Page 1 of 8contents
THE STANDARD
[Mailing label pasted on the masthead at upper left, partly legible: “52 Dr W Mer[illegible] / 209 W [illegible]”]
VOL. I.—NO. 9. | NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887. | PRICE FIVE CENTS
p. 1, col. 1
THE LETTER CARRIERS.
FAILURE OF CONGRESS TO GRANT THEM EIGHT HOURS.
Abuses in the New York Postoffice—The Tyranny of Superintendents and the Trials of Clerks and Carriers—An Investigation Needed.
Congress has finished its session and has paid no attention to the grievances of the letter carriers and the clerks in the sic department. It had been petitioned by them, it has been deaf to them, and they feel the consequent disappointment 1?2?
Those who hold positions in the postoffice department are divided into two castes. The upper caste comprises the office holders who rank from station superintendent up to postmaster general. The lower caste are the clerks and the carriers. The two bodies look upon each other as enemies, and they are at war.
There are 703 letter carriers engaged under the jurisdiction of the New York postmaster, which extends from the Battery to the Bronx river on the north and from the East river to the Hudson. Besides the regular force, there is a class of substitute carriers. These substitutes earn a precarious living, until in the course of time they are put upon the permanent list, their average pay being but $30 a month, and the average time elapsing before a substitute becomes a full hand being fourteen months. The first year after being put on the permanent force a carrier’s salary is $600. If the postmaster recommends him to promotion, he receives $800 for the second year; and, provided he is again recommended, he is then placed in the highest class, and receives thenceforward $1,000 a year.
The carrier’s working hours are irregular. He has an “off” week—that is, a week in which he puts in a few hours less than during the week previous, and generally a daily “swing”—a breathing spell, just short enough to prevent him from going anywhere for amusement or attending to his personal affairs, and just long enough to give him a show of having some time off from work. At the close of a month, however, he will have averaged fourteen hours a day surrendered to his duties. His work is tedious. He spends an hour or two a day sorting his letters and arranging them for his route, and he may spend two hours in the evening searching for the destination of misdirected or “blindly” directed letters. The public knows how faithfully he performs his duties. His familiar figure is always out on the street, under the broiling sun of summer and in the freezing atmosphere of winter.
Yet what the letter carrier suffers from overwork, long hours, and the inclemencies of our climate is not what he especially complains of. As a man he resents his treatment by the “upper caste” of the department. He is subject to be bullied, spied after, informed against, fined, ungraded, and unjustly discharged.
Let a few instances be given: Last September Superintendent Morgan, of Station E, Twenty-eighth street, corner of Seventh avenue, notified twenty-seven letter carriers who were in a labor organization that they must either leave the society or resign their positions in the office. They dropped their membership in the labor organization. The discovery by Morgan that the men had, while away from their duties, joined a society indicates the thoroughness of the spy and informer system in the service. There has been a turn in the tide of affairs since then, however, and seventy-two per cent of the force is organized, the societies bearing on their rolls nearly all the men trusted by their fellows. It is confidently asserted by the members of the organizations that nine-tenths of the men who are discharged for drunkenness or failure to perform their duty are from the minority outside the organizations. Membership in the societies imposes the obligations of sobriety and strict performance of duty.
But to our unsavory examples of small tyrants: Superintendent John Richards of the general postoffice undertook, some time ago, the task of putting down the men who believe that they have rights and can assert them by means of organizing. When he imbibes suspicion against a man who has been working at the comparatively light duty of a deliverer of letters, he sets him at collecting on a heavy route, one where the letter and newspaper bag ought to be carried on a truck rather than on the back of a human being. The writer has lately talked with an athletic carrier who had suffered transfer to a “donkey” route, and had, in consequence, lost more than twenty pounds of flesh in a single month; most of the time being spent in tugging a weight of forty pounds in his bag to the office. If Richards’ frown is directed toward a man who lives near the postoffice the carrier will be sent to a route far up town. This is a common form of punishment. It either adds to a man’s long hours, or, sic him to move from a neighborhood where he may have been brought up, to a new one, where his family will be strangers to school, church and the retail dealers.
The best sic man in the New York postoffice is Charles D. Conklin, and the men under him are hoping for a congressional investigation, which to their minds is the only means of ever putting before the public the records of the office. Conklin delights in penalties, exactions, arbitrary changes and ironclad rules.
The clerks in the postoffice work under the eight-hour law in theory. They all work more than eight hours, and often a good deal more. They have the same general complaints as the carriers as to living under a grinding despotism. The civil service rules are, in the hands of the superintendents, a ready instrument which makes them masters and the men servants. If a clerk displeases a superintendent he may be ordered before an examining committee and his grade taken away from him. A new man who is a favorite can receive rapid promotion if he “brushes up” in the requirements of letter distributing and the like. Length of service is overlooked, and lip service and readiness in the tricks of a favorite entitle underlings to consideration. There are steady, faithful, hard-working clerks in the post office of New York who have been there for years, and who are now receiving but sixty dollars per month, while others with no better qualifications are, after a brief service, receiving 30 to 50 per cent more.
During a debate on the civil service at a late meeting of the labor party county committee it was stated by a clerk that clerks and carriers are expected to be fetchers and carriers for the superintendents, and a refusal to perform menial service for them—to bring them luncheon, cigars or liquor—would quickly bring down on them serious evidences of displeasure. A complaint from a clerk or carrier can hardly be made to reach Postmaster Pearson. It must go first to a petty superintendent, then to the general superintendent, then to the assistant postmaster and then to the postmaster. The power that the superintendents wield is simply unrestricted might. They regard themselves as impregnably fortified in their positions, and if a man does not like to serve under them they can harass him until he resigns or submits.
Those who are intimately acquainted with
p. 1, col. 2 the operations of the New York postoffice aver that the work is, on the whole, not well performed. There is no better service in the world than that of a part of the down town business section and of the central line of the city along Broadway and Fifth avenue. The daily newspapers, a part of the business community and many of our “prominent” citizens will, in view of the facts as they see them, testify to the good work of the postoffice.. But outside the preferred districts testimony to the contrary can be gathered in abundance. It often takes a letter a longer time to reach a point on the west side from the east than it would to have it sent to Harrisburg or Hartford. In order to secure the support of a powerful class in the community, the rest is not given the service to which it is entitled, and the carriers, though few in number in the neglected districts, are overworked.
There was lately, an investigation in the New York postoffice. It was conducted by special agents. About one hundred carriers and clerks testified before it, and many more would have done so had it not been for a general impression that the wining and dining of the inspectors by the postoffice men of their own caste was more powerful evidence that things were as they ought to be than anything to the contrary that could be brought by the caste that works hard for poor pay. Nothing has been made public in regard to this investigation. It is intended by the organizations that the next investigation shall be conducted under congress itself, and material which shall lead to one of this sort is being prepared.
There is an abundance of public sympathy for the carriers. When they had their eight hour mass meeting on June 24 last, there was an outpouring of the people to cheer them on. One hundred and fifty men in public life sent them letters wishing them the success they deserve, and half a dozen of the best known men of the country addressed the meeting. Of course all this did the letter carriers some good. But congress has adjourned and they have not yet obtained the eight hour day, though it was largely through their labor that the postoffice surplus in 1886 was $3,000,000.
MANUFACTURERS WHO THINK.
A Firm Which Realizes How Capital is Robbed by Private Ownership of Land.
Messrs. Atkinson Bros. of Philadelphia are among the rapidly growing number of capitalists and captains of industry who recognize the fact that the movement for the resumption of land values by taxation is as much in the interest of capital as in that of labor—that the dog-in-the-manger system, which permits the appropriation of the natural elements of production by private individuals robs the capitalist of his share of wealth production as surely and inexorably as it does the meanest workman in his employ.
Messrs. Atkinson Bros. are the agents for the Keystone Standard Watch company of Lancaster, Pa. They make and sell watches by the score of thousands—good accurate timekeepers—at very moderate prices. Under their guidance, American inventive genius has exerted itself to the utmost to bring within the reach of persons of very moderate means, timekeepers of an accuracy and durability such as not long ago were to be found only in the most expensive watches. And being thinking men, who study cause and effect, it has not taken them long to discover that the private ownership of land not only directly diminishes the just profits of their manufacture, but also, by its depressing effect upon wages, seriously curtails the market for their wares.
The Atkinson Bros. have the courage of their convictions. They have distributed, gratuitously, several thousand copies of “The Land 3” among their friends and customers, and have lost no opportunity of aiding, by word and pen, in the spread of the doctrines in which they take so deep an interest.
The Position in the South.
MOBILE, Ala., Feb. 22.—It is doubtful if any such antagonism with regard to land reform exists as might be inferred from what a delegate at the Cincinnati convention is alleged to have said, viz.: “If what is known as the Henry George land theory is to prevail in the convention, the southern members will leave the labor party.” I have for the last three years traveled over nearly the entire south, and have talked with all classes of people, and the only stubborn opposition I have encountered from any who professed to have a knowledge of the subject was from a few men interested in booming land values and a few ill-informed newspapers. All others were easily won over by a statement of principles, the rise in land values,enhanced by speculation. The attention of all people through the south is drawn to the rise in land values. Speculation has greatly injured general business. Much money that should be put into trade here is used in speculation; and I am told that during the past year nearly three hundred thousand dollars have gone out of this city for investment in mineral lands and town and city lots in northern Georgia and Alabama. Such investors look with alarm upon the “land-taxing theory,” as do those who, bereft of nearly everything by the war save their land, welcome the appreciation in land 4?
But aside from these, and after careful investigation, I am persuaded that the majority of the more intelligent people all through the south are ready for a change, and would support a new party which sic the imposition of all taxes upon land values.
E. Q. N.
How Protection Protects.
SOUTH CHICAGO, Ill., Feb. 20.—I have been an iron worker for the last fifteen years, and part of that time a believer in high tariff. I am now fully convinced that this high tariff for the protection of American labor is a mockery. The American workman is “protected” in Cook county. There are four iron and steel establishments in the county, employing thousands of men. Of 2,000 men employed at the South Chicago iron and steel works 700 are American citizens. Of 1,500 men employed at the Bridgeport iron and steel works 650 are American citizens. At the Calumet iron and steel works, of 1,200 men, 250 are American citizens; and at the Pullman iron and steel works, of 300 men employed, 45 are American citizens. These figures show that of all the men employed in these mills the non-citizens are in the majority by nearly 2 to 1. In this county and around the city of Chicago at the present time there are over 30,000 American citizens out of employment and who can find nothing to do. And this is what these great iron monopolists call protection for American labor. I think the American workman should open his eyes and see how he is protected. I am inclined to believe that the great protected state of Pennsylvania has more non-citizens employed than citizens. If this is so, what protection does the tariff give to workingmen?
IRON WORKER.
He Sees the Light.
NEW YORK, Feb. 27.—I have been buying your paper for some weeks, and now I am beginning to see the light above the horizon. This is the light for which the producing people have been looking for a good many hundred years. At last the day has dawned.
C. T. J. SHEPHERD. p. 1, col. 3
THE DANGER IN THE WEST.
Large Eastern Capitalists Gobbling Up City Lots, Farms and Cattle Ranches.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo., Feb. 25.—The land question, it seems to me, has been sprung upon us none too soon. Whatever may be said of the dangers arising from the formation of great oil, coal and iron companies in the east, they certainly are not to be compared with the menace to our liberty and general welfare that attends the rapid monopolization of land now going on in the west. To say nothing of the vast tracts of land that have during the last twenty years been given to the railroads, the rate at which “titles” to our western lands are being concentrated is simply frightful and totally incomprehensible to people living in the east who have never been here. Wild lands, cultivated lands, town lots, all alike are passing out of the possession of the many into the hands of the few. The methods are various, depending upon the character of the lands monopolized. Our wild lands are bought up for a song by companies organized to engage in the stock business. Cultivated lands, farms and city lots are passing out of the possession of large owners. Merchants and manufacturers in the east are forced out of active business by reason of the disastrous operation of the stupid sic” tariff. for sic they clamored so hard, Shylocks loan their money through the agency of the money broker to our farmers, taking as security notes drawing 12 per cent interest and secured by a mortgage on the farmer’s land, or else they invest their money in city lots and buildings and draw, in the form of rents, a sum equivalent to 12 per cent interest on the investment. Vanderbilt once said that it would ruin any man to pay 10 per cent interest. If paying such interest will ruin a first-class business man, how much the more will it ruin our farmers and small business men? And this is precisely what it does do, as anyone will learn if he will but note what becomes of the farm that is thus mortgaged, or notice the number of failures during the last year among the smaller merchants. Truly the farmer should not be among those that oppose the land reform movement.
Now, who is to blame for this land monopolization and the many other wrongs that exist to-day? Are the monopolists? Clearly not? We are to blame for allowing these abuses to exist. Let us begin energetic political action. The chief cause of poverty is private property in land.
GEORGE SHARP.
Justice or Anarchy?
Rev. Dr. 5 preached upon “Coal Oppression” at Park Avenue M. E. church, 6?, last Sunday. The text preached from was found in the following words: “Roll ye away the stone.”—John xi. 44. Dr. Fawcett began by showing the interdependence of capital and labor. He said: “Every blow that labor strikes at capital is a postponement of the day of prosperity, and a blow in the face of labor’s best friend. Every time that capital speaks against labor, every time that capital unites to in any way oppress labor, it speaks against and unites against its own mother, and postpones the day of permanent prosperity.” He then discussed unionism and labor organizations and their methods, expressing the opinion that labor has a right to ask for increase of wages; has a right to ask for a shortening of the day of toil; has a right to ask for favorable legislation; has a right to ask for representation; has a right to ask for a place to work. After which he proceeded at length to show the evils of the monstrous coal monopolies and those kindred monopolies, the railroads—showing how production and industry were depressed and the poor robbed of their scanty wages in order to support a few “barons” and “kings,” and ended as follows: “The poor, wretched, ragged peasantry of Ireland are not more subject to the oppression of Irish landlords than are the poor of Chicago and the surrounding country to the ‘coal barons’ of the land. Perhaps the day will come when the suffrage of this country will demand that the government take control of all railroads and telegraph lines, as fully as it now has control of the postal service of the country, and will demand that all the coal beds of the country be so under the control of the government that no corporation or combination shall be able to strangle the commercial interests of the country or rob the poor man’s hearth of its comforts. In some way this monster stone of injustice must be rolled away, and this oppression, real or possible, must be lifted or invited anarchy will announce its reign.”
The Ringing of the Bell.
BALTIMORE, Feb. 26.—The reply of THE STANDARD on “Trying to Solve the 7,” in to-day’s issue, was acknowledged by the “solver,” who said: “Yes, I hear the ‘Ringing of the bell,’ and in 1888 you will see that a great many men like me have heard it too. We may not know ‘where the steeple is,’ but we believe that it crowns the school house where George and McGlynn are the teachers. THE STANDARD has given me my first lesson to-night. I see I was wrong in my views. I was ‘Fighting in the dark,’ but here comes light—a steady, honest light—and I see my way better now. Your engines, both republican and democratic, are badly in need of repairs, and will break down very soon. Then you will be hunting for some one to fix them up, so that you can ride again. Don’t forget that heads count in this country when a change is needed. Do you remember the abolition vote that was cast for James G. Birney? Very few ‘heard the bell ring’ then, and fewer knew where the ‘steeple’ was.
“They began to hear it all over the land when John C. Fremont ran for president, and they found the ‘steeple’ in Abraham Lincoln. The rights of property in man disappeared. The country is happier and better because those rights no longer curse us. The rights of property in land will disappear also, not only in this country but in Europe.”
I wish your Mayor Hewitt could have seen this honest mechanic and heard him talk. I heard Frederick Douglass in his early days. I heard Raymond and all the early anti-slavery “bell ringers.” To-night I have seen a new “bell ringer,” and heard him ring his bell.
WALTER WHITE.
For Whom Was the Earth Made?
The Pittsburg Christian Advocate says: “That the earth is the mother of us all, and that all the children have an equal and inalienable right to her bounties may be an abstract truth (if any one knows what that means), but it is beset with so many conditions and limitations that it cannot be trusted as a basis for conclusion and action.” Are we to suppose that nature can disown us? Is it possible that we have no right to live after being brought into the world? For whom was the earth intended if not for us all? The old doctrine reads: “The earth hath He given to the children of men.”
What We Want.
NEW ROCHELLE, N. Y., March 1.—There seems to be some misunderstanding as to what our theory of land reform is. Briefly, it is this. First, take all taxation from every article of consumption, and then put all this taxation on land values. I don’t see how a farmer or any intelligent man can object to that.
GEORGE W. LLOYD.
p. 1, col. 4
WASHINGTON.
THE LAST ACTS OF THE FORTY-NINTH CONGRESS.
A Defective Law to Prevent Alien Ownership of Land—No Probability of an Extra Session—The President Glad to Get Rid of This Congress.
WASHINGTON, March 3.—Among the important measures that will become law if the president does not withhold his signature is an act to prevent alien land holding. As the act stands it cannot be said to prevent alien land holding. In the first place it interferes with no right already acquired, leaving many vast estates still in the hands of alien landholders. It does not prevent the acquisition of lands in the United States by aliens who may inherit them. The law applies only in the territories and in the district of Columbia. As the law now stands, an alien cannot acquire lands under the homestead, preemption or timber culture acts, unless he becomes a citizen of the United States or declares his intention to become such. An alien, however, may still purchase lands after they shall have once passed from the government to private ownership, and may thus acquire them in any quantity. Section 3 of the act prohibits many kinds of corporations from acquiring (hereafter) any more land than 5,000 acres; but as this amount is in excess of the lands “necessary for the operation” of their railroads, canals, etc., it is difficult to see why any corporation should be permitted to own over 5,000 acres. This section, moreover, confirms all lands “lawfully” held at the present time by any corporation. Section 2 provides that a corporation not more than 20 per cent of the stock of which is held by aliens, may hereafter acquire lands in the states and territories of the United States and the District of Columbia. On what conceivable plan any corporation, alien or native, should be permitted to acquire or own real estate other than what is absolutely necessary to enable it to build and operate its road, it is hard to conjecture. The final passage of this measure through both houses, after much noise of trumpeting, shows how far this congress is from being properly alive to this question. Mexico has always had laws against alien landholding; but of late years these have been sadly encroached on by the aggressive spirit of land speculation. Foreign companies have received grants for railroad purposes. There have also been evasions by companies and corporations, partly domestic, but also partly of aliens, and in some cases largely so. This “dirt hunger,” with an eye to draining future incomes and rents from the American continent to sustain wealthy persons and aristocrats in Europe, has largely been encouraged by land speculators, who thus wish to maintain higher prices.
The fears entertained by many that there would be an extra session is evidently groundless. No one wanted a special session. It was intimated indeed that Senator Edmunds, fearing the defeat of the retaliatory fisheries bill, intended to compel an extra session. The senator exhibited a somewhat belligerent spirit the first two days of the week, but it is questionable if he ever contemplated an extra session. The administration evidently does not. The president will doubtless bid good-by to this congress without regret. Whether the next one will be any better remains to be seen, but he can, doubtless, wait until next December with resignation. Mr. Randall and Mr. Holman received and deserved pretty severe excoriations for keeping back the legislative, executive and judicial bill. To give the house a proper opportunity to carefully consider this measure it ought to have been read and discussed in that body not much less than a week. To make the matter worse, it was filled with fifty or more changes of law, some of which should have been made. It appropriates the money for the salaries of every officer in the government. The different grades of clerical force, the number of clerks or employes in each, and the amount of salary in every case is here defined. It covers the salary of congressmen and all grades of employes at the capital. Whether the changes made in the committee were all of the kind that should have been made it is not necessary to argue, as they were all incontinently struck out. It is needless to say that this bill ought to have been before the house at least a month ago, in order to give the house and senate an opportunity to consider it intelligently. Mr. Randall, however, in addition to his arduous duties as chairman of the committee on appropriations, conceived it to be his duty to act as a guardian for congress, to prevent that body from rushing into the excesses of legislation. Among these latter may be enumerated changes in the tariff, in revenue taxation, or reduction of the surplus. It is not too much to say that congress as organized and conducted is not, correctly speaking, a representative body. Another guardian of the house, not quite so intelligent but even more suspicious and stubborn, is Mr. Holman of Indiana. He has posed for many years as the great objector. The three, sic, kept back the legislative bill until Tuesday of this week, within three days of the close of the session. When first it was considered the house showed an indisposition to swallow all the committee’s changes without considering them. To prevent a special session it was agreed that all charges should be stricken sic, and the bill passed so as to provide for officers and salaries on the same basis as last year. With this modification it passed under a suspension of the rules, and its hundred and more pages are before the senate committee.
Another important measure, a house bill that has been very considerably amended has passed the senate and goes to conference. It is to provide a mode of adjudicating Mexican land grants, New Mexico, Colorado and California. There is certainly no subject requiring present and wise action so much as this, and no interest more liable to serious and grave abuses. A large portion of the valuable lands in those regions are covered by real or pretended grants. Every man who settles there has the fear that a Mexican grant will be trumped up or extended so as to take his land. This bill is very far from being what it should be. Probably, if passed, it will do much more harm than good. To become a law it has still to run the gauntlet of the conference committee and the president. Mr. Cleveland has not yet named the interstate commission. That he should desire to appoint the first officers under this law without “the advice and consent of the senate” is a little singular, more especially as there is a provision in it that they shall not be exclusively partisan. There are doubts as to whether he can lawfully appoint the first officers in recess. He evidently contemplates doing so, which conclusively shows that relations between the president and the leaders of his party are not as cordial they should sic, or that the president is very much at sea in performing this delicate task.
W. A. P.
p. 1, col. 5
NOT WILD INDIANS.
A Catholic Journal Corrects a Common Misstatement of the Land Doctrine.
The Brooklyn Examiner (Catholic) has concluded, after closer examination, that St. Thomas Aquinas in his “Summa Theologica” does not speak of ownership in land, and it says that he does not seem to have apprehended the vital difference between land and those things of which man is the producing agent. It continues: “He probably never thought it necessary to make the distinction, as in his day the community’s rights to land were almost unquestioned. Vast estates were held by the nobles, who in return were obliged to pay all the expenses of the government, or by the monasteries, whose inmates instructed the people. Then indeed all taxation was placed upon the land in nearly every quarter of Europe and no one ever considered the land as much private property as a man’s hat or his shoes. But with the Protestant reformation the curse of private ownership of land began. The estates of the monasteries were seized and divided up among courtiers, and the nobles shifted the land tax to the shoulders of the people by taxing the products of their labor.”
The Pittsburg Catholic, in discussing this question, had declared that the “scholastic, or Christian communism,” taught by St. Thomas, “permits individual ownership and individual use and enjoyment of earthly possessions, whether of land or of other property,” whereas the secular communism of to-day does deny such ownership. In reply to this the Examiner says:
Whatever “theoretical communism” in the mind of the editor of the Pittsburg Catholic may forbid or not forbid, it is certain that the principles upheld by Bishop Nulty, Michael Davitt, Dr. McGlynn and Henry George are in direct antagonism to any prevention of individual use and enjoyment. In fact, their strongest argument is that it is only through the community asserting its rights to what the community has created—the speculative value, or selling price of land—that individual use and enjoyment can be fully secured.
The theory is not that we should all be a tribe of wild Indians roving over a territory without bounds or fences, but that land should be held just as distinctly as it is to-day, all taxes being placed on the value of land, destroying its speculative price by taxation, so that no one could hold land for a rise in values in order to enrich himself out of the necessities of his fellow beings.
A Rascally Society Saver.
The case against Nelson P. Pearson, a saloon keeper in “Johnny” O’Brien’s bailiwick, has at last come to something. This man was arrested last November for bribing voters in favor of the “savior of society.” He demanded a preliminary examination; but by means of his political “pull” the matter was thrown from one police justice to another like a shuttlecock. Disgusted with these tactics, Fred. C. 9 of the law committee of the united labor party presented the case to the district attorney and demanded that it be laid before the grand jury. While refusing to do this, Mr. Martine directed Police Justice White to hear the evidence. After a number of adjournments designed to tire out Mr. Leubuscher and the witnesses, the hearing was had one Sunday morning a month ago. Justice White this week held Pearson for the action of the grand 8?
What We All Want to Know.
NEW YORK, Feb. 28.—Why does the New York Star try to impress upon the minds of workingmen that the course of democratic legislation and administration toward American labor has been friendly and fraternal? It tells us that the democratic party, while never truckling to revolutionary spirit and communistic doctrines, has not been afraid to speak the truth with courage and without reserve through its distinguished representatives and saviors of society. There are thousands of toilers in New York and vicinity who would be interested just now in knowing why the would-be saviors have been so anxious for the downfall of Edward McGlynn. Is it because the doctor is unfriendly to those who labor?
M. J. M.
From Another California Judge.
CHICAGO, Feb. 22.—THE STANDARD is doing noble work here. Men who formerly would not listen to the theory of the land for the people and called it rank communism are beginning to change their opinions. I think the coming spring elections will surprise many in regard to labor’s strength in Chicago. The corruption of the two old parties is sickening in the extreme. I wish we had a few McGlynns and Pentecosts here; they could do great work, as we have few ministers of the poor who have courage to preach the gospel of the land for the people. God speed THE STANDARD in diffusing light throughout the land.
