty, more chastity, more unsel-
fishness. We need a religion that will not lead
us to think it enough to skin and film the ulcer-
ous place, but that will impel us to probe deep
and cut away the gangrenous flesh that poisons
the fountains of life.

As a people we are wanting in respect for
those who are clothed with authority; we lack
reverence; we are too ready to persuade our-
selves that all is well so long as wealth and pop-
ulation increase ; we wish to be flattered, and we
turn away from the truth-speakers who love us,
to listen to the demagogues who would lure us

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY. 141

to ruin. We seek facile solutions of the great
problems, and distrust whoever, for instance,
declares that to teach the young to read, write,
and cipher is not to educate them; that educa-
tion consists essentially in the building of char-
acter, which is what a man is, and not what
he knows. We forget that morality, and not
legality, is the only foundation on which a free
government can securely rest. When corrupt
influences determine legislation, laws cease to
be regarded as binding. Men yield to force, but
in their hearts they rebel against, the injustice.

When immoralities and crimes become gen-
eral, minds are perverted and consciences made
callous. How is it possible to read day after
day of the suicides, the murders, the lynchings,
the robberies, the divorces, the adulteries, the
prostitutions and corruptions with which the
newspapers are filled, and not to lose the sense
of the sacredness of human life?

Vice propagates itself far more easily than
virtue, as men take disease, but not health, from
one another; and if whoever is guilty of crime,
or of misdeeds of whatever kind, is at once ad-
vertised to the world in millions of sheets as an
object of curiosity, of interest, and at times of
admiration, how can the readers of such things
retain balance of judgment and a sensitive con-
sciousness of the heinousness of sin?

142 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

It is easy to put to death the wretched man
who has committed the outrage which has filled
us all with consternation; it is easy 'to denounce
and difficult to exaggerate the inhumanity, the
fiendish nature of those who would destroy the
whole fabric of society, our very civilization,
the beliefs, the laws, the forces, which make us
men and give value to life ; it is easy in the hour
of national affliction to gather in numerous as-
semblies throughout the land to utter our grief
and to express our abhorrence. And all this is
well, springing as it does from what is best
within us; but it has little efficacy. It will do
good only if it helps to make us good. We can-
not destroy anarchy by enacting more rigid
laws; much less by resorting to violence.

" God bless every undertaking," said Presi-
dent McKinley in 1897, " God bless every
undertaking which revives patriotism and re-
bukes the indifferent and lawless." And in
1894: "With patriotism in our hearts there is
no danger of anarchy and no danger to the
American Union."

There is the patriotism of instinct, that which
binds a man to the land of his birth and to the
home about which cluster his earliest and sweet-
est memories; and there is the patriotism of
reason and religion, whereby we are made con-
scious that our dearest interests, temporal and

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY. 143

eternal, are vitally associated with our country,
with its prosperity and security, its honor and
welfare. The patriotism of instinct needs little
encouragement; it is implanted by nature and
is self-developed; but that of reason and reli-
gion must be cultivated and cherished with cease-
less care and vigilance, as reason and religion
themselves are living forces only in the self-
active.

To this higher patriotism none but the wise
and good are true ; and false to it are not those
alone who commit crime against the majesty
and sacredness of the State, but false to it are
all who are vicious themselves, all who by word
or example sow the seeds of vice. The germ
of anarchy is in every wrongdoer, in every law-
breaker. It is in those who propagate irreli-
gion, who undermine man's faith in God and
in his own spiritual nature, for the moral code
of the people is their religion. What is right
or wrong for them is what they believe, not
what they know, to be so. For all of us, indeed,
duty is a thing of faith, not of the pure reason.
Religion has rocked the cradles of all the na-
tions, and infidelity, issuing in insatiable greed
and sensuality, has dug the graves of those that
have perished, sophistry and indulgence destroy-
ing what had been built by faith and virtue.
There is the principle of anarchy in the mobs

144 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

that gather to torture and murder with fiendish
cruelty the unfortunate beings for whose pun-
ishment laws have been enacted. There is the
germ of anarchy in the homes of those who
marry as recklessly, and separate with as little
compunction, as animals breed. It is in the
boodleism which in our cities fosters prostitu-
tion, the criminal saloon, the dance hall, and the
gambling den. It is in our street fairs, when
they are made a pretext for pandering to the
lowest passions of the crowd. It lurks in the
very constitution of our competitive system, if
this system leads us to prefer markets to men,
riches to the dignity and honor of human beings ;
if it so turns us away from the ends and ideals
for which the wise live as to make of the nation
a money-getting mob, where the few are dwarfed
and crippled by their enormous possessions,
while the multitude seek to drown their sense of
misery in alcohol and degrading pleasures. It
is not conceivable that this should be the fate
of us, the heirs of all ages, us, the latest birth
of time. Rather shall we lay to heart and be
convinced in our inmost souls of this truth,
uttered by one of the best inspired teachers of
our age : " There is no wealth but life — life,
including all its powers of love, of joy, and of
admiration. That country is the richest which
nourishes the greatest number of noble and

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY. 145

happy human beings; that man is richest who,
having perfected the functions -of his own life
to the utmost, has also the widest helpful in-
fluence, both personal and by means of his
possessions, over the lives of others."

There is not now, nor has there ever been,
a civilized people. Ignorance, sin, depravity,
injustice, cruelty, deceit, greed, and selfishness
have always prevailed and still prevail in the
world. The majority has never loved, nor does
it now love, truth and mercy and purity and holi-
ness. But we, more than any other people, are
dedicated to the securing of the largest freedom,
the fullest opportunity, the completest justice to
all — to men and women, to the strong and the
weak, to the rich and the poor. These are the
principles which we proclaimed when first we
took our place in the family of Christian nations ;
these are the principles which our greatest and
most representative men, whether orators or
statesmen or warriors or poets, have with deep-
est conviction asserted to be the embodiment of
the spirit of America. This is the meaning of
our life; this is the key to our destiny. Our
conception of democracy is not that it is, like
some of the barbarian empires of the past, an
irresistible power whose mission is to overrun
and subjugate, to conquer and lay waste. On
the contrary, from our point of view democracy

146 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

is a beneficent force. It rests on faith in human
nature ; on the educability of all men, if they be
but rightly environed and attended.

Institutions are preserved by the principles
from which they originate, and if our country
is to grow, not in wealth and numbers alone,
but in inner power and worth, we must adhere
with unalterable fidelity to the great truths
which inspired our fathers when they founded
the Republic. Nay, since it is the nature of vital
truth to develop, we must see more clearly than
it was possible for them to see, that the Republic
means justice to all, good-will to all, helpfulness
to all ; and first of all, to those who are overbur-
dened, who are insufficiently equipped, who are
sorely tried. The cry of the laborer is for jus-
tice, not for charity; and it is a cry which all
the good gladly reecho. But let us remember
that men are just only when they love. Sym-
pathy gives insight, and where this is lacking
we are blind to the injustice our fellows suffer
and we do them wrong with easy consciences.
The impulse now, as of old, is to seek to over-
come evil with evil. The world is so full of per-
versity that the only way, it would seem, in
which society can protect itself is to cut off
for a time or for ever those who sin against its
laws. But no punishment, however severe, can
destroy the roots from which grows the tree

ASSASSINATION AND ANARCHY. 147

that bears the bitter fruit ; and if in any part of
the world men should ever become rightly civ-
ilized, they will overcome evil with good. They
will not condemn men to do work which they
cannot do with joy, work which takes away
heart and hope, which cripples the body and
darkens the mind. They will suffer none to live
in ignorance who might have knowledge ; none to
live in vice who might be made pure and holy. In
their cities there will not be found districts where
no innocent or healthful creature can breathe
and not become tainted. There shall be no
fortunes built on dead men's bones and cemented
with blood ; no splendid dwellings around which
shriek the ghosts of women whose toil did not
bring enough to save them from lives of shame.
It is toward all this that we must strive and
struggle, if we are not to be recreant to our
most sacred duties, false to the mission which
God has given to America.

In the shadow of the gloom that falls on the
hearts of all the people, as wrhat was mortal of
the most religious, the most God-fearing of our
presidents is lowered into the grave, let the
eternal principles of freedom and justice, of
truth and love, of religion and righteousness,
gleam on us with fuller beauty and power, like
stars from the raven bosom of night.

Let us rouse ourselves from the torpor which

148 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

benumbs our spiritual being. Let us forget a
little our petty and selfish interests and pleas-
ures, that we may become able to enter into the
larger life of our country, each working as a
separate individual force for the good of all.
So shall the calamity which has befallen startle
us into newness of heart and mind, making us
more solicitous for the common welfare, more
careful lest we ourselves give offense; so shall
there be more love and piety in our homes, more
reverence and docility in our schools, more
faith and religion in our churches, more wisdom
and virtue in our public life. And in this way,
and possibly in no other, shall we be able to
make such crimes as this, which has filled us with
horror and dismay, for ever impossible.

IX.

CHURCH AND COUNTRY.

TT7HEN a bishop gets an auxiliary it is time
for him to begin to grow silent, even
though in our councils we have declared that a
bishop's chief office and duty is to preach. But,
as the steed that has been familiar with the
gleam of bayonets and the thunder of battle
will still, amid the peaceful fields and quiet
homes of men, at the faintest breath of some
martial strain, feel again the warlike fire re-
kindle, so indeed it would be hard for me to
keep silence when you ask me to speak of the
things which for many years I have tried to
love best — the Catholic Church and the Ameri-
can Republic. Are they not the symbols of
what should be most dear to true and well-
born souls — the love of God and the love of
one's fellow-men?

It is a habit with us to speak of the triumphs
and glories of the Church in ages which are
gone. We love to tell the story of her martyrs
and confessors, of her saints and founders of
religious orders; we dwell gladly on her mar-

150 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

velous success in converting the barbarous
races that have grown into Christendom, in
purifying morals, in softening manners, in con-
secrating and protecting woman, in founding
schools, in preserving the treasures of classi-
cal literature, in fostering the arts; in leading
migratory tribes to choose fixed homes, to fell
the forest, drain the marsh, build cities and put
themselves under the rule of law. Her name
has indeed been associated at times, during the
lapse of nineteen hundred years, with things
upon which we cannot dwell with pleasure or ap-
proval, but her general course and influence have
made for righteousness, peace, charity, reverence,
chastity, obedience, mildness, modesty, kindli-
ness, and habits of cheerful industry. What she
has been able to do in other ages and other lands
she is still able to do for us here and now ; and
though we rise in dignity of being in propor-
tion to our power to live in thought in the past
and the future, yet since life is chiefly action,
our first concern is with the present. In the
Church there is an exhaustless fountain-head of
spiritual energy, since in her, as the Saviour
has taught us to believe, there abides the very
Spirit of God. But if this energy is to mani-
fest itself in the world, it can only be through
God-like men. To such it was intrusted in the
beginning, by such it was spread throughout

CHURCH AND COUNTRY. 151

the earth, and by such alone can its divine heal-
ing be communicated to the sick and hungering
souls of the people. On us it depends whether
the sacred ark shall ride in safety, bearing the
holiest and most priceless treasures, on the ris-
ing waters of the modern democracy; whether
again as of old, the priest shall not merely point
the way to heaven, but be also a pioneer in all
the paths that lead to wider knowledge, truer
freedom, and more wholesome living.

