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left to provide for our keep. A Wall Street broker had advertised for a watch-dog, and I went with Bob to see him. But when he would have counted the three gold pieces he offered into my hand, I saw Bob's honest brown eyes watching me with a look of such faithful affection that I dropped the coins as if they burned, and caught him about the neck to tell him that we would never part. Bob put his huge paws on my shoulders, licked my face, and barked such a joyous bark of challenge to the world in general that even the Wall Street man was touched.

"I guess you are too good friends to part," he said. And so we were.

We left Wall Street and its gold behind to go out and starve together. Literally we did that in the days that followed. I had taken to peddling books, an illustrated Dickens issued by the Harpers, but I barely earned enough by it to keep life in us and a transient roof over our heads. I call it transient because it was rarely the same two nights together, for causes which I have explained. In the day Bob made out rather better than I. He could always coax a supper out of the servant at the basement gate by his curvetings and tricks, while I pleaded vainly and hungrily with the mistress at the front door. Dickens was a drug in the market. A curious fatality had given me a copy of "Hard Times" to canvass with. I think no amount of good fortune could turn my head while it stands in my bookcase. One look at it brings back too vividly that day when Bob and I had gone, desperate and breakfastless, from the last bed we might know for many days, to try to sell it and so get the means to keep us for another twenty-four hours.

It was not only breakfast we lacked. The day before we had had only a crust together. Two days without food is not good preparation for a day's canvassing. We did the best we could. Bob stood by and wagged his tail persuasively while I did the talking; but luck was dead against us, and Hard Times" stuck to us for all we tried. Evening came and found us down by the Cooper Institute, with never a cent. Faint with hunger, I sat down on the steps under the illuminated clock, while Bob stretched himself at my feet.

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He had beguiled the cook in

one of the last houses we called at, and his stomach was filled. From the corner I had looked on enviously. For me there was no supper, as there had been no dinner and no breakfast. To-morrow there was another day of starvation. How long was this to last? Was it any use to keep up a struggle so hopeless? From this very spot I had gone, hungry and wrathful, three years before when the dining Frenchmen for whom I wanted to fight thrust me forth from their company. Three wasted years! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. To-day I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; nothing would ever go right; and, worse, I did not care. I drummed moodily upon my book. Wasted! Yes, that was right. My life was wasted, utterly wasted.

A voice hailed me by name, and Bob sat up, looking attentively at me for his cue as to the treatment of the owner of it. I recognized in him the principal of the telegraph school where I had gone until my money gave out. He seemed suddenly struck by something.

"Why, what are you doing here?" he asked. I told him Bob and I were just resting after a day of canvassing.

"Books!" he snorted. "I guess they won't make you rich. Now, how would you like to be a reporter, if you have got nothing better to do? The manager of a news agency down-town asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn't much-ten dollars a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know."

He poked over the book in my hand and read the title. "Hard Times," he said, with a little laugh. "I guess so. What do you say? I think you will do. Better come along and let me give you a note to him now."

As in a dream, I walked across the street with him to his office and got the letter which was to make me, half-starved and homeless, rich as Croesus, it seemed

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quiet, thinking it over. What had happened had stirred me profoundly. For the second time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just when it seemed inevitable; and I knew it for His hand, to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before. It had ever been my own will, my own way, upon which I insisted. In the shadow of Grace Church I bowed my head against the granite wall of the gray tower and prayed for strength to do the work which I had so long and arduously sought and which had now come to me; the while Bob sat and looked on, saying clearly enough with his wagging tail that he did not know what was going on, but that he was sure it was all right. Then we resumed our wanderings. One thought, and only one, I had room for. I did not pursue it; it walked with me wherever I went: She was not married yet. Not yet. When the sun rose, I washed my face and hands in a dog's drinkingtrough, pulled my clothes into such shape as I could, and went with Bob to his new home. That parting over, I walked down to 23 Park Row and delivered my letter to the desk editor in the New York News Association, up on the top floor.

He looked me over a little doubtfully, but, evidently impressed with the early hours I kept, told me that I might try. He waved me to a desk, telling me to wait until he had made out his morning book of assignments; and with such scant ceremony was I finally introduced to Newspaper Row, that had been to me like an enchanted land. After twenty-seven years of hard work in it, during which I have been behind the scenes of most of the plays that go to make up the sum of the

life of the metropolis, it exercises the old spell over me yet. If my sympathies need quickening, my point of view adjusting, I have only to go down to Park Row at eventide, when the crowds are hurrying homeward and the City Hall clock is lighted, particularly when the snow lies on the grass in the park, and stand watching them awhile, to find all things coming right. It is Bob who stands by and watches with me then, as on that night.

The assignment that fell to my lot when the book was made out, the first against which my name was written in a New York editor's book, was a lunch of some sort at the Astor House. I have forgotten what was the special occasion. I remember the bearskin hats of the Old Guard in it, but little else. In a kind of haze, I beheld half the savory viands of earth spread under the eyes and nostrils of a man who had not tasted food for the third day. I did not ask for any. I had reached that stage of starvation that is like the still center of a cyclone, when no hunger is felt. But it may be that a touch of it all crept into my report; for when the editor had read it, he said briefly :

"You will do. Take that desk, and report at ten every morning, sharp."

That night, when I was dismissed from the office, I went up the Bowery to No. 185, where a Danish family kept a boarding-house up under the roof. I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled over me in the dark and carried me in. My strength had at last given out.