CHAS. COWLES.
No Degeneracy.
MANISTEE, Mich., Feb. 24.—In your issue of Feb. 19 I read an admonition by E. B. Nolan to the Swedes, to think of Engelbrecht. and I sic assured that I express the sentiment of my countrymen when I declare that they now, as in the days of Engelbrecht, the finest character upon the records of Sweden, will stand by righteousness notwithstanding the warnings of an ignorant and perhaps corrupt clergy. We remember that our forefathers gathered round and followed Engelbrecht in spite of the opposition of the clergy of those days. The descendants of the vikings do not degenerate! A Swedish newspaper advocating reform will soon be issued in Michigan.
AXEL G. BURMAN.
God Speed the Good Work.
SANTA BARBARA, Cal., Feb. 14.—From what I can glean from the public prints within my reach I am satisfied the views that you entertain and are now promulgating touching the present and future of the working masses of our country are founded in true philosophy and sound statesmanship, and I say may God speed the good work.
R. M. DILLARD.
“The Poor Are Voiceless.”
—Suggested by a sermon of the Rev. Mr. Pentecost.
“Voiceless!” ah no, the bleeding
heart’s deep cry,
Pierces the silent air and mounts on high
Swifter than lightning’s flame in gloomy night,
Reaching—the bosom of the Infinite!
HENRY ANCKETILL.
Hudson, New York.
A Caution.
Hemstead, sic., Advance Guard.
> It appears that the announcement to the News that this paper would editorially advocate Henry George’s theory of free land has led some farmers, especially colored ones, who have experienced the effects of the rent system, to believe in a speedy social revolution, whose outcome would be the practical application of the theory in question. To disabuse their minds of all false ideas on this subject, the Advance Guard takes this occasion to say to its friends, and the colored people especially, that the doctrines of free land and free trade must of necessity work their way to success by educating the popular mind in the principles involved by showing the injustice of land ownership as private property, and the iniquity of indirect taxation through protection to individual enterprise.
p. 1, col. 6
TAKE CARE!
SOCIETY’S SAVIORS WANT TO IGNORE THE PEOPLE’S WILL.
Are We to Have a Constitutional Convention?—Albany Politicians are Hatching Schemes—Working for a Disastrous Delay—A Few Small Bills Affecting Labor.
ALBANY, March 2.—By the action of the constitutional convention committee of the assembly in offering a bill that does not provide for an election of delegates to the convention until next fall, the intention of the politicians to defeat the expressed will of over half a million voters is clearly shown. On the first day of the session Speaker Husted offered a constitutional convention bill, and blatantly announced that he expected it would be passed at once and the convention assembled by March 1. It is now after the 1st of March and there are no more signs of a convention than there were two months ago. Bills were offered in plenty, but that was only the politicians’ method of blinding the eyes of the people by making a big fuss. It looks now as if there will be no convention this year, and if there is one next year the people will get it only by the kind grace of the politicians. The reason there is no interest taken in the convention here is because it is only the people who demand it. If the New York Central railroad wanted a convention, Speaker Husted, John I. Platt, Fremont Cole and Senator Vedder would at once do their utmost to get it, for the N. Y. Central is a very tangible thing. If the great New York insurance companies found that a convention would be a good thing for them, ex-Speaker Erwin, Senator Coggeshall and a lot more men would promptly rally to kiss it through. If the cable road had an interest in a convention, Senator Traphagen and Assemblyman McIntyre would howl aloud against “indifference to the people’s wishes.” If the rumsellers, who acted as saviors of society in chief to a mayor in ordinary last fall thought that they had anything to gain by a constitutional convention, at least nineteen assemblymen and four senators from New York and a dozen legislators from Brooklyn, not to count a score in other parts of the state, would arise with a cry of “The people!” on their lips, and a constitutional convention would be held at once.
But neither the railroads, the big corporations nor the liquor dealers want a convention and therefore legislators see no reason why there should be one. The interests that rule this state have found ways of evading the restrictive clauses of the present sic and of utilizing the rest of the instrument to their advantage. With a new constitution they would have to set their attorneys to new methods of evasion; not to speak of the unpleasant possibility of having to bribe a whole convention to prevent the people from having some voice in the making and altering of their laws. So all these interests have passively combined to suppress the will of 574,993 voters. If the voters had quarter as much sense as their professional saviors; if they knew their interests, and, knowing, fought for them, there would he a new sic of legislators here as soon as another election day came, and what few men of the venal, cringing type happened to get in would fear to contravene the will of the people, a vague term that is mentioned at the capitol new sic with a chuckling sneer and grin.
There are two ways in which the people can get a convention. One is, that the democratic governor should assent to a bill passed by a republican legislature that would give a sure republican majority and insure the selection of Speaker Husted to preside. With him in the chair the corporations would feel that their supremacy was guaranteed, and they would willingly consent to a convention whose result would be to insult the intelligence of the state. There would also be a convention should the republican legislators agree to a bill that could be signed by a democratic governor. No non-partisan action seems possible, for such a thing as a constitutional convention to regulate the fundamental law of the state, must, of course, be in charge of the professional saviors of society. It would never do to let the people decide for themselves.
The bill that has been reported favorably, and which will come up next Tuesday before the assembly for consideration, provides for a convention of 160 delegates, one from each assembly district and thirty-two from the state at large. No voter may vote for more than sixteen delegates at large. According to last fall’s vote the republicans would get ninety delegates and the democrats seventy. Assemblyman Graham introduced a bill early in the session to give the labor party and prohibitionists some representation. His bill calls for one delegate from each assembly district and three from each senatorial district, no voter to vote for more than one. According to the committee’s bill delegates will be elected next fall at the regular election, the convention will meet next year; and the constitution will be submitted to the people at the presidential election, 1888.
This is all carefully calculated so as to make the convention as partisan as possible and to introduce the most politicians into it as delegates. The democrats have a bill to elect the delegates by congressional districts, two or three from each, with forty-two at large, sixteen to be voted for by each party. This would insure a reasonable labor representation.
Mr. Graham, the Brooklyn labor assemblyman, introduced a batch of labor bills early in the session—to limit car drivers’ hours to twelve with two hours for meals; to tax corporations; to give mechanics a first lien, and similar bills. Not one has passed yet.
The direct charges of bribery in the senatorial election which I alluded to last month were repeated on the floor of the assembly a few days ago. Names and sums offered were distinctly stated. The accused men refused to allow an investigation. From the speaker down the tricksters and law jugglers of this legislature have cowardly hearts.
JOHN COMMONWEALTH.
Democrats Hopelessly Divided.
The Tribune says that however much the Brooklyn democratic club and Gov. Hill may be annoyed by the discussion arising out of the suppression of Hewitt’s letter, President Cleveland’s friends in this city “are rather pleased than otherwise that the governor is brought face to face with the labor question.” A prominent county democracy politician said to a Tribune reporter that this question of tolerating a secret oath-bound labor organization had to be met soon any way. “I am glad to see Mayor Hewitt take the stand he has. It is undemocratic, this organizing of secret politico-labor associations, subject to the control of men whom the great majority of members have never seen, but whose orders they are sworn to obey implicitly. By advising the suppression of the letter Gov. Hill has alienated the conservative democrats, who would otherwise have been with him as the leader of the democracy of this state. . . . The governor, in his endeavor to be very foxy, has made what promises to be the fatal move of his life. He cannot now obtain the nomination for the presidency, or, if he should, he would be beaten by the votes of the conservative democracy.”
Page 2 of 8contents
2 THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887.
p. 2, col. 1
WOES OF THE LANDLESS.
REV. MR. PENTECOST’S FIFTH SERMON ON THE LAND QUESTION.
Belleville Avenue Church Again Crowded—A Congregation Accustomed to Liberal Ideas—God’s Will Not Done on Earth as It is in Heaven.
Rev. Mr. Pentecost of Newark, N. J., continues his Sunday evening sermons on social-political problems, and the public interest, as evidenced by the fact that the ushers cannot seat the crowds that attend the services, is 10?
Mr. Pentecost’s church was formerly under the charge of Dr. Hepworth, himself a liberal minded man, and it is probably due to the fact that two such men have successively filled the pulpit that the radical sentiments so plainly expressed during the last few weeks have not aroused opposition. The liberal treatment of other subjects has prepared the people for an unprejudiced consideration of the question of the distribution of wealth. The sermons have excited much attention in other quarters. They have been copied in all directions and discussed editorially by newspapers. Mr. Pentecost is not the first nor the only preacher who has come out in the pulpit or on the platform for land nationalization, but he is the first who in a series of addresses has sought to show that the monopoly by a few of the gifts of nature is the root of all the legalized robbery that our system now upholds. His sermons are models of graphic description, convincing logic and eloquent advocacy of the cause of oppressed humanity.
Mr. Pentecost has consented to deliver an address before the Knights of Labor in Danbury, Conn., on the 9th or 10th of this month.
The number of people who listened to Mr. Pentecost last Sunday evening was if possible even greater than on the previous Sunday. The sic were lined with people sitting on extra chairs and many could not find seats. He took for his text the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom 1112?13?14?15?16?. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and spoke as follows:
“I have endeavored to present to you during the last four weeks the evils which attach to our present social system, and have explained to you that they are the direct result of the unequal distribution of wealth; all wealth not necessary to the actual support of physical strength in laboring people and the somewhat better support of intermediary agents, who constitute our middle class population, going ultimately into the possession of monopolists and primarily to those who hold land which they will not use nor allow others to use. I have shown you how the accumulation of wealth in a nation cannot benefit workers under the present system; how industry, economy, sobriety and education, while helpful to the few working people who practice them now, would cease to be helpful if universally prevalent among them, since the inevitable tendency of the present system is to push wages down to the lowest point at which men will consent to work, the point of bare subsistence or the starvation point; how economy in government, co-operation in industries, labor organizations for the purpose of enforcing labor’s demands by strikes, or seeking to secure them by arbitration, while being all good measures for elevating the condition of laborers, and the best that have yet been practiced, are utterly inadequate remedies for existing social evils.
“That is to say, if politics were absolutely pure, if all politicians were saints, if all legislators were patriots, if all differences between labor and capital were settled by arbitration, and strikes were no more; if all laboring people were total abstainers from intoxicating drinks, were educated and intelligent, so that they could labor with or without machinery to the best possible advantage, were industrious and economical, and the system still prevailed under which some persons are allowed to own land for which they have no use and which they will not allow others to use, a monopoly privilege which is the parent of all other monopoly privileges, the inevitable result would be that the great mass of laboring people, however improved intellectually and morally, would be even poorer than they now are, since all the enormous gain to the community which would result from such a state of things, under which much more wealth would be produced, would go to those who own land. The effect of all improvements, whether in machinery or men, under the present system, is always to increase rent—ground rent—and always to decrease interest and wages; that is to say, the inevitable effect of all increase in wealth under the present order of things is to give the lion’s share of wealth to those who do nothing to produce it.
“The only reason why this is not perfectly apparent to anyone is because land owners, capitalists and laborers are not always distinctly separated into classes. It happens that most capitalists are also land owners. If that were not so capitalists would have no power to crowd laborers. If that were not so there would be no fights between capitalists and laborers. The fight would be between capital and labor on the one hand and land owners on the other. But it would be just as one-sided a fight. The land owner would win it every time. He would be rich and the capitalist and laborer would be poor.
“Last Sunday evening I used an illustration, supposing a manufacturer who put up a factory on leased land, to show how the landowner was in a position to reap all the benefit of the wealth produced by capital and labor.
“Several gentlemen spoke to me about the illustration, saying it was not a representation of what actually is, since no man would be such a fool as to build a factory without sooner or later buying the land. That is not true, and if you suppose my manufacturer to have used his surplus in buying the land you will have a state of things which corresponds to what is now generally the case. The capitalist is usually also a landowner, and reaps not only the legitimate reward for the use of his capital and labor, but the illegitimate reward of the increased value of his land, which is created not by labor but by the growth of the community. The result is, that instead of capital and labor being equally crowded by the landowner, landowner and capitalist merge themselves into a single interest or person and labor is the sufferer. The failure of the late strike in New York was owing to the fact that the coal companies are great land monopolies as well as capitalists.
“This is the state in which society now is, and so long as the laborer is not permitted to use land for his own benefit he is compelled to work for what he can get or starve. Thus it is that the laboring class to-day are in a state of hopeless slavery, in some respects worse than the negro slavery of the south. This is why I am moved, as I believe in the spirit of Jesus Christ, to speak in behalf of those who have absolutely no redress except in a radical change in the present system.
“I have very good reason to suppose that many of my hearers do not understand the system which I would exchange the present one for, although I have striven to make it simple and clear. It does not involve the dividing up of all land so that each citizen might have what might be considered his share, nor making land common property so that no one could have the exclusive use of any land, nor the confiscation of land in such a way that what is now used by an individual would be wrested from him.
“Perhaps the simplest statement of the system
p. 2, col. 2 is that it involves the ultimate transfer of all taxes to land values. At present we raise the money needed for the carrying on of government by imposing taxes in a very partial and arbitrary manner, all of which except that on unimproved land falling upon articles or values created by human labor. The theory which I am advocating supposes the raising of all money necessary to meet public expenses by taxing land according to the value that it has acquired by the growth of the community, the only way that land can acquire value. It is not a system of land taxation, but a taxation of land values. Land that is worth nothing would be taxed nothing. Land that is improved either by agricultural methods or by building a house upon it would be taxed no more than unimproved lands, for the simple reason that it is worth no more. Improving land does not improve its value. It adds to it the value of the improvements, which, being the result of labor, would not be taxed.
“The moral beauty of the system lies in that revenues for the public good would come from the individual use of common property, according to the value which had been thrust into it by the growth of the community. The community would thus be supported by revenues proceeding from values which the community creates, rather than from values which individual labor creates.
“What would be result of this change?
“Let us suppose that this change has come about, and that enough time has elapsed for society to adjust itself to its new conditions, what would you behold?
“The most interesting fact to note would be that every man who now owns a farm or a dwelling house or a store would then be occupying and using it just as now, still in possession of his deed, still protected by society in the peaceable possession of his own, the property which he has accumulated, and the exclusive use of the land. It is taxed precisely or nearly what it was before. I am inclined to believe his taxes would be less than before. The only difference would be that what he now pays on his house, his personal possessions and articles of consumption he would then pay for the use of his land.
“The selling value of the land would be gone, but this would be no loss to him or his children, since if he or they cared to move or sell, other land as good as that in use by either could be obtained for nothing, subject, of course, to the payment of rent or taxes for its use. This is why I said a few evenings ago that probably not ten men in this house would be affected to the extent of a penny. Those of you who now own the land upon which you live or which you are working as a farm would be just where you are now, except that you would enjoy the benefits of a better civilization. People who are not doing wrong have nothing to fear by an adjustment of society according to natural law. The use of land is not wrong. It is the control of land which you will not use and will not permit others to use that works all the evils we see about us. But for the use of land private ownership is not necessary. All that is necessary is that society shall protect you in the perpetual use of what land you need. That you would get just as effectually under the new system as under the old.
“And if those who now own the land which they are using would lose nothing, behold, also, how much better off their children would be. When you built your house you had to take a portion of your savings and give them to another man for the privilege of putting a house on a little spot of earth, which naturally belongs to you as much as to him—you had to buy a piece of land. If your house cost you $3,000 you must have $500 more to pay to the man who owned the land you wanted. You are paying $75 a year taxes. Your son would need $500 less to set up his home than you needed. If he has $3,000, let him select a lot the tax on which is $75 a year, and he is as well off as you. He has house and lot in perpetual possession, with the deed in his pocket, which is all that you have, and it cost him $500 less to get it than it did you to get yours under the existing system.
“One of our daily papers, which has published full reports of these sermons, said editorially that I was ‘away off on the land question.’ ‘What we want,’ says the Daily Journal, ‘is to have our streets lined with small dwellings occupied by well-to-do workmen who own their own places.’ As I have explained the system which I am advocating, would we not have our streets lined with just such houses, which could be procured with less money than it takes to procure them now? The difference would be, as I shall show you presently, that under the new system workmen would have wages out of which they could save something to build a house, whereas now only a few workmen get enough wages to ever think of such a thing as owning a house.
“But what would be the effect upon those who now own land which they do not wish to use and will not let others use—land which they are holding for a speculative purpose; land which we now speak of as unproductive; unimproved land, so much of which is so unsightly in our cities as vacant lots, and the holding of which in a condition of uselessness to the community is what spreads our cities needlessly over so much territory. Not half the land in the city of New York is built upon, and perhaps that is true here. Most of our western domain has passed into the hands of men who have, in many cases, fraudulently obtained it, and in many cases bought it up in enormous tracts which are worked on shares or lying idle, so that now the settler who goes west to get a bit of government land under the pre-emption or homestead or timber culture or desert land acts finds it so difficult an undertaking as to be hardly worth while, and wholly impossible unless he is enough of a capitalist to spend a good deal of time in the undertaking. So many frauds have grown up under our pre-emption system that a bill is now before Congress proposing not only to abolish those laws, but to take back lands fraudulently obtained, even though in the hands of”innocent possessors,” without compensation. Thus has Georgeism found its way into congress.
What would be the result to the sic of land for speculative purposes, or for the purpose of letting it out to other people in the expectation of living in idleness off the fruits of their industry, as is the case of the noble landlords or landgods of England? The result would be that all taxes being laid upon the value of land without regard to improvements, they would be so greatly increased on unimproved land that a man could not afford to hold such land unless he improved it. He would either use it or it would pass to the use of some one else, or be held for the taxes precisely as so much land is now held. Land would have no value except for actual use. It would lose its speculative or monopoly value entirely and be thrown into the open market as horses and houses and other things now are.
“The man who owns a lot next to you, on which he pays less taxes than you do, though it is of the same size and value as yours, the community is paying him a premium as compared with you for keeping an open receptacle for tomato cans and dead cats and old boots, and taxing you more heavily because you are public spirited enough to build a house; that man would have to pay as much tax as you and you would have to pay no more than you do now, the new system permitting you to freely own what you produce for your own and the common good. You can easily see that he would either have to build a house on his lot and make it productive or give it up for the use of some one else who would thus use it.
“The result of this in cities would be a reduction in the number of big tenement houses, which are the result of high prices for land, which compel a landlord to put as much
p. 2, col. 3 house as possible on as little land as possible, and an increase in the number of small houses, which the Journal says are so desirable. Tenement houses are not fit to live in and are one of the fruits of the present method of doing things. There are tenement houses in New York by the side of which, if you should place the coffins of those who untimely died in them, piled one upon another, the coffins would be many times higher than the house.
“Outside of cities an sic amount of good land now held by dogs in the manger would lose its fictitious value, and in many cases lose all value, and would be free to the occupation of any one who wished to use it with due regard to the equal rights of others. I must remind you again that there would be no more difficulty in conserving the rights of lawful land users than there now is in conserving the rights of lawful land owners. This system is grossly maligned by those who insist upon confounding it with socialistic or anarchic schemes which combat the idea of private property in anything.
“The natural result of opening our vast domain would be just what it was when our vast domain was open. Large numbers of persons who now get a precarious living in our overcrowded cities would move into the country; some of them able, out of their savings to start their little farm in comfort, others roughing it for a while, just as our early western settlers did. These new agriculturists, however, would start under much more favorable circumstances than the early westerners, because the country is more thickly settled, and therefore not so lonesome.
“Very intelligent persons tell me that this would not be the case; that our cities are populated by people who will live in the cities and would not go to the country under any circumstances.
“To this my answer is that human beings follow the laws of their nature, one of the most fundamental of which is that a man, sooner or later, will go where he can make the most money with the least labor; where he can get the greatest results for his labor; where he can gratify his desires with the least effort.
“I answer, also, that when land was free, that is, when a man could take what he wanted to use by going just beyond the man who preceded him, men did go to the country.
“I answer again that the tendency of our foreign population to the country, when they can better themselves by going, is shown by the fact that the small farms of the east are rapidly passing into their hands. I made a bicycle tour of a portion of New Jersey and New York last year, and was interested to observe how many Irish farmers I saw.
“I answer further that the reason why farmers cannot always get hands just when and in the numbers they want them, as is alleged, is because they want them only at special seasons. If it is true that farmers cannot get all the steady help they want, it is simply because men know that they can do better elsewhere. Let a Jersey farmer offer $2.50 a day for men and guarantee them work at that rate for five years and he would have men standing a thousand deep all around his house in no longer time than it would take so many to get there. Anyone who has given the subject the least study knows that the tendency of wages in similar employments is just as sic to a common level as the tendency of water is, and if farmers do not have all the help they want it simply proves that labor of about the skill required on a farm is better paid somewhere else.
“Reverting to the law of human nature by which men seek to gratify their desires with the least possible effort, it [is?] a self-evident proposition that if land were as free to the use of all as it would be under the new system, a vast number of persons, either from preference or motives of gain, would go upon it in preference to doing what they are now doing. These would not necessarily be of the lowest classes, but from the number of those who, for one reason or another, saw that they could go onto the land and better themselves there would gradually proceed such an exodus from cities that two very desirable things would follow: That tendency of population to cities which is such a marked feature of our present civilization, which results in such disastrous overcrowding, would be checked, and the corresponding sparseness of country settlements, which is also detrimental to society, would be remedied. But better still, the vast numbers of laborers whose clamor for employment keeps wages down to their present low standard would be reduced to such an extent, as I believe, that instead of labor having to beg employment of capital, in reversal of natural order, capital would be asking labor to employ it, which is true to the nature of things. In other words, instead of workmen seeking employment as now, employment would be seeking workmen. Wages are down now not because labor is not worth more than it gets, but because there are so many others who are willing to work for what is now paid. Wages would be up then, because only those persons would consent to work for any wages who could not do better by working for themselves.
“At present the laborer is a slave under the upper millstone of capital, upon the nether millstone of private ownership in land. Take away that under millstone and he would be a free man, for you cannot crush a man unless you have something to crush him against.
“It is this vision of freedom for the laboring man which moves to tears and joy—tears that it is not; joy that it might be. O glorious kingdom of God, in which rich and poor are not arrayed against each other in church and state; in which hopeless strikes of labor against capital are no more, because capital shall have no power to oppress; in which women and children no longer slave and weep and starve, in which titled and aristocratic idlers can no longer live off the earnings of the industrious; in which legalized robbers can no longer prey upon the poor; in which all men shall be on an equal footing in the sight of God, with an equal chance to use themselves and exercise their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!
“This ransom of the imprisoned, the freedom of the slaves, this lifting up of those who have so long been the victims of our greed and injustice; is not this enough to rouse the soul of any man who loves his fellow man and move him with all the fervor of religious enthusiasm?
“The only reason why one would not like to die for such a consummation would spring from his desire to live and enjoy it.” [Great applause.]
The Newark Press-Register, commenting on Mr. Pentecost’s sermons, says:
Every sermon preached like that of last Sunday draws the masses nearer in sympathy to the pulpit. Dryasdust fills most of our modern pulpits. Morality is dished up in conventional forms, theological hairs are nicely split, and words and phrases carefully polished. Meanwhile the masses avoid the churches, which are usually little social exclusive communities. Mr. Pentecost throws aside platitude and doctrinal rubbish and plunges into the practical issues of the day, recognizing the fact that if religion has to do with men it enters into all these questions, and should make a basis for their settlement. Religion gave birth to modern civilization; it has been the foster mother of literature and the arts, and it has been the conservator of popular liberties in all the ages since the Christian era began. It ought to be to-day the great agent in effecting new social adjustments, and it will be if every religious teacher takes up social questions in the spirit of the Belleville avenue pastor.
All Places Lose by It.
Lynn, Mass., Bee.
It is to be hoped that the greed of a few individuals will not prevent the new postoffice building from being located so as to be convenient for our citizens and an ornament to the city. Lynn has lost enough by the unreasonable demands of real estate owners who have prevented the erection of public buildings here.
p. 2, col. 4
CITY CHURCHES.
PROTESTANT ECCLESIASTICISM IN NEW YORK CITY.
What Pure Religion and Undefiled Really Means—Numerous Churches Built for Show and to Gratify Pride—The Masses Drifting Away from the Churches.
In the lower hall, 52 Union square, on Sunday night last, the Rev. Charles P. McCarthy preached a discourse on the following text: “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”—James i, 27, Revised Version. The doctor said:
My text sets forth in brief the practical character of “pure religion.” Indications are conspicuous that the ecclesiastical stage of the Christian religion, especially in its Protestant forms, is fast passing away and is being merged into its moral and social, i. e., civil period.
The essential form of Christian life has ceased to dwell in its ecclesiastical configuration, because it has “allied itself with injustice to preach down the natural aspirations of the masses.”
The religion of the Carpenter of Nazareth now demands, in the sacred name of justice, a return to the fundamental annunciations of its Founder.