Now, all the great things that mold and
transform human life — religion, patriotism,
friendship, love, devotion to heroic men and
right causes — must be cared for and followed
for themselves, and with all one's mind and
heart, or their power to strengthen, uplift, and
purify is lost. Shall we, the leaders of the
Church in America, be able to turn resolutely
from the false lights of momentary success, of
material progress, of pride in mere numbers
and showy buildings, to the inner sources of
power, to knowledge and wisdom, to purity
and love, to modesty and mildness? Shall we
be able to free ourselves from the awful pres-
sure of a public opinion which believes in noth-
ing but money — and shrewdness as a means
to money — an opinion that

" Hangs upon us with a weight
Heavy as frost and deep almost as life " ?

I$2 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

Shall we be able to reach and maintain a
living and passionate faith in an estate higher
than that of men — a faith which shall make
us reverent, devout, patient, and self-denying;
which shall impel us to desire and labor for the
things that lead to life, and to put far away the
things that lead to destruction? If so, then in
making ourselves worthy to be called ministers
of Him who died for all, we shall find that we
have become capable of rendering the highest
services to the State of which we are citizens.

If we do not work for bread with our hands,
we are bound under penalty of becoming crimi-
nal, to labor with brain and heart, to strengthen,
purify, and enrich human life ; and the basest of
those who fail in this are the false shepherds of
souls, who, having pledged themselves to the
care and nurture of the spirit, sink into indo-
lence and ignorance, while the people perish of
inanition or are devoured by the beast of prey
that lurks in each one's bosom. There must
be work of hand that men may live, and there
must be work of brain and heart that they may
live worthily and nobly. It is not necessary
that we should live, but it is necessary that,
being alive, we should live well; and hence
the tasks intrusted to the scholars, the teachers,
and the priests of a people are the highest and
most indispensable. The desire to teach, to

CHURCH AND COUNTRY. 153

teach those who do not know it, the truth that
is freedom, the knowledge that is power, the
wisdom that is peace and joy, lies at the heart
of the purest and divinest yearnings to be of
help; and therefore the greatest teachers have
been and are the chief lovers and benefactors
of the race.

In whom should this yearning, as of a god,
be found if not in the Catholic priest whose
good fortune it is to labor for the salvation of
the souls and the temporal welfare of men in
the American Republic?

What has such power to make the noblest
efforts at once possible and effectual as the con-
sciousness of living in the midst of a free, gen-
erous, and brave people? What inducement to
make ourselves more and more fit for the work
we have chosen is so powerful as the sense of
success in accomplishing the task? What is so
good as to follow after high aims in the midst
of a people who are more alive than men are
elsewhere on earth?

In many ways our country is dear to men
of many minds. Like a most richly endowed
soul, it has gifts for all who are not unworthy.
The millions who have been bound in the triple
chains of servitude, poverty, and ignorance feel,
as they put their feet on our shores and breathe
our air, that the night is past and the dawn is

154 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

come. Here opportunity beckons, here occa-
sion waits, here hope invites, here the general
condition of things urges us to make ourselves
men.

Where else shall we find, I will not say, so
much tolerance, — for tolerance implies evil,
implies necessity, implies indifference, — but
so much good-will, so much loving-kindness,
so great readiness to go to the help of the
weak and suffering? Where else is so much
light thrown upon the whole life of the people?
And however offensive and even harmful the
glare which the public press flashes upon evil
deeds may be, yet is light not only the best
policeman, but the chief purifier and quickener,
the most fatal foe of filth and disease, whether
of body or of soul. Where else are all men so
given to the ways and arts of peace, so little
crazed by the bray of trumpets and the glitter
of steel, so little blinded by the flame of war-
like glory, which is fed by the gases of the
putrescent bodies of the slain?

We have no dynasty to defend with our
blood, no empire to be held together by great
standing armies, no religious quarrels which
we think it possible to settle by wager of
battle; yet is there no danger that we shall be-
come effeminate, for it requires a higher and
truer courage to live for one's country in a

CHURCH AND COUNTRY. 155

right spirit than to die for it on the field of
carnage.

Where else is there a people so eager to
learn, so confident in the power of education
to transform individual and social life, so quick
to test whatever new thing may give promise
of help? Where else is property so safe, well-
being so widely diffused, woman so educated
and honored? Reasons enough, indeed, these
are for loving our country ; but those who love
may not be free from watchful and anxious
care, and the more priceless the treasure, the
more vigilant should be its guardians. History
is full of the stories of fallen republics. Those
of Athens and Rome and Venice flourished,
and then fell to ruin. Shall our own have the
same fate, or shall it, obedient to the heart
prayer and inmost desire of all noble souls,
endure while its mountains stand and its rivers
flow?

Only truth can make and keep individuals
free, and righteousness alone can serve as an
everlasting foundation of national liberty. In
vain our numbers multiply, in vain our wealth
accumulates, in vain our lines of commerce
weave themselves into a network that enmeshes
the globe, if we ourselves decay, if we lose firm
grasp of the spiritual verities which constitute
the worth and honor of human life. There are

156 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

doubtless signs of degeneracy on many sides,
nor is there in this cause for surprise.

We have been successful to a marvelous de-
gree; and the tendency of success is to nourish
conceit and to undermine good sense. We have
become the richest of the nations; and it is the
tendency of wealth to corrupt and harden the
heart. A great English writer says of Ameri-
cans : " This is their specialty ; this their one
gift to their race — to show men how not to
worship, how never to be ashamed in the pres-
ence of anything " ; and in so far as there is truth
in his words, the source of the evil is to be
sought for chiefly in our uninterrupted success
and in our fabulous wealth. We are tempted
to consider the authority of gold as higher than
the authority of God, and a man's circumstances
as more important than the man himself.

Are not the foundations of the home grow-
ing weaker, and has not our popular education
failed to accomplish much that we had most
earnestly hoped for and expected ? " The idea
of a general education," says Ruskin, " which
is to fit everybody to be Emperor of Russia,
and provoke a boy, whatever he be, to want to
be something else, and wherever he was born
to think it a disgrace to die, is the most entirely
and directly diabolic of all the countless stu-
pidities into which the British nation has of

CHURCH AND COUNTRY. 157

late been betrayed by its avarice and irreli-
gion." In this matter, at least, there seems to
be something like an alliance between the
British nation and the American people.

But true thoughts are thoughts that inspire
hope and courage; and whatever leads us to
think meanly of ourselves or of our country is
to be put away as evil. Good men, like good
books, are those that fill us with confidence in
the triumph of truth and justice and love, and
so help us to conquer in the battle against
doubt and sensuality and greed. Great souls
are brave souls, and the wise understand that
it is better to find fault with one's self than
with one's country or one's age. There is no
joy but in strength — strength of body, strength
of mind, strength of heart. Weakness is the
true opposite of virtue, which, if it be not
strength, loses its name and essence. If we
would influence and improve men, if we would
ourselves grow better, we should cherish brave
thoughts, speak brave words, do brave deeds.
If we are lovers and doers of good, we must
make ourselves also amiable; for else we shall
easily teach men to distrust or even to hate the
best things. The unlovableness of the pious
does more harm to religion than the mocking
of infidels.

For myself, the more I learn to know the

158 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

past, the more confident I become that God is
still leading His children to higher and holier
things. It is His world, and not the devil's.
He is with us, and why should we grow de-
spondent or afraid ? I envy none but the young,
but those who in the full vigor of early man-
hood salute the century that now opens the
gates of a wider and fairer future for mankind.
Wordsworth, standing on the threshold of the
nineteenth century, when all men's minds were
aglow with thoughts and hopes of liberty and
fraternity, exclaimed:

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven. "

Nor was he wrongly inspired ; for though
our century has not accomplished all that the
poet dreamed, yet when its history is summed,
it shall stand forth as the one in which the
Christian peoples made the greatest and most
real progress in knowledge, in freedom, and in
power. Had we nothing to set to its account
but the growth and consolidation of the Ameri-
can Republic and the revivification and spread
of the Catholic religion throughout the English-
speaking world, it were enough. And when I am
tempted to envy the young, and to cry out that
youth be given me again, it is not that I may
be bathed afresh, as in my early days, in the

CHURCH AND COUNTRY. 159

golden light of new-born worlds, when all the
hills were clothed in mystic hues and all the
valleys rilled with flowers, when the earth it-
self seemed ready to break forth into a uni-
versal shout of joy, into an all-bewitching smile
of beauty. Not for this, nor for the free heart
and the mind at ease that recreate a paradise,
would I he young again, but that I might bend
the full force of pristine vigor to the upbuild-
ing of my own being; that I might reduce my
whole endowment to faculty, and having made
myself a man, might devote myself to the ser-
vice of the Catholic religion and the American
Republic in the new century, which bears omens
of mightier conflicts and nobler triumphs than
men have ever known.

X.

LABOR AND CAPITAL.

F^HE people of America have many things
•*• to be thankful for. The material re-
sources of our country are so great that as yet
neither we nor the world at large have been
able to measure their extent. Hidden store-
houses of wealth are continually being re-
vealed to us. We are energetic, industrious,
brave, and untiring. We are convinced of the
supremacy of mind over matter, and we make
ceaseless and increasing efforts to educate the
spiritual faculties of the whole people. We are
averse to war and believe that disputes be-
tween nations, as between individuals, should
be settled by discussion and arbitration. We
are opposed to standing armies, believing that
the national wealth and intelligence should be
devoted to the improvement and culture of the
citizens, and not to conquest and destruction.
We have no powerful neighbor to repel or over-
throw. Our comparative exemption from war
has made possible the rapid development of our

LABOR AND CAPITAL. l6l

country. The love of peace, which is a charac-
teristic of the American people, manifests itself
also in religious good-will and toleration. As
dynastic wars are for us out of the question,
so are religious wars. The spirit of forbear-
ance and helpfulness manifests itself in our
customs and habits as in our legislation. In
no other country is property more secure; in
no other is it so generally diffused. Nowhere
else is opportunity for woman as for man so
universal; nowhere is there such faith in the
national destiny; nowhere has the fusion of
peoples differing in many and important re-
spects been brought about so rapidly or so
satisfactorily; nowhere are the multitudes so
eager to learn or so quick to avail themselves
of new discoveries and inventions. The mil-
lions from foreign lands who have founded
homes here are making other millions in the
Old World thankful that America exists. We
are indeed a source of hope and confidence to
all, in whatever part of the earth, who love jus-
tice and liberty, who believe in a higher and
more blessed social and religious future for
mankind. Already we are the possessors of
greater wealth than any other nation possesses
or has ever possessed; and though a few men,
whose names stare us in the face from the pages

of the newspapers, have fortunes that seem al-
ii

1 62 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

most fabulous, there is diffused among the
masses of the people a well-being and comfort
such as exists in no other land. This may be
perceived in the housing of the people, in their
clothing, in the wholesomeness of their food,
and above all in the spirit of courage and hope-
fulness which pervades our whole life.

There is no gulf between the rich and the
poor, but a gradation of generally distributed
possessions.

