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rental of the whole of Scotland did not a century ago exceed £1,000,000 sterling.

We could not, indeed, have chosen a more suggestive scene for our Congress, or one where social science should be more dear. For here we have a great material recult rapidly produced by the exertions of a vast laboring population; and no one surely, in considering the labors of this Congress and its functions, can avoid seeing that the most vital and perpetual question before it is the well-being of our working classes; a vital question, because on the apt solution of it depends the commercial supremacy, the political solidarity, nay, the very existence of our empire. To my mind a body like ours has no more direct or important duties than the attempt to raise the condition of the nation by means which Parliament is unable or disdains to apply.

Here we have an illimitable field of operations. Parliament can give a workman a vote; it cannot give him a comfortable home. Nor can it sift and exhibit the many contrivances which may be placed before him for bettering himself or increasing his capacities and enlarging his enjoyments.

All this lies within our province, and it is work incalculably more important than the great mass of our parliamentary legislation. In this century we are surrounded by a great aggregation of humanity, seething, laboring, begrimed humanity; children of toil who have made Glasgow what she is and can alone raise and maintain her; not mere machines of production, but vehicles of intelligence, mixed in nationality and various in opinion.

You cannot appeal to them by common feelings or uniform interests. They are there, a dark and mighty power, like the Cyclopean inmates of Ætna. I must honestly avow my conviction-though to those who see how many there are who

profess to represent and understand the working classes it may seem rash, while to others it may seem a truism-that this vast laboring population of ours has not made itself, its wants, its creeds, and its interests sufficiently intelligible to many of us. How indeed, if it be otherwise, is it that the problems connected with their condition have advanced so little toward solution? How is it, otherwise, that each political party claims with equal certainty and on every point to possess the sympathy and confidence of the workingman? How else is it that, when the working class makes its voice heard on any question, it comes upon us like thunder in a clear sky? I avow myself no exception to the rule, but for that very reason, perhaps, I can conceive no subjects more interesting than those which relate to the welfare of our laboring population.

Perhaps, then, you will allow me to disregard the ordinary precedent upon these occasions. The opening address of this Congress has commonly surveyed the present position of those questions with which your Society is accustomed to deal, or which it watches with interest. But speaking, as I do, in the presence of many who, in the various sections, will discuss such subjects with ripe authority of knowledge and experience, I should feel it presumptuous in me to poise a light sentence or hazard a shallow conjecture where my hearers can for themselves sound the very depth and perhaps approximate solution.

I will, then, if you please, attempt to-night to take stock in some degree of the various means by which it is sought to raise the condition of the working classes; a group of subjects some of which appear under different divisions in your programme, but which are ultimately-I had almost said solemnly-connected together; and I would do so rather

as a sign of humble interest in them than with the slightest pretension of having anything original to advance.

The moment is as suitable as the place for the discussion of these vital and national questions. In times such as these, of high wage, of general peace, of immunity from furious political discord, the well-being of the laboring classes often appears secured and does not always attract the attention of statesmen. It is, however, precisely then that it is possible to take measures which, without exciting jealousy on one hand and suspicion on the other, may secure that well-being in less prosperous times. It is then that even the Greeks may innocently bring gifts.

But should there come a European war such as we weathered successfully at the beginning of the century, but which left us surrounded for the most part with battered wrecks and with stranded hulls, we might possibly find our teeming population, confined within so small an ark, a perilous and disheartening agency.

Moreover, while our numbers increase in a greater proportion daily, it would seem that for a few years our principal outlet for emigration may be partially blocked up. It appears more than probable that for some time, owing to late commercial disasters, and it may be because corn-growing in the West has been somewhat overdone, the United States will not find employment for that million and a quarter of emigrants, more or less, that we are accustomed annually to send to her. This is the most important problem which can occupy statesmen; and at the same time the most difficult for a statesman to face. For Parliament can seldom see its way to interference. Nor is it, indeed, desirable that it

should do so.

Legislatures and governments have at various times, by

direct laws, attempted to benefit the working classes; but the most obvious instances of this-the National Workshops of 1848, and the decrees of the Parisian Commune in 1871— have been conspicuous failures.

It is well, then, that in this present time, so peaceful and blessed for us, we can here discuss, however slowly and imperfectly, the pregnant topics which our programmes sug gest. And there is so much to be done; our civilization is so little removed from barbarism! At this moment there is a daily column in the newspapers devoted to recording brutal outrages, where human beings have behaved like wild beasts. Every policeman in London is assaulted on an average about once in two years. Within the memory of living men, the workmen at the salt-pans of Joppa, only a mile or two from Edinburgh, were serfs-adscripti gleba-and sold along with the land on which they dwelt. Neither they nor their children could remove from the spot or alter their calling. The late Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who bears the honored name of Chambers, records his having talked to such men.

What a hell, too, was that described to Lord Ashley's Commission of 1842. In the mines were women and children employed as beasts; dragging trucks on all fours, pursuing in fetid tunnels the degraded tasks which no animal could be found to undertake. We know that equal horrors existed in the brickfields two or three years ago, where there were 30,000 children employed, looking like moving masses of the clay they bore, whose ages averaged from three and one-half years to seventeen; and when an average case was thus described:

"I had a child weighed very recently, and though he was somewhat over eight years old he weighed but 52 pounds, and was employed carrying 43 pounds of clay on his head an

average distance of 15 miles daily, and worked 73 hours a week. This is only an average case of what many poor children are doing in England at the present time; and we need not wonder at their stunted and haggard appearance when we take into account the tender age at which they are sent to their Egyptian tasks."

Then again:

"All goodness and purity seems to become stamped out of these people; and were I to relate [says a witness who has worked himself in the brickfields] what could be related, the whole country would become sickened and horrified."

It would not indeed be difficult, and it would be painfully instructive, to draw out a dismal catalogue of facts to prove how little the splendor of our civilization differs from the worst horrors of barbarism.

And yet, after all, we can only come to the hackneyed conclusion that the sole remedy for this state of things is education, a humanizing education. It is not a particularly brilliant or original thing to say, but severe truth is seldom brilliant and original. There is a noble passage in De Tocqueville, known probably to all and too long to quote here, which points out that knowledge is the arm of democracy; that every intellectual discovery, every development of science, is a new source of strength to the people; that thought and eloquence and imagination, the divine gifts which know no limit of class, even when bestowed on the enemies of the popular cause, yet serve it by exalting the natural grandeur of man; and that literature is the vast armory, open to all indeed, but where the poor, who have hardly any other, may always find their weapons. These, I say, are features of education which all recognize, though some may profess to dread them.

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