I believe that primitive Christianity would not only revolutionize society, but would be too liberal for modern free thinkers. Christianity in this broad sense is the kingdom of God in man. It is in its expression the practical fulfillment of all social duties, comprehending human life in its all-embracing scope, and in all its departments and relations determined by the divine will of holy love, which is in itself the eternal essence and perfect power of the true, the beautiful and the good. In this broad sense Christianity is not either the actual or ideal church. It is not creed or dogma; nor is it superstition, bigotry, or fanaticism; for these are the children of ignorance, that hunted to the death the ancient primitive Christian. And least of all is it that “Protestant ecclesiasticism” which has fostered and sustained the social wrongs that have brought us to the verge of revolution. Recently a popular preacher, the pastor of a leading Presbyterian church, stated in the course of his sermon “that out of 450,000 Protestants who were residents in this city of New York, only 125,000 ever went to a place of worship. Of these 83,000 were professing Christians, 70,000 of whom kept their hands in their pockets and did nothing to help their sinful neighbors; consequently the whole work of the Protestant churches of the city rested upon about 13,000 active members.” He further stated that the “real trouble” consisted in the fact that Christians “built up a church organization to make a show in the world, and to go once or twice in the week to enjoy good singing and good speaking.” This sad and humiliating confession was made after industrious inquiry and sober reflection.
With statistical accuracy it proclaims the failure of the puritan forms of Protestant ecclesiastical Christianity amid a population numbering over a million of inhabitants—a failure remarkable in its character for several reasons; a failure for which there is no excuse. The Protestant ecclesiastical organizations of this city are simply colossal. The Protestant clergy, who are the spiritual rulers of these organizations, are not inferior in learning, ability, piety and indefatigable industry (in proportion to their numbers) to the clergy of any Protestant metropolis in the world. And I know of none who are better paid, and whose means of usefulness are greater.
The church edifices are, for the most part, fair specimens of architectural beauty, and not a few present an ecclesiastical exterior of surpassing elegance and grandeur, while the interior fittings display affluence and luxury to such an extent that the poor have hardly a place within them where they can feel at ease. The means placed at the disposal of these ecclesiastical corporations, so far as material wealth is concerned, if properly administered, are more than ample to meet all the spiritual needs of the people; but the fact is, the churches are, from extravagant management, embarrassed by debt, while the greater majority of them are only partially filled with occupants, and not a few are almost, if not altogether, deserted.
Where shall we find the cause for this condition of things? And a similar condition of partial, if not complete failure, will be found everywhere. Has the truth of God or His love and light grown dim that His gospel should fail, and that its power to evangelize the world should prove abortive? Not so. God’s truth in the world was never brighter nor more resonant of His glory, of His power, and of His love than it is to-day, for the Story of the Cross is interpreted with more rational intelligence than ever before. The failure of Protestant ecclesiasticism is no more a failure of the true gospel now than the failure of Roman ecclesiasticism was a failure of that same gospel in the days of Henry VIII or Edward VI.
Truth will march triumphantly over the debris of all ecclesiastical machines, whether Protestant or Catholic, for its author is no more a respecter of churches than He is of persons. The lamb of God was not slain to save ecclesiastical organizations. He grants no spiritual monopolies in order that his agents may plunder the people. Not a few are cast out, and more than a few refuse to come in, because they do not see practical life in the professing churches. They see more of the spirit of self and of the world, of human dogmatism, and of what I would call creed-faith than of the spirit and life of the meek Nazarene. The religious sects to-day are for the most part spiritually dead, and however materially prosperous they may be, this epitaph might truthfully be written on their church doors: “Starved to death by ecclesiasticism;” or this: “After a lingering illness this church died of pew rents;” or this: “Wealthy but graceless; seats sold by auction in the name of the Nazarene.”
How much longer will the churches continue to resist the plain injunctions of Him whose name they bear? After casting out and scourging all who profaned God’s house by traffic He thus addressed the orthodox priests and pastors: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but ye have made it a den of thieves. And the scribes and and the chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy Him; for they feared Him, because all the people were astonished at his doctrine.”
It is evident from this, as well as from many other passages of the gospels, that Jesus was in bitter antagonism with the spurious ecclesiasticism of his day; and that his denunciations of its falsehood and corruption brought upon him the hatred and malice of the various sectaries of the Jewish church. After his human form was withdrawn from the earth and his excarnation completed he again descended upon his infant church in “cloven tongues, like as of fire,” “and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them that aught of the things that he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” This divine communism was a prophecy and a foregleaming of what Christianity should be, and may yet in the future become. But what a falling off is here. Alas! how soon selfishness and greed and love of
p. 2, col. 5 getting brought in their train of untold miseries.
Then came ambition with its lordship, envy with its malice, hatred with its murder—divisions, contentions, oppressions, and that hard and bitterest of all conflicts, the grinding tyranny of the rich over the poor—the conflict of capital with labor, money vs. toil; but Jesus always on the side of labor, toil, poverty.
Read how His servant James deals with pew rents, and let the churches learn that a front seat cannot be bought in God’s house with money: “For if there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring and goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment, and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place, and say to the poor, stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool, are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? Ye have despised the poor.” In proportion to the truth of doctrines and the sincerity with which they are held a correspondingly pure life will flow; but if false or held in unrighteousness, that is unjustly, not sincerely, the outflowing life will be a counterfeit.
The pastor of a Brooklyn Methodist church has stated that if Jesus of Nazareth, as the poor and despised carpenter, were to come and preach in that city as He did in Judea, the smallest church would afford ample accommodation for all who would listen to his ministry. This pastor then added that there were in the city of Brooklyn 300,000 people who did not attend any place of worship. From this testimony it is evident that Brooklyn is not behind New York in its indifference to the claims of modern Christianity as represented by Protestant ecclesiasticism.
In short, it is a palpable fact that the great masses of the people repudiate pseudo-orthodox Christianity, as represented by Protestant sectarianism. It is equally true that a very large majority of those who regularly attend and support public worship do not believe their puritan creeds, and are restive and impatient if their ministers, even in a mild form, teach or preach dogmatic theology, while the few who desire this teaching, and who are fast dying off, suspect their pastors of disloyalty to their iron-bound confessions of faith. It is safe to affirm that it would be difficult to find any congregation of note that would now tolerate the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, of Cotton Mather, or of Michael Wigglesworth, the celebrated author of “The Day of Doom.” The puritan preachers have passed away, and their theology has died with their sincere and enthusiastic devotion, and now lies moldering in these creeds which hang round the necks of their successors in the ministry, holding them in bondage from which they are continually but vainly attempting to escape. This bondage has been produced by a moral revolution in the religious thought of the masses of the people and an unhallowed compromise which still retains these unintelligible and contradictory formulas of doctrinal beliefs.
Theological evolution has been at work showing that God’s truth grows and can never be confined within the limits of the religious thought of any one age. Our Puritan ancestors manufactured confessions of faith which suited their day and generation, but which are utterly unfitted for a more advanced condition of religious progress.
Their nominal retention in the constitutions of these ecclesiastical organizations has weakened our sense of obligation to candor and honesty, and exercised a demoralizing influence upon the religious conscience generally. Sectarianism is the root; corporate selfishness is the tree; dogmatic formulas and ecclesiastical corruption are the bitter fruit. One of the foremost men of the age—I refer to Abraham Lincoln—when asked his reason for not joining any of the Protestant orthodox sects, replied: “I have never united myself to any church because I have found a difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their articles of belief and confessions of faith.” Experience has demonstrated that the most transcendental and extravagant belief in machine made confessions of faith, connected with long standing church membership, can be allied with sensuality of disposition and absolute criminality of character, while, on the other hand, purity and high principle often animate the minds of those who from their very integrity of character are unable to attach themselves by membership to any Christian communion.
We need to-day to accomplish two great achievements by which the people, with God’s help, will work out their own salvation—politically, a politico-economic and moral revolution, and religiously a spiritual reformation. These will emancipate us from the deluge of selfishness and corruption which floods the state and the ecclesiastical machines called churches. That theology which to the puritans was true, and which in the past served its purpose, the great puritan mind being true to it, has become, because of higher education and enlarged knowledge, false to us of to-day. I know it is the fashion with puritanical ecclesiasticism to undervalue and even ridicule this enlightened progress, which is one of the marked characteristics of the age; and oftentimes both the pulpit and the religious press will describe this advancing culture as the spirit of infidelity and the presumption of profane skepticism, dismissing the subject by pounding it with irrelevant texts, such as “The world by wisdom knew not God,” and “The foolishness of preaching,” etc. But human thought continues to press forward, leading on to fresh discoveries and higher altitudes of material and moral light, while the preacher and the clerical editor continue the process of pounding to empty pews and to a decreasing number of readers.
Meantime the current facts of continuous history demonstrate the truth of this inevitable process, proving the sleepless principle of evolution, as Herbert Spencer has well shown, to be subjective as well as objective, mental as well as material.
When Christendom shall grow out of its narrow sectarian spirit and embrace in its ecclesiastical teaching a theology which shall unite truth and life together, then will the nations of the earth accept at its hands that gospel which must be one of justice, and which when rationally interpreted and sincerely obeyed, will bring with it not only individual but national salvation. Race prejudices and prenatal disabilities will disperse and vanish before such a message when it comes backed up with that purity of character and self-sacrificing disposition which animated the mind and life of the crucified Nazarene.
Sherman’s Boom.
The New York correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger says that John Sherman keeps up a voluminous correspondence with republican business men in New York, in which he makes no concealment of the fact that he is in the field as a candidate for the next republican nomination for the presidency. The correspondent says: “The feeling at the Union league and the Union republican clubs is undoubtedly growing in his favor, owing, perhaps, to the ubiquity of his brother, Gen. W. T. Sherman, whose residence in this city, as your correspondent has had occasion to remark before, is an immense advantage to the senator. The general at this moment is, probably, the most popular man in the city. He is invited everywhere, and, as a rule, with true courtesy, he rarely declines an invitation, except for cause. He rarely talks politics, but, notwithstanding that, he is a positive political influence.” Gen. Sherman, thus described as the most popular man in New York, is possibly not known by sight to one in a thousand of its inhabitants, and it is doubtful if a third of the people remember that he lives here.
p. 2, col. 6
THE NEW PARTY.
THE PROGRESS OF THE LAND AND LABOR MOVEMENT.
A Complete Municipal Ticket Nominated in Chicago—The Prospect in Kansas City—Echoes From the Cincinnati Conference.
The city convention of the labor party of Chicago last Saturday nominated a complete ticket and adopted a platform. Robert Nelson, who was nominated for mayor, is an iron molder and master workman of D. A. 24, Knights of Labor. He is in the employ of McDowell & Co., and is thirty-two years of age. Frank Stauber, the candidate for city treasurer, was twice elected alderman by the socialists, and was a member of the board of education from 1882 to 1885. John M. Dollard, candidate for city clerk, is a member of the printers’ union. Jesse Cox, jr., sic for city attorney, has been engaged in the practice of law in Chicago since 1874. In all, candidates for thirty-four offices were nominated. The Chicago Herald says that every one of the nominees has a reputable trade, and it is a recommendation to the party that each is earning his bread in manful fashion. The labor ticket is the first in the field, and hence it appears to decline in advance any coalition with the democrats. The platform is a reaffirmation of the one adopted last September, with a number of new demands. The plank on taxation is as follows: “We demand the taxation to the full limit of the law of all unoccupied land, and that the tax on all lands occupied by individuals or corporations shall be made on an equitable basis.” The Chicago Central labor union on Sunday indorsed the ticket and the 17?
In Hyde Park and Lake View the united labor party also adopted platforms and nominated candidates.
The municipal labor convention will be held in Kansas City on the 12th inst. There are organized clubs in every ward, and the leaders claim that there are now 3,000 members enrolled, while more are coming in at a lively rate. The Kansas City Star says that “the new order of things seems to be due in a large measure to the rapid spread of the teachings and principles of Henry George among the laboring men of the country. It is said that 400 copies of THE STANDARD come to Kansas City every week.”
The Knight of Labor sic for mayor of Harrisburg, Penn., A. Fritchey, was elected last week.
John Denny and John W. Lilly have declined nominations for assessorships by the democratic party in Newark, as they “have cast their fate with the labor party.”
The united labor party of Hamilton county, Ohio (Cincinnati), will hold its convention on the 20th inst. Primary elections, after the manner of the old parties, will not be held, but the ward clubs will elect delegates to its nominating convention. Reports from the wards sent in to the executive committee on last Sunday were most favorable, all of them announcing an increased membership. On the Sunday before the election there will be a grand demonstration of the party.
The Orange, N. J., Central Labor union decided on Sunday to nominate a candidate for mayor, and a committee was appointed to select one. The city convention is to be held on Saturday evening. The ward labor organizations of Orange will not support any candidates of the old party for council. A mass meeting will be held on next Monday evening.
The Cincinnati Convention.
The national committee of “the union labor party” met on last Friday, after the convention, and decided to put a salaried organizer in every state. The ratification meeting held at Music hall attracted an audience that filled about one-fourth the house.
The Cincinnati Zeitung (German) says of the Cincinnati platform: “As to the all-important land question, the expressions in the platform are unworthy of a labor party, since they make concessions to the worst monopolies and most terrible robbery and extortion, namely, those resulting from the owning of the gifts of nature, such as ores, coal and oil by private individuals, instead of demanding their ownership by the people at large.”
A Milk and Water Platform.
New York Leader, Feb. 24.
The platform adopted by the Cincinnati convention is a very weak document. Starting out with the proposition that “every human being possesses a natural, inalienable right to sufficient land for self-support, and to a home, as the sic result of free institutions,” the platform does not in any way suggest any efficient measure which might insure this desirable result, beyond “a graduated land tax,” “reclamation of unearned land grants,” “opening of sic to homestead settlement,” etc. These are but palliatives, and will not, if adopted, result in such fundamental changes in the existing social order as may bring about what the labor movement of our age strives for—the abolishment of poverty. A party desiring to represent organized labor must fight for a principle and not for palliatives. And this principle is nationalization of land and of all the natural productive forces. Whoever shirks these issues is not able to represent labor in its struggle for social emancipation.
Rural Protectionists.
The 18 Kills correspondent of the New York Times describes the excitement in that village over a project for a railway to run from Diverville through Squallitj Kills to Spiderhook. “It turned out,” he says, “that the prospect of a railway was as poison to the enterprising tradesmen, since easy access to Diverville meant easy access to Albany and Troy, and people would go there and buy their goods, thus reducing the profits of our merchants, who now, for instance, ask $4 for a washing machine which may be had at Albany for $2.50. To one of our protectionist merchants I suggested that a ready way of keeping prices up in Squallitj Kills would be to instruct our assemblyman to bring in a bill laying a heavy import duty on Albany and Troy goods, so as to enable our tradesmen to compete with the pauper labor of the two cities mentioned, and thus foster the infant industries of Squallitj Kills. Struck with the brilliancy of the idea, he at once wrote a letter to the assemblyman, and received in due time an answer from that august personage assuring him that the subject should be attended to without delay. In this mean way I seduced the merchant into voting for the railroad, but of course our party was easily routed at the mass meeting in the opera house by the opposition cabal, which showed not only that if the railway should be built the stage drivers would be reduced to beggary, and so a great domestic industry be crushed; many men would sell their horses, for which they would have no further use, thus the price of oats would decline, and the honest farmer would no longer have money enough to spend any at the village shops. This would impoverish our merchants and force them to shut up their shops, and soon ‘grass would be growing in the streets of our now thriving village.’”
Don’t Like the Platform.
NEW YORK, Feb. 28.—I heartily agree with your editorial in the last issue of THE STANDARD regarding the Cincinnati platform. It is truly everything in general and nothing in particular, especially the land and tax planks. It will not carry, and the sooner that platform is demolished the better it will be for the new party.
WALTER CARR.
Page 3 of 8contents
THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887. 3
p. 3, col. 1
DR. M’GLYNN’S FRIENDS.
ST. STEPHEN’S STEADFAST TO THE FIRST MARTYR OF THE NEW CRUSADE.
The Congregation Will Force More Money on Their Late Pastor—A Strong Speech by David Healy Warmly Received—Editor Gahan Rejoices in the People’s Allegiance.
The large hall in East Twenty-seventh street in which the weekly indignation meetings of the parishioners of St. Stephens are held was crowded to the doors half an hour before the proceedings began on Friday night of last week. Hundreds who were unable to obtain admission remained outside in front of the hall and attested by loud cheers for Dr. McGlynn their unabated sympathy with their late pastor and the cause he represents.
Chairman Feeney, in an able speech, reviewed the history of the agitation, and announced that $500, which had been forced on the treasurer, had been handed to Dr. McGlynn, who had insisted that all the committee collection books should be called in, as he would receive no more from his old parishioners. It was also announced that the employes of Bellevue hospital had contributed $104 to the fund.
Dr. Carey, the treasurer, said that the annual parochial donations for the Indians might be entrusted to him, and that he would act as their Indian agent, a suggestion which was received with loud applause and laughter.
The books of Dr. Carey have been audited and found correct. They show that the parish contributions to the fund amounted to $2,500, which sum has been handed over to Dr. McGlynn.
Mr. David Healy of the Irish World received an ovation when Chairman Feeney introduced him to address the meeting. He said he was deeply affected as a Catholic by this remarkable demonstration when he looked upon this meeting of the loyal members of St. Stephen’s congregation and saw old and young vying with each other in manifesting their unwavering devotion to their noble pastor, who had for years been ministering to their spiritual needs. This gathering of the parents to whom Dr. McGlynn has for twenty years given spiritual counsel, the children whom he has prepared for their first communion, and no doubt many of whom he has united in the holy bonds of matrimony, showed that a love had been born of that long ministration which no calamity could affect and no humiliation take away. [Cheers.] The fact that those aged Catholic parents brought their children whom they desired to bring up in the Catholic faith to participate in this formal demand that the injustice to Father McGlynn be undone, was in itself an ample answer to the charge made by the enemies of the church that Catholics surrendered blindly their political independence or accepted ecclesiastical authority in their strictly temporal affairs. In taking this action he believed they were rendering a service to the Catholic church by rescuing its fair fame from the false light in which it had been placed before the world by the unjust treatment of a venerated priest, whose holy life, whose devotion to the cause of humanity, whose eloquent appeals for the poor and oppressed had endeared him to the hearts not only of the congregation of St. Stephen’s, who enjoyed the blessings of his holy ministry, but of the inmates of every poor man’s home throughout the land. In the appeal which they were making for the undoing of this great wrong they were sustained by the Catholic conscience of the country. The evidence was ample that in all their legitimate endeavors as Catholics to secure the restoration of Father McGlynn to the sacred altar the sympathies of the great body of the Catholic priesthood were also with them. [Cheers.] Their demand that the reproach should be removed from the Catholic church that its authority could be successfully invoked to further the schemes of corrupt politicians, would be echoed from one end of the nation to the other. [Loud cheers.] The opinions shared by Father McGlynn in common with thousands of others, including eminent bishops as well as lay Catholics, in regard to the best system of land tenure and taxation, were well known to be constitutional and within the power of the people in their right of sovereignty to adopt if they so desired. Those principles had been openly taught for years. They had been published broadcast. They were the subject of public discussion in all civilized countries, and during all these years no ecclesiastical anathema was hurled against them until Tammany hall [groans and hisses] found itself in danger of defeat at the polls, and the politicians begged for protection. In the name of the Catholic church he protested against the fulmination of pastoral decrees under conditions that give the appearance of enthroning the money changers in the Temple and dragging the vestments of the holy ministry in the mire of partisan politics. [Cheering.] The principle here involved was one on which Catholics could be proud to take a positive stand. It was one which involved the self-respect of every thinking Catholic in the land, and it was one which must be vindicated before this issue can be allowed to rest. He had been many years an admirer of Father McGlynn, but his character had never seemed to him so lofty, so sublime, so Christ-like as when inspired by that divine anger which prompted the raising of the scourge in the very sanctuary of the Temple. [Loud cheering.]
When Mr. Healy had concluded his able speech Chairman Feeney said there was a gentleman present whose voice had been heard before in this cause, and he was sure the people would be glad to welcome him again. He would take the liberty, therefore, of asking Mr. Gahan of the Catholic Herald to favor them with a few remarks. Mr. Gahan, who was loudly cheered, said: “I cannot refrain from expressing my gratification in seeing your sturdy allegiance to the priest of the people—the advocate of ‘the land for the people’—Father McGlynn. [Loud cheers.] You have evidently entered into this fight to win, and your presence to-night is proof that you will never leave the ranks of battle until victory perches on your banner.
“Am I justified in so interpreting the purpose of this meeting? [Cries of ‘Yes, yes.’] Will you be faithful to the great principle of the land for the people? [Shouts of ‘We will.’] And notwithstanding any amount of pressure that may be brought to bear on you, will you be firm in leaving on the shoulders of Father McGlynn’s enemies the expense of maintaining the church from which he has been unjustly removed? [Cries of ‘Indeed we will.’] You will, then, never desert your pastor, the holy man who joyed in your joys, sorrowed in your sorrows, never knew a thought apart from your welfare, and who now suffers because he labored to improve your condition and promote the best interests of mankind? [Tremendous shouts of ‘Never, never.’]
“Remember how the college of cardinals told the Germans how they should vote; but those undismayed German Catholics sent back word to them that they in matters of politics were Germans, and would vote to benefit their class. As they stood by Windthorst against Jacobini, so should we stand by McGlynn against Simeoni. [Cheers and cries of ‘We will.’]
“I deny the right of pope or any one else to tell me how to vote. The archbishop has the right to say ‘this is a day of fasting.’ I’ll obey. But if he says I must vote a republican ticket to suit him, or a Tammany ticket [prolonged hisses], I say that he is going outside his province, and I will not obey. And more,
p. 3, col. 2 I ask you, will you not stand by Dr. McGlynn? [Cries of ’Yes! Yes!”]
“I hope the magnetic currents may not be diverted on their way; but that they will bear to the Bahamas the echoes of your splendid answer, to the end that the archbishop may learn there is no weakening on your part, but rather growth in your determination to stand by Dr. McGlynn and by ‘the land for the people.’”
Mr. Gahan then briefly reviewed the later developments of the movement. He knew that in Rome there were great and distinguished men who held that the issue which had brought Dr. McGlynn into conflict with the archbishop of New York should be treated as an open question. Mr. Gahan reasoned that the chief duty of the people was to maintain the struggle, so that the hands of friendly cardinals would be strengthened and Rome be made to feel that as behind Archbishop Croke there stood the people of Ireland, so behind Dr. McGlynn there stood his faithful parishioners, with the manhood of America. (Loud cheers.) In the end they were bound to triumph. “As St. Stephen was the first martyr of the Christian dispensation, so now it was, by a singular coincidence, that the pastor of St. Stephen’s church was the first martyr, on American soil, of a great principle. The saint who had been stoned to death on earth was now enjoying his triumph in the choirs of heaven; and the priest whose holy life was similar to that of the first Christian martyr would enjoy a triumph in the realization by the people of the great reforms he had labored to bring about. Be true to him, my friends. Be steady in your opposition to his foes. His friends are your friends and his enemies are your enemies. His cause is identical with your cause. Nothing should be permitted to sever or sunder the ties which bind you; and if you assist to the very death, to the bitter end in maintaining his principles, the dawn of a better day will not be long delayed—a day which will witness Father McGlynn again ministering to your spiritual needs as Catholics, while the victory of ‘the land for the people’ will bring about your emancipation in a social and political sense as American citizens.” [Loud cheers.]
The meeting adjourned to Friday, March 4.
ANOTHER PRIEST PROTESTS.
Dr. McGlynn Not the Only Priest Who Believes that the Land Belongs to All the People.
———, ———, Feb. 23.—Inclosed find a year’s subscription to THE STANDARD. It is refreshing to find a paper that dares give utterance to the truth. Your manly defense of your friend Dr. McGlynn in his undeserved trouble may provoke the disinterested criticism of the aristocratic secular press of New York and of a religious press that, with a few bright exceptions, is religiously careful not to say what it thinks on certain subjects, but with men all over the country, and among priests especially, it will make you friends. Dr. McGlynn is not the only priest who believes in the doctrine of Henry George concerning property in land; and many of us think that in a free country a priest should not be deprived by his priestly character of his rights as a citizen, and forbidden to give public expression to his opinions on political or economic questions because “his lordship” or “his grace” or an Italian cardinal—who knows much more about filling up a letter with such stuff as “most eminent, most reverend and most worshipful sir” than he does about the rights and duties of an American citizen—happens to think differently. “Their lordships” have in many cases spent so much of their time in acquiring perfection in that fawning which thrift doth follow; they have been so constantly engaged in looking up that they can scarcely be expected to sympathize with the common herd, even when the people and their leaders happen to be right. This is why there was a French revolution of bloody but blessed memory, and why Catholic France to-day entrusts its political fortunes to men without religion.