Nevertheless it is obvious that when there is
question of American life, a merely optimistic
view is a shallow and false view. There are
great and widespread evils among us, as also
tendencies which if allowed to take their course
will lead to worse evil. There is the universal
political corruption. There is the diminished
sense of the sacredness of property. There is
the loosening of the marriage tie and the sink-
ing of the influence of the home. There is a
weakening of the power to apprehend spiritual
truth, and a consequent lowering of the stand-
ards of value, a falling away from the vital
principles of religion, even while we profess to
believe in religion. There is, indeed, enough
and more than enough to keep all who cherish
exalted ideas of the worth of human life and
who love America lowly-minded and watchful.

One of the most certain signs of decadence

LABOR AND CAPITAL. 163

is a failure of the will, and one might think that
we are threatened with this. Our ability to
react against abuses is growing feebler. The
social organism is so vast and so complex that
it seems hopeless to attempt to interfere, and
so we permit things to take their course, abdi-
cating the freedom and the power of will in the
presence of an idol which we call Destiny. The
more public opinion is shaped by the ideals of
evolution as the supreme law of life, the less
capable we become of bringing reason and con-
science to bear on human affairs, of recogniz-
ing God's presence in the world, and holding
to truth and love as something higher and
mightier than a universe of matter.

The course of things is, indeed, but partially
subject to human control. Human progress
nevertheless depends chiefly on human intelli-
gence and energy, which, if they cannot create,
can shape and guide. The one means of pro-
moting the welfare of man is labor or effort.
It alone can develop his mind, can form his
character, can protect him from the blind forces
of nature, and provide for him what is neces-
sary for his comfort and dignity. The end of
labor is the strengthening and enrichment of
life, and the best measure of its value is the
effect it produces on man, individually and col-
lectively. The end is not abundance of riches,

1 64 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

but noble life, healthful, pure, intelligent, brave,
and loving. No wealth can enrich the brutal
and the base; no possessions can purchase joy
or peace for the slaves of appetite. Where right
human life is led, — a life of faith, hope, and
love, of thought and self-control, of industry
and self-denial, — to live with as few material
and animal wants as possible ennobles man.
To learn to live with as little as possible and
to waste nothing that is needful is the sum of
practical wisdom. Socrates was happy in think-
ing how many things the world is full of which
he did not need. Simple pleasures are the best.
Expensive luxuries harm those who indulge in
them, and bring misery to many. The highest
ambition springs not from the desire to rise in
the world, but from the will to lead an honest
helpful life, whatever one's circumstances. One
may be a wise, good, and happy man, or a
foolish, wicked, and miserable man, whether
rich or poor. We must have food, shelter,
and clothing that we may live; but we should
live not to be fed and housed, but to grow
in knowledge and virtue, in helpfulness and
holiness.

For the most fortunate men life is full of
difficulties and troubles; for the poorest it may
be filled with light, peace, and blessedness.

To be a man is to think as well as to work,

LABOR AND CAPITAL. 165

and the more intelligence there is in the work
the better shall it be for the workers.

Reason as well as religion impels those who
work with the head and those who work with
the hands to cooperation, not to conflict. The
interests of both are best served when they are
friends. If labor is not directed by ability it is
sterile. The notion that those who work with
the hands are the sole producers of wealth is a
fallacy which should deceive no one. The vast
increase of wealth in the modern world of in-
dustry and commerce is the result to a far
greater degree of ability than of labor. It has
been produced chiefly by the comparatively few
men of exceptional gifts, who have invented
machines, organized enterprises, opened mar-
kets, and thus given work and sustenance to
millions who but for them would never have
been born. Capital itself, which makes our
great undertakings feasible, is largely stored
ability — ability embodied and made perma-
nently fruitful in the means of production and
distribution. Columbus did not sail his ships,
but had it not been for his genius they would
not have sailed at all; and had the mutinous
crew thrown him overboard, they would have
drifted to death and the New World had not
been discovered. The natural sources of wealth
had existed in America for countless ages, but

1 66 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

the savages who dwelt here lived in poverty and
wretchedness because they lacked men of ability
to lead them to the conquest of the riches of
whose existence they were ignorant.

Capital is like an exquisite musical instru-
ment— valueless if there is no one who knows
the secret of its uses, and the men of ability
who know how to use capital wisely are as rare
as excellent musicians. Laborers may be com-
pared to soldiers, who conquer only when they
are disciplined, equipped, and commanded by
men of ability. It has been calculated that
two-thirds of the wealth produced in the nine-
teenth century were due to ability, and but one-
third to the work of those who toil with their
hands. This applies to spiritual not less than
to material wealth. The great advances of
mankind, in whatever sphere, have been made
through the genius and under the leadership
of a few highly endowed individuals — the
prophets of better things, the subduers of the
foes of man, the pioneers of progress. Land
and labor are the primary sources of wealth,
but its production in the modern world is due
chiefly to ability, working with capital, which
it more than any other agency has created.
Nothing is more wonderful than the hand, but
its almost miraculous power is due to the fact
that it is the instrument of the brain.

LABOR AND CAPITAL. l6/

In former times the men of ability were
drawn to devote themselves to war or govern-
ment or philosophic speculation, but now more
than ever before they throw themselves into in-
dustry and commerce, making the pursuit of
riches their life-aim. This is the career which
seems to promise the most immediate and the
most substantial results; and the really able
men are so few and the work to be done is so
immeasurable and so complex, that the demand
for these exceptional individuals is greater than
the supply. Every great enterprise, every great
business concern, needs for its success what they
alone can give. Hence they command salaries
which seem to be exorbitant; hence they grow
rich, become capitalists and form combinations
of capital, which appear to many to be a menace
to the freedom and welfare of the whole people.
Competition, which begins as a struggle for ex-
istence, finally becomes a desire to crush and
dominate, becomes a warfare, which if less
bloody is not less horrible or cruel than that
which is carried on with shot and shell. As in
battle the generals, however humane they be,
think only of victory and are heedless of the
suffering and the loss of life, so in the struggle
for industrial and commercial supremacy, the
men of ability, the leaders and capitalists are
wholly bent on the attainment of their ends,

1 68 SOCIALISM AND LABOR,

and easily lose sight of the principles of justice
and humanity.

It is this that makes the organization of
workmen into labor- and trades- unions inevit-
able and indispensable. The consciousness that
if they do not protect and defend themselves
they will be ground by the wheels of a vast
machine or reduced to a condition little better
than that of slaves, compels them to unite lest
they be deprived of the common rights of man.
In ancient times laborers were slaves, it is not
long ago since multitudes of them in our own
country were slaves; and however the fact be
disguised, the natural tendency of greed, of the
love and pursuit of material things as the chief
good of life, is to deaden the sense of justice
and humanity, to make the strong, the men of
ability, feel that they have the right to do
whatever they are able to do. They are not
necessarily unjust or cruel, but they become the
victims of a false belief and the agents of a
system which is as pitiless as a law of nature.

One of the chief forces by which this ten-
dency is held in check is the religious principle
and feeling that men are the children of God,
and have inalienable rights; that work should
enable the worker to lead a life not unworthy
of a rational being; that riches which are pro-
cured at the cost of human misery and degra-

LABOR AND CAPITAL. 169

dation are accursed; that what constitutes the
proper value of individuals and of nations is
spiritual and not material; that there is eternal
wrath in store for all who trample upon moral
and intellectual good that they may add to their
possessions. These truths are accepted by the
public opinion of the civilized world, and hence
there is a general sympathy with laborers in
their efforts to obtain justice and to improve
their condition. All who observe and reflect
recognize that their lot is hard, that they bear
an undue share of the burdens of life, that they
are often forced to do work which is destructive
of health and happiness, and that they are ex-
posed to greater vicissitudes of fortune than
others.

All this, however, would accomplish little for
their improvement if they themselves remained
indifferent, if they did not organize, if they did
not discuss and come to a fuller consciousness
of their grievances, if they did not by strikes
and other lawful means make strenuous efforts
to increase their wages or to prevent them from
falling, if they did not agitate for fewer hours
of work and whatever else may give them
leisure and opportunity to cultivate their spirit-
ual natures and thus to make themselves cap-
able of enjoying life in a rational and Christian
way. Economic laws, which are immutable,

170 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

make it impossible that wages should rise be-
yond a given point, or that wealth should be
so distributed as to make all men rich. The
multitude are poor and can never be rich. It
is indeed fortunate that it is impossible that the
masses of mankind should ever be able to lead
an idle and luxurious life. It is a law of human
nature that man shall work and abstain, if it
is to be well with him; that to do nothing and
enjoy much is impossible. Political Economy,
like government, rests on a basis of morality.
Moral character alone can give a man self-re-
spect, courage, hope, cheerfulness, and power
of endurance. Hence the laborers, and all who
identify themselves with their cause, should
have a care first of all that they be true men —
provident, self-restrained, kindly, sober, frugal,
and helpful ; and that this may be possible, also
religious. The foe of labor is not capital, but
ignorance and vice. In the whole English-
speaking world, at least, its worst enemy is
drink. More than a combination of all em-
ployers, the saloon has power to impoverish
and degrade workingmen. In their own ranks
the traitors are those who preach irreligion and
anarchy. The influence of Christianity has
been and is the chief power which has brought
the world to recognize the rights of the en-
slaved, the poor, the weak, of all who are heavy-

LABOR AND CAPITAL. 171

laden and over-burdened. It aroused and it
alone can sustain enthusiasm for humanity. If
this faith could die out, what would remain but
the law of the survival of the fittest, that is, of
the strongest, the most unscrupulous, the most
reckless of the sufferings and sorrows of their
fellow-men? These are the men who prosper
among savages, in barbarous states, and in
periods of anarchy.

But it is not conceivable that the civilized
world should turn from the principles which
Christ proclaimed, whose development and dif-
fusion must in the end substitute for universal
competition — the war of all upon all — the co-
operation of all with all, not merely or chiefly
for the winning of the bread that nourishes the
body, but above all for the spread of the higher
life of truth and love, of purity and goodness.
In America, assuredly, we have good reason to
take a hopeful view of the future. No foreign
power can offer hindrance to our progress in
the fulfillment of our God-given tasks, which
are not only to secure equal rights, liberties, and
opportunities to all the people, but so to educate
and inspire all the inhabitants of this great con-
tinent that they may all work together to shape
here a nobler manhood and womanhood than
the world has ever seen.

XL

WORK AND LEISURE.

