CHAPTER XX.

THE DUTY OF A REFORMER.

BY JOHN M. POTTER, SECRETARY MICHIGAN STATE ALLIANCE, AND EDITOR OF THE Alliance Sentinel, LANSING, MICHIGAN.

A REFORMER has stood in all ages past, and will doubtless stand in all time to come, among his fellows misjudged and misunderstood. His motives will be impugned, his sincerity questioned, and his efforts unappreciated. He is one "who treads on the thorns and thistles of earth, while walking amid the stars."

The qualifications of a reformer are numerous and exacting, and without them success is impossible. Honesty, patience, and courage are the three most essential. Add to these a continuity of action, a full understanding of the proposed reform, and a willingness to labor without even a prospect of reward, and the necessary requirements of a genuine reformer are partially enumerated. The incessant, persistent exercise of those qualities constitutes, in part, the duty of a reformer. He who undertakes a reform must fight existing power, old conditions and practices, and the almost universal dread of innovations. The settled policies of years are to be changed; the prejudices of long standing are to be overcome; and last, but by far the most difficult, education must do its perfect work.

To be a reformer is to be a hero, perhaps a martyr, but seldom a beneficiary. It is only after the ground has been prepared, the seed sown, and the plant cultivated, that the harvest can be gathered. It is just so with a reform. The people must be prepared through want and distress; the cause must be discovered and pointed out; the remedy must be clearly shown; and a concert of action toward the demand for its application must be aroused; and after all this has been brought about, some eleventh-hour convert usually steps in and receives the reward. But the true reformer is satisfied to perform his duty if only rewarded by the consciousness of having discharged it honestly and well. His efforts are all directed toward the accomplishment of his purpose, without even a care as to what will become of him in the grand results attending success.

The history of reforms during the past demonstrates the fact that none were failures in the end. In the fulness of time, the seeds sown

brought a harvest, of which the world eagerly partook. Men have died believing that their efforts at reform were futile, to whose memory a grateful people have erected monuments many years afterward. It may be true that

"The seed ye sow another reaps,

The wealth ye find another keeps";

but it neither hinders the true reformer in the discharge of his duties, nor causes a single pang of regret in his reflections. It is not necessary to mention any particular reforms in order to designate certain lines of duty. Nearly all reforms originate under similar conditions, and are carried forward by the same forces. The battle may be bloodless, it may even be without confusion or tumult, and yet it may result in the weal or woe of the people of the entire world. Death and destruction to the people wait upon other methods than war.

Carlyle says:

"It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die. But it is to live miserable, we know not why; to work, save, and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire."

John Stuart Mill says:

"If the bulk of the human race is always to remain as at present, slaves to toil in which they have no interest, and therefore feel no interest, drudging from early morning till late at night for the bare necessaries, and with all the intellectual and moral deficiencies which that implies-without resources either in mind or feeling; untaught, for they cannot be better taught than fed; selfish, for their thoughts are all required for themselves; without interest or sentiments as citizens and members of society, and with a sense of injustice rankling in their minds equally for what they have not and what others have, — I know not what there is which should make a person of any capacity of reason concern himself about the destinies of the human race."

What a fearful picture, and yet how true!

"The iron law of wages," says Ricardo, "is the natural price of labor which is necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race without increase or decrease."

"Labor," says Karl Marx, "is bought at its exchange value, and sold at its use value. Exchange value is the least amount that will permit the laborer and his family to live, while the use value is all the employer can squeeze out of it."

"You believe, perhaps, fellow laborers and citizens," said Lassalle, "that you are human beings, that you are men. Speaking from the standpoint of political economy, you make a terrible mistake. You are nothing but a commodity, a high price

for which increases your numbers, just the same as a high price for stockings increases

the number of stockings, if there are not enough of them - and you are swept away. Your number is diminished by smaller wages, by what Malthus calls the preventive and positive checks to population; just as if you were vermin, against which society wages war."

Conditions, and not theories, bring about the necessity of reforms, and it is necessity, not theory, that brings out the reformer. His duty begins where equal rights are ignored, and never ends until justice and equity are obtained.

Emerson says:

"What is a man born for, but to be a reformer, a re-maker of what man has made, a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth, and that all reforms are the removing of some impediment. The Americans have no faith; they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to sentiment; they think you may talk the north wind down as easily as to raise society. And no class is more faithless than the scholars or intellectual men. Now, if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my friend with a poet, with a conscientious youth, who is still under the dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of society to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how paltry is all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards their institutions are; and I see what one brave man, what one great thought executed, might effect. But the reformer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist; not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised. above themselves by the power of principles. To principles something else is possible, that transcends all the power of expedients."

The estimate put upon a reformer, in the true sense of the word, by Mr. Emerson, was in reality a tribute to all the virtues. How true this is! When the generations that come after look back upon the efforts of reform, the dark shades with which it was enveloped are turned into brighter beams, and the methods then considered doubtful become the maxims of future conduct. True reforms, true beneficence, and better conditions for the human race, are bound together in indissoluble bonds of union. Where one is found, all may be seen; and where either is wanting, neither need be expected.

The Alliance is the one grand reform of the nineteenth century. Its objects are to enlighten, elevate, and make better. It is founded upon the principle of equal and exact justice to all. It demands reform in the conditions which obtain among those who labor in production,

especially the farmers. Being the most conservative element of society,