You contrast Bishop Nulty and Archbishop Corrigan, but you fail to give the explanation that shows the whyness of the difference. In Ireland bishops and priests are united, and both are with the people; in this country bishops and priests are at war, and the people are an unknown and unconsidered quantity. And the reason is not hard to find. In Ireland the priests make the bishops, who are chosen by the pope (almost always) from a list of three names selected by the priests by ballot. In this country, on the other hand, the hierarchy is made up of a certain number of aristocratic cliques with power to perpetuate themselves. The result is natural; like begets like. In Ireland the bishops are selected for such qualities as recommend them to the priests with whom they have associated on terms of equality and familiarity, and who are consequently the best judges of their fitness. The Irish bishops are, therefore, likely to be men of courage, fairness, learning, ability and independence. Here, when a see is vacant, the half-dozen bishops of the province hold a secret meeting and select three names, from which the pope chooses. In such elections senility, obsequiousness and the other noble qualities that go to make the successful courtier have a remarkably lengthening effect on the pole that knocks the persimmons. The Holy Ghost, although He is doubtless invoked on these occasions, seldom has influence enough to make a change in the list. Bishops chosen by this process are, of course, likely to be either lovely specimens of ornamental mediocrity or “offensive partisans” of most “pernicious activity,” like Borgess and Corrigan.
The McGlynn case is but a new illustration of an old trick in church diplomacy. When a man whose life can be blighted by ecclesiastical censures teaches a doctrine offensive to the rulers of the church, which doctrine cannot be easily (or at all) shown to be false, they punish the individual, but leave the truth or falsity of his teaching an open question. They thus crush the poor fellow who thought he was doing right, intimidate others who may be inclined to think like him, impede progress with the whole weight of church authority, and yet shirk the only duty that was really incumbent on them—that of deciding authoritatively whether or not the doctrine in question is heretical.
Here’s to the triumph of right over might, and to the success of the doctrine that “the land belongs to the people.” If we are all the inheritors of Adam’s sin, are we not also the inheritors of Adam’s title to the earth?
A CATHOLIC PRIEST.
What the Catechism Teaches.
SAVANNAH, Ga., Feb. 12.—I have read Dr. McGlynn’s reply to Archbishop Corrigan with intense interest, because it involves the question of land monopoly, which has been the potent cause of Ireland’s chronic misery and the scattering of millions of her race to the four winds of heaven, and which is entwined in wreaths of wormwood about the history of my life, carrying me back to the days of my childhood when in the land of the shamrock I heard the land question discussed in bitter and fervid eloquence at my father’s knee, and which has been the constant day dream of my struggling and checkered career. I am a Catholic, and glory in the name, and intend to die one. My Catholic ancestry reaches back to the flood, so to speak. I have never heard of a Protestant or proselyte of my name (no offense intended) and hope I never shall. I have never been taught or thought I should be called upon to implicitly believe in the politics of the Catholic church. I have been all my life one way or the other, in an humble way,
p. 3, col. 3 battling for the principles of the “land for the people.”
I learned to lisp the doctrine of the common ownership of land in my Catechism, which is the quintessence of Catholic theology, in the Celtic tongue, viz.: “Who made the world?” Answer—“God.” “For what end did God make the world?” Answer—“For his own glory and for man’s (mankind’s) use and benefit.” I would be stultifying myself; I would be a craven, nay, an apostate, did I not now stand by this doctrine so bravely upheld and defended by Father McGlynn, and for which he has been subjected to such bitter humiliation. Shall Father McGlynn retract the divine doctrine that land, air, light and water are the free and God given gifts to man, and prime essentials of life, without which he would instantly perish? Retract truth? And substitute what? A lie, a blasphemy! I hope he may never be guilty of so terrible a crime. Let Bishop Corrigan retract (which it is his duty gracefully to do) his doctrine, or alleged doctrine, of the private or individual ownership, and monopoly of land, which is evidently and absolutely opposed to the teachings of the Catholic church, which he misrepresents. Let the cardinals of the propaganda, or even the pope himself, with due respect and reverence for his holy name and office (for neither he nor they are sic in politics), retract, should one or either fall into the same grave error, which I pray they never will; but let none who hold to the truth ever forswear the divine doctrine of the “land for the people.”
J. C. DUGGAN.
A Clear Statement.
BAYSHORE, L. I., Feb. 24.—No one denies the right of Archbishop Corrigan to make stump speeches for Tammany Hall, though they may deprecate his political affiliation, nor can any one deny his right to inject a stump speech into his pastoral letter, especially as it gave his enemies an opportunity to “lay him out;” but when he uses his ecclesiastical authority over his subordinates to coerce them into silence on subjects outside of religion or of doctrine he assumes a prerogative that no one in the republic, let alone a foreign power, has a right to exercise, and if permitted would place the direction of American politics in the hands of that foreign power. The question of religion does not enter at all into the remonstrance against ecclesiastical interference with political or economic opinions or actions. Whoever says so befogs the question at issue. If my liberties as an American citizen are threatened, what matters it to me whether it be from a hierarchy or a lay corporation? If I am justified in resisting the latter, why not the former?
HUGH B. BROWN.
Dr. McGlynn Should Lecture.
ROCKFORD, Ill., Feb. 21.—I believe with J. B. Barry of Philadelphia that Dr. McGlynn can do more good for the cause and for his church by going into the lecture field than in any other way; and if he will make a tour of the west and come to Rockford, we will see that he has a rousing house.
A. F. HUFFMAN.
Right Words in Right Time.
SOUTH HAVEN, Mich., Feb. 21.—THE STANDARD’S course in the Dr. McGlynn matter should have the indorsement of every true American citizen, whatever his politics or religion. You have said just the right thing in the right way, and at the right time. One of the noblest men in this whole township, who is a Catholic, is in full sympathy with Dr. McGlynn, and rejoices in your brave words.
A. C. WOODRUFF.
St. Stephen’s to the Pope.
The St. Stephen’s church committee sent on Tuesday a telegram to Pope Leo congratulating him on his seventy-sixth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of his entrance into holy orders.
Dr. McGlynn as a Financier.
Irish World.
It has been suggested if not positively asserted that under Dr. McGlynn’s management the financial affairs of St. Stephen’s were in a bad condition. Elsewhere we print a statement which not only gives the lie to any suggestion of this kind but completely vindicates Dr. McGlynn’s character as an able and successful financier and as a hard worker in the effort to pay off the debt of his church. The statement to which we refer is a report certified and indorsed by auditors of the income and expenditure of St. Stephen’s during 1886, of the present amount of liability, and of the value of the church property. From this report we find that last year Dr. McGlynn paid out toward clearing off debt the sum of $18,506, and that during the last four years he has paid toward clearing off debt the large sum of $142,502. We also find that as against the total debt at the end of 1886 there stood, over and above the amount of debt, church property to the value of $435,314. If this be not a thoroughly sound condition of affairs and one highly creditable to Dr. McGlynn we do not know what figures mean. We earnestly hope that St. Stephen’s will in a very few years be clear of debt and that the work of clearing it will be in the hands of the great and good man who has already given such splendid service to the church and to the poor in St. Stephen’s parish.
Dr. McGlynn’s Friends in Greenpoint.
New York Leader Feb. 28.
The workingmen of Catholic faith who live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, have arranged for a mass meeting to express sympathy with the Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn, rector of St. Stephen’s church. The meeting will be held at Bartholdi hall on Wednesday evening, March 9. A number of able speakers will be present.
The Rev. Father P. F. O’Hare, rector of St. Anthony’s Catholic church, denounced the meeting yesterday and warned his parishioners against attending it. This will insure a large attendance.
Washington Territory.
Seattle Voice of the People.
In Washington territory, as in almost every other portion of the American Union, a few gluttonous and miserable men have, by hook and crook, managed to gobble up all the valuable lands and hold them from public occupation for the purpose of speculation and gain. There are in close proximity to this city, and in fact to all the growing cities of sound, hundreds of acres of the best lands that are susceptible of the highest state of cultivation owned by individuals and withheld from market or occupation by these Shylocks of society, in the hopes of realizing the profit that will accrue when their poorer and hardworked neighbors shall have raised the value of their land by the toil and improvement they place on their own. The time has come when the puerilities of party politics must be laid aside, when the laboring men throughout all the length and breadth of the land must arise as one man and assert their rights, or else the chains of bondage by which they are held will be riveted tenfold stronger and a slavery worse than Egyptian bondage will be theirs.
To Revolt.
Properly speaking the land belongs to these two, to the Almighty God and to all his children of men that ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. Who made the land of England? Who made it, this respectable English land, wheat growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let readily hand over hand for seventy millions or upward as it here lies, who did make it? “We!” answer the much consuming aristocracy. “It is we that made it, or are heirs, assigns and representatives of those who did!” My brothers, you? Everlasting honor to you then, and corn laws, as many as you will, till your own deep stomachs cry enough, or some voice of human pity for our famine bids you hold! ye are as gods that can create soil; soil creating gods there is no withstanding. . . . Infatuated mortals, into what questions are you driving every thinking man in England?
THOMAS CARLYLE.
p. 3, col. 4
NEW YORK’S SHAME.
ITS HORRIBLE TENEMENT HOUSES DESCRIBED AND DENOUNCED.
A Meeting in Behalf of Tenement House Reform—A Letter From Father McGlynn—Father Huntington’s Graphic Description of the Horrors of Tenement House 19?
A meeting in behalf of tenement house reform was held in Cooper union on Monday evening. James P. Archibald presided and stated that the reason for calling the meeting was the effort of a number of property owners on the west side to obstruct the passage of bills now pending in Albany.
20 F. Wingate was then introduced, and he explained that the pending bill increases the power of the board of health and puts a special police force at its command to enforce necessary sanitary regulations. He said owners would not be allowed to build on 100 per cent. of their lots as they are now, and that bad plumbing would be cause enough for the health board to declare the house uninhabitable. “If the wheels of progress are blocked we’ll procure a bill ten times as radical as this one,” said Mr. Wingate, “and we’ll put it through, too,” and then there was tremendous cheering. An incidental reference to Dr. McGlynn by the speaker called forth enthusiastic applause, and at the conclusion of his speech Mr. Wingate read the following letter from Father McGlynn:
NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 1887.
MY DEAR MR. WINGATE: I regret very much that I shall not be able to attend the meeting for tenement house reform. I have felt very keenly for many years the need of such reform, and in my profession have had too many occasions to witness and deplore the manifold physical, mental and moral miseries of the system you are laboring to correct. If the needed reform by law shall impose great expense upon owners and diminish very much their profits, no injustice shall thereby be done to them. The community surely has the right to see that they shall not injure public health and decency while pursuing their selfish gains. But, besides this, the losses they may suffer will be but a partial restitution to the tenants and to the community of the rent they are permitted unjustly to levy upon the land they occupy, which unjust privilege even in this democratic country fully justifies their undemocratic title of landlords! But let us frankly confess that the reforms that may now be brought about will be but palliatives and not a cure of the disease; and let us never tire of asserting that the true remedy will be in the restoration of the land and other natural bounties to the people, and that this will not merely correct the evils of the system, but abolish the system itself. Very sincerely yours,
EDWARD MCGLYNN.
Samuel Gompers and Edward King made strong speeches denouncing the horrors of the tenement house system, and their telling hits were enthusiastically applauded. Resolutions supporting the changes in the tenement house act were adopted declaring that tenement house landlords of the lowest grade are trying to obstruct the bill at Albany, characterizing these men as shameless and unscrupulous scoundrels. They also say “that the allegation that tenants are solely to blame for unsanitary houses is a baseless slander, and that, in the words of the chief executive of the state, the wretched condition of dilapidated and ill-ventilated buildings is really to be charged to the”criminal cupidity of the owners.”
Henry George, the next speaker, was received with prolonged applause. He said: “I don’t care whose movement this is; it’s good for us whoever started it. Tenement houses are no place for human beings to live in. There is no need of their living in them. The bill is good so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. I am rather in favor of tenement house abolition than of tenement house reform. The tenement house is the outgrowth of the system of land monopoly that crowds our people into such structures while leaving half of this island vacant. There is no necessity for such crowding. We have the whole continent to spread over, and if the community had the revenue justly belonging to it we could build railroads at public expense leading from this city in all directions, so that the people, no matter in what number, could live in their own houses. In these simple means lies the remedy for overcrowding, and the way to reach that remedy lies through the ballot.”
Rev. J. O. S. 21 of the Guild of the iron 2223?24? and church workingmen’s society and of Holy cross mission on Avenue C, was the next speaker, and he was received with enthusiastic applause. Father Huntington said:
“People get used to almost anything. I am very much afraid that is my case about these evils and wrongs in the tenement house districts. For five years I have been living down as near as I could get to the East river, going up and down tenement house stairs, through rickety halls and bad smelling courts, in and out of close and noisome rooms, through streets filled with weak-eyed, pale-faced children and discouraged-looking men and women, and now I am afraid I have got almost used to it. That, I suppose, is the case of a good many of us here to-night, and we find it hard to imagine what it would be if things were as they should be, and to realize how bad they are. I want to help you to do that, and ask you to remember that what I may say is not the statement of a commissioner or board official, who comes down some pleasant afternoon to look about on the east side, but of one who has been breathing the atmosphere of the district night and day for years, and living part of the time in a tenement house, with ample opportunity to understand the wretched conditions under which life goes on in such caravansaries. And though, as I say, it is not easy, living constantly in such surroundings, to realize how bad these sic are, yet when I come here to-night and listen to this terrible array of facts, and, looking in your faces, try to comprehend what an enormous mass of needless suffering this tenement house question represents, the thousands of children pining their lives away in these lazar houses, manhood broken down and degraded, womanhood dishonored, then I declare I don’t get used to this infamy and won’t get used to it.
“Now what is the state of the case? Here is a vast population crowded together more closely than anywhere else on this globe, living not merely in the small rooms of houses side by side in blocks, but in houses one behind the other as well, with whole families depending for light and air on two windows opening into a court forty feet wide and fifty or sixty feet high, the air of which is breathed by at least fifteen other families as well, living in many cases in basements below the street level or over cellars where the water stands at most seasons of the year. In many of the blocks on the east side, between two avenues and two streets, there are as many people as in country towns and villages covering several hundreds of acres, that is from three to four thousand souls.
“How are these houses filled? With families of eight or ten people living in two rooms, one of them with no window but only a hole into a narrow passage from which the air for a dozen other bedrooms is drawn. And remember that we breathe not only through our mouths but through our whole bodies, and every human being must have a certain amount of pure air about him to keep in any proper state of health. But this is not all; in these blocks there are many occupations carried on that are still further exhausting the life supporting qualities of the air and sending up noxious gases, vapors and exhalations. I do not say that, in all cases, blame attaches to those who carry on their trade—some of
p. 3, col. 5 of them are necessary—but I say that they often render the whole house unfit for human habitation. There are bakeries, filling the halls and rooms with the “sickly, sour scent” of the new bread; laundries keeping the whole house continually damp with the steam from the washing; rag and junk shops, with their heaps of refuse, containing no one knows what germs of disease; breweries abutting on dwelling houses and pouring into the windows the moldy dampness of the bins and vats, to say nothing of stables in rear yards, sending up every morning their thick stench of dung. And then the ill-ventilated living rooms are often shops as well. I have seen a room twelve feet square, with two or three piles of rotting tobacco and half a dozen half-naked men and women rolling and molding cigars in a perfectly fetid atmosphere, with a temperature over seventy at ten o’clock at night, even the children looking as if their lives were being drained out of them by nicotine. In other such room—rooms, where people live, remember—you will find three or four sewing machines whirring and rattling all day under the hands of as many haggard looking girls, making trowsers at starvation wages, the air filled with fluff and dust. And add to this one further indictment against this atrocious system. The people in these houses have not even facilities for keeping themselves clean when their work is done. Bathrooms are unknown, and in many cases the water supply is so limited that women have to carry water up three or four flights of narrow stairs for what little washing they find it possible to do, and the drainage and sewerage is so bad that sometimes the dirt washed down comes back in overflowing cesspools or in the deadly forms of miasma and sewer gas.
“And yet this is not the worst; this is only physical suffering. But poor people are not animals merely. I wish the good, easy-going philanthropists uptown would remember that. It would greatly simplify the labor problem if laborers were nothing but animals requiring only so much food and sleep, like horses and dogs. I wish they would treat us as worthy of even so much attention; but when I go up toward Fifth avenue I find that the horses and the dogs are much better housed than many poor people I visit. A gentleman will be very quick to have a pane of glass mended through which the wind is blowing on his fifty thousand dollar trotter, while the repairs in the houses where he lodges his poorer brothers and sisters are put off from week to week and month to month, or neglected altogether through the greed of some rascally agent. But the poor are not merely animals, they have hearts and feelings and affections, and infinite possibilities of good and evil. And yet what chance does a boy or girl have for the development of heart or soul in a tenement house life? What place is left for the growth of the spiritual nature in a child that has never known what it is to be alone, whose”home” is at once kitchen, dining room, parlor, nursery, bedroom, washroom, and perhaps workshop as well; whose only playground is a dirty street with all its degrading sights and sounds; who comes home from the factory to find the only sitting room full of washtubs and squalling children, and hurries out to find some relief in the gang at the street corner, and the dime museum, and later on in the saloon and the dance hall? Remember there is no seclusion, hardly even privacy, in a tenement house. It is bad enough this weather, but you know what it is in summer, when all the doors and windows must stand open for a breath of air, and even in sickness the sufferer cannot be screened from the sight and sound of strangers. You know what opportunity there is for modesty and decency where families must crowd together, body to body, just to lie down and sleep that they may be able to drag themselves to work next day. You know what death is in such quarters, where all the routine of life must be carried on side by side with a corpse for two days and two nights. I declare I am getting less used to this abomination every minute. But this is only what I have seen. And yet let no one say in my presence that those who dwell in tenement houses are “filthy and debased creatures.” I give the lie to any such wholesale characterization of my neighbors on the east side. Let no one tell me that many of our working people, living in their tenement houses, are not high-minded, pure-hearted and clean living. I know of those among my own people, young men and women who are living nobly, unselfishly, chastely. They fight with desperate courage to rise and keep above the lowering conditions of life in which they are, and I will not hear them maligned without lifting my voice to do them honor.
“But, ah! they do not all succeed in this fierce encounter with evil influence and surroundings. Many sink under them, not merely into an early grave, but into that living death, the penitentiary and the brothel. I know of some twenty girls that, in a few years, have passed almost at once, as it seemed, from their confirmation and first communion, to which they came with every earnest purpose to do right, into the awful darkness of a life of shame, driven there, most of them, by the results of the tenement house system.
“Working people of New York, are you going to let all this go on in the generations to come? Will you stand by and see your children growing up to sink under this misery into death of body and soul? Will you not give them some kind of chance? Will you not rise up as one man and say calmly, but with unmistakable, sic to politicians, corporations and monopolists, ‘This thing must stop.’ If there is any Christian work in the world it is that. You can make a change if you will. There is a remedy, but to find it we must put down the meannesses and jealousies and prejudices that keep us apart, and learn to act together. That remedy lies farther than in amendments of regulation and increased inspection; but we can find a point of union in the determined effort to pass the amendments to support which this meeting is called. With union will come strength, and with strength the way will open to sweep away this horror, and to class the ‘tenement house system’ as one of the obstacles that have been rolled out of the path of human progress to a nobler and purer civilization.”
Chairman Archibald read a brief message from James Redpath declaring his sympathy with the purposes of the meeting, and John J. Bealin made a speech that was warmly received.
“Combination” All Around.
Indianapolis News.
We don’t think much of Mr. 26?’s letter denouncing a secret labor organization as tyrannical, as usurping the functions of law, and so forth and so on. All organizations are to an extent secret. So this part of the accusation amounts to nothing, and Mr. Hewitt stands simply in the position which English capital and aristocracy stood in for so many years, of denying to labor the right of organization. That right has long ago been conceded in England, and it has in this country also, though Mr. Hewitt doesn’t seem to know it. The combinations of capital in this country are just as tyrannical and a thousand times more harmful than labor combinations. The rolling-mill in this city is at a dead loss of hundreds and thousands of dollars for its plant, and the town has suffered a loss of hundreds of laborers because the Bessemer steel ring won’t let this mill do business, and what is more, this ring is upheld in its tyranny by the law of the land, without which it could not exist. So it is with the oil pool, the coal pool, the salt monopoly, and so on. Labor’s only protection is organization, and it will not abandon it at Mr. Hewitt’s 25?
Selling a Man.
Henry Dodson, charged with being a vagrant, was recently tried in a Kentucky court. The jury, after hearing all the evidence, returned a verdict of guilty, and ordered him sold to the highest bidder, at public auction, for the period of seventy-five days. Judge Bradford has fixed March 5 as the day of sale
p. 3, col. 6
THE SCOTCH CROFTERS.
HOW THE HIGHLANDS HAVE BEEN DEPOPULATED.
The Homes of Its Inhabitants Burned—Men Must Give Way to Deer—English Landlordism Worse Than the Desolating Hoof of the Turk.
“I see no complaint to be made against the Scotch land laws, and I believe the trouble will settle itself in a right and fair way,” said Mr. Archibald M. Stewart, editor of the New York Scottish-American, a few days ago to a Herald reporter who called to interview him on the terrible story of landlord robbery in the the western highlands of Scotland. No complaint to be made against the Scotch land laws? If this is so, then there is no trouble to settle, Mr. Stewart, and the crofters and their leaders have been imposing on the world for the past half dozen years. I have the pleasure of knowing several of those leaders personally. I lived in Scotland for over twenty years, and during that time I had a good deal of active participation in political movements connected with the agitation of the Irish and Scotch land questions. I am, therefore, in a position to give some help in the work of enlightening Mr. Stewart on the condition of matters in his native land, about which he seems to know or feel so little. I am in a position to say of my own knowledge, derived from personal observation and from information received in Scotland from gentlemen born and reared in the crofter districts, that the report of the Herald commissioner, so far from being an over-colored picture, is but a very mild presentation of the heart-sickening reality. If Mr. Stewart were to visit Scotland just now, and venture at any public gathering of his countrymen, from John o’Groats to Berwick-on-Tweed, to repeat the statement that there is no complaint against the Scotch land laws he would be hooted from the platform. Since Mr. Stewart left the land of his sires the schoolmaster has been very much abroad in the highlands. Henry George and Michael Davitt have been across the border, and the gospel they preached spread like wildfire. They found eager listeners wherever they went, and they saw with their own eyes the explanation of all the eagerness and the sources of the complaint against the landlords which Mr. Stewart is unable to 28?
Mr. Angus Sutherland, an old friend and fellow agitator of mine, is now M. P. for his native county of Sutherland, from the representation of which we ousted the marquis of Stafford at the last general election. The marquis is the oldest son of the 27 of Sutherland, who holds as his absolute property nearly the whole of the county from which he takes his title. For generations up to 1885 the parliamentary seat for that county had, as a matter of course, been held as an inalienable heritage in the family of the great duke. The people were no more considered or consulted than the ducal flunkeys or gamekeepers. At the general election last year the condition of affairs all over the highlands had become so hot through “complaints against the land laws” that the marquis, with all his father’s wealth and influence at his back, was powerless against the candidature of my friend Angus Sutherland, the son of a poor crofter who was evicted thirty years ago by the duke of that day. Does Mr. Stewart see in this most instructive and significant fact no indication of a “complaint against the Scotch land laws?”
The facts set forth by the Herald commission bear eloquent testimony to the beauties of the system which Archbishop Corrigan and his saviors of society are so zealous in defending in America. A few more may be of interest to the men who read THE STANDARD, including, I hope, a goodly number of patriot Scots who do not believe with Dr. Sutherland, the Liberty street (New York) restaurant keeper interviewed by the Herald, that “a landlord has the right to evict all his tenants if he wishes to, and it’s nobody’s business whether he turns his property into sheep farms, deer parks or a howling wilderness.” The total area of Scotland is 18,946,694 acres. Twelve men own one-fourth and seventy men own one-half of the whole. The duke of Sutherland, who is, I believe, an extensive land speculator in the western states of America, owns 1,326,000 acres in Scotland. The duke of Buccleuch owns 460,108 acres. The earl of Breadalbane owns 438,358 acres. The duke of Argyll owns 175,114 acres. According to the Liberty street Mr. Sutherland, and according to a still higher authority on morals, viz., the archbishop of New York, the seventy men who own half of all Scotland have the right to sweep away half of its entire population and wipe out the civilization of nineteen centuries. As a matter of fact this is the programme that two of the above mentioned dukes have been carrying out within the present generation. Over hundreds of thousands of acres in the Scottish highlands the landscape to-day presents a scene hardly different from what it was when Cæsar’s legions invaded Britain. A traveler in Argyll, Inverness or Sutherland may make a journey of sixty miles without seeing a human habitation except a shepherd’s or a gamekeeper’s hut. “The Financial Reform Almanack,” a most admirable book of statistics, tells us that “in Scotland much more than 2,000,000 acres have been depopulated to make room for deer forests—homes, farms and food destroyed that wealth may sport.”