IFE is energy: we feel ourselves only in
•^^ doing, and when we inquire what a man's
value is we ask what is his performance. The
deed is the proof of faith, the test of character,
and the standard of worth. To do nothing is to
be nobody, and to have done is to have been.
True work fixes attention, develops ability, and
enriches life ; it strengthens the mind, forms the
will, and inures to patience and endurance. It
is what we do and suffer to overcome nature's
indifference and hostility to man's well-being
and progress; it is the means whereby what is
not ourselves is taken hold of and made to do
us service. True work, then, is furtherance of
life, and it cannot be rightly understood unless
it be looked at in this light. To know the worth
of work we must consider first of all what is its
effect upon the worker. If it warps, cripples,
and degrades him it is not true work, though
he should thereby amass vast wealth or gain
great reputation. That work is best which helps

WORK AND LEISURE. 173

to make men and women wise and virtuous;
and that which breeds vice is worst, is little better
than idleness, which is evil because it breeds
vice. The political and social conditions which
are most favorable to work that elevates and
enriches and purifies human life approach
nearest to the ideal; the political and social
conditions which involve the physical deterio-
ration and the mental and moral degradation
of multitudes are barbarous, and unless they are
improved must lead to the ruin of the State.
From this point of view, which is the only true
point of view, our present economic and com-
mercial systems are subversive of civilization.
They sacrifice men to money ; wisdom and vir-
tue to cheap production and the amassing of
capital. They foster greed in the stronger and
hate in the weaker. They drive the nations to
competitive struggles which are as cruel as war,
and in the final result more disastrous; for
their tendency is to make the rich vulgar and
heartless, and the poor reckless and vicious. As
stratagems and lies are considered lawful in
war, so in the warfare of commercial compe-
tition opinion leans to the view that whatever
may be done with impunity is right. The adul-
teration of food and drink, the watering of
stocks, the bribing of legislators, the crushing
of weaker concerns, the enforced idleness of

174 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

thousands who are thereby driven to despair
and starvation, are not looked upon as lying
within the domain of morals, any more than the
shooting of man in battle is considered a ques-
tion of morality. The degradation and ruin
of innumerable individuals are implications of
the law of competition, just as in the struggle
for existence there is a world-wide crushing and
destruction of the weak by the strong. On the
other hand, the capitalists, the captains in the
armies of laborers, are, under the present sys-
tem, driven like the workmen themselves. The
necessity of ceaseless vigilance and effort keeps
them under continual strain. Like those they
employ, they become parts of a machine, and
therefore partial and mechanical men. The
sense of inner freedom dies within them, the
source of the purest joy runs dry, and they are
made incapable of thinking great thoughts or
of walking in the light of high ideals. They
are the victims of their own success, and, hav-
ing great possessions, are poor in themselves.
The work, then, which we are doing, and the
conditions under which we are doing it, whether
we be rich or poor, are unfavorable to the best
kind of life.

We are the slaves instead of being the masters
of our work; we have forgotten that work is
a means and not an end ; as the money for which

WORK AND LEISURE,

we work is a means and not an end. Believing
that work and riches are the ends of life, we
work with feverish hurry, and our greed grows
as our possessions increase. God, says Eurip-
ides, hates busy-bodies and those who do too
much. We are too busy, we do too much. And
the temper our restless activity creates makes
us incapable of leisure, which is the end of
work. The man is worth, not what his work is
worth, but what his leisure is worth. By his
work he gains a livelihood, but his leisure is
given him that he may learn how to live, that
he may acquire a taste for the best things, may
acquaint himself with what is truest and most
beautiful in literature and art, in science and
religion, may come to a knowledge of how he
may find himself, not chiefly in the narrow
circles of his private interests, but in the wide
world of noble thought and generous emotion.
For every man who rises above the vulgar life
is divided into two parts, the one to be devoted
to means, the other to ends. On the one side
he places the things of practical concern, — trade,
business, and politics; on the other the things
which are ends in themselves, — the upbuilding
of his own being with the help of religion, phil-
osophy, science, and art. Whoever permits the
occupations whereby he gains a livelihood to
absorb his whole thought and energy is neces-

1 76 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

sarily an incomplete man. He lacks openness
of mind, breadth of view, the sense of beauty,
and the disinterested love of knowledge. His
perception of spiritual truth is dimmed, and he
is made incapable of the purest and most gener-
ous emotions. To give him something of all
this, leisure, if rightly used, may serve; and
hence I say the man is worth what his leisure
is worth.

But who makes a wise use of leisure? The
pleasures to which it is devoted are dissipations
rather than recreations. The theatre might be
a school of refinement and taste, but it is, in
fact, rather a school of coarseness and vulgarity.
As for the club, Cicero said, nearly two thou-
sand years ago, that those who have no love of
study join clubs. The dinner habit is as fatal
to physical and moral health as the newspaper
habit is to intellectual culture. Sir William
Temple thought life would be endurable were it
not for its pleasures; and so our busy Ameri-
cans feel that it would be bearable were it not
for its leisures, in which they bore and are
bored.

As for those who do the rough work of the
world, fewer hours of toil will hardly be of ben-
efit to them, if their leisure be spent in saloons
and in the company of the vicious. Work
must be done, — work of hand, that we may

WORK AND LEISURE. 177

have the means of living ; work of head, that our
life may be worth having ; and this is the nobler
work. A man's importance is determined by
his usefulness, and the most useful are not those
who provide food for the body, but those who
nourish and exalt the spiritual faculties ; as the
greatest people is not the richest people, but the
people that has the greatest number of noble,
generous, fair, and enlightened men and women.
Such men and women are found only where
leisure is looked upon as a heavenly gift, as an
opportunity to upbuild one's being, to prepare
one's self for complete living.

12

XII.

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN.

Put pain from out the world, what room were left
For thanks to God, for love to man ?

— Browning.

'""INHERE is hope and courage in the air of
••• America. No other people has carried
optimism to such extremes. We refuse to listen
to talk of failure, or to entertain despondent
thoughts, holding nothing impossible. This
splendid confidence is found not alone in our
attitude toward material things. In brief time
we have subdued a continent and amassed in-
credible wealth, but we feel certain that we shall
be able also to overcome ignorance, poverty,
crime, and evil of whatever kind. We believe
that this is God's world and that we are His
most fortunate children. Is not America a
happy land, where good and better days are now,
and yet to come?

If we cannot shut our eyes to sorrow and
misery we look to find in them some soul of
goodness. As darkness is light's relief, death

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 179

life's foil, so we like to think that evil exists
that we may be impelled to learn to know and
love the truth and beauty which are everywhere.
In our optimism there is doubtless something
of the Israelite's satisfaction with this present
world, of his delight in a land flowing with milk
and honey; but there is also in it much of his
moral earnestness, of his belief in righteous-
ness, in work done well and done in a Godlike
spirit. We are not dreamers, but doers; and
genuine doers are brave and cheerful and con-
fident. Those who feel it were better never to
have been born, feel too that to do nothing is
happiness. But for us he who does nothing is
nobody ; and in our deepest heart we understand
that those alone who act in obedience to the
voice of duty really do anything worth while:
the essential good being moral and religious,
nothing else having power to create in the
human breast a harmonious world or to give
lasting joy to man.

The things which have value are innumer-
able, and the lacking of any of them we may
call evil. Whatever satisfies the reason, the
heart, the imagination, whatever ministers to
health and comfort, whatever offers opportunity
to increase knowledge or power has worth. The
useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, the true are
valuable; but that which is indispensable, with-

ISO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

out which all else is vain, is moral good, what
conscience says ought to be, what we recognize
as duty.

Duties are of three kinds: duties of self-
respect, of justice, and of benevolence. Self-
respect is violated by lying and sensuality;
justice by whatever harms the rights of another,
whether rights of property or of reputation;
benevolence by failure to succor our fellows in
their corporal and spiritual needs. To be a man
one must rise above merely animal existence,
must reverence the reason, the soul which makes
him human, and must therefore be truthful,
temperate, and chaste; and since humanity can
come into being and prosper only in society, he
must fulfill the social duties of justice and benev-
olence. These are principles which all men ac-
cept in the inner sanctuary of conscience, and
against which only those who are blinded by
passion or led astray by a sophistical spirit will
attempt to argue. Remove from a city drunken-
ness and prostitution, theft and dishonesty, lying
and deceit, the hardness and inhumanity which
greed and sensuality produce, and you have a
happy community — one in which peace and or-
der, self-respect and justice, sympathy and lov-
ing-kindness prevail; one in which woman and
the child are held in honor, in which old age is
accompanied by reverence and service, in which

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. l8l

the poor and the sick are relieved and consoled.
And yet in such a community there would still
be evil, there would still be suffering, sorrow,
and death.

Why, then, if we could suppress moral evil
would the mystery of pain still remain? If a
wholly satisfactory explanation of this problem
could be given, all the weary weight of this un-
intelligible world would be lifted from our
minds and hearts.

If it is not possible to sweep this black cloud
from the heaven of human consciousness, we
may at least see rays of light gleam through its
rifts. If we look, first of all, into its impene-
trable centre where the darkness is most dense,
into the realms of moral evil, of sin, we may
understand that in a world in which no one could
do wrong, no one could do right; that if men
are to have freedom of will, — without which
they would not be men, — they must have the
power to abuse it. What is the highest thing in
the world, that which properly constitutes hu-
manity ? It is character. Now character cannot
be created, it must be formed in the midst of
temptation and struggle, in the heat of battle,
where, if there is victory, there must also be the
possibility of defeat. God may create an inno-
cent being, but not a perfect character. That
human goodness may come forth in full power

1 82 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

and form there must be free choice, there must
be the conflict by which alone moral energy is
produced ; and if conflict, therefore pain, suffer-
ing, and failure. And is not a world in which
there is much wickedness and sorrow, but
which is also filled with heroic and Godlike men
and women, higher than one in which there
should be nothing superior to the innocence and
ignorance of childish natures?

Of the Captain of our Salvation, the inspired
word says : He was made perfect through suf-
ferings. There is indeed no other way that leads
to moral excellence. Self-denial, the bearing of
the cross, the wearing of the thorny crown, the
gibes and mocks of the rabble, the consenting to
death rather than to wrong — these are the
means whereby character is built, whereby saint-
liness is made to spring in the soul, whereby the
world is redeemed. We are all apprentices, and
suffering is our great teacher and master. A
man is worth what he has borne. They who
have not passed nights of bitter anguish, who
have not moistened their bread with tears, know
not the heavenly powers. None are wise who
have not received the baptism of sorrow. In
luxurious climates, where man has nothing to
do but to eat and sleep, he is little more than an
animal.

.What is the universal law of progress but

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 183

struggle, effort, labor? And what is this but
pain? If there were no obstacles how should
there be energy and courage? If Nature pre-
sented no difficulties how should man be made
intelligent? Pain is dangers signal. It floats
above the entrance of the haunts of vice and
shame; it waves for the glutton, the drunkard,
the adulterer, the tyrant, for criminals of every
type. On it is inscribed in letters which none
but the blind can fail to read : The wages of sin
is death.

Suffering is the mother of wisdom, of pity,
of mercy, of the most generous moods and the
most tender emotions. They who have never
suffered are unfeeling as well as ignorant. The
young are cruel because they have not been
civilized by sorrow; and they whom sorrow
hardens or depraves were ignoble from the
start. What joy is there, higher than that of
children, which does not derive its fine flavor
from the memory of hardships borne and diffi-
culties overcome? We cannot feel that any-
thing is properly ours unless we have made it
our own, by industry, patience, perseverance,
and foresight, by self-denial and courage.
Nothing we inherit rightly belongs to us unless
we re-act upon it, suffer for it.

Evil is the foe we have to fight, and by fight-
ing, convert to means of good. By such combat

1 84 SOCIALISM AND LABOR. !

alone is advance made possible. All progress,
intellectual, moral, and material, is through
conflict with ignorance, passion, and the obsti-
nacy of nature. From less to more, from evil
to good. This is the law of human develop-
ment, individual and social.

