sonally by his colleagues, even by those differing very widely from him in matters of principle. The stanchest friends of order and decent government fully and cordially recognized Mr. Watson's honesty and good faith-men, for instance, like Senator Lodge, of Massachusetts, and Representative Bellamy Storer, of Ohio. Moreover, I sympathize as little as Mr. Watson with denunciation of the “cracker,” and I may mention that one of my forefathers was the first Revolutionary Governor of Georgia at the time that Mr. Watson's ancestor sat in the first Revolutionary Legislature of the State. Mr. Watson himself embodies not a few of the very attributes the lack of which we feel so keenly in many of our public men. He is brave, he is earnest, he is honest, he is disinterested. For many of the wrongs which he wishes to remedy, I, too, believe that a remedy can be found, and for this purpose I would gladly strike hands with him. All this makes it a matter of the keenest regret that he should advocate certain remedies that we deem even worse than the wrongs complained of, and should strive in darkling ways to correct other wrongs, or rather inequalities and sufferings, which exist, not because of the shortcomings of society, but because of the existence of human nature itself.

For

There are plenty of ugly things about wealth and its possessors in the present age, and I suppose there have been in all ages. There are many rich people who so utterly lack patriotism, or show such sordid and selfish traits of character, or lead such mean

and vacuous lives, that all right-minded men must look upon them with angry contempt; but, on the whole, the thrifty are apt to be better citizens than the thriftless; and the worst capitalist can not harm laboring men as they are harmed by demagogues. As the people of a State grow more and more intelligent the State itself may be able to play a larger and larger part in the life of the community, while at the same time individual effort may be given freer and less restricted movement along certain lines; but it is utterly unsafe to give the State more than the minimum of power just so long as it contains masses of men who can be moved by the pleas and denunciations of the average Socialist leader of today. There may be better schemes of taxation than those at present employed; it may be wise to devise inheritance taxes, and to impose regulations on the kinds of business which can be carried on only under the especial protection of the State; and where there is a real abuse by wealth it needs to be, and in this country generally has been, promptly done away with; but 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.

I am not an empiricist; I would no more deny that sometimes human affairs can be much bettered by legislation than I would affirm that they can al

at once put them on an intellectual, social, and business equality with the whites. The effort has failed completely. In large sections of the country the negroes are not treated as they should be treated, and politically in particular the frauds upon them have been so gross and shameful as to awaken not merely indignation but bitter wrath; yet the best friends of the negro admit that his hope lies, not in legislation, but in the constant working of those often unseen forces of the national life which are greater than all legislation.

It is but rarely that great advances in general social well-being can be made by the adoption of some far-reaching scheme, legislative or otherwise; normally they come only by gradual growth, and by incessant effort to do first one thing, then another, and then another. 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. For the last two years there has been an honest effort in New York to give the city good government, and to work intelligently for better social conditions, especially in the poorest quarters. We have cleaned the streets; we have broken the power of the ward boss and the saloonkeeper to work injustice; we have destroyed the most hideous of the tenement houses in which poor people were huddled like swine in a sty; we have

made parks and play-grounds for the children in the crowded quarters; in every possible way we have striven to make life easier and healthier, and to give man and woman a chance to do their best work; while at the same time we have warred steadily against the pauper-producing, maudlin philanthropy of the free-soup kitchen and tramp lodging-house kind. In all this we have had practically no help from either the parlor socialists or the scarcely more noxious beer-room socialists who are always howling about the selfishness of the rich and their unwillingness to do anything for those less well off.

There are certain labor unions, certain bodies of organized labor-notably those admirable organizations which include the railway conductors, the locomotive engineers and the firemen-which to my mind embody almost the best hope that there is for healthy national growth in the future; but bitter experience has taught men who work for reform in New York that the average labor leader, the average demagogue who shouts for a depreciated currency, or for the overthrow of the rich, will not do anything to help those who honestly strive to make better our civic conditions. There are immense numbers of workingmen to whom we can appeal with perfect confidence; but too often we find that a large proportion of the men who style themselves leaders of organized labor are influenced only by sullen short-sighted hatred of what they do not understand, and are deaf to all appeals, whether to their national or to their civic patriotism.