Mgr. Preston, to whom Sunday’s Sun, in the interests no doubt of the saviors of society, devotes a column of eulogy, warns Catholics that they are heretics if they have a word to say against the system which permits the sweeping away of homes and farms to make space for the sport of idle dukes—of men like Lord Colin Campbell, who spend the enormous rents received for the property of the people in unnamable abominations in London, such as were shown by the divorce court revelations a few months ago, which shocked and scandalized the world. In the county of Sutherland in 1885 there were 130,000 acres of deer forest, in the county of Ross 190,000, in Inverness 260,000 and in Argyll 220,000. Within the memory of men now living most of that vast area was covered by the homes of industrious highlanders, whose sons fought England’s battles in Russia, Africa and India. The house burning atrocities perpetrated some weeks since in Glenbeigh in the south of Ireland aroused the indignation of two hemispheres. It was by similar horrors on an immensely larger scale that Sutherland county was converted into a deer forest. On one day, as I remember that Angus Sutherland told at a land league meeting in Glasgow, three hundred houses were burned down on the sic estates, and the crofters, whose fathers built them and lived on the land for generations, were left with their families homeless and destitute.
No wonder that the doctrine that the land belongs to the people is welcomed in the highlands among a people who have such terrible experiences of landlordism, and no wonder that the crofters and their champions, Angus Sutherland and James Shaw Maxwell and John Murdock and John Ferguson and dozens of other land nationalizers in Scotland take an eager interest in the controversy challenged by Archbishop Corrigan, and earnestly pray that the manhood of America may stand like adamant by Dr. McGlynn and the great principles he represents.
MICHAEL CLARKE.
Page 4 of 8contents
4 THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, sic.
p. 4, col. 1
THE STANDARD.
HENRY GEORGE, Editor and Proprietor.
Published weekly at
25 ANN STREET, NEW YORK.
TERMS, POSTAGE FREE:
One year, $2.50; six months, $1.25; single copies, 5 cents.
Entered at the post office, New York, as second class matter.
Communications and contributions are invited, and will be attentively considered. Manuscripts not found suitable for publication will be returned if sufficient stamps are sent for return postage. No notice will be taken of anonymous communications.
Contributions and letters on editorial matters should be addressed to THE EDITOR OF THE STANDARD, and all communications on business to the PUBLISHER OF THE STANDARD.
THE STANDARD wants an agent to secure subscribers at every post office in the United States, to whom liberal terms will be given.
THE STANDARD is for sale by newsdealers throughout the United States. Persons who may be unable to obtain it will confer a favor on the publisher by notifying him promptly.
Sample copies sent free on application.
SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887.
THE STANDARD is forwarded to subscribers by the early morning mails each Friday. Subscribers who do not receive the paper promptly will confer a favor by communicating with the publisher.
A MATTER WORTH CONSIDERING.
Judge Addison Brown, sitting in the United States circuit court for the southern district of New York, in passing, last week, upon a motion in the civil suit of the Old Dominion steamship company against members of the Knights of Labor for damages based on alleged interference with their business during the recent strike of ’longshoremen, took occasion to say:
All associations designed to interfere with the perfect freedom of employers in the proper management and control of their lawful business, or to dictate in any particular the terms upon which their business shall be conducted by means of threats of injury or loss, by interference with their property or traffic, or with their lawful employment of other persons, or designed to abridge any of these rights, are illegal combinations or associations and all acts done in furtherance of such intentions by such means and accompanied by damage are actionable.
This opinion is not to be taken as deciding the particular case, as the facts were not yet all before the court, the decision having been made on the ex parte statement of the complainants. Nevertheless, embodying, as it doubtless does, the line which will be taken by the federal courts. it is well sic the serious attention of workingmen.
Judge Brown’s opinion is, we are inclined to think, good law, and, what is still more important, it is certainly good sense. As an abstract proposition, nothing can be clearer than that any combination to interfere with the perfect freedom of any one to manage a lawful business, or by means of threats of injury or loss, or by interference with property or traffic, to dictate how such business shall be conducted, ought to be punishable by law. It is time for the labor associations to face this fact, and to consider it soberly.
To say that men have the right to combine in order to raise wages, or in any way to make better terms with their employers, provided they merely content themselves with refusing to work, and do not seek to interfere with the liberty of others to manage their own lawful business in their own way, is under present conditions little better than a mockery. The strike, the boycott, all the methods by which labor associations and combinations endeavor to carry out their objects, are methods of coercion—do involve interference with the liberty of others to conduct their own lawful business in their own way. When they do not proceed to the sic of actual force and the actual destruction or injury of material things, they only stop short of this as a matter of degree. Without the power to in some way inflict injury or loss, the regulations of a trades union would be as futile as a law without a penalty.
The labor associations which have least necessity of resorting to the coarser and more obvious modes of inflicting or threatening injury or loss as a means of coercing employers, are those in trades where special skill is required and which carefully restrict the number permitted to learn the trade. Beginning at this primary point to interfere with the freedom of the employer and of their own members to teach a trade, and with the freedom of boys to learn it, they are able to so limit the number of those who can take their places that they can, by their own mere refusal to work, inflict such injury and loss upon employers as will exert a sufficiently coercive power to maintain their wages and enforce their rules. But even this power, it must be remembered, rests on the determination, expressed or implied, to inflict injury or loss upon deserters from their ranks. The strongest trades union without this would be but a rope of sand. And just in proportion as the organization of labor proceeds beyond the trades to the learning of which artificial difficulties have been imposed, or which from their nature are not easily learned, do the practicable methods for the exertion of the coercive power necessary to win in a contest with employers become coarser and more obvious.
The mere cessation of work on the part of a strict trades union of glass blowers may inflict such damage and loss upon employers as to compel them to accede to terms. But a strike of unskilled laborers, when there are thousands of unemployed men eagerly pressing for employment, must be backed either by some sort of coercion to prevent others from taking their places, or by some means of inflicting such injury and loss upon employers as will make them afraid to employ men outside of the association.
Now, it is the tendency of constantly increasing labor saving invention to dispense with special skill on the part of the mass of workmen and to reduce skilled labor to the status of unskilled; and the extension
p. 4, col. 2 of labor organizations, which has been so rapid of late years, has been in the direction of the less skilled occupations.
This is the reason of the growing tendency of strikes to violence, and the necessity more and more felt of calling upon men in other occupations for help, by stopping work or by boycotting, to inflict injury or loss upon the employers with whom a struggle is being carried on. In the recent strike of coal handlers and ’longshoremen some dozen other organizations struck to help them, and this proving unsuccessful it was even proposed that the brewers, the engineers engaged in running elevators, and the conductors and drivers of the New York street car lines should strike.
Now, if the labor movement is to go on in this direction, every man who looks ahead must see that it will at last come to violence. This, at least, is clearly evident, that the labor associations must make up their minds either to defy the law, to change the law or to be ground to powder.
It is perfectly true, as an abstract proposition, that no one ought to be permitted to interfere with the legitimate business of another, or by going out of his own right to inflict or threaten injury or loss as a means of coercion. Yet it is also true that, under existing conditions, it is only by combining together to interfere with the legitimate business of others, and to coerce others by the fear of injury or loss, that workmen are at all able to resist the tendency to crowd wages down to the point of bare existence. The great fact that is ignored by those who talk so flippantly about the wickedness of workingmen attempting to coerce employers, is that all this coercion is in reality coercion against coercion, the attempt to use force in resistance to force.
Before the 29 of an eastern city there came from the desert two torn and bruised travelers. “There were five of us,” they said, “on our way hither with merchandise. A day’s journey hence we halted and made our camp, when following us there came a crowd of ill-conditioned fellows who demanded entrance to our camp, and who, on our refusing it, used to us violent and threatening words, and when we answered not their threats, set upon us with force. Three of us were slain, and we two barely escaped with our lives to ask for justice.”
“Justice, you shall have.” said the sic. “If what you say be true, they who assaulted you when you had not assaulted them shall die. If what you say be not true, your own lives shall pay the penalty of falsehood.”
When the assaulters of the merchants arrived they were brought at once before the cadi. “Is the merchants’ story true?” said he.
“It is, but”—
“I will hear no more!” cried the cadi. “You admit having reviled men who had not reproached you, and having assaulted men who had not assaulted you. In this you have deserved death.” But as they were being carried off to execution the prisoners still tried to explain. “Hear them, cadi!” said an old man, “lest you commit injustice.”
“But they have admitted that the merchants’ words are true.”
“Yes, but their words may not be all the truth.”
So the cadi heard them, and they said that when they came up to the merchants’ halting place they found that the merchants had pitched their camp about the only well in that part of the desert, and refused to let them enter and drink. They first remonstrated, then threatened, and then, rather than die of thirst, rushed upon the merchants’ camp, and in the melee three of the merchants were slain.
“Is this also true?” said the cadi to the merchants.
The merchants were forced to admit that it was.
“Then,” said the cadi, “you told me truth that, being only part of the truth, was really a falsehood. You were the aggressors by taking for yourselves alone the only well from which these men could drink. Now the death I have decreed is for you.”
What the labor combinations are attempting to do is to secure for themselves a monopoly in supplying labor, and the real cause and only justification of this effort is the existence of monopolies in the things vitally necessary to the use of labor.
Conscious of the coercion those who have only labor to sell are subjected to, though without fully realizing its cause, there are active men in the labor organizations who have dreamed of so fully organizing all kinds of laborers in mutually supporting combinations as to make labor, by the stopping of all work, master of the situation. But this dream is hardly capable of realization. For, putting aside all the difficulties of inducing so many diverse trades to act in concert with any persistence, and putting aside the surety that there must remain outside of any possible combination a body of laborers pressed by the direst necessity to take work on any terms, the great fact is that laborers as a class live from hand to mouth. They, therefore, are of all classes the least able to maintain a contest of endurance, and would quickest and most severely suffer by any general stoppage of the machinery by which the community is fed and its necessary wants are from day to day supplied.
A partial strike is only now maintained for any length of time by contributions from workmen who remain at work. And in the check put upon the supply of coal to New York during the recent strike, they who suffered quickest and suffered most were they who buy coal by the bucket, not they who can lay in a season’s supply. If the thirsty men in the desert had attempted to compel the merchants to let them in to drink by forming a cordon around the camp and refusing to let the merchants pass, their plan would have been about as hopeful as the dream of securing the rights
p. 4, col. 3 of labor by a general refusal to labor. The merchants could have remained quiet for a long time. How long could the travelers have gone without water? Any attempt to carry out such a plan as this must either come to speedy failure or else lead to violence.
In the attempt to meet coercion by coercion, workingmen under present conditions are at fearful disadvantage. It is not merely that the capitalists and corporations against whom they fight have control of the organs of public opinion and of the courts, but that they can combine, can coerce, can inflict injury and loss in a much more quiet and effective way than can workingmen. They can evade or take advantage of the law, while workingmen to do things of essentially the same kind must defy the law.
Labor surrounded by law-made and law-supported monopolies of all kinds is virtually told by the law that the only coercive force it can apply to fight off the coercion to which it is subjected, is to stop work and starve. But our laws are based on universal suffrage, and laborers are in the majority. Cannot they change the law? The power to do so is in their own hands. To exert it it is only necessary that they should agree as to just what changes in the law they want.
Suppose that by properly applying their voting power workingmen were to succeed in giving to the labor associations just such a legal monopoly of supplying labor as is now given by our laws to monopolists of things necessary to the exertion of labor. The trades union ideal would then be realized. No one could then go to work without permission of a trades union, just as now no mere laborer can go to work without the permission of a land owner or a capitalist.
But, if this were practicable, would not the placing of such power in the hands of the managers of trades unions lead to tyranny and abuse of the kind which, as experience has shown, always attend the concentration of power? And outside of the trades unions or labor associations, would there not remain or grow up a class deprived by one set of monopolists of access to the natural means of employing labor, and deprived by another set of monopolists of the power to sell their labor to those who could give them oppo sic to use it?
The true line to follow for the emancipation of labor is not the multiplication of restrictions, but the sweeping away of restrictions—not the creation of new monopolies, but the abolition of all monopolies. And the fundamental and most important of all monopolies is that legalized monopoly of the earth itself which deprives the laborer of all right to the use of the natural means and material for the employment of labor—and which by thus making him helpless to employ himself, and forcing him to buy from some other human creatures permission to even live, compels him to compete with others disinherited like himself for permission to sell his labor.
Out of the multiplying and menacing labor difficulties of our time there is but one way of escape, and that is by the restoration to all men of their natural and unalienable rights to the use upon equal terms of the element on which and from which all men must live—the land.
This can easily be obtained by the ballot.
AN INCOME TAX.
A dispatch from Albany to the Tribune 30?
One of Henry George’s theories for improving government is that incomes should be taxed. Gideon J. Tucker, who is a George man, has drawn up a bill for the taxation of incomes in this state. It was presented to the senate to-day by Senator Traphagen. It provides that all incomes from $2,000 to $3,000 shall pay a yearly tax of 1 per cent; all from $3,000 to $10,000 a tax of 2 per cent; from $10,000 to $50,000 a tax of 7 per cent; from $50,000 to $100,000 a tax of 20 per cent, and all above $100,000 a tax of 50 per cent.
It is not true that the taxation of incomes is one of Henry George’s theories. And while it is true that Gideon J. Tucker did draw the bill now introduced by Senator Traphagen, it is not true that he is now in favor of it. He drew this bill and sent it to Albany more than a year ago. Since that time he has considered the whole subject more carefully, and we have his personal authority for stating that he is now opposed to an income tax, and in favor of concentrating all taxation upon land values. Judge Tucker is not alone in this change of opinion. The increased attention given to the subject of taxation all over the country is leading thousands of men to see that a more equitable distribution of wealth, which was all that commended a graduated income tax to their minds, can be secured far more easily, certainly, and fully by concentrating all taxation upon land values.
There is a good deal at first sight to commend an income tax as compared with most of the taxes by which our public revenues are raised, and which, falling upon men according to what they consume, bear with greatest weight upon those whose expenditures are necessarily greatest in proportion to their earnings. Our import and excise duties, our license taxes, our taxes on buildings and improvements and on capital in all its forms, besides having other great disadvantages, all fall ultimately upon the poor far more heavily than upon the rich, and so tend to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and to impoverish the many. An income tax such as Judge Tucker a year ago was in favor of would, if it could be collected with anything like fairness, have the advantage of reversing this tendency and making the weight of taxation tell toward the equalization instead of toward the concentration of wealth. It is idle to attempt to get at the rich by taxing capital. Taxes upon capital in any of its forms are ultimately thrown upon producers, but by means of a tax on incomes, if it could be fairly collected, the rich
p. 4, col. 4 could be made to contribute in something like proportion to their wealth.
But it is impossible to fairly collect an income tax. This arises from the impossibility of ascertaining incomes. The salary paid to an employe of any kind, or the income which is a matter of record, such as annuities paid by trust companies, or the incomes of widows and orphans derived through an executor, can generally be ascertained for purposes of taxation, but it is impossible even by the most inquisitorial devices to ascertain with any certainty the incomes of business men, speculators and capitalists having large investments.
An income tax could only be fairly collected where all men were so scrupulously honest that they could be relied on to give a correct return of their incomes to the assessor. But as the temptation to evade the tax by subterfuge, by falsehood or by perjury, if necessary, increases in proportion to the amount of the income, and as the difficulties of any independent ascertainment of the income similarly increase, the income tax in effect proves to be a net through which the big fish swim while the little ones are caught.
Our own experience during the days of the war income tax, as well as the experience of other countries, shows that an income tax always falls heaviest on the poorest class of those subjected to it. Even a graduated income tax, such as is proposed in the bill introduced by Senator Traphagen, would fail in its purpose. Clerks, teachers, bookkeepers, clergymen, superintendents, etc., might be made to pay one per cent. upon their incomes, but instead of the state getting fifty per cent of the incomes above $100,000, the certainty is that, with few exceptions, it would not get one-half of one per cent., if it got anything at all.
This would be true even if the income tax were levied by the United States government, as was our income tax during the war; but an income tax levied by a single state could so easily be evaded by mere change of residence to another state that should Senator Traphagen’s bill become law we should not have a rich man who could be caught by the tax left as a resident of New York. Men of such moderate means that they could not afford to change their residence would alone be compelled to pay.
There is another way in which an income tax works unfairness. It may compel some men to pay even more than the law contemplates that they should. A business man may have had no income at all during the year. Yet because it might be dangerous to his credit to have this known, he might in some cases be tempted to make a false return, and to pay a tax upon an income he did not receive. The rich man who really has a large income need not care how small his income appears on the official lists, but the man who is struggling to keep up appearances is timid about anything which might suggest his real condition.
But even if an income tax could be honestly assessed and honestly collected, it would still be unequal. A man who is in the receipt of a steady income of five thousand dollars a year from ground rents is in reality a very much richer man than a man who receives five thousand dollars in one year from a business which may yield him nothing the next, or than a man whose income derived from his own labor will cease with sickness or old age or death.
And beyond all this a tax upon incomes involves the same vicious principle as do all taxes upon the products of labor, and operates to check the incentives to industry and thrift. If a man can increase his income by adding to the production of wealth or by making himself more serviceable to his fellows, it is neither just nor wise in the state to tax him for having done so. If he can make a large income by appropriating the results of the labor of others, the proper way to deal with him is not to tax his income, but to remove the conditions that make it possible for him to grow rich at others’ expense.
The true principle of taxation is that men should be called on to pay not on what they u se, what they earn, or what they accumulate, but upon what they are permitted to hold of that which justly belongs to all. And taxation of this kind, that is to say taxation levied upon land values, irrespective of use or improvement, would not only be the fairest of all taxes, but the one which could be most easily collected, and which is least liable to evasion.
WHAT IT COSTS TO SAVE SOCIETY.
Mr. Chamberlain Ivins, who may be assumed to know whereof he speaks, has been making public some interesting figures regarding the expenses of elections in New York city, and the sources from which the money to pay them is 31?
According to Mr. Ivins, the cost to the city treasury of the last election was over $600,000, of which nearly $300,000 was for legitimate expense, as r sic of polling places, etc., while the rest was, under various pretexts, distributed among the district leaders of the democratic and republican parties. “Not less than $750,000,” says Mr. Ivins, “was invested in the same way among political captains, heelers and hangers on.”
The market prices of nominations are also quoted by Mr. Ivins. City clerks and registers, it appears, are in brisk demand at $15,000 to $40,000; supreme court judges, fair to middling, are easy at $15,000 each; mayors are active at $20,000; senators are quoted at $30,000, with a downward tendency; aldermen are dull at $12,000; sheriffs lively at $20,000, and district attorneys somewhat inquired for at $5,000 each. Mr. Ivins’ list embraces other quotations, but those given are sufficient to show the general tendency of the market.
Truly it costs money to Save Society. No wonder Mayor Grace should cry aloud in bitterness of heart that the quotations have “reached such figures that only rich
p. 4, col. 5 men, or men backed by friends who have good or corrupt motives, can afford to run for office,” or that in view of the rapidly rising market he should pathetically complain that “the great disgrace is that it excludes from office all men in moderate circumstances who are unwilling to accept the assistance of friends.”
We have some curiosity to know, by the way, on what terms a man in moderate circumstances, who wants to buy a nomination, and is “willing” to accept the assistance of friends, can obtain that assistance.
Three “labor bills” have been signed by the president during the past week. One is the act prohibiting the importation of foreign labor under contract. The bill is of a kind which easily finds favor in congress, for as a law it can have very little effect, if any, and demagogues in both houses can make cheap capital for their party out of a vote for it. There is but little need for employers to make contracts in Europe with workmen and bring them here. Those who want to hire European laborers can engage them through the labor contractors of this city, who have their offices chiefly in Greenwich street. The contractors send word to the men or to agents abroad that situations are awaiting a certain number of persons in a given occupation on their arrival in this country. The men frequently have their passage paid in whole or in part by the agents, and as soon as they reach Castle Garden they are directed where to look for the places which they are expected to fill. As no contract is made in such a transaction, no law is violated. The second “labor measure” approved by the president prohibits the performance of contract labor by prisoners convicted of violating United States laws. As an example to the state legislatures, the law has its merits. The third provides that workmen employed by the day in any department of the national government shall be paid for holidays on which work is suspended. This is a good thing for the men employed on government work, and by making such places more desirable will increase the power of political patronage; but it will do nothing whatever for workingmen at large. Congress and the state legislatures might go on passing such bills as these for a hundred years without in the slightest degree improving the conditions of labor or in any wise arresting the tendency which is filling the land with tramps.
Yet that this is all congress can find to do for labor is hardly the fault of congress. Just such “two-penny” measures as these are about all that the spokesmen of the labor organizations have asked. Up to this time the trouble with most of the active men in the labor organizations is that they have felt that they ought to go into politics, without knowing what to do when they get there. But more definite ideas are fast making their way among the working masses, Everywhere it sic beginning to be perceived that the land question is the heart of the labor question, and that the road to the emancipation of labor lies in the sweeping away of all indirect taxes and the throwing open to labor of natural opportunities by such taxation of land values as will make it unprofitable for any one to hold land that he is not putting to its full use. Before long this growing sentiment will begin to tell on congress and on our state legislatures.
Congressmen, as law makers, certainly ought not to be law breakers. That they are such in many ways is well known, but rarely, if ever, have we seen so bold a justification of such conduct as is found in the Tribune in an article complaining of the delay in reporting appropriation bills. It says:
Those who control action in the house, of whom Mr. Randall is in this matter the chief, have had some excuse. They have desired to prevent unwise action on the tariff and on other matters. Being in a minority, the only way in which they could thwart the will of the free trade majority has been to hold back appropriation bills long enough to block the road when dangerous legislation was attempted.
The house has no more imperative duty than that of providing the necessary funds for the necessary expenses of the government. Its refusal to make any appropriations would be a revolutionary act that would bring government to a standstill. Yet here we have one of the organs of the saviors of society openly commending a minority for taking the risk of such a failure for the avowed purpose of “thwarting the will” of a majority. The readiness of the professed friends of law and order to resort to such expedients does more to weaken the authority of law, destroy faith in democratic institutions and to prepare the way for the overthrow of government than all the ravings of avowed anarchists could accomplish in a score of years. The really disorderly classes are those who seek to rule a democratic republic in defiance of the will of the people. Yet it might be instructive to consider to what extent and how the great American people would suffer if all the appropriation bills failed, and all the government employes were to stop work.
We commend to the special attention of Postmaster General Vilas, who, we believe, has at heart the efficient management of his important department, an article in another column stating the grievances of the letter 3233? of New York. Some of these grievances are beyond his redress, but he can certainly interfere to prevent by a few salutary removals the petty tyrannies of which the men complain. If, on the contrary, a democratic administration thinks it within the province of a district superintendent to forbid government employes to join labor organizations, it is time that voters should know it.
We are inclined to think that the management of the New York postoffice needs a thorough overhauling, and we suggest to Mr. Vilas that he send somebody here in whose energy and integrity he has
p. 4, col. 6 personal confidence, to make an examination of how business is done in all its departments. Complaints come to us from subscribers in various parts of the country that THE STANDARD does not reach them until a day or two days after it is due. This could hardly happen if the New York office was properly administered.
A correspondent of the Herald, interviewing a high German official, called attention to the enormous growth of the socialistic vote. The official thought that need give Prince Bismarck no alarm. “Why,” he continued, “if an outbreak came, these men would be forced to aid in shooting down their own comrades. If they refused to fire they would be instantly shot.”
Here in a nutshell is the secret by which a few men, no wiser, no braver, no stronger than ordinary men, are enabled to lord it over great nations and to set, whenever they choose, hundreds of thousands of men who have no quarrel with each other to cutting each other’s throats and laying waste each other’s homes. And here in a nutshell is the reason why workingmen should set their faces like flint against standing armies. Standing armies have ever been the great enslavers of mankind, The sic of New York, Boston and San Francisco would be of less permanent disaster to the republic than the passage of the system of bills intended to begin here a great war establishment.
To him who has eyes to see, nothing can be plainer than that the great Nineteenth century revolution has already begun, and that modern civilization every day draws nearer to that struggle which must either raise it to a higher plane or overthrow it. Most picturesque and most significant was the great gathering of the poverty-stricken masses of London in the great national cathedral of the metropolis last Sunday, and Hyndman and his fellows of the democratic federation could have desired no demonstration more effective as a means of propaganda and none more portentous to the system which crushes a thousand into pauperism to raise one to unwholesome wealth. Think of what is involved in this defiling of tens of thousands of pinched and stunted Englishmen into the grand temple erected at national expense to a just and merciful God.
When the underclothed, underfed, overworked millions actually begin to realize that they, too, are really the children of “Our Father which art in Heaven,” then the rule, of those who claim sic earth as theirs draws near its close.
As the Real Estate Record and Guide says, there is something absurd about the two parties in the New York legislature refusing to unite on some plan for a constitutional convention for fear that one or the other party will have the upper hand in it. Any change in the constitution or new assertion of principles cannot, if such change is made at the instance of one of the two big parties, harm either one. Such changes will be made by rascals for rascals, and the party which has the biggest voting power in the state will, in the future, get the advantage, not the party which happens to be able to control this convention. But beyond all this we would like some one to tell us what difference there is anyhow between the two old parties as to constitutional principles. The truth is that the corporations (and Archbishop Corrigan) who control both the democratic and the republican machines do not want a convention, and hope to defeat it under the excuse of irreconcilable differences among their henchmen.