But it is in vain that we appeal to philosophy
to persuade ourselves that evil is but a means to
good, and that all is well. In such a world as
this, indeed, good and ill are so intertwined and
blended, that we cannot imagine them existing
in separateness ; but none the less they are dis-
tinct and opposite. The ideal which must for-
ever invite us is that of a society in which there
shall be no sin nor sorrow nor wrong. To the
coming of this kingdom of heaven on earth the
noblest look; to bring it nearer the most gen-
erous devote all their strength. This is their
aim, whether they put their trust in the im-
provements of institutions or in evolution or
in education or in religion. The object is to
overcome and suppress whatever is hurtful to
man, for we measure all values by human stan-
dards; and as we should not think storms,
earthquakes, and floods evil, if they wrought
no harm to man, so we could not believe God
himself to be good if He were not good to man.

Wide and deep as life is life's curse and woe.
Millions still believe that those alone are wise

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 185

who strive to destroy the will to live, and who
desire to sink back into the unconscious; that
the best is not to be born, or being born, at once
to die. But this religion of despair is as foreign
to Christian souls as it is to right reason. We
know well all life's sadness, all its vanity and
misery ; but we know also its joy and sweetness,
the infinite possibilities it opens to us since the
Eternal Father is but the perfect Life.

In our great cities we see the ruin wrought
by heartlessness and greed, by drunkenness and
prostitution, by corrupt politicians and gamblers,
desolation worse than that caused by famine,
pest, and war (for the moral evil is blacker and
the causes more permanent) ; yet are we not
disheartened but rather incited to new efforts
to save bodies and souls from the human devils,
whose existence no man or woman can doubt.
They are the foes of life, and we are life's lovers
and defenders. As they help the animal and the
fiend in the breast to kill the man, we appeal
to the man to stand forth a living soul, breathed
on by God.

The opportunities of laymen for religious
work are in some respects greater than those
of priests. In the manifold relations they have
with one another, in their social intercourse, in
their business, means for doing good are given
them which are granted more sparingly to the

1 86 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

clergyman. If we trace the history of conver-
sions, we shall find in many instances that they
are due to the silent influence of a layman or of
some gentle and pure-hearted woman. How
often have churches and schools been established
because two or three devoted families have be-
lieved and made it possible. One might think it
almost tragical that the masses should be shut
out from the world of high thought and noble
emotion which lies in the great literatures; but
is it not still more tragical that the multitudes
who heard Jesus gladly, who are ahungered and
athirst for God, should be so little acquainted
with the wealth of joy and love and strength
there is in Catholic faith?

This must be so, so long as they remain but
passive members of the Church — of the Church
which needs the hearts and minds and energies
of all its children, whose welfare and progress
depend on the moral condition and spiritual ac-
tivity, not of the priesthood alone, but of all
Catholics. It is one of the glories of America
that here every man and woman may, if they
will, find fruitful work to do. This is one of
the things that make it the most attractive of
all lands, drawing to itself the millions from all
the earth. In the Catholic Church, too, there is
work for every man and woman ; and if oppor-
tunity is denied to anyone, it is not because the

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 1 8?

Church is not wide and great and rich enough,
endowed as she is with the treasures of the
mind and heart of Christ, but because those
who happen for the time to shape her course
and policy, are narrow and unintelligent. A
more living participation of all Catholics in the
work of the Church is one of our most urgent
needs, and whoever might have power to awaken
in them a longing for this larger and higher
life, and open a way for them in the Church to
exercise an influence in the things which concern
man's permanent and most essential interests is
the leader whom we should all hail with delight
and follow with enthusiasm. What brilliant
examples of enlightened and beneficent lay ac-
tion in Catholic affairs we have had in the nine-
teenth century! It was O'Connell who led the
Catholics of Ireland, and I may say of the Eng-
lish-speaking world, out of the bondage of the
penal laws. Mallinkrodt and Windthorst were
the captains of the hosts that triumphed in the
Kultur Kampf. Goerres more than any other
man brought about the Catholic revival in Ger-
many nearly a hundred years ago. In France
Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand reawak-
ened enthusiasm for the Church which seemed
to have perished in the general ruin wrought by
the Revolution. Brownson is the most vigorous
writer who has advocated Catholic principles

1 88 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

in America. In England Dr. Ward, the most
loyal and devoted of believers, surpasses Car-
dinal Newman in metaphysical insight and in
logical cogency. How nobly Ozanam and Mon-
talembert served the cause of religion! What
these have done, why should not many do, ac-
cording to the measure of their gifts?

XIII.

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE.

[Address delivered at the Altgeld Memorial Meeting,
April 20, 1902.]

/T'VHE disinterested sympathy which we feel
-•• for genuine men is a testimony to our
own worth, for it proves our faith in character
as the paramount good, the solid foundation of
man's likeness to God. When we think of the
dead whom we have known and loved, we think
not of their strength or beauty of body, not
of their wealth or position, not of the circum-
stances of their lives, but we think of the self
that made them what they were — of their spirit,
of the intellectual and moral habits which made
them wise, brave, true, loving, and helpful.
They may have lived in poverty, in feeble
health, in prison; they may have suffered cal-
umny and persecution; they may have died as
malefactors; but if in them there was a divine
something, an utter devotion to any vital truth
or principle, a sacred and disinterested enthu-
siasm for some good cause, an unwavering and
unwearying pursuit of ends which are forever

I QO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

right, their memory is safe. The clouds shall
break away and the light which guided them
shall shine for thousands; and even their ene-
mies shall learn to admire and be grateful.

In assembling to honor the memory of Gov-
ernor Altgeld, to profess our faith in his per-
sonal worth and in the value of what he has
said and done, we honor ourselves, for there is
no better proof of noble nature than apprecia-
tiveness of noble men.

To be drawn to a genuine man it is not neces-
sary that without reserve we accept his opinions
or approve all his actions. All that is required
is faith in his intelligence, his honesty, his cour-
age, his good-will, his disinterestedness. It is
better to be wrong, inspired by the sense and
love of right than to be right, impelled by
motives of policy and the worship of vulgar
success.

Altgeld doubtless had the qualities which
make men interesting and give them influence
over their fellows. His aims were high, and
the industry and perseverance with which he
pursued them were altogether exceptional.

He was eager, all-earnest, untiring, self-for-
getful, and devoted. He feared no foe, shrank
from no obloquy, turned aside from no danger.
Though a politician, he was without policy,
never asking himself what might be expedient,

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE. 191

but looking only to what he believed to be true,
just, and honorable. Though born in Europe,
no other public man of his day was so genuinely
and so thoroughly American. No question that
concerned the general welfare eluded his alert
mind. His eye was everywhere, and saw every-
where, through shams and shows into the heart
of things. He had a fine scorn of mere wealth,
title, and position, and would have taken delight
in a beggar who might have had power to make
him wiser or better. He abhorred cant, pre-
tense, hypocrisy, and lies. He would not have
flattered a king for his crown, nor a plutocrat
for all his gold. If a cause was just it com-
mended itself to him all the more because it was
unpopular. Like all genuine men, he was
modest and without conceit. No honors and
no office could rob him of his plain and simple
manners. A farmer's boy, a soldier, a lawyer,
a politician, a governor, he compelled every sit-
uation in which he found himself to minister to
the enlargement of his mind and the molding
of his character. Deprived of the opportunity
of early education, he developed the mental self-
activity which is the only means of mental cul-
ture, and his intellectual curiosity became at
once comprehensive and discriminating. No
other politician among us has been so attracted
to the things of the mind. .Without a knowl-

IQ2 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

edge of the classical languages, he was fasci-
nated by the classical literatures. Ability, talent,
genius, character, were what he most admired.
No other public man in our country has written
anything that I should so gladly commend to the
perusal and study of our youth as Altgeld's
" Essay on Oratory," which he published but a
year ago. If we make certain reservations with
regard to the style, it has everything to stamp
it a classical treatise on the subject. In this
brief composition he reveals himself more com-
pletely than in anything else he has written.
We have here the passionate lover of eloquence,
one whose thoughts are as urgent as the growth
of wings, who, believing in the healing virtue
of the truth he knows and loves, would com-
municate it with such directness, force, persua-
siveness, and charm, that all shall be compelled
to hearken and become partakers of the divine
gifts. For him oratory is the greatest of the arts
— greater than music, than poetry, than paint-
ing, than sculpture. The orator must gather
into unity and harmony all that other artists
achieve separately — must be at once musician,
painter, poet, sculptor, architect; must be able
to take the human mind and heart and imagina-
tion for his instrument and play upon it all the
infinite divine cadences of rhythm and reason.
He must stand forth before men as a man clothed

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE. 193

with the resonance of the thunder-crash and with
the searching power of the forked lightning;
must sing to his audience and command them
and subdue them to his every mood and thought ;
must have power to transport them into the
midst of sublime scenes, of tumultuous oceans,
of white and eternally serene mountain peaks;
he must know all the melodies that soothe like
the lullabies of mothers; must be able to plead
as only love can plead, — to rouse like a clarion's
note; must be able to find his way through the
labyrinthian windings of the heart of man, with
all its passions and prejudices, and issue forth
heralded as a conqueror. His words must be
as full of music as a poet's, as clear-cut as a
statue, as symmetrical as the noblest monument,
as rightly ordered as an army in battle array;
his thought must unfold itself like the budding
leaves and the blossoming flowers ; and from the
centre and heart of it all he must rise and reveal
himself, not as an actor but as a man and mes-
senger sent by God to proclaim truth and vindi-
cate the right. He must have a knowledge of
history, of literature, of religion, of science, of
the world. He must be all alive with the sub-
ject he discusses. If his thoughts be not new,
they must glow with a light not seen before;
and they must be pure and high that they may
appeal to what is best in man. He must uttep* v

194 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

not what the arithmetical understanding would
suggest, but what the soul would speak to souls.
His language must be beautiful; his words
simple, chaste, and crystalline ; his phrases must
sparkle and glow like jewels on the brow of
beauty. But he must ever bear in mind that
mere vesture can not hide the unreality and
vacancy of what is false and vulgar. Right
words are born of true thoughts; and true
thoughts of noble life. Those alone who take
infinite pains can hope to become orators. There
is no seeming trifle which may be neglected,
for perfection is the result of attention to little
things. He who would excel must inure himself
to the labor of writing and rewriting what he
would utter. The pen is to the mind what the
plough is to the field. Ploughs do not sow the
seed, but without the culture they give it will
not thrive and yield rich harvest, however fertile
the soil. When meditation and composition
shall have made him familiar with every phase
of his subject, lucid order, accurate expression,
and copious language will come as the fountains
burst and leap in spring. Having aroused and
illumined his own spiritual being, he will have
a message and the skill rightly to deliver it to
his audience; and not to them only, but to the
wider world to which the wings of the press
shall bear his words.