So began my life as a newspaper man. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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The Rights of Man

A Study in Twentieth Century Problems

By Lyman Abbott

Chapter V.-Law and Liberty

W

E have seen that government grows out of the instinct of self-preservation, and is a spontaneous development of that instinct. Its function is the protection of the inherent and indefeasible rights of person, property, reputation, family, and liberty. It has other and secondary functions of which I shall speak hereafter, but they are not governing functions. If government fulfills this one function of protection justly and adequately, it is a good government, whatever its form; and, whatever its form, it is a bad government if it fails to perform this function justly and adequately; it is pre-eminently a bad government if, instead of protecting rights, it violates them.

It is not always easy to determine what are the rights of person, property, reputation, family, and liberty which government ought by force to protect. A great deal of the business of the courts consists in the determination of these questions. They recognize, for example, that man has rights of property in some kinds of animals and not in other kinds; that a verbal charge of crime is a violation of the rights of reputation which government will punish, but a verbal charge of impropriety or indecorum is not; that to seduce a daughter by promise of marriage is an offense against the family which the law will punish, but to win her consent without promise of marriage is not. Who is to determine what are the rights which government will protect and how they shall be protected? The answer is that the existing government, whatever it may be, is to determine these questions. And And this for a very simple reason. Whoever possesses power is, by the mere possession of that power, made responsible for its right employment. To recur to the illustration with which I commenced the last article, assuming that I had power to protect the butcher-boy from the hoodlums,

I was responsible for the right exercise of that power. The possession of the power imposed a concurrent responsibility. If, on arriving on the scene, the boys whom I took to be hoodlums had assured me that the boy whom I took to be a butcherboy was a thief and they were simply attempting to recover their property, it would clearly have been my duty to have investigated the question or secured an investigation of it. If, as the result of my interference, the thief had made off with the property which he had stolen, I should have been morally responsible. In any given community the actually existing government must in the first instance determine what is justice in any given

case.

Its power to enforce its judgments makes it responsible to form just judgments. Might does not make right; but might does impose responsibility on the one who possesses it to determine what is right.

Suppose, what not infrequently occurs, the government forms a judgment which to the individual or to a group of individuals seems to be unjust, what is the remedy? Is there any? or is the decision of the government final, so that while in theory might does not make right, practically and in effect it does? In case the decision of the government appears to be unjust to the individual or individuals directly affected, there are four courses, and only four, open to the injured party. He may submit; he may endeavor by peaceable methods to change the decision. of the government or the personnel of the government; he may leave the community for another which is under a government that seems to him more just; or he may resist the government and endeavor to overthrow it.

In the great majority of cases the first is the course which both prudence and morality dictate. There is probably not a reader of these articles of the age of manhood who has not at some time suffered what he regards as an injustice,

either through the commission or the omission of his government, and has submitted to it with such grace as he could command. All human organizations are imperfect. And for those individual acts of injustice due to the imperfection of human government quiet and uncomplaining submission is the best remedy.

When, however, it is not a single act but a series of acts, and when this series of acts becomes a governmental habit, we may resort to the next remedy. We appeal to public opinion, and by public opinion endeavor to bring about a change either in the habit of the government, or in its personnel, or in its structure, or in all three. As I am writing this article such an agitation is going on in the city of New York, the object of which is to change both the form of the municipal government-that is, its charter and the personnel of the government—that is, the men who administer it. As we have seen, the force which enables the government to serve its purpose of protection of rights may be a force of arms exerted over the governed, or a force of conscience exerted within the governed. In nearly all modern governments these two forces are combined. The more democratic the government the more its force is in the conscience of the governed and the less is it in the physical power or force of arms of the governor. The appeal to the conscience of men, therefore, which would have been in vain under the Cæsars in the first century, is not in vain in modern Christendom in the nineteenth century. The appeal to the conscience of Europe made by Mr. Gladstone in his published letters concerning the cruelty and rapacity of the Bourbon rule in Naples led to the overthrow of Bourbonism in Italy and the establishment of Italian unity. The appeal of the anti-slavery reformers in England and America against slavery resulted in the overthrow of slavery by peaceful measures in the British Empire, by revolution in the United States. The appeal to the conscience of England by the Chartists ended in the initiation of nearly all of the political and social reforms which they demanded and the end of much of the injustice against which they complained.

A variety of circumstances may make this method impracticable or ineffective. The government may refuse to permit

free speech or a free press; or those who suffer the injustice may only know that they are suffering, but not be sufficiently intelligent to understand why they suffer and so be unable to point out the injustice and demand a remedy; or they may be so poor and so uninfluential that their protests are unheard and unheeded. In this case the third remedy remains they may, if they can accumulate the means and possess themselves of the courage, leave the community in which they were born and reared and go to another community, where, as they believe, their just rights will be better safeguarded and their interests better promoted. This is the remedy which millions of immigrants to America have sought for injustice suffered in their original homes. It is true that the government may forbid, and in some cases has forbidden, such migration. In so doing it clearly violates the fundamental principle of its own existence. For government, as we have seen, is formed to protect the rights of man. One of the most elemental of those rights is the right to go where one pleases so that one does not violate the rights of others. Leaving one's native country to go to another country does not violate the rights of any other one. Such prohibition of migration assumes that the governed exist for the benefit of government, whereas governments exist for the benefit of the governed.

When neither of these remedies is practicable, there remains, as a last and terrible resort, revolution. To justify revolution against an existing government, whatever it may be, these conditions must exist: the government must be an unjust government; the injustice must be of such a character that submission to it involves evils to the community greater than resistance will involve; the remedy by public opinion must be denied or be unavailing; the evils must be so widespread that escape from them by emigration is impracticable except to the favored few; and, finally, the discontent produced by the injustice must be so widespread as to give promise of success to a movement organized to overturn the government and substitute a new one in its place.

This right of revolution, however, requires further elucidation.

"Man," says Aristotle, "is naturally a

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