W. A. A. CARSEY as chairman and J. J. Condon and J. W. Keogh as secretaries of the “Anti-monopoly league of the state of New York” are distributing in cities where there is political agitation a circular in which a column of comments, printed parallel with one containing the declaration of principles of the Knights of Labor, is employed to show that the democratic party of New York has enacted into law every plank but one in the knights’ platform that can be affected by state laws. Hence the signers assert that the claims of the democratic party to be “the friend and champion of the rights of the working people” are justified. There is little shrewdness shown in the employment of these men to plead a party’s cause with organized workingmen. They are not members of any labor organization; they have been ruled out of the State workingmen’s assembly, and their names have been bandied about in every party and every hall as self-constituted leaders who hold their influence on sale. So intangible is this influence that workingmen have ceased to resent their assumption of being possessed of any, but merely regard with amusement their remarkable effrontery and their successive alliances with aspiring but not wily politicians.
A Double-Barreled Rifle.
[Set in two parallel small-type columns, side by side:]
> [left] Albany, March 2.—Gov. Hill to-day sent in the nomination of ex-Senator Arkell of Canajoharie to be railroad commissioner.
[right] From the Albany Evening Journal, March 2.—“The Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, president of the N. Y. C. & H. R. R. R., was yesterday the guest of Senator James Arkell, and last evening delivered a lecture in Canajoharie.”
The Tariff Movement in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia Record.
> Whilst our five representatives in congress are doing their level best to maintain war taxes and to prevent resumption of commerce interrupted by the war, there is a wonderful change taking place in the tone and the temper of the merchants and manufacturers of Philadelphia. It is no longer a species of political treason to discuss the necessity for tariff changes. It is done with somewhat bated breath; but it is done. Conviction, in hundreds of cases, has had its perfect work: only an indefensible regard for consistency and a pride of past opinion stand in the way of outspoken advocacy of tariff reform. There are thousands of old-time protectionists in Philadelphia who are protectionists no longer. They perceive that there is nothing to be accomplished by a policy of restriction but a competitive strife between overgrown infant industries as to which shall eat the other up. What we now want is a free foot to do in the world something commensurate with our place in it and with our natural resources.
A Losing Fight.
San Francisco Argonaut.
> The fight which Rome—with all its power, its splendid organization, its wealth, prestige and political influence—is making against this one poor American priest, is a losing one. A hundred Romes on seven thousand hills can not successfully contend against this one American priest, because the priest is right and Rome sic wrong
Page 5 of 8contents
THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887. 5
p. 5, col. 1
THE WEEK.
The beer trade of New York and vicinity is mainly in the hands of sixty-four brewers, whose manufactories have a capacity of 4,000,000 barrels per annum. In an agreement which they formed last fall there was a section providing that the discount on a barrel of beer, which sells at eight dollars, would after Nov. 1 be but five per cent to those retailers who should change their brewers, but that it should otherwise remain at the percentage which had been previously agreed upon between a brewer and a customer. In the eyes of the retailers this was a notification that they could change their brewer only at the cost of a loss of ten per cent discount, as fifteen per cent had been the general rate of deduction. The members of the brewers’ pool had so apportioned the sales in the New York market that it mattered not to them whose beer was sold, as the profits to each would remain the same, a member of the pool selling more than his allowance being required to deposit two dollars per barrel in the treasury of the combination, and one disposing of less than his quantity being paid two dollars. Since the pool agreement went into effect more than 2,000 retailers have decided to fight the monopoly, and on Tuesday the members of their organization posted notices in their saloons that they would sell no pool beer. There are six New York breweries, with a capacity of 300,000 barrels a year, not in the pool, and beer can also be supplied to the retailers at a low cost by out of town firms. Aside from the saloons owned by members of the retailers’ association, there are thousands managed by men whose places are mortgaged to the brewers—in other words, they work for the brewers on wages proportioned to their sales, while the brewers hold the saloons by the safest form of ownership. In the beer trade competition has merged into combination, and the monopoly controls the “trust” for its own benefit.
The United States senate, after prolonged delay, has confirmed the appointment of Daniel Magone as collector of this port. The delay has caused much speculation among city politicians, many of whom have hoped for Magone’s rejection. [He is a sic democrat, with but little affiliation with the local factions, and the bosses say that he does not take good care of the workers.
Mayor Hewitt tells a Herald reporter that there is but one labor organization to which he is opposed, and that is the Knights of Labor. He says that the knights are seeking the destruction of individual freedom for personal ends, ana that they can sic and will be put down. This is interesting reading for those Knights of Labor who voted for Mr. Hewitt last fall.
The legislative committee that investigated the recent strikes have recommended a bill making it unlawful for corporations to agree together to limit the production of fuel or food. This reads well, but as a law it would be a dead letter. Corporations can limit the production of fuel and food without getting into any legal tangle so long as they are allowed to own the source of supply. The truth is that this clause is put in the bill merely to draw away attention from another clause, the real purpose of the bill, which makes it unlawful by any mandate “to prevent the free, voluntary labor of a person of suitable age for any employer he may choose.” Under that provision, if a trade union voted to strike, and its proper officer ordered its members out, there is at least one judge in this state who would not hesitate to construe the order as an unlawful mandate. There is a pretense in the bill of excepting such a case. It provides that the clause “shall not prevent united sic by peaceful means for a grievance common to all seeking redress.” This would be construed to permit employes in an establishment to unite with one another to redress a grievance there, but to prohibit other men uniting with them. The bill is an attack on trade unions. If it passes they will be outlawed.
Assemblymen John Martin and M. F. Collins, as a minority of the coal strike investigating committee, have submitted a report. They “believe in the wise and judicious organization of sic,” and that the more perfect the organization the better the results in education and in the settlement of labor disputes. This was shown, they hold, in the late strike; for what would have degenerated ten years ago into a riot was conducted in a peaceable and orderly manner. They recommend the extension of the powers of the state board of arbitration embodied in the senate bill, and an act declaring any combination of dealers, producers or carriers of fuel or food a conspiracy.
Monopoly had more than one legal inning last week. In New York Arthur Swinton Brunswick, founder of the messenger boys’ union, was arrested, charged with conspiracy by the manager of the American district telegraph company. Edward Goldsmith and Ed. [I.?] Farrell gave bail for him, and the hearing in his case was set down for next week.
In the case of the Old Dominion Steamship company against certain Knights of Labor to recover damages, Judge Brown of the United States court handed down his decision denying the motion to discharge the defendants from arrest, and holding that workingmen who combine to raise wages by boycotting may be sued for any damages they cause. In this suit the Knights of Labor will now put in their answers and go to trial.
The supreme court of Connecticut has decided the case of the New Haven Journal and Courier boycott against the men. The superior court had convicted them of conspiracy and they appealed to the supreme court. They will now be sentenced.
The republican members of the New York assembly refused last week to pass a resolution providing for an investigation of the charges of bribery in the recent senatorial contest. Their choice was probably as to whether they should continue to rest under suspicion or be convicted.
The forty-ninth congress adjourned on Friday. The week has been spent in hurrying through the greatly delayed appropriation bills, and at one time there was a prospect that their failure would compel the calling of an extra session. Senator Edmunds, determined to have some sort of retaliatory legislation passed, persistently obstructed the appropriations until he had accomplished his object, and a bill was passed which authorizes the president to restrict importations from Canada by sea. The disagreement between the two houses on this question illustrates the subserviency of the senate to railway influences. The house bill allowed the president to stop all importation, but the senate insisted on an amendment permitting unrestricted importation by railway.
One of Mr. Van Wyck’s last acts as a senator was to make a speech in favor of electing senators by popular vote. He would have come more near to representing the public opinion of the future if he had prepared to do away with them altogether.
On Friday of last week Mr. Page was sworn in as a member of the forty-ninth congress for Rhode Island, in place of Mr. Pierce, who was unseated because not legally elected. The seat has been vacant for a long time, and though the new incumbent could only occupy it for a week, he will be able to draw from the United States treasury the salary and perquisites of a two years’ term.
p. 5, col. 2 Such a thing would be impossible were it not that congressmen have been more careful to take care of their own than of the public interest. Mr. Page is a democrat, the first elected to congress from Rhode Island for many years.
In the course of the discussion of the Pacific railway investigation in the senate last week Mr. Hoar insinuated that the New York daily papers are edited with a view to bulling or bearing stocks, and Mr. McPherson retorted that no other agency on earth had done so much in that way as the judiciary committee of the senate. Both were probably right.
The legislature of West Virginia adjourned without electing a senator. The Standard oil and railroad combination purchased a few republican votes for Camden, but party feeling for once proved of use, and the outcry of their constituents prevented the delivery of other republican votes confidently expected by Camden. The general appropriation bill was not passed, and the governor will call an extra session. He has offered the vacant United States senatorship for that state to D. B. Lucas, one of the independent democrats who bolted Camden’s nomination. Mr. Lucas has accepted and will receive his credentials after March 4. This open defiance of the Standard oil company and railroad influence by the governor will probably bring matters to a crisis in that state.
There was a republican break in the joint ballot for United States senator in the New Jersey legislature last Tuesday, and several votes hitherto cast for Sewell were scattered. Several republicans voted for Bedle, a democratic railway attorney, but the expected rush of democrats did not take place. On Wednesday the republicans and bolting democrats voted for Rufus Blodgett, democrat, and he was elected. He is superintendent of the Long Branch railroad and a thorough corporation man.
Gen. J. J. Finley has been appointed by the governor United States senator from Florida, to succeed Jones, whose term expired March 4. Jones is probably crazy, as he has remained in Detroit for over a year without appearing in the senate.
The new senate will stand thirty-nine republicans to thirty-seven democrats; but Riddleberger, counted as a republican, is expected to make a tie vote every now and then.
Judge Gresham on Monday last, at Indianapolis, released one Perkins, who had been committed for contempt because he refused to testify before a United States commissioner who was hearing charges of bribery against some local politicians charged with the forgery of election returns for local offices. The proceedings were begun before the commissioner under the decision of Judge Blodgett of Chicago in the Mackin case, that “because a congressman had been voted for at the same election the federal court had jurisdiction, although the result of the vote for county officers was involved in the forgery.” Judge Woods of the district court, on appeal, took the same ground. In his opinion Judge Gresham says: “Such an assumption is neither good law nor good sense, and as the vote for congressman was not in question at all the commissioner had no jurisdiction, and Perkins is discharged. The decision is of interest to workingmen in view of recent attempts to utilize United States judges to secure strained decisions against labor organizations and of the disposition of monopolist organs to boast that federal judges holding life positions”are beyond the reach of popular clamor.”
The folly into which attempts to tax personal property lead people is shown by a Louisiana law imposing a tax on Pullman railway cars entering that state. If the law had been sustained the result would probably have been the exclusion of sleeping cars from Louisiana. The United States circuit court at New Orleans has just decided that such a tax is illegal.
Leonard Swett, counsel for the condemned anarchists, presented to the supreme court at Ottawa, Ill., on Wednesday, a brief, in which he pleads for a reversal of the judgment. Mr. Swett, who was an early abolitionist, parallels his clients’ case with that of John Brown and the other radicals in ante bellum times. Of the republican party of those days he says: “The most radical of its leaders characterized the constitution of the United States as ‘a league with hell.’ Underground railroads were everywhere established, leading from Mason and Dixon’s line to Canada, and people conspired, contrary to the constitution and laws, to aid and abet the slave in his escape. If there had been no republican party there would have been no John Brown’s raid, and, therefore, all republicans who made speeches and believed in the Utopian idea of a change in society for the benefit of a class were like the anarchists, and were particeps criminis with old John Brown and ought to be hanged.” It will be remembered that the principal reason for the condemnation of the Chicago anarchists was that they were members of an organization which fostered the ideas that led to the bomb-throwing.
P. D. Armour of Chicago is organizing a new cotton seed oil trust in opposition to the old one, and owing to this and to other things prices in the old shares have tumbled. It is generally believed that Armour’s scheme is a job to bring about such a result, and that in the end there will be but one company. Whether there shall be one or two the cotton planters and the oil consumers will eventually have to pay the costs of this warfare.
The quarrel between the politicians in Indiana has culminated in a small civil war. Mr. Robertson (republican), who claims to be lieutenant governor, undertook last week to force his way to the chair of the presiding officer of the senate. He was forcibly ejected by order of the democratic majority and there was a prospect at one time of a rough and tumble fight. One republican senator sat down so hard with the assistance of a democratic doorkeeper that the chair broke and both men fell to the floor.
One of the most significant of the numerous demonstrations recently made by the unemployed of London was that of last Sunday, when the working people, under the lead of Mr. Hyndman, attended St. Paul’s cathedral. Notice of their coming had been given and thousands of policemen were stationed in and around the building. The lord mayor and the aldermen were in their civic chairs and a small congregation of the usual worshipers occupied the front seats. Back of these, filling all the remaining space, were two thousand roughly dressed men. The socialists, who managed tne sic, had sent a request to the archbishop of Canterbury to be present and preach from the text, “Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor.” This request was disregarded, and the archdeacon of St. Paul’s preached from Proverbs xxii., 2, “The rich and poor meet together, the Lord is the maker of them all.” Cable dispatches say that “the socialists behaved better than was expected.” The text was received with some cries of “bravo” and subsequently a remark of the archdeacon that there must ever be rich and poor was met by groans of dissent. Otherwise the services were uninterrupted.
Outside the cathedral the scene was remarkable. The various bodies of socialists marched to the church, many of them headed by brass bands playing the “Marseillaise.” Leading one body there marched a hundred
p. 5, col. 3 miserable, ragged children from the Clerkenwell district. As the various organizations appeared they were greeted with the ringing of bells and shouts of applause from the immense throng of people, many of them well dressed, who had gathered about the cathedral. The crowd is variously estimated at from 30,000 to 50,000. It was orderly, and good natured. Held aloft over the grand entrance of the cathedral was a red banner, bearing the inscription, “Landlords and capitalists, My home is a home of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” In the procession were numerous banners bearing such inscriptions as these:
“We seek not revenge, but justice.”
“We will have work or bread.”
“By heavens, our rights are worth fighting for.”
“I was a-hungered and ye gave me no meat; naked and ye clothed me not.”
“Not to be a slave is to dare and die.”
“Work for all; overwork for none.”
“Feed my lambs.”
“Justice and liberty or death.”
Canon Gregory held a service on the steps of the cathedral for the benefit of those outside, but the noise was too great for satisfaction, and he and his assistants soon retired.
The disagreement of the jury in the case of Dillon, O’Brien, Redmond and others for asserting “the plan of campaign” was a surprise to the government. The fact that even the Protestants on the jury were divided is especially alarming to the tories. The government asserts that the accused will be tried again in April, but the announcement is received with incredulity.
A much more exciting trial would be that of Archbishop Croke, a rumor of which was printed in the London evening papers on Monday. The charge is advocating the non-payment of taxes. William Johnson, the Orange leader, asked what the government intends doing concerning the archbishop. Sir Michael Hicks Beach answered that they were considering the matter. The Parnellites received the reply with derisive laughter. No one believes that even tories are stupid enough to venture on a persecution of the most beloved of Irish prelates.
Remarks by Lord Salisbury indicate that the currency commission will report strongly against bi-metalism and in favor of the single gold standard. Until the English people really govern no change in the conditions that help the rich can be looked for.
An investigation of a great scandal has been ordered by the house of commons. The charge is that the corporation of London has illegally spent $100,000 in hiring people to attend mass meetings called to protest against the bill for the reform of the city government. This is worthy of Tammany in its palmiest days.
On Tuesday rumors were rife tc the sic that Bismarck would demand Boulanger’s dismissal as Commander-in-Chief of the French army. Later reports declared this to be false. Premier Goblet, in Paris, said to a New York Staats Zeitung reporter that, while the election results in Alsace-Lorraine were complimentary to France, the French government had no idea of taking advantage of the dissatisfaction there to precipitate war. He said Boulanger would, in the end, be honored by France and Germany alike. As to the patriotic league in France Goblet said that it was already disrupted and Bismarck knew it. Other reports show that Prince Bismarck has pursued a despotic course in Alsace, where the people voted against him. Societies have been disbanded, and the people humiliated. The supplementary elections show that the national liberals and radicals have united everywhere to defeat the socialists. Berlin returns four radicals, and, as formerly reported, two socialists—all opposed to the 34. The radicals (new German liberals), who were so badly beaten in the first vote, have done well in the supplementary elections.
HE WANTS TO KNOW!
Will the “Herald” Be Kind Enough to Tell Him?
The Herald, in an editorial expression of its sympathy for the starving crofters of Scotland, 35?
We can at least thank God for America, where these caste privileges do not prevail, where “a man’s a man for a’ that,” and where, for the present, at any rate, there is so much land that socialism has no reason to grumble and the poorest may have a farm for the asking.
Well, I want a farm. I am perfectly willing to ask for it, and all I want to know is, Whom shall I ask?
I am not greedy. I don’t want much of a farm. I don’t want a farm that anybody else is using. I shall not interfere with or disturb anybody; but just go right along, put up a little house for my family and do my best to make a living by the exercise of such modest strength and talents as it has pleased God to bestow on me.
The farm I have selected is situated on Manhattan island, at the intersection of West 129th street and Seventh avenue. It measures about a quarter of an acre. The soil is not particularly fertile; but as it has been lying fallow since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, it will probably raise fairish crops for a year or two at least. At present it is principally used as a receptacle for empty tomato cans and as a stamping ground for cats.
Will the Herald aid a respectable American citizen in his pursuit of happiness by telling me with what person, corporation, or authority I must file my application for this farm? Also in what form must the application be made, and how soon can I obtain possession?
I make these inquiries thus publicly because there are to my knowledge quite a number of decent, hard-working men who are anxious to select and settle on farms in this vicinity so soon as they can learn what little formalities are necessary to be observed in the matter. I make it, too, because I feel that I am the representative of a class whose condition is analogous to that of the Scotchmen with whom the Herald sympathizes so keenly. I am a sort of American crofter, as it were.
I was born here, in the city of New York, the descendant of a line of New Yorkers. I have just as much attachment to the place of my birth as any Scotchman can possibly have to this. I want to live here and to bring up my family here, and I find myself unable to do so, for the same reason exactly that lies at the bottom of the Scotchman’s trouble, because I can’t get land to live on. The only difference is that in Scotland the land is being turned into deer parks, while here the tendency seems to be toward cat preserves.
I reject as unworthy of a thinking mind the idea that when the Herald tells me I can have a farm for the asking, it means a farm in Dakota or Alaska, because if that were what the Herald meant it couldn’t, in the very nature of things, have any more sympathy for the Scotch crofters than for me. It would be just as easy for the Scotchman to go to Dakota or Alaska as for me to do so, and he would have just the same privilege of land-getting after he got there that I should. The Herald sympathizes with the Scotchman because he wants a farm right there, in Scotland, where he was born, and it tells me, in effect, that my condition is happier by contrast because I can get a farm right here where I was born by asking for it.
All right. I have selected my farm and I ask for it publicly. Will the Herald please advise me what to do next?
T. L. MCCREADY.
p. 5, col. 4
ANSWERS TO QUERIES.
Cheap Farms for City Workers.
NEW YORK, Feb. 14.—What prevents unemployed laborers from entering upon agricultural pursuits now? I know of available farms to be sold for a song, and farms to be cheaply rented for money or on shares. Why are not these opportunities used? Persons engaged in charitable work inform me that it is almost impossible to induce the poor to leave the city. Poverty stricken men and women are furnished good positions in the country, but within a month they return to the city to renew the old struggle. Charitable organizations assert that this is a most exasperating feature of their work, which leads me to think that even though land nationalization should be accomplished, our underpaid and suffering laborers would refuse to become farmers. Nevertheless, I believe you are morally right and must succeed.
FRANK L. COLGATE.
If land were nationalized city workers would not, as a rule, become farmers. But men who are farmers, both employers and hands, would, if idle land were made free by taxing land values and abolishing all other taxes, which is what we assume you mean by land nationalization, get much more for their work than they get now, and set in motion a wave of prosperity that would be felt all along the line of labor. Every farm hand who left land already under cultivation to cultivate adjoining free land, either for himself or another, would not only improve his own wages but also those of city workers. Nor would it be necessary for any city worker to take his old place. It would be filled as a displacement in water is filled; not by a supply from a distance, but from the neighborhood. The effect of his resort to free land would be felt everywhere without any greater displacement of labor at any point than was involved in his climbing the fence that separated the land in use from the land out of 37?
It is not to the entry of unemployed city laborers upon agricultural pursuits that we must look for relief. The great 36 is that labor of all kinds and wherever located, shall have elbow room; that there shall be a constant local demand for workers; and that the workers’ product shall not be diminished by private taxes, nor even by a public tax, except what he may pay to the public for a privilege such as the exclusive right to use valuable land. This is to be accomplished not alone by opening idle agricultural land to use, but also by encouraging the most productive uses of all land and collecting into a common fund the value of such as has value. The erection of a city house or the working of a mine opens avenues of employment—makes elbow room for labor—and tends to improve the condition of all workers, as well as would the shifting of city laborers to distant farms, and that does not, as this often does, involve the displacement of local labor.
But available farms are not cheap. When you speak of farms to be sold for a song or cheaply rented, you do not mean relatively to their productiveness but to the value of more productive farms. He who buys or rents a cheap farm will get a scanty living. Were it otherwise the farm would not be cheap. Wages are the difference between the value of the products and the value of the opportunity; and as they are, all things considered, nearly the same thing everywhere, the cost or rent of a farm advertises its productiveness. For example, if wages are 10, a farm worth a rental of 20 produces 30, while one renting for only 5 produces but 15. It is therefore on an average immaterial whether labor resorts to the dearer or to the cheaper opportunity. This, together with the facts that the change from city life and occupation to country life and farming is radical, and that they have not the “song” to give, deters city workingmen from investing “songs” in farms.
The reason that proteges of charitable institutions abandon “good” positions in the country to renew the old struggle in the city is that the positions are not good. A sense of exile, entire change of occupation, domestic drudgery, poor pay, and many other things which must be experienced to be understood, may make the position that appears good to the philanthropist exceedingly undesirable to the object of his charity. The “position” of convict in a well-managed penitentiary is “good” compared to the misery that thousands suffer in our tenement districts; but who so poor that he would sic leave it and resume his struggle in the city.
Throw open the idle land that lies all around, and charitable organizations will no longer be exasperated by the “ungrateful” conduct of poor workingmen. Then everybody will be able to get work without extreme change of employment, or becoming an exile, or soliciting work as a charity.
Land and Cattle.
CHICAGO, Feb. 20.—In answering a correspondent who asked how cattle could justly be private property if land was not, since neither is a product of human labor, you say “land is limited; cattle may be multiplied indefinitely.” This is unsatisfactory. The owner of a farm can, by good tillage, irrigation, manuring and so on, make his farm more productive and thereby increase and multiply the land precisely as the owner of cattle can by labor increase and multiply his stock.
IN THE DARK.
The answer referred to was in these words: “Land is limited; cattle may be multiplied indefinitely. Land is essential to human life; cattle are not. Cattle would disappear from civilization but for human labor, while the surface of the earth and all it contains would be the same if human labor ceased.” You not only select a single clause of this answer, as if that embodied the whole, but also treat the statement that land is limited as if it meant limited in productiveness instead of in area.
The owner of a farm may increase its productiveness, but he cannot increase its area, and if he increase its productiveness the increase belongs not to the category of land, but to that of improvements, and would, on the plan proposed in “Progress and Poverty,” be exempt from taxation. The farm owner does not increase the land, as you assert. What he does, and it is true that he does that precisely as the cattle owner increases his stock, is to increase his capital. The value of this capital, which may readily be determined by comparing the market value of his improved land with the value of unimproved land that offers equal natural and social advantages, is his private property just as, and for the same reason that, cattle are the private property of the cattle breeder; but the value of the land itself, irrespective of improvements, the value of the natural opportunity without which there could be no improvement, belongs of right to the whole people. The unyielding limitation of land surface, by limiting natural opportunities, clearly distinguishes property in land from property in cattle.
But not only is land limited, while cattle may be multiplied indefinitely, but land is essential to human life, while cattle are not, and its existence does not depend on labor, while the supply of cattle does. Careless critics are apt to confuse the latter distinction, as you have the first. It occurs to them that as labor cannot create a cow any more than it can create an acre of land, one is as much a gift of nature as the other. They forget or do not know that creation is not involved in human labor. Labor creates nothing; it only produces or brings forth. It gives direction to the forces of nature and shape to matter, producing cattle or grain, iron or lumber, clothing or shelter, as it may determine; but in every case the source of its product is the land. The product is rightfully individual property until through the inevitable processes of nature it returns to its source; but the source itself no man can exclusively own
p. 5, col. 5 without depriving others of their equal right to the enjoyment of its bounty.
There is the same distinction between property in the soil and property in cattle that there is between property in air and property in tame pigeons, or property in the sea and property in fish taken from the sea. You may suppose that a fisherman who by a judicious use of bait makes extraordinary catches, has increased and multiplied the sea, but no one except a few editors who are looking into industrial questions with their eyes shut will agree with you.
Cattle are produced by labor as truly as is clothing or food. But there is no such thing as producing land; there is nothing to produce it from.
Compensation for Abandoned Buildings.