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE. 195

The public-speaking which has politics and
business for its subject is useful and important,
but Fame blows not her trumpet above the
heads of those who do this work. They are
talkers, not orators ; fortunate if they talk logi-
cally, forcibly, to the point, while they keep
themselves free from slang and other offense
against the laws of speech. But he who would
utter memorable things in perfect form must
dwell in higher regions where gleams the light
of ideal aims and ends; must think no labor
too great, no self-denial too hard, if it help him
to become a master. Like the mighty Grecian,
he must love solitude, be willing, if need be,
to dwell in caves by the resounding shores of
the loud ocean; must take for his companions
the immortal minds who have left record of
themselves in books. He must abstain, train
himself like an athlete, and accustom himself
to all exercises that invigorate and sharpen the
intellect or harden and supple the body. He
must stand aloof from the crowds and despise
the applause of the vulgar and the notoriety
which is within the reach of criminals and prize-
fighters. He must be wholly serious and sincere
and keep his conscience pure, though he have
not bread to eat. Great manhood alone can
make great oratory possible. Above all, the
orator must be a lover of truth and justice. His

196 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

sympathies must go forth to the toilers who do
the world's work and are God's children. Wher-
ever there is oppression and wrong, he must be
ready in the name of the Lord to defend and
make good.

All this springs from the purest spirit of
Altgeld's life. He himself lacked some of the
important qualities which contribute to a public
speaker's success and eminence. His presence
was not commanding; his voice lacked sonor-
ity, modulation, and persuasiveness ; his gesticu-
lation was awkward and constrained; his style
was unpolished; his imagination prosaic; his
literary culture defective. He had not the
scholar's fine insight and thorough knowledge
of the best that has been thought and said ; and
yet withal he was more truly an orator than
almost any other public man of his day. Elo-
quence lies not in words and manner, but in the
man himself; and Altgeld was all athrill with
the passion, earnestness, and emotion which
awaken and fix attention while they create inter-
est. It was not merely the things he believed in,
admired, and loved, but rather the thoroughness
and intensity of his convictions, that lifted him
to higher planes of thought and feeling, and
gave to his utterances a significance and charm
which are beyond the reach of rhetoricians and
demagogues. With all his heart he loved truth

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE. 197

and hated lies ; loved justice and hated iniquity.
As he was capable of giving his life for what
he held to be right, so had he infinite power of
scorn for tricksters and spoilsmen, for palterers
and beggars of the approval of men. He knew
the blessedness of being hated and calumniated
for fidelity to conscience. The best men are
made great by the obstacles they surmount, by
the enemies they withstand. Nearly all our
speakers tread the paths of dalliance, hold their
ears to the ground to catch the murmur of the
crowd, make brave shots at safe objects, apolo-
gize if by chance they utter the naked truth;
but here was one for whom right and wrong
are parted by eternal laws, for whom compro-
mise is treason, and connivance apostasy from
God and the soul. Pallid, feeble in body, over-
worked, and overwrought by the intensity of his
own nature and too eager mind, he faced corrup-
tion and a hostile opinion begotten of the spirit
of Mammonites and time-servers with the heroic
courage of confessors and martyrs. He knew
better than anyone that throughout America
and Europe his name was associated with doc-
trines and practices which he abhorred, that he
was a safe mark for the conscienceless fling of
every hireling of the press, that to be his friend
was to incur suspicion of not being respectable,
but he faltered not; and though fallen on evil

198 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

days and slandered by evil tongues, though over-
taken by poverty and sneered at by the idolaters
of success, he continued to confront with daunt-
less courage all the fosterers of lies and corrup-
tion, all the contrivers of oppression and wrong,
all the apologists of conquest and inhumanity.
He had a heart as tender as a woman's ; a soul
as dauntless as a hero's. Whatever concerned
the poor, the weak, the disinherited, had his
earnest attention and sympathies. His faith
in the people was profound, and he believed that
democratic government may be so organized and
administered as to make it a blessing to all, and
first of all to those who most need protection
and fair opportunity because they are the most
defenseless and the most easily wronged. He
studied the question of education, and thoroughly
understood that liberty of teaching is the foun-
dation on which all our other liberties rest. He
did not, I think, sufficiently understand — nor
has any other American statesman sufficiently
understood — that if education does not form
character and promote conduct, it fails in the
most vital point. Intelligence is not enough ; it
is not the most indispensable thing in human
life, individual or social ; but when one considers
the infinite misery and ruin which have been
wrought and which continue to be wrought by
ignorance and stupidity, he is persuaded that

AN ORATOR AND LOVER OF JUSTICE. 199

it is not possible to have too much zeal for
the diffusion of knowledge and the spread of
enlightenment. No other governor of Illinois
has devoted so much serious thought or so much
good-will to the management and improvement
of our penal and reformatory institutions, and
the great good he has done in this matter can
hardly be other than permanent. How jealous
he was of our constitutional rights and liberties !
How quick to resent even the appearance of
infringement upon them!

He knew and felt intensely that the good
which we cherish for ourselves we should not
take from others; and hence he abhorred all
wars of conquest, however specious the pretexts
with which the real motives are cloaked. He
applauded the expulsion of the Spaniard from
Cuba that the inhabitants of the island might
have opportunity to establish a government of
their own; and he held that justice and honor
and every genuine American impulse demand
that the same right should be conceded to the
Filipinos. What ineffable disgust, what right-
eous wrath the crimes of some of our officers
and soldiers (which have affixed a brand of in-
famy on the name of America) would have
aroused within him!

It was altogether fitting that he should die
while pleading for the Boers — the most heroic

2OO SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

patriots and the victims of the greatest crime
against liberty and justice, against humanity
itself, which has been committed within the
memory of living men; a crime which Ameri-
cans more than any other people would have
denounced to the whole world with clamorous
indignation and abhorrence, had not conscience
made cowards of us all.

Here, then, let me close, while I salute, with
admiration, respect, and reverence the memory
of a genuine and heroic man — the truest ser-
vant of the people and the most disinterested
politician whom Illinois has known since Lincoln
died.

XIV.

ST. BEDE.

[Delivered at the dedication of St. Bede College,
Peru, 111.]

'HpHE founding of St. Bede's College by the
-*• order of St. Benedict in the Valley of the
Illinois is not merely an interesting event, it is
also a fact which is pregnant with promise of
good.

From this spot we have a view of a country
which is as fair as it is fertile, and which,
already populous, is destined to become the busi-
est hive of human industry. Beneath the black
soil lie inexhaustible coal-measures hardly
blacker. The climate is at once wholesome and
invigorating, and the people who have taken
possession of this favored region have in their
veins the blood which for more than a thousand
years has nourished the hearts of conquerors
and subduers. They belong to that race which
has never quailed before hostile man or forbid-
ding nature, and which has acknowledged as
its superior only the almighty God. The State

202 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

of Illinois, which half a century ago was almost
a wilderness, is now cultivated like Belgium or
Lombardy. Its villages are counted by the
thousand, its towns by the hundred; and
whithersoever we turn we behold streaming in
the air the black pennon of the mighty engine
which bears over the trembling plain bounteous
gifts to pour them into the lap of peoples which
are separated from us by oceans and by every
divergence of tongue and character. We are in
the heart of the great continent, in the centre of
commerce and manufacture, with lines of com-
munication, east and west, north and south.
There are interests too, of a more spiritual na-
ture, which cluster here to dedicate this spot
to religion and to the cause of education. Along
this valley passed the early explorers and dis-
coverers, who seemed already to foresee that
the rivers which make an open highway between
the lakes and the gulf, were destined by Provi-
dence to help to bring about a union of hearts
and minds among millions of men, who should
have but one law as they adore but one God. In
the plain which lies beneath us the holy Sacrifice
was offered and the gospel was preached when
the colonists of New England were still engaged
in fierce conflicts with the Indians, when feuds
and revolts were threatening the existence of
the struggling settlements of Virginia and

ST. BEDE. 2O3

Maryland, when Manhattan Island (which the
Dutch had bought from the natives for twenty-
four dollars) did not contain a population of
fifteen hundred souls. From the College win-
dows " Starved Rock " looms before us, over-
looking the valley where stood the original Kas-
kaskia when Father Marquette, the discoverer
of the Mississippi, established the mission of the
Immaculate Conception, and on Holy Thursday,
in the year 1675, in the presence of two thou-
sand warriors and countless women and chil-
dren, said the first Mass ever celebrated in
Illinois. This, alas, was the last act of his noble
and heroic life, for almost immediately after-
wards he set forth on his journey northward
only to be taken from his birchen canoe to die
in the wilderness.

He was followed by Father Allouez, the
founder of many missions, who, on the third of
May, 1676, erected in the midst of the village a
cross twenty-five feet high, which stood fof
years in the plain that stretches away from the
little town of Utica. Here, too, Father Ri-
bourde, a noble Burgundian and the companion
of La Salle, preached the gospel, and fell be-
neath the tomahawk, when the Illinois fled
before the terrible Iroquois. Here also labored
Father Rale, who more than a quarter of a
century later was murdered by the English,

2O4 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

while offering his life as a sacrifice for his be-
loved Abenakis. Associations of yet another
kind which are more intimately related to the
history of our own country, also gather here;
for the spot on which we stand was once the
property of our greatest orator, — of him whose
lofty thought and majestic style have clothed
the constitutional principles of our government
with the splendor of genius, — Daniel Webster,
our least mortal mind, who in his high pre-
science foresaw the diruption of our country,
and saw that God would make it whole again.
Those who have chosen this spot as the site
of a college and monastery have not acted with-
out wisdom. The sons of St. Benedict inherit
a taste for the beauties of nature. Their cradle
on Monte Cassino overlooks the dreaming hills
and the rich valleys which stretch far away to
dip themselves in the blue waters of the Bay of
Naples; and from that eminence, where they
supplanted Apollo, the god of light and beauty,
they have taken flight and, like the honey-laden
ever-busy bees, have settled upon a thousand
heights, and on a thousand plains, to make
them vocal with the ceaseless song of praise and
the most pleasant noise of labor. The very
ruins of the places where they abode make beau-
tiful and consecrate the regions which lie about
them. The highest symbol and embodiment of

ST. BEDE.

205

man's spiritual and infinite nature, of his faith
in God and moral consciousness, is the Church ;
but the mightiest and most heavenly leader of
the champions of the soul, of the followers of
the Blessed Christ, is Saint Benedict. If we
look to what he has accomplished he stands forth
from the ranks of the saints, as Csesar stands
forth from the ranks of the heroes. As the
great Roman shaped the course of Empire for
more than a thousand years, so the founder of
Western monasticism directed for centuries the
progress and development of Christian life and
civilization. More than all others he understood
how to harmonize man's yearning for temporal
power and dominion, for knowledge and free-
dom, with the genius of the religion of Christ,
whose eye is forever bent on the eternal and
infinite. The history of his order is the highest
evidence that faith and love, humility and pa-
tience, are the saving principles. They fertilize
the earth, illumine the mind, strengthen the
heart, and people heaven with elect souls. From
his brotherhood sprang the two popes who in
their influence upon the Church take precedence
of all others — Gregory the Great and Gregory
VII. St. Maur, a disciple of St. Benedict,
carried the order to France, where in a short
time it absorbed the flourishing communities
founded by St. Columbanus, and spread rapidly

206 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

throughout the Prankish kingdoms. St. Augus-
tin carried it to England, and it became the
paramount influence in converting and molding
the Anglo-Saxon race. St. Wilfrid, St. Willi-
brord and St. Boniface carried it to Holland and
Germany, and these great Benedictines hold
their undisputed place in history as the apostles
of the Teutonic peoples. From the tomb of
Boniface at Fulda, the monastic brotherhood
spread through the whole Fatherland, as in
England it spread from Canterbury; and wher-
ever the monks encamped, the forest was felled,
the marsh was drained, the school was built,
and the barbarous populations were brought
under the influence of religion and law.

