Labor in this country is independent and proud.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

Honest labor bears a

lovely face.

THOMAS Dekker.

Capital and Labor

the first lesson to teach the poor man is that, as a whole, the wealth in the community is distinctly beneficial to him; that he is better off in the long run because other men are well off; and that the surest way to destroy what measure of prosperity he may have is to paralyze industry and the wellbeing of those men who have achieved success.-American Ideals

Wealth Beneficial

to the Poor

When Denunciation of

Dangerous

Demagogic denunciation of wealth is never wholesome and generally dangerous; and not a few of the proposed methods of curbing Wealth is the trusts are dangerous chiefly because all insincere advocacy of the impossible is dangerous. It is an unhealthy thing for a community when the appeal is made to follow a course which those who make the appeal either do know or ought to know cannot be followed; and which if followed would result in disaster to everybody. Loose talk about

When

destroying monopoly out of hand, without a Denuncia hint as to how the monopoly should even

tion of

Wealth is be defined, offers a case in point.

Dangerous

Wild and
Foolish
Remedies

for the
Trust Evil

Addresses and Messages.

I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say should think of it than that you should applaud it. I am not going to try to define with technical accuracy what ought to be meant when we speak of a trust. But if by trust we mean merely a big corporation, then I ask you to ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit of rancor or in a spirit of folly says "Destroy the trusts, without giving you an idea of what he means really to do. I will go with him gladly if he says "Destroy the evil in the trusts. I will try to find out that evil, I will seek to apply remedies, which I have already outlined in other speeches. But if his policy, from whatever motive, whether hatred, fear, panic, or just sheer ignorance, is to destroy the trusts in a way that will destroy all our propertyno. Those men who advocate wild and foolish remedies which would be worse than the disease, are doing all in their power to perpetuate the evils against which they nominally war, because, if we are brought face to face with the naked issue of either

keeping or totally destroying a prosperity in which the majority share, but in which some share improperly, why, as sensible men, we must decide that it is a great deal better that some people should prosper too much than that no one should prosper enough. So that the man who advocates destroying the trusts by measures which would paralyze the industries of the country is at least a quack, and at worst an enemy to the Republic.

Ibid.

Wild and Foolish Remedies

for the

Trust Evil

Quack remedies of the universal cure-all type are generally as noxious to the body politic as to the body corporal.

Often the head-in-the-air social reformers, because people of sane and wholesome minds will not favor their wild schemes, themselves decline to favor schemes for practical reform.

Ibid.

Quack Remedies Noxious

ing Changes

The well-being of the wage-worker, like the Jeopardizwell-being of the tiller of the soil, should be treated as an essential in shaping our whole economic policy. There must never be any change which will jeopardize the standard of comfort, the standard of wages of the American wage-worker.-Ibid.

Belief in
Organized
Labor

I believe emphatically in organized labor. I believe in organizations of wage-workers. Organization is one of the laws of our social and economic development at this time. But I feel that we must always keep before our minds the fact that there is nothing sacred in the name itself. To call an organization an organization does not make it a good one. The worth of an organization depends upon its being handled with the courage, the skill, the wisdom, the spirit of fair dealing as between man and man, and the wise self-restraint which, I am glad to be able to say, your Brotherhood has shown. Ibid.

Put Your

Place

Capitalist and wage-worker alike should self in His honestly endeavor each to look at any, matter from the other's standpoint, with a freedom on the one hand from the contemptible arrogance which looks down upon the man of less means, and, on the other, from the no less contemptible envy, jealousy, and rancor which hates another because he is better off. Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point of baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose between them.