BROOKLYN, Feb. 14.—Suppose I own a home, and the land becomes so valuable that I cannot afford, merely for a home, to pay the proposed land value tax, would I be compensated for the building upon abandoning the land to business uses.
VICTOR.
This question presents a plausible objection to the land value tax because of the difficulty of comprehending the great change in conditions that such a tax would bring about. We are apt to imagine the tax as operating in conditions as they are and not as they would be. Knowing that land values take sudden leaps, making homes give way to business, it seems, as you intimate, that a tax based on the value of land would confiscate the home owner’s building; but these sudden leaps in land values are mainly due to the present system which encourages speculation and locks up land. If land values were taxed so as to discourage the holding of vacant land, values would rise gradually, spreading outward from centers with the spread of population. In such circumstance your case would hardly, if ever, occur, so as to be a hardship. You could move the building intact, or tear it down and use the materials; or if it was suitable for the use of your successor, it could be appraised and the value paid to you by him.
But if hard cases like this might occur, is that an argument against the proposed system of taxation? Has it not a great deal of the flavor of the Georgia deacon’s denunciation of abolitionists because they wanted to deprive the widow Smith of her solitary “nigger,” her only means of support? If you are of a statistical turn exhaust your imagination in figuring out the possible number of such cases, and compare that total with the number of men who by the present system are prevented from getting homes, added to those who, with every recurring business depression, are squeezed out of the homes they had.
It is not necessary, however, to consider the changed conditions which a land value tax would effect, nor to weigh actual hardships of the present system against possible hardships of the system proposed. This tax would, by raising wages and exempting consumers from taxation, so improve the condition and enhance the independence of every producer, that the case you suppose, while it might involve a loss, could not involve suffering. Of course, an ideal condition is one in which producers receive, retain and enjoy their products without diminution; and so long as the case supposed were possible, we should fall short of that ideal. But we shall be aiming at the ideal and get nearer to it if we lay all taxes on land values, even though somebody does once in a while have his house turned into second-hand building materials. Yet it is possible to avoid that. Public funds, realized from ground rents, would serve a better purpose than they serve in the pockets of landlords if applied to compensation for improvements in cases like yours.
Shall Big Capitalists Escape Taxation?
CLINTON, Miss., Feb. 16.—Your theory being to tax lands, and not personalty, in what manner would you reach bonds, hoarded money, manufactories, railroads (the rolling stock) and other corporations? It may happen that a man may hold government bonds; may have money and may hold railroad and other corporation stock and bonds, or may invest his money in merchandising or various other ways, and not own an acre of land. How do you propose to make these classes of our citizens bear their part of the burden of government?
W. B. SORSBY.
To tax land is not our theory. It is land values that we propose to tax, and to exempt not only personalty, but everything except land values. If this were done no one would pay taxes except those individuals who appropriate to their own use values that rightfully belong to all the people in common. Occupiers of land of no value would pay nothing; others would pay according to the value of the land they occupied.
We would not make any effort to reach bonds, hoarded money, manufactories or railroads. We do not believe it is right to tax these so long as there is a common property of sufficient value to bear all public burdens.
If bonds represent actual products they should be as free from taxation as the products themselves; if they represent fictitious values, and are therefore mere instruments for taxing some people for the benefit of others, as many corporation bonds and most government bonds are, they should be reached by another process than that of taxation. Some adaptation of the criminal law might be appropriate in the case of fraudulent corporation bonds.
There is no reason why hoarded money should be taxed. Money is only a medium of exchange, as useless when hoarded as an empty freight car on an abandoned railroad, and quite as harmless, unless bad money laws permit speculators to thrive by contracting and expanding the money volume. For this evil, however, the remedy is not to tax hoarded money, but to amend the bad currency laws. It is as senseless to tax a man’s hoarded money as to tax his Sunday boots.
And why should manufactories be taxed? Are they not products and instruments of labor? Have we too many manufactories, that we should reduce their number by taxation? Let us have all the factories that people are inclined to build and operate, and let us make it easy to build and operate them by abolishing all taxation on them and their products.
As to railroads, we believe that they, like all other highways, should be common property. But they are products of labor, and while private property should be free of taxes like other products, we should not impede the building and burden the operation of railroads by taxation.
Your fear that men who hoard money or invest in bonds, corporation stock or merchandise without owning an acre of land would escape their part of the burden of government is groundless. Every man, including bondholders and the like, has an equal interest in the land values of his community; and when taxes are paid out of those values the man who does not own land contributes as surely as the man who does. The taxes are paid from a common fund.
What troubles you is this: You notice that some people who have no landed investments are rich, while others who own land are poor, and you suppose that the land value tax would make the former richer and still more impoverish the latter. But the truth is that the inordinately rich, whether their wealth comes immediately from merchandising, stock or bond investments, or land, are indebted for most of it to the fact that natural opportunities are monopolized. Private ownership of land for use generates private ownership for speculation. That makes available land scarce
p. 5, col. 6 and gives rise to a class of men who are dependent on others for work. This produces a competition for employment that forces wages down. Thus out of the earnings of labor and at the expense of the laborer both the great capitalist and the great landlord are enriched without working. This is an evil. But the remedy is not to recognize the system of pillage, and levy a tax which would fall on the property of the producer as well as on the plunder of the monopolist. It is to go back to first principles, which teach that products of labor are rightfully private, and natural opportunities public property. Levy your tax on the value of the latter, and common values would go into a common treasury; natural opportunities, having no value, would be free, and the products of labor that have been already plundered would soon return to the earth whence they came. Under such a system of taxation no one could grow inordinately rich and no one could be rich in any degree except as the result of his own industry. The latter would be justly entitled, free of taxes, to all he had.
GOVERNMENT RAILROADS.
Shall Owners of Watered Stock be Compensated?
The first question to be met in the agitation for the acquirement by government of the means of transportation and tranmission of sic is, What will be the effect on investors, for no one is foolish enough to suppose the people would buy railroads and telegraphs at the price fixed by the corporations.
The primary object in granting public privileges is to benefit the community; and where a privilege is so abused as to be harmful, it is a duty to promptly recall it. We have never given up our right of eminent domain. We can take for the public use any species of property at an appraised valuation. Would it work a harm then to any one if, by due process of law, we should condemn the property of a railroad or telegraph company for public use, paying what it cost? The notion that prevails among eminent financiers whose center of gravity is the great gambling den known as the New York stock exchange, is that the value of a property is determined by its earning capacity, and if a corporation is earning more than a legitimate return upon its paid up capital or upon the face value of its issue of stock, the managers at once look around for ways and means to increase its indebtedness, and thus bring the return to its nominal capital within the limits prescribed by law. This process of swelling the bookkeeping indebtedness of corporations is called “stock watering.” If a corporation can get a larger return for the use of its actual capital than capital receives when engaged in other branches of industry this return is not really interest, but is taxation, it being wholly a return for monopoly. It is as natural for capital to seek the largest return for its use as it is for man to seek to gratify his desires with the least exertion, and any continuous increase of returns to capital in one undertaking over the returns in other undertakings is due to monopoly. Therefore if a corporation is so circumstanced (as were our elevated railroads) that the returns, not only to the capital paid in, but to the entire issue of capital stock, are so excessive, so far beyond the liberal limits allowed by law, that in order to confine such returns within “lawful” limits an issue of stock far beyond the actual cost of construction is required, we see at once that this stock represents no capital whatever, but simply the power, claimed by such corporation by virtue of its monopoly, to tax the people.
Monopoly, or the power of taxation, has never been consciously given by the people to any other corporation than the government, and it is clearly illegal for any corporation other than the government to levy and collect a tax. Stock watering or the issue of certificates of stock far in excess of the actual value of a corporation’s paid up capital or plant, is, therefore, an effort to capitalize a privilege, to demand a return for monopoly, and it assumes to exercise an exclusive function of government, the authority to levy taxes. The capital stock of these incorporated institutions can only represent the actual cost of the plant, right of way, etc. Stock issued in excess of this is water, and has no value whatever. No matter what Wall street operators may be willing to pay for a watered issue of stock, they cannot give it an actual value. A bill has been introduced in both houses of the New York legislature which is intended to prevent the capitalization of monopoly. It provides that all incorporated institutions, such as railroad, telegraph, telephone and electric light companies, shall make a statement of their actual paid up capital, and all earnings of such companies in excess of ten per cent upon said paid up capital shall revert to the state and be applied to the purposes of government, as is the case with revenue derived by other methods of taxation. There can be no question of injury to any stock or bond holder in this. In no court of the country can the plea of innocence prevail. The court assumes that all know the law, and if I purchase a piece of land I am not guaranteed occupancy except in so far as the title is perfect. If a flaw be discovered the plea that I paid the purchase money in good faith will not avail me.
The stocks or bonds of corporations can have no representative value other than the value of the paid up capital or cost of construction of the plant of such companies. Stocks or bonds issued upon the assumption that monopoly can be capitalized represent no value whatever, and if an investor purchases such stocks or bonds, what rights to indemnity can he have? Clearly the stock or bond holder, no matter how “innocent, is entitled to no recompense from the rest of us for capital invested in worthless paper.
W. O. EASTLAKE.
MEN AND WOMEN.
James 38 is fast recovering. Every day adds to his bodily strength, and his intellect is as clear as a bell. Dr. Dana, who has fetched him from death’s door, says his patient will be in his old haunts in the course of a month, though not to commence serious work for a season to come. Though daily in receipt of many sic from a wide circle of warm friends and admirers, confine- ment within four walls goes hard with this man of many fights. He looks forward anxiously to the time when he shall be out and doing, and have a part in that fight of fights which, years ago, after slavery had been driven from the land, he entered upon when he cried, “We now propose to abolish poverty.”
Mr. Andrew D. White has declined the president’s invitation to him to accept a position on the inter-state railway commission. New York democrats are angry because the offer was made.
Geo. H. Pendleton, minister to Berlin, to whom the gossips have been assigning a cabinet position, has sailed for Europe.
The McGlynn Testimonial.
The publisher of THE STANDARD acknowledges the receipt of the following sums for the fund for Dr. McGlynn:
John J. Haggerty, Garden City, L. I………….. $1 00 Fred. Bestelmeyer………………………… 1 00 Wm. W. Rose, New York city…………………. 2 00 Thomas F. Byron, New York city……………… 1 00 Myles Connolly, New York city………………. 1 00 A. M. Segin, Memphis, Tenn…………………. 2 50 John Rogers, Perry, Iowa…………………… 2 00 By W. J. H., Sacramento, Cal. W. J. H…………………………..$1 00 Terence McCabe……………………. 1 00 ——— 2 00 ———— $12 50 Previously acknowledged……………………. 769 00 ———— Total……………………………………. $781 50
Page 6 of 8contents
6 THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887.
p. 6, col. 1
IRELAND’S PROTEST.
SIMEONI’S ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE IN IRISH POLITICS FOUR YEARS AGO.
How Prohibition from Rome Helped the Parnell Testimonial—Vigorous Denunciations of Interference by Priests, Politicians and People.
The profound ignorance displayed by the press and people of New York in the Dr. McGlynn controversy concerning the political relations between Catholic priests and laymen and the higher ecclesiastics of the church would have been impossible had the truth concerning the great commotion in Ireland four years ago over the 39 testimonial been generally understood on this side of the Atlantic.
At the beginning of the year 1883 the Irish people were watching with hopeful interest the operation of Gladstone’s new land bill, and the necessity for the maintenance of the splendid fight the Irish nationalists had made in parliament was manifest to all of the friends of Ireland. It was reported that Mr. Parnell, the leader of the nationalists, was in pecuniary straits, and that he was threatened with the loss of his heavily mortgaged family estate at Avondale, in county Wicklow.
To sustain the leader a testimonial movement was proposed, and Rt. Rev. T. W. Croke, archbishop of Cashel, wrote to the Dublin Freeman’s Journal, sending his check for $250 as a first subscription toward a grand national tribute to Mr. Parnell. There was a fairly liberal response, but the sum raised was disappointing to the friends of the cause. By the time that $30,000, not half the amount needed to emphasize the significance of the undertaking, had been collected, subscriptions had fallen off, except now and then a few straggling contributions came in from country places.
By the subscription and strongly-worded letter of the archbishop of Cashel the attention of Rome was attracted to the movement. Cardinal McCabe, archbishop of Dublin, had, during the whole of the land league agitation, out-Englished the English in denouncing it. On one occasion his denunciation, in a pastoral letter, of the league’s doctrines had been so bitter that Thomas Mayne, a member of parliament from Tipperary, and hundreds of others, among them James P. 42, now of New York, arose and marched out of the pro-cathedral in a body when the priest who read the pastoral came to the clause denouncing the land league.
Again Sir George Errington, who had not then acquired his title, a Castle Catholic member of parliament from Longford, was known to have left his place in parliament to make frequent visits to Rome, where he was busily intriguing against the nationalists at the instance, it was commonly supposed, of the English government. All of this caused considerable uneasiness among the Irish patriots, but even this did not prepare them for an open denunciation of the Parnell 4041? and an attack on Archbishop Croke, the most beloved of the Irish prelates. The appearance then of a circular from Rome, dated May 11, and addressed to the Irish bishops, naturally created, as that journal said, “a profound sensation,” when it appeared in the Freeman’s Journal of May 16. The English papers received the circular with undisguised delight, while the Irish people received it with mutterings of anger and amazement that soon swelled into a chorus of indignation that made itself heard within the walls of the Vatican itself.
The circular, as translated by Cardinal McCabe himself from the original Latin, read as follows:
Whatever may be the case as regards Mr. Parnell himself and his objects it is, at all events, proved that many of his followers have on many occasions adopted a line of conduct in [open?] contradiction to the rules laid down by the supreme pontiff in his letter to the cardinal archbishop of Dublin and contained in the instructions sent to the Irish bishops by this sacred congregation, and unanimously accepted by them at their recent meeting at Dublin. It is true that according to those instructions it is lawful for the Irish to seek redress for their grievances and to strive for their rights, but always at the same time observing the divine maxim, to seek first the kingdom of God and His justice, and remembering also that it is wicked to further any cause, no matter how just, by illegal means.
It is, therefore, the duty of all the clergy, and especially the bishops, to curb the excited feelings of the multitude and to take every opportunity with timely exhortations to recall them to the justice and moderation which are necessary in all things, that so they may not be led away by greed of gain to mistake evil for good or to place their hopes of public prosperity in the shame of criminal acts. Hence it follows that it is not permitted to any of the clergy to depart from these rules themselves or take part in, or in any way promote, movements inconsistent with prudence and with the duty of calming men’s minds. It is certainly not forbidden to collect for the relief of distress in Ireland, but at the same time aforesaid apostolic mandates absolutely condemn such collections as are raised in order to influence popular passions, and to be used as the means for leading men into rebellion against the laws. Above all things they (the clergy) must hold themselves aloof from such subscriptions when it is plain that hatred and dissensions are aroused by them: that distinguished persons are loaded with insults; that never in any way are censures pronounced against the crimes and murders with which wicked men stain themselves, and especially when it is asserted that the measure of true patriotism is in proportion to the amount of money given or refused, so as to bring the people under the pressure of intimidation.
In these circumstances it must be evident to your lordships that the collection called the Parnell Testimonial fund cannot be approved by this sacred congregation, and consequently it cannot be tolerated that any ecclesiastic, much less a bishop, should take any part whatever in recommending or promoting it. Meanwhile we pray God long to preserve your lordship. [Signed],
JOHANNES, CARD. 45,
Præfectus.
The first response of Catholic Ireland to this interference from Rome in Irish politics was a tumultuous wave of enthusiasm in behalf of the Parnell testimonial, which the sacred college could not approve or tolerate. Men who had hitherto appeared to be indifferent hastened to subscribe, and many who had already given money doubled and even tripled their subscriptions, announcing as their reason for so doing the interference of Cardinal Simeoni in the matter. O’Connell’s old cry, “As much religion as you like from Rome, but no politics,” rang out as loudly in Catholic Ireland as it now does in New York city. The uprising of the Irish national spirit was perhaps stronger and certainly more effective than it was in support of O’Connell’s historic stand against the veto.
The excitement ran through the whole island. Catholics, while careful to say nothing against the religious authorities in Rome as such, freely denounced the cardinals as intermeddlers in Irish politics. So fierce and unanimous was this denunciation that to this day any reference to the Irish national question by priest or prelate visiting Rome is heard with fear and trembling by the sacred congregation of propaganda. In Ireland the immediate effect was to swell to unexpected proportions the Parnell fund proscribed in Cardinal Simeoni’s circular.
The utterances of the Irish leaders during the contest with Rome that followed were quite as bold as any recently heard in New York. Frank Hugh O’Donnell, one of the most scholarly and cultured members of the Irish parliamentary party, was at that time p. 6, col. 2 member for the borough of sic; but a little while before he had created an exciting scene in parliament by denouncing the French embassador to England as a persecutor of the Catholic church in France. Mr. O’Donnell’s ardent devotion to the church was beyond question. Furthermore, he had for a considerable time openly antagonized the authority exercised by Parnell over the Irish delegation. Immediately after the promulgation of the circular Mr. O’Donnell wrote to the Freeman’s Journal, contributing $50 to the fund. He stated that he had not intended to subscribe; “but,” he continued, “in view of a characteristic intrigue of English tyranny at Rome, I feel bound to add my name without delay to the list of subscribers to the Parnell fund.” Mr. O’Donnell continued as follows:
I am sure that in the future, as in the past, Irish nationalists will perform their duties to their country while revering the precepts of religion, and the curious politico-ecclesiastical document which is the result of the mendacious information supplied for years to the propaganda will, I am confident, afford no occasion for a departure from the traditions of the Irish church and Irish nation. It is not the first time that English emissaries have poured the poison of lying assertions into the unsuspecting ears of the Vatican and beguiled with specious mendacity the pastoral simplicity of distant pontiffs. It required all the exertions of the great O’Connell and the Irish nation in his day to prevent the odious and enslaving veto of the English government being imposed upon the Irish episcopate by the weak concessions of Rome, and it is notorious that, for many years, an English Camarilla in the vatican, principally recruited from English New Catholics, with a sprinkling of denationalized Irishmen, has left no endeavor unused in order to procure by surreptitious means the practical re-enactment of the veto project. This Camarilla, basely ungrateful for the liberty of Catholic belief achieved by the herculean labors and martyr-like sacrifices of the Irish people, has especially constituted itself as a sort of scandal-mongering and tittle-tattle league, for the purpose of impressing upon the chief ecclesiastical dignitaries at Rome, the truth of the slanders and libels against Irish nationality published by the organs of Ireland’s enemies. In my own experience as a journalist, my attention has been arrested on innumerable occasions by the splendid mendacity of the statements on Irish affairs ventilated in such journals as the Osservatore Romano, the Moniteur de Rome and similar organs; neither is there any mystery as to the names of the chief liars-in-waiting who do the work of calumny at the ear of the vatican. . . .
For my own part, as a Catholic politician, I unfeignedly regret the apparent adoption by the propaganda of the unfortunate maxim of “No priests in politics.” In every country in the world in which the priesthood has been prevented from associating itself with the national movement it has been necessary to carry on the national movement without the esteemed co-operation of the priesthood.
. . . . .
John Dillon, at that time member of parliament for Tipperary, and now representing one of the divisions of the county Mayo, sent $25, sic which was a letter, as follows:
The circular will have two effects: first, to increase greatly the affection that the Irish people already have for Mr. Parnell, and secondly, to give a great stimulus to the Parnell fund. What does this circular mean? It means that because Mr. Parnell stood for his own oppressed people with splendid courage and dogged perseverance against frightful odds, and because he has proved too much for Ireland’s enemies, and has wrenched from them some concessions for his people, the English government hate him and are resolved to crush him if they can. Finding that his popularity remains unshaken in Ireland the English government appeals to Rome to aid them to crush him; but the Irish people, unless I am much mistaken, will think more of Mr. Parnell now than ever they did before.
I have already had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the horrible system of slander with which the propaganda is besieged in reference to Ireland. Wealthy Englishmen resident in Rome—Mr. 43, the private agent of Lord Granville, and, I regret to say, a few renegade Irish—have been for some time in unholy alliance to blacken and traduce the Irish people and the Irish priests, and the work of slander went on day by day and week by week until there was, at last, extracted from Cardinal Simeoni and his holiness this circular, which has been a bitter blow to nine out of every ten Catholics of Irish blood throughout the world. This circular, outraging, as it does, the political convictions of more than half the Irish bishops and of nine-tenths of the Irish priests and Catholic people, has been issued at the request of the English government and for the miserable clique of pauper landlords who infest Rome. . . .
What is the clear duty of the Irish race[,?] unless they are contented to efface themselves and remain forever contemptible serfs? The one way to meet this blow is to make the Parnell fund such a splendid success that the propaganda will realize how grievously it has been deceived by those men under whose influence the circular was issued.
Thomas Sexton, M. P., like the others, a distinguished Catholic, who is regarded as the leading orator of the Irish party, expressed his views upon the circular at a meeting of several thousand Catholic citizens of Dublin. He said:
This circular is regarded as an act of political service to the very minister who, in in his pamphlet called “Vaticanism,” insulted the Holy Father and defamed the Catholic church, and to the very government which at this moment insults the Catholic jurors of Ireland by permitting its judicial officer to deny to them the exercise of the first and most important duty of a citizen of a free country. . . . I believe it is not for the good either of the papacy or of Ireland that any attempt should be made to deal from Rome with what the English newspapers call Irish disaffection, but what I call Irish patriotism. The most flourishing days of the Catholic church in Ireland were those days when the prelates and the priests of Ireland were the principal agents in the work of what is now called Irish disaffection: and I say it will be an evil day if ever the power of the Catholic church is cast against the holy feeling of the human heart, which the English press calls disaffection, but which I call pure and honest love of country. We shall regret if we be fated to endure the loss of our most potent and valued allies in this movement, but with allies or without them the movement must go forward.
These remarks from three of the best known public men in Ireland may be taken as a fair expression of the torrent of opposition to the interference in Irish politics of one whom Michael Davitt, at the mass meeting in the Madison Square garden, called “the ignorant pro-English Roman Simeoni.” But the protests from the clergy were stronger. One such, printed in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal and signed by Father M. D. Lenihan, the Catholic curate of Rehy, ran thus:
It is the essence of a law that it be for the good or advantage of the community. It must be just. It cannot oppose the eternal law, or the natural law, or the divine positive law. An unjust law is a mere abuse of power and cannot bind in conscience. Apply these conditions to the circular. That document says it is not lawful for a priest to contribute to or promote the Parnell testimonial. . . .
I have never promoted turbulence. I have restrained outrages and in so far as one poor person can, shall not I lawfully give a mite to him who has got so much for Ireland?
He has spent all his wealth, the best years of his life, his whole energies in behalf of Ireland, and shall I, a child of Ireland, be prohibited by a Roman cardinal and an African bishop to express my gratitude?
A still more emphatic demonstration of Ireland’s resolve to permit no papal intervention in her national affairs was made a few years later in connection with the appointment to the archiepiscopal see of Dublin. On the death of Cardinal McCabe, early in 1885, Errington and other English agents at Rome resumed negotiations at the Vatican, with a view of securing the nomination of a successor to the cardinal who should be favorable to the British connection. The Freeman’s Journal, noticing this attempt to crush the Irish movement through Rome, sounded a note of warning in the following words:
“It is no wonder that rumor and intrigue p. 6, col. 3 should both be active, for in all truth seldom, if ever, has the appointment of a great dignitary of the church involved considerations of greater significance or been more likely to entail consequences of far-reaching importance. The idea of a gutter agent of the English government in Rome having the effrontery to declare who shall be archbishop of Dublin is absolutely revolting. The recognition, tacit or otherwise, of Mr. Errington’s nomination would be even more monstrous and degrading than submission to the veto which Ireland so indignantly rejected in Quarantotti’s time.” In a few days all Ireland was in a flame, and at meetings everywhere throughout the country popular indignation was expressed in emphatically-worded resolutions. The clergy of Dublin, in the exercise of their canonical right of a voice in the selection of their bishops, met and all but unanimously nominated Dr. Walsh, then president of Maynooth college, and known to have strong sympathy with the national cause. sic it became apparent that at Rome the feeling was against Dr. Walsh because of his patriotic proclivities. The cardinals, and even the pope himself, were evidently resolved to yield to Errington, and appoint either Dean Neville or Archbishop (now Cardinal) Moran of Sydney, Australia, both strong opponents of the Parnellite movement. Early in May the Irish bishops were summoned to Rome, ostensibly on business relating to general interests in Ireland, but in reality, as everybody believed, to be sounded, and, it sic, won over to the anti-Irish side in the matter of the Dublin archbishopric. Immediately before his departure Bishop 46 addressed a pastoral letter to his clergy and people which attracted widespread attention, and produced a profound impression all over Ireland and Great Britain. The purport and drift of this remarkable pronouncement may be judged from the following extract:
It is a very melancholy, and indeed a very awful fact, that great Catholic nations like France, England and Scotland have practically apostatized from the faith. That fact is surrounded with very salutary as well as with very unpleasant warnings. I do not believe that the Irish nation will ever follow their fatal example, but I do believe it would be nothing short of criminal rashness to expose it to the danger or temptation of doing so. I can find no evidence of a divine promise made to any nation, any more than to our own, guaranteeing to it the indefectibility of its faith in all circumstances. Neither can I see any solid grounds for believing in a special exceptional Providence which would save Irish multitudes any more than Irish individuals from renouncing their allegiance to the church in a paroxysm of passion, either in retaliation for some imaginary interference with their political freedom or to avenge an insult or an affront which they had rashly assumed had been offered to them by the holy see.