In the midst of universal ignorance these
monasteries became the centres of learning, the
storehouses of all that remained of sacred and
profane literature; and from them there issued
forth a ceaseless stream of enlightened teachers
and wise rulers. The knowledge of what was
then accomplished led Charlemagne to decree
that a school should be attached to every mon-
astery and every cathedral throughout the em-
pire. In this apostolic epoch, in the history of
the order, the Benedictines were the heroes who,
amidst the irruptions of lawless hordes, amid
the clash of arms and the wild confusion of
unrestrained cruelty and lust, stood undaunted,

.ST. BEDE. 2O7

their hearts raised to heaven, while their hands
held the plough and the pen. They were the
men of light and reason, who looking up to the
Father in heaven, put their trust in knowledge
and labor: they appealed from the brutal cour-
age of the barbarian, who exulted amid the ruins
he had made, to the all-conquering moral power
of religious faith, which makes man patient and
strong in the consciousness that he works with
God to upbuild an enduring society, where those
who know and love dwell with the Eternal.
These monastic schools taught the whole cycle
of human knowledge: philosophy, theology,
mathematics, natural science, poetry, rhetoric,
and music, as well as classical and sacred liter-
ature. Of Alcuin, one of these monks, the
friend and counsellor of Charlemagne, Guizot
says : " He is a monk, a deacon, the light of
the contemporaneous church; but he is at the
same time a scholar, a classical man of letters."
When we reflect that the Benedictines, in their
heroic age, to perfect faith, to blamelessness of
life, to dauntless courage, to the spirit of tireless
labor, joined the best culture of mind then pos-
sible, we need not stop to examine into the
causes of their phenomenal success. In spite
of the jealousy and envy which great merit ex-
cites, true worth wins its way to the heart of
man. We fatally turn to those who have the

208 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

power and the will to help us; for we all are
weak, and would be strong ; we all are ignorant,
and would have knowledge; we all are timid
and confused, and would follow those who have
an eye to see and a heart to lead. When men
are pure, devout, and humble, and also enlight-
ened, intrepid, and active, the world will hearken
to their voice and drink the inspiration of their
lives; and those who, by habitual self-denial
attain to knowledge and virtue, become the nat-
ural guides and rulers of their fellows. In what
marvelous degree the order of St. Benedict has
succeeded in giving such men to the world we
may see at a glance. By the middle of the four-
teenth century, twenty-four of its members had
sat upon the Chair of St. Peter, two hundred had
been cardinals, seven thousand had been arch-
bishops, fifteen thousand had been bishops, and
upon more than fifty thousand the title of saint
had been conferred by the voice of the people
or the Church. To them chiefly the world is
indebted for the conversion of the Germanic
peoples, for the upbuilding of the kingdoms of
France and England ; to them for bringing under
cultivation vast tracts of waste land, for training
innumerable barbarous populations to till the
soil ; to them for keeping alive in the West the
traditions of intellectual culture and for pre-
serving the classical writings. Every monas-

ST. BEDE. 209

tery, according to the rule of St. Benedict, was
to have a library, and every monk to possess a
pen and tablet. To them also the world is in-
debted for their fearless insistence upon the
principle that neither obscure birth, nor poverty,
nor bodily weakness is a barrier to eminence;
that opportunity should be given to slaves and
beggars, who, if they are found worthiest,
should be made popes and kings. To them,
notably to Gregory the Great, Guido D'Arrezzo,
and Ockenheim, we are indebted for the cultiva-
tion and improvement of sacred music, of which
our modern music, the disinctive art of the
nineteenth century, is but a development. I will
not, however, insist upon the services which the
Benedictines have rendered, nor shall I attempt
to conceal the abuses, which, here and there, and
again and again, have crept into the order dur-
ing the fourteen centuries of its existence.

A religious order is but a human institution,
and the Church itself, which is of divine origin,
has its epochs of weakness and decadence. I do
not now recall the name of the cardinal, who,
when there was question of giving the highest
ecclesiastical sanction to the society of Jesus,
opposed it on the ground that the good done
by religious orders in the fervor of their early
years is more than counterbalanced by the harm
they do when, as it always happens, discipline

210 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

becomes relaxed and the heroic virtue of the
founders and first disciples gives place to indif-
ference and self-indulgence. Whatever truth
there may be in this view, it did not meet with
the approval of the Pope, although a committee
of cardinals, of whom Reginald Pole was one,
had but two years before made a report to
him, in which they declared that they were of
opinion that all the religious orders should be
suppressed.

It was a disciple of St. Benedict, himself a
saint, and a monk and a pope as well, Gregory
the Great, who wrote : " It is better to have
scandal than a lie " ; and the monks who wrote
the annals of their orders did not seek to conceal
the abuses which had crept into them. " I con-
tend," says St. Bernard, " not against, but for
the monastic order, when I expose the vices of
men who make part of it." It was left to the
half-doubting faith of weaker ages to imagine
that the best way to make wrong right is to deny
its existence.

It is but truth, however, to say that the abuses
which have enfeebled and tainted the life of so
many orders, have been misunderstood and ex-
aggerated. They have nearly always arisen from
the invasion of the temporal power. Kings and
princes and statesmen, under the vicious system
known as the Commende, which began to prevail

.ST. BEDE. 211

early in the middle ages and spread widely
throughout Europe, claimed the right to place
their favorites as superiors over religious houses,
and under the rule of such men the vices of the
world fatally made their way into the sanctuaries
of religion. But when the worst is said even of
those whom the world thus corrupted, all that
can be truthfully affirmed is that they became
self-indulgent and indolent, following the bent of
human nature, which inclines to the love of ease
and of the good things of earth, drifting down
to a sluggish life of mere sensation and thought-
lessness. !< Vain will be any endeavor," says
Montalembert, the historian of " The Monks
of the West/' " to alter the distinctive character
of their social historical part, which is that of
having lived to do good. Humanly speaking,
they have done nothing else : all their career is
occupied with peopling deserts, protecting the
poor, and enriching the world. Sadly degen-
erated towards their decline, much less active
and less industrious than in their origin, they
never became less charitable. Where is the
country, where is the man whom they have in-
jured? where are the monuments of their op-
pression? the memorials of their rapacity? If
we follow the furrow which they have dug
through history, we shall find everywhere but
the traces of their beneficence." But to have

212 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

done is of small account. Ingratitude to in-
dividuals is but a form of that universal un-
thankfulness which makes us look with a pity
akin to contempt upon whatever thing or insti-
tution which, having been great and strong, is
now reduced to nullity. Men will not love the
Church or its religious orders for what may
have been done by them. The old, who are
sinking beneath life's rapid current, may seek
to prolong a feeble existence by cherishing mem-
ories of things that have passed away, but the
young and vigorous turn with eager expectancy
to what is now capable of nourishing the mind,
the heart, and the soul. Our religion is divine,
not because it has blossomed forth in former
ages, in the lives of virgins and apostles, of
martyrs and confessors ; nor yet because through
its inspiration, genius in every form of artistic
expression has clothed the highest thought with
perfect beauty — breathing harmony, giving
movement to stone, speech to canvas, and to
human language the power to utter immortal
truth and Godlike love, in cadence and melody,
which like the music of higher worlds, like the
cradle-songs of childhood's lost paradise, linger
forever in memory to soothe, uplift, and console
the heart of man; but it is divine because it
contains the germs of an everpresent, infinite
life, which seems to wane and die only to be

ST. BEDE.

213

born again, amid other environments, with a
vigor and a beauty which are always fresh and
delightful.

And it is the glory of the order of St. Benedict
that though like the Church, it has again and
again seemed about to be overwhelmed by the
calamities of the times and the force of human
passion, yet like the fair mother of souls, it has
again and again in the long course of ages, risen
superior to fate, and gathering into its ranks
the children of new generations, addressed itself
to deeds of light and beneficence.

When nearly three centuries after its founda-
tion, the troubled and barbarous state of the
world had led to a relaxation of discipline
in innumerable monasteries, St. Benedict of
Amian arose and finally succeeded in reforming
almost the entire order, which then entered
upon its most brilliant period of service to the
cause of religion and civilization, of science and
literature.

When the Empire of the Franks was invaded
by the Normans and the Huns, from the West
and the East, who pillaged the convents and
dispersed the monks, the general ruin brought
disorder also in the cloisters. The ninth and
tenth centuries are the age of darkness and con-
fusion. But even in this epoch of chaos a new
and salutary movement was begun among the

214 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

Benedictines. Hitherto each monastery had
stood alone and independent; but now mother-
houses were constituted, which imposed their
rule upon the affiliated convents and watched
over the observance of discipline. Upon this
plan the congregation of Cluny was established
in France, the congregation of Camaldoli in
Italy, the congregation of Vallombrosa in Tus-
cany, and the congregation of Hirschau in Ger-
many, which have all a great and noble history.
In England a similar reformation was
brought about by St. Dunstan, who caused
the old life in its peace and fruitfulness to
flourish again. During the eleventh century
new branches sprang from the parent trunk
such as those of Granmont and Citeaux, the
latter of which the genius and courage of St.
Bernard pushed so vigorously forward that it
rapidly spread through Europe, and within a
century of its foundation embraced eight hun-
dred rich abbeys; and when towards the end
of the twelfth century its immense wealth began
to act unfavorably upon discipline, John de la
Barriere, after a considerable lapse of time, suc-
ceeded in effecting a reform which gave rise to
the Feuillants in France and to the Bernardines
in Italy. Another salutary reformation brought
about by Didier de la Cour in the Convent of
St. Vanne, in the sixteenth century, renewed

ST. BEDE.

215

the religious life of the Benedictine monasteries
of Lorraine, Alsace, and Burgundy. Intimately
associated with St. Vanne is the reformation
introduced into the convent of St. Augustin of
Limoges in the early part of the seventeenth
century, giving rise to the celebrated congre-
gation of St. Maur, which embraced a hun-
dred and twenty-four abbeys, the centres of a
literary activity that extended to every branch
of science, and enriched the world with works
which will remain as monuments of patient
research and profound erudition.

The French Revolution, upheaving and over-
turning everything, suppressed the Benedictine
order in France, Spain, and Germany; as in
England the Protestant Reformation had swept
away its hundred and eighty-six abbeys and
priories. But this order has again sprung to
life and established itself in the chief countries
of Europe. It was introduced into Pennsyl-
vania in 1846 by a colony of monks from Ba-
varia; and from the Abbey of St. Vincent it
has spread through the country in many direc-
tions; and that its activity has not ceased the
opening of this College of St. Bede to-day is
evidence enough.