All Ireland thoroughly understood the spirit and the meaning of the “unpleasant warnings” suggested by the bishop. In England the pastoral was interpreted as a “menace to the pope.” That it was intended as a pretty plain intimation to his holiness that Irish Catholics would most positively refuse, even at his bidding, to discontinue their agitation against landlordism and castle rule everybody recognized. In Rome the Irish bishops had a stiff fight, as was evident from the dispatches published from day to day in the Freeman, of which the following are samples:
It is confidently expected in the Vatican entourage that the pontiff will not indorse the views of the Irish Episcopal majority in favor of the Parnellite party. His holiness will forbid the Irish bishops to adopt any angry or aggressive policy against Mr. Gladstone’s cabinet [then enforcing coercion in Ireland] and will admonish them to advocate the redressal of their country’s grievances in an essentially constitutional manner, disavowing all connection with the supporters of the nationalization theories of Mr. Henry George.
. . . . . . . . . .
A telegram from Rome states that the pope has selected for the archbishopric of Dublin Monsignor Moran, archbishop of Sydney since 1883, who has accordingly been sic for. All the efforts to induce the Irish bishops to assist the pope by ceasing their insistance for the nomination of Dr. Walsh as archbishop of Dublin have been in vain. A reply from Mr. Errington respecting the representations he was charged to make to the English government on the subject is anxiously expected at the Vatican.
The resolute attitude of Bishop Nulty, Archbishop Croke and the other patriot prelates at Rome was sustained by the storm of agitation in Ireland. In the national press and on the league platforms the doctrine of “no politics from Rome” was loudly proclaimed. T. D. Sullivan, the Catholic editor of the Nation, declared that if England were permitted to strike at the Irish movement through Rome the Irish people should and would fight Rome and England for their national rights. United Ireland scourged the castle 44 and their policy, and sent its warning to the Vatican in the following style:
For a warning to those who may be tempted to imitate Cardinal McCabe’s view of his duty, it is necessary to remember that it was not any compunctious visitings on his own part, but the stern resistance he encountered from the Irish race, that prevented Cardinal McCabe from making shipwreck of the loyalty of Ireland to the holy see for the gratification of a gang of rack-renters and castle officials.
. . . . . . .
Cardinal McCabe will, we trust, be the last archbishop of the pale. The wave of nationalism has completely submerged the capital to the very boundary walls of Dublin castle, and the archbishop of Dublin who for the future should attempt to use his sacred influence to resist the most cherished aspirations of the nation, with whatever rustle of applause from courts and drawing-rooms, would be an anachronism and a scandal too pitiful to contemplate.
The result was that Rome was forced to bend to the national will of Ireland and give the Catholics of Dublin the bishop that they and their clergy desired to have, and whose politics were in accord with the sentiments of the people.
PRESS OPINIONS.
The idea of nationalizing the railroads and telegraphs is gaining ground every day. The more the question is agitated and discussed the more apparent its advantages and benefits become.—[Sheboygan, Mich., sic.
If the Henry George system of taxation were in effect to-day the poor laboring men of Vincennes would not have to practice “years of close economy” in order to save enough to get a right to live on God’s earth. Now, though the poor laboring men of Vincennes have as much right to live on the earth as anybody, they must pay somebody for the privilege.—[Vincennes, Ind., News.
It is always a comfortable thing to own real estate in town or country where population and wealth are increasing, and where there is a moral certainty that in time the original investment will be greatly enhanced in value.—[Pittsburg Chronicle-Telegraph.
An unquestionable right to the soil on which a citizen lives, fosters a love of locality and of country. Free the land from the dominion of money, and each citizen may have a home. He will then feel that the country is his. Payment of rent to the individual for using what the Creator placed here for the enjoyment of all, makes a mockery of democratic institutions.—[Hemstead, sic., Advance Guard.
An Orthodox Baby.
From the New York Sun.
A Lewiston newspaper says that the little daughter of a well known clergyman was heard talking as she lay in her crib the other night. She said: “Dear Lord, this afternoon I saw out upon the cold sidewalk a poor little girl, and she had no shoes or stockings on—and—and”—hesitating as though staggered by the problem—“it’s none of our business, is it, God[?]” p. 6, col. 4
SUNDAY LAWS.
Sunday Laws and Eight Hour Laws Analogous.
From a legal point of view Sunday laws are not religious enactments, but police regulations in the interest of public health, belonging to the same family of statutes as the eight hour laws which labor organizations are advocating. But they are religious laws in origin and spirit. It was not regard for the physical welfare of man, but reverence for the decalogue that prompted the Puritans to declare the first day of the week a day of rest from secular vocations. When however, in later days it came to enforcing an observance of this legalized holy day upon people who recognized the seventh and not the first day as holy time, constitutional guarantees of religious freedom compelled the courts to make a distinction of persons which the Sunday laws did not warrant, to annul the laws altogether, or to sustain them on purely secular grounds. The latter course was adopted, and Jews who worshiped on Saturday and did business on Sunday, seventh day Baptists who observed Saturday with Judaic strictness but made hay on Sunday, and infidels who made hay or sold merchandise on both days, found that the constitutional guarantee did not avail them. The courts said: “This law interferes not with your conscience. It leaves you free to observe any day as holy time. It does not compel you to any religious observance. All it does is to restrain you from pursuing secular vocations on the first day of the week. This is a reasonable police regulation. All experience teaches that ceaseless work is destructive to health. It is, therefore, within the province of the legislature to enforce periods of leisure for recuperation, and that these periods, to be effective, must be uniform throughout the community is obvious.”
Sunday as a religious or holy day is a substitute for the Sabbath of the Jews. Jesus having arisen from the dead on the first day of the week, that day was observed by Christian converts as the Lord’s day. Converts from Judaism long observed both the Sabbath of their native religion and the Lord’s day of Christians, and in the early centuries of Christianity cessation from labor on the latter day was enforced by law. The day, however, was more a holiday than a holy day, until English puritanism transformed it into a Judaic Sabbath. That this example of the Puritans is losing force is matter of common observation, so apparent that a leading religious paper not long ago admitted editorially that the Sabbath had been surrendered. Few, perhaps, will deplore the surrender of that tiresome, dreaded Sabbath, the memory of which punctuates the history of their childhood with dismal periods; but if Sunday as a regular day of rest from monotonous toil is to go, the people, and especially laboring people in existing circumstances, may almost wish the Puritan Sabbath back again.
It was this editorial admission that Mr. Crafts undertook to refute in “The Sabbath for Man.”(1)
His book is a scrap book, but it is a wonderful scrap book. From nearly every nook and corner of the globe he has gathered information relative to Sunday observance, and in the form of extracts from newspapers, sermons, letters and lectures, has strung the whole artfully upon a “clothesline” of comment. Considering the great quantity and variety of material, his work is harmonious in arrangement and interesting to read. But Mr. Crafts falls into the common error of his profession of appealing to the opinions of “great men.”
The fact that Charles Sumner was “almost the only man of eminence in modern times” who favored the continental Sunday does not argue that he was wrong, any more than the fact that Lincoln, Garfield, Webster, Seward and others, who favored, but many of whom did not practice Sunday, sic, proves that Mr. Crafts is right. The opinions of “great men” on moral or religious questions usually reflect the opinion of their time and country. Most of the “great men” of continental Europe would probably agree with Mr. Sumner, as would the great men of Cæsar’s time if they could be consulted. Mr. Crafts recognizes the truth of this when he is confronted with Luther’s condemnation of Sunday as a Sabbath, and without ceremony brushes aside the opinion of that great man.
It is perhaps natural that one who has written, read and thought so much about the importance of a Sabbath, and whose professional associations inspire him with the belief that popular discontent is a sin, should attribute the “mass of volcanic discontent ready at any moment to exchange the tyranny of a monarch for the greater tyranny of a mob,” to lack of a Sabbath; and that he should oppose Sunday amusements because “the nihilists and socialists of the most extreme type, who seek to destroy all religion and morality as much as they seek to destroy social distinctions, who are atheists and advocates of the grossest sensuality, are found in the very towns where art galleries, music halls and theaters are open on the Sabbath.” But his premises are false and his conclusion inconsequential. Mr. Crafts has relied too much on newspaper editorials for his facts. The volcanic discontent to which he alludes is not ready to exchange “the tyranny of a monarch for the greater tyranny of a mob,” nor do nihilists or atheists seek to destroy all religion and morality. Men who go to the scaffold for a principle are not without religion. Theirs may not be Mr. Crafts’ religion, but it is religion none the less. But if the facts were what Mr. Crafts asserts, the tyranny of the monarch, rather than lack of a Sabbath, is the true cause of that “volcanic discontent” which he deplores, and it would be just as logical to imply that the irreligion and sensuality of socialists and nihilists is due to Sunday churches as to Sunday art galleries. If men are ready to exchange “the tyranny of a monarch for the greater tyranny of a mob,” it is because the present tyranny of the monarch is felt and the prospective tyranny of the mob is not; and if they “seek to destroy all religion and morality as much as they seek to destroy social distinctions,” it is because the only religion and morality they have ever been taught is dominated by and made subservient to the privileged classes, whose social distinctions and privileges oppress them.
A repugnant feature of Mr. Crafts’ book is his frequent appeals to greed—his asseverations that it pays financially to keep the Sabbath. So far as he defends Sunday observance as a civil institution this is legitimate; but such a defense of the Sabbath as a religious and moral institution is abhorrent. Yet instances of business success, traceable to keeping the day holy, are frequent in his book, and in one place in the appendix he, with approval, quotes this from a rich man: “Shrewd business men are wont to regard those who honor the Lord’s day with favor, and upon those who dishonor it they look with distrust and suspicion.” In the same line of argument he quotes Justice Strong of the United States supreme court, who said: “There is profound political economy in the question, What would a house and lot be worth in Sodom without a Sabbath, a church and a preacher?” The connection between piety and money-making is a commonplace in these degenerate days of the church, but it is one of those vices which,
(1)The Sabbath for Man. A study of the origin, obligation, history, advantages and present state of Sabbath observance, with special reference to the rights of workingmen, based on Scripture, literature, and especially on a symposium of correspondence with persons of all nations and denominations. By Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, A.M. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls. 1885[?]
p. 6, col. 5 while it may be tolerated, cannot be candidly spoken of without a shock. But the quotation from Judge Strong is suggestive of more than money making. If it is Sabbaths, churches and preachers that give value to real estate, and to some extent this is true, it is hardly a fair thing, to circulate the subscription lists among tenants, when churches are to be built and preachers paid. They pay twice—once to the church fund and again to their landlords.
But however lame Mr. Crafts may be at times in his appeal for a Sabbath, he is strong in his plea in behalf of workingmen for a regular day of rest. “With the first encroachment upon the New England Sabbath for business and pleasure,” he says in one place, “those employed on that day received double pay for their labor. Then the compensation came down to that of other days, and now the men are generally hired by the month, and get no more than other workmen of the same grade who rest on the Sabbath.” This is pretty much what might be expected, and it illustrates the philosophy of the eight hour movement. In communities like ours, where laborers are under the necessity of working to live, and yet by reason of private ownership of land are dependent upon the wants or whims of others for the right to work, any rule enforcing a reduction of working time, whether of days in the week or hours in the day, tends to raise wages, while a relaxation of that rule tends to lower them. Editors who, in the alleged interest of workingmen, teach a different doctrine, may derive profit, if not pleasure, from Mr. Crafts’ book.
While Mr. Crafts asserts the necessity of preserving the sanctity of the Sabbath as a condition of preserving Sunday for rest, he does not favor a dismal nor insist upon a churchly Sabbath, and so far as legalization is concerned seeks to maintain it as a civil institution only. That he is right in supposing the religious institution necessary to preserve the civil institution must, as things now are, be conceded. So long as workingmen are not free the influence of Sunday laws will be more or less a dead letter, unless earnestly supported by church influence. Employing bakers, for example, would not persistently violate these laws as they do now, if they or their customers had a superstitious regard for Sunday. But with workingmen relieved of the fears of losing a job that harass every employe, masters seeking them instead of their seeking masters, as it would be if idle land were not fenced in, there would be no occasion for Sunday laws. As a civil institution Sunday would, by general consent, be a day of rest, and as a religious institution it would be observed by those who accepted it as a holy time and respected by all others.
CORRESPONDENCE.
William A. Chapman of Haddonfield, N. J., writes a strong letter, the length of which deters us from printing it fully, indorsing THE STANDARD’S sic deprecating a nation’s arming in time of peace. He says: “This age of progress could and should do away with the curse of war and the keeping of large armies ready to go into it. Wrongs could be righted by good statesmanship, fair play and honest dealing; more humane and much less expensive than blowing people to pieces with Gatling guns. Soldiers are not needed, but their maintenance helps to weigh the people down to the starvation point.” The true policy of a nation, he declares, is for peace, and he calls upon the Knights of Labor and all other workingmen’s organizations to strongly and persistently oppose any proposition to arm our republic in such time of tranquillity. All we require is “a good system of police; not bullies, but well-disposed, orderly men, who could control the desire to club and shoot a fractious multitude.” He predicts that the rise of the labor party to power will result in the downfall of this monstrous injustice and cruel 48?
J. D. of St. Louis, Mo., says that all the schemes advanced at Washington for the disposal of the surplus are intended for the further enrichment of the rich, but there is never a plan in aid of the poor. That there “should be millions of men in enforced idleness and abject poverty, homeless and landless” in a country where there are “millions of acres of idle land and millions of idle money” in the national treasury, he denounces as a burning shame.
A. Richardson of Philadelphia, who has for some years advocated man’s birthright to land, writes that he has recovered from the despair into which he had fallen and is now filled with great hope for the future. But one thing is wanted, he says, and that is unity of the laboring people. Once united, they have it in their power to right every wrong. There may be great hardships, but, he says, “Let us remember one who had not where to lay His head, and who at last cried: ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.’” He quotes from 47? Tiffany, now an old man: “Whosoever would countenance the system of land monopoly and resist the right of man to a free and inalienable use of the soil as a means of supplying his natural necessities and the necessities of those dependent upon him would as quick deny to him air to breathe, or water to drink, and would as gladly make merchandise of one as the other. The man who would drive sic crushed and perishing laborer from the soil unless he would buy of him the right to occupy it would as soon, had he the power, monopolize the air, the light, the water, and see the poor laborer die for want of breath, or grope his way in perpetual darkness for want of light, or famish for want of drink, unless he was able to cash up for every breath of air, or for every ray of light, or for every swallow of water, and the one would be as right, as honest and just as the other. That these things are so cannot be denied. That the laborer is plundered and made poor, and then disrespected and despised for his poverty, is as true as heaven. . . . The situation of the laborer in the old world admonishes us of what is preparing for him in the new unless labor is emancipated. The same causes are at work here, and will ultimately produce the same results, until the”frame of things disjoints.” The Almighty will not change the principles of His government to suit them to the false positions and relations of men. If labor would be emancipated and blessed it must come into true relations to the divine government. Until it does this nothing can save the laborer from injustice and oppression.
Though we break our Father’s promise, we have nobler duties first; The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accurst; Man is more than constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to church and state while they are doubly false to God. We owe allegiance to the state; but deeper, truer, more, To the sympathies that God hath set within our spirit’s core. Our country claims our fealty; we grant it so, but then, Before man made us citizens, Th’ Almighty made us men.
A Good Bill.
Paterson, N. J., Guardian.
Assemblyman Matthews has introduced a bill, aimed at pool conspiracies, which ought to become a law. It provides “that no corporation organized under the laws of this state shall enter into or make agreement with societies, companies or corporations, within or without the state, to withhold from the markets or ordinary channels of trade, or to refrain from sending or bringing into this state, for any period of time, any article of food or fuel, or any of the necessaries of life, or any natural or staple product, either manufactured or unmanufactured, or in any limited quantity thereof, the result of which would create or tend to create a scarcity of such article.”
p. 6, col. 6
HOW TAXING LAND VALUES WOULD IMPROVE THE CLIMATE.
A Farmer Suggests a Way to Tame the Western Cyclone and Prevent Drouth.
MURRAYVILLE, Ill., Feb. 25.—Replying to Mr. Tucker on the effect upon small farmers of taxing only the rental values of land, THE STANDARD says we must always have floods, hail and drouth. If it is meant that we must always have these as we now have them, that we must always fear them and suffer from them as we do now, the proposition may be 49?50?
There is no reasonable doubt but that changes wrought in the earth’s surface affect the atmosphere over it. Nor can there be a reasonable doubt but that we can make such changes in the soil as to affect the atmosphere so as to produce a more equable or more rigorous climate.
The section of central Illinois where I have resided for nearly fifty years has always been subject to floods, drouths, tornadoes and blizzards, even when nearly the whole surface was covered with primitive woods and indigenous grasses, but the more we chop and plow, the greater these evils become. Nearly every family now has a storm pit, into which thunder storms very often drive men, women and children, even at midnight; and such is the wreck, ruin and destruction of life wrought by our tornadoes that these people cannot be called cowardly for so doing. Many who in their childhood would have laughed at such precautions, would now think a man foolhardy who did not provide such a refuge for his family. We have not to look far to find an explanation for such phenomena.
The trees, whose branches partially shaded the soil in early spring, and, as the season advanced and their leaves put out, gave a denser shade against a sun daily growing more ardent; their sic, branches and leaves absorbing tons of moisture to slowly evaporate, as atmospheric conditions required water in gaseous form—are too largely cut away. We still seem to have a good deal of timber, but any 51 who will draw an accurate map, so as to compare the timbered with the cleared land, will be surprised to find how much his eyes have deceived him. Here and there one may find a fine grove of young, thrifty woods where, in his younger days, were only bushes and prairie grass; but if he goes to that grove in the winter or chopping season he too often finds the ruthless axe doing direful duty.
The native grasses that once covered every square foot not under water or in too dense a shade are nearly extinct. The blue sedge, of whose long, smooth canes, when a boy, I made arrows, is now rarely seen; long-bladed slough grasses, once so convenient for shed roofs and stack covers, can rarely be had in quantities large enough to pay for gathering. Yet these not only covered the ground where trees were lacking and prevented a too rapid evaporation, but their tough roots also held back the water and filtered it gently on its way to the water courses, and as no great gullies and washes were made, our creeks and smaller rivers ran clear over gravelly bottoms nine months in the year. Take rod and line and go now where once your young heart leaped over piscatorial triumphs, and amid a desolation of mud you may find part of a rill of the old mill-dam; but the mill has has gone with the miller; and if you see a minnow, even in the most propitious season, you will do well. Stop to take a drink at some favorite spring, and nine chances to one you cannot even tell where it formerly ran.
Take your gun and go to the high table lands we call prairies, and instead of the well-remembered marshes and ponds, the haunts of millions of water fowl, where till even the heats of July the water was held and slowly fed all our streams, and you will find plows running in our well tilled fields, or cattle grazing on clover or blue grass pasture. If you talk with the farmer he will admit that after he tilled his land his wells gave out, and he has had to resort to artificial ponds or to cisterns, even then running short of stock water.
Now if we observe these changes and try to understand the part that trees and ponds and grasses play in the economy of nature, we shall see why we suffer so much more than we once did from drenches and drouths, from blizzards and tornadoes. We shall learn, too, of the direction we must take in order that we may make our climate better, instead of worse, as we are making it now. If we have a bright, beautiful day in the spring of the year, we say with a shy glance at the sky, “This is a weather breeder.” And if this fine day should be followed by two or three more, the danger of a destructive storm becomes more imminent; for there are millions of acres of quite naked soil exposed to the rays of the sun, and many million tons of water go up into the atmosphere and make it a good conductor of electricity, while the same process has made the ground a relatively poor conductor, so that great and violent changes of polarity must necessarily occur. Over a large, contiguous territory clouds have hung during the same days; and since opposite meteorological conditions have been induced, the efforts of nature to restore an equilibrium over both must result in great atmospheric disturbances.
Common “horse” sense, as we farmers sometimes put it, ought to show us what is necessary to be done. Though we may not know now just how to do it, he would be bold indeed who would say that we never could do it. For the intelligence of man seems to have been intended to fill out or complement the cruder efforts of nature. We must prevent a too rapid evaporation of moisture, and retain the water upon our high lands, not on, but underneath, the surface of the soil. Suppose, by way of practical illustration, we should dig deep, wide ditches every two or three rods, keeping the bottom level, so that the trenches would hold water, walling up the sides to within two or three feet of the surface of the earth, then arch over, or use large sewer tile instead of walls and arch, and then fill up, after laying common drain tile over and across these underground reservoirs; here we should secure a dry, and loamy surface that would receive and absorb the heaviest rains as fast as they fell: the reservoirs would hold the needed stores of water and capillary attraction and the roots of the plants would bring it to the surface only as it was required. Evaporation would not only be steady but constant, and hence changes in the atmosphere would be slow and never extreme. This, or some other method, would have the desired effect, and would follow the method which gardeners have long practiced in potting plants, when they put a handful of potshards in the pot before filling in the earth, thus making a reservoir for water at some depth below the surface.
“It would cost too much,” says Dollar-and-cents. “Look what a lot of money it would take to put a single acre in that fix!” Yes, that is the trouble now; so long as men have an interest in acquiring land and in merely owning it, rather than in improving it, we must continue to “sow the wind” and to “reap the whirlwind.” There is no hope till we conform to natural right and justice, and then whatever is good will pay while many hands will make light work of it.
Here we see how intimate are the relations that exist between the moral and the material worlds, between the laws that govern the conduct of men and the laws that regulate mutations in matter, and we realize how true it is that—
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
WM. CAMM, Farmer.
Page 7 of 8contents
THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887. 7
p. 7, col. 1
THE HEART OF THE LABOR QUESTION.
We Must Secure to All Free Access to Natural Opportunities.
The labor question presents itself to us Americans in this form: How shall the production of wealth be so carried on as to secure to every honest citizen, male or female, the means of attaining what the Declaration of Independence declares to be inalienable rights—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That, with our present economic system, our government fails to secure these things, is only too manifest. To say nothing of the pursuit of happiness, the very conditions of liberty are denied to multitudes of our fellow-citizens, while many have the utmost difficulty in obtaining even the barest necessaries of life. Unless our entire system of government is to be a sham and a lie, our present economic system must either be replaced by another or be so modified as to promote the ends which our government proposes to itself. The question is: What system shall take the place of the present one, or how must the the present system be sic?
When a great social question like this comes up, demanding an immediate practical solution, we can often obtain valuable hints as to the direction in which this solution is to be sought by inquiring into the causes which have raised the question, and by observing the principles which guide the march of civilization. In the present instance this is especially true. The circumstances which now present the labor problem for practical solution are the result of a series of causes by no means difficult to retrace, while the principle that guides civilization on its economic side is most manifest. By removing these causes and acting in accordance with this principle we shall be most likely to find our solution. Wealth is the result of the combination of two primary factors—the productivity of nature, and especially of the earth, and the energy of man. A third factor is capital; but this is secondary, being a product of the other two. Capital is simply a part of wealth used to increase the power of the two primary factors. The productivity of the earth is increased by “improvements:” the energy of man by means of implements. Improvements and implements constitute the whole of capital. Whatever else may be called capital—e. g., money—is so only in so far as it is conventionally made to represent these.
It is perfectly plain that, if a man be debarred from taking advantage of either of the primary elements, he cannot produce wealth, and, therefore, is practically debarred from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is also plain that, if a man be permitted to take advantage of them only under conditions imposed by another man, he is that man’s slave to the extent of these conditions. If I can, in any way, be forced to labor three days for another, before I am permitted to apply my energy to the earth or its products for my own benefit, I am that man’s slave for three days. And the case is not in any degree altered if I am compelled, for the same privilege, to pay the proceeds of three days’ labor, whether in money or in anything else.
This matter is perfectly simple, so long as we take into account only the two primary elements, nature’s productivity and human labor; then a man is made a slave by being forbidden to apply his energy to the earth and its products, save under conditions. And this may be done in either of two ways, (1) by taking possession of his person, or (2) by taking possession of the land and its products. In the former case, the result is chattel slavery; in the latter it goes by several names, according to the different conditions imposed for access to the earth and its natural products—serfage, villenage, tenancy, etc. So long as there is productive land unoccupied, the masterful and selfish portion of humanity will resort to the former method and seize the persons of their weaker brethren. Accordingly, we find that everywhere chattel slavery is the earliest form of slavery. As soon as all the accessible productive land is occupied by a portion of the community or nation, to the exclusion of the rest, chattel slavery becomes unnecessary, because the same result can be attained without it, since those who have no access to the land are practically the slaves of the land holders, however their slavery may be disguised, and however frequently they may change masters. Slavery