Here, indeed, there is little to recall the condi-
tions, physical, moral, and intellectual, which
existed when the Benedictine monasteries and

2l6 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

schools were established throughout Europe in
the early middle ages. No barbarous hordes
will come to destroy these buildings ; kings and
princes will not have power to appoint here un-
worthy superiors, and the people by whom they
are surrounded are neither ignorant nor pagan;
for the marvelous material development of the
West has not been unaccompanied by religious
and intellectual improvement. If the thousands
of Indians who heard the first Mass said in
Illinois have with their descendants passed away
to sink into the ocean of oblivion and nothing-
ness, the faith has not perished with them. On
the contrary it lives in this great State with an
energy and freshness which might make us for-
get that it comes down to us from ages when
our rude ancestors had not yet emerged from
their dense forests to overrun the world and to
fill it with terror and ruin. There are in Illinois
to-day more than six hundred Catholic churches
and nearly seven hundred priests, and our
schools, asylums and institutions of beneficence
are scattered all over the State. And to perceive
how rapid is the development of our ecclesiasti-
cal organization, we need but consider that in
this diocese of Peoria, where at the time of its
formation, fourteen years ago, there were not
fifty priests, including those who were in the
five counties since added to it, there are now a

ST. BEDE. 217

hundred and thirty, and that whereas then there
were not in its present territory more than ninety
churches, there are now a hundred and seventy ;
and it is but truth to say that among the strong
and active people in the midst of whom we live,
none are more intrepid, more laborious, more
eager to take advantage of whatever opportu-
nities are offered to promote the spiritual and
temporal welfare of their fellow-men than the
Catholic priests. They instruct, they guide,
they build, and while they insist upon righteous-
ness and plead for interests which are eternal,
nothing that concerns the welfare of man is
foreign to their thought. I will not speak of
their patriotism, for to boast of one's patriotism
is to lay one's self open to suspicion, and is
besides as much a breach of good taste as to
boast of one's virtue; but I think I may say
without risk that they believe in freedom and in
education as they believe in God and in Christ.

In their name and with them, Right Reverend
and Reverend Fathers, I welcome you to this dio-
cese of Peoria. You come, in a sense, to be our
teachers and guides; for whatever fervor of
faith and 'piety, whatever illumination of mind
is shed from here, will warm and light us all.

The principles which underlie the religious
life are divine. It is forever and everywhere
right to be gentle and lowly of heart, to be obe-

218 SOCIALISM AND LABOR,

dient to law, to be chaste in thought and act, to
prefer the good which lies within us to whatever
is merely external. To pray, to toil, to study,
to write, to speak, to live plainly and to think
nobly, because such life is Godlike and because
it brings blessings to men — this is your aim,
this your vocation : to spread peace and faith,
freedom and good-will, science and art, light
and life — this is your work.

" Your rule," says the most eloquent voice
ever uplifted in advocacy of religious truth, " is
an epitome of Christianity, a learned and myste-
rious abridgment of all the doctrines of the gos-
pel, all the institutions of the holy fathers, and
all the counsels of perfection. Here prudence
and simplicity, humility and courage, severity
and gentleness, freedom and dependence emi-
nently appear. Here correction has all its firm-
ness, condescension all its charm, command all
its vigor, and obedience all its repose ; silence its
gravity, words their grace, strength its exercise,
and weakness its support; and yet always, my
fathers, he calls it a beginning to keep you al-
ways in holy fear." You bring to our young
and vigorous life, the charm and mystery of the
past, the poetry, and romance of the marvelous
creative middle age. You knew the Rome of the
Caesars before it had been despoiled by the in-
vader and the envious tooth of all-destroying

ST. BEDE. 219

time. You were present when century after cen-
tury the onrushing hordes trampled whatever
was great or beautiful beneath the hoofs of their
wild steeds. You saw the new order begin
to take form, as islet after islet emerged from
the chaotic waste, and hearkening to the voice
of religion, men dared again to hope. You saw
the splendid pageantry of that wondrous world
which lives again in the pages of Froissart and
Shakspere, of Bocaccio and Dante. Emperors
and kings, queens and princesses, have taken the
habit of your order and become your brothers
and sisters. You have spoken truth to popes
and defied tyrants. Of all the heroes whom Car-
lyle has praised, none I think, was so near to
his heart, as Abbot Samson, that typical Bene-
dictine, whose foot was planted on the solid
earth to maintain all justice and to defend all
right, and whose faith in the unseen world was
as sure and serene as though he had gazed upon
it with bodily eye. You are of ancient and noble
lineage; the awful weight of a glorious past
rests upon you ; adown the centuries a cloud of
virgins and apostles, of martyrs and heroes,
whisper in the silent regions of the soul, bidding
you gird yourselves for the ceaseless struggle
for moral freedom from enslaving passion, for
mental illumination that will dispel all-con-
founding ignorance. The one great purpose of

22O SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

all institutions of learning is to bring young and
sensitive natures into living, daily and hourly
contact with generous and enlightened minds.
This is the vital part of education, and all else
is mere machinery. Ah ! may the eager yearn-
ing youths who shall crowd these halls find here
as friends and teachers, men, the bare thought
of whom shall have power, like fame, to raise
the clear spirit " to scorn delights and live
laborious days."

But to exhort is to reproach, and I gladly turn
to the sweet and placid countenance of our Ven-
erable Bede, as he is brought before me by the
most meditative and thoughtful of poets:

" But what if one, through grove or flowery mead,
Indulging thus at will the creeping feet
Of a voluptuous indolence, should meet
Thy hovering shade, O Venerable Bede !
The saint, the scholar, from a circle freed
Of toil stupendous, in a hallowed seat
Of learning, where thou heard'st the billows beat
On a wild coast, rough monitors to feed
Perpetual industry. Sublime Recluse
The recreant soul that dares to shun the debt
Imposed on human kind, must first forget
Thy diligence, thy unrelaxing use
Of a long life, and in the hour of death
The last dear service of thy passing breath."

Bede is the fairest and noblest figure of the
age to which he belongs. Born in an obscure

ST. BEDE. 221

corner of the world, of the Anglo-Saxon race,
which half a century before was still hidden in
the darkness of ignorance and idolatry, he
stands forth not only as a historical writer of
the first rank, the sole source of our knowledge
of a people whose deeds have changed the earth
and filled it with their fame; but he is also a
scholar of wide culture, intimately acquainted
with whatever in his day was best worth know-
ing. A theologian, an exegete, a historian,
writing and speaking at pleasure in prose or
verse, in Anglo-Saxon or in Latin, he knew be-
sides whatever it was then possible to know of
philosophy and science. Quotations from Plato,
Cicero, Seneca, from Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius
fall from his pen as readily as the words of the
gospel itself. He is, in truth, as Edmund Burke
entitles him, the " Father of English learning,"
the typical scholar such as the English univer-
sities have always sought to produce. In the
midst of a life of ceaseless intellectual toil he still
preserves the fresh fervor of his youthful piety,
closing the list of his literary labors with this
touching prayer : " Oh, good Jesus, who hast
deigned to refresh my soul with the sweet
streams of knowledge, grant that I may one day
mount to Thee, who art the source of all wis-
dom, to remain forever in thy divine presence."
And what simple winsomeness there is in these

222 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

words concerning himself : " Having been sent
by my family at the age of seven years, to be
educated, I have ever since lived in this monas-
tery, where I have diligently pondered the Scrip-
tures ; and while observing the rule and chanting
daily in choir, I have always felt it to be a
pleasant thing either to learn, or to teach or to
write." His death was as beautiful as his life
was fair and fruitful. During all his illness he
ceased not from teaching and dictating, and
when the evening of the last day was come, one
of his disciples said to him : " Beloved master,
there remains but one word to write." " Write
it quickly," he answered ; and when it was com-
pleted the disciple said : " Now it is finished."
" You say truly, it is finished," the Saint replied.
" Take my head in your arms and turn me, for
I have great consolation in looking toward the
holy place where I have prayed so much." Then
he passed to the unseen world.

Oh, happy omen, that this college and mon-
astery are to bear a name so full of warmth and
light ! Here too shall be found servants of God,
lovers of men, bright stars of the monastic
brotherhood, who, here where the echo of the
war whoop died away but yesterday, shall walk
in the ways of peace and of wisdom, shall teach
knowledge and shed upon fair young souls the
light of faith and the glow of heavenly love.

ST. BEDE. 223

As the harvest reaped in these fertile fields is
sent over seas and oceans to nourish millions;
as the coal underlying our feet is distributed
through distant regions of the North, to warm
and cheer the homes of thousands, so shall there
gather here from year to year a swarm of youths
athirst, who, drinking deep at this open fountain
of truth and spiritual life, shall scatter through
the land — centres of influence from which high
thought, true courage, and noble aims shall
radiate. If I, who by birth, by training, and by
love, not less than by the visible environments
of my actual home, belong to the West, may be
permitted to express an opinion upon the char-
acter of the western people, I will say that those
persons mistake who imagine that the energy
which has wrought the material transformation
of which the wide world is witness, is that of a
people which can ever rest content with merely
material achievements. Whether our origin be
Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, or German, we come of
the world's best blood, belong to races to whom
the ideals of religion and culture, of freedom
and righteousness have ever appealed with
irresistible force.

If, with incredible industry we have, within
half a century, leveled the mountains and filled
the valleys and made straight the ways, who
can doubt that all this has been done to enable

224 SOCIALISM AND LABOR.

a free people, unhindered and unhampered, to
enter upon the infinitely more arduous task of
rising to heights of intellectual and moral ex-
cellence? The spirit of democracy bids us look
at the man, not at his birth or surroundings:
but if — while we think lightly of aristocratic
descent, of the trappings of office, the vain sound
of titles, and the vulgar show of wealth — the
best culture of mind and the noblest devotion of
soul leave us unsympathetic and unmoved, what
power can save us from becoming hopelessly
common and inferior? Ah! we shall not rest
content until religion infuse through all our life
the charm of reverence and gentleness, of
modest and polite breeding, making impossible
the coarseness and vulgarity which are still so
manifest ; until the best culture, opening to our
view the whole past of the race and all the
realms of nature, break down the hard and nar-
row walls which confine every ignorant soul,
giving to each one of us the dignity, greater than
that of princes, which belongs to virtue and
wisdom. The impetus given to our material
development is so irresistible that we cannot
imagine its progress should be arrested ; and the
machinery of our political life will be kept in
some kind of order, we cannot doubt, by the
patriots who are ever willing to sacrifice their
ease for the care and worry of office; but what

ST. BEDE. 225

we need above all things, and what I believe we
most yearn for, is the man, the influence, the
institution, with power to nourish the life of the
soul; to give us faith, hope, and love; to give
us wide knowledge and great thoughts; to
strengthen and refine our sense of beauty; to
make us appreciative of whatever is true or
divine or fair or noble.

For some such purpose, this college has been
founded. May God's blessing rest upon it; may
good men's hands be outstretched to help it;
may those who year after year shall enter its
halls return to their homes, like merchants from
distant lands, laden with rich store of wisdom
and love ; and some day, when we who are here
shall sleep with our fathers in the cool earth,
let a loving hand write above its portals Bede's
epitaph :

" O Bede, God's servant and bright star
Of the monastic brotherhood !
From regions which do lie afar,
To the whole Church thou hast brought good."

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Spalding

AUTHOR

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TITLE

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3072
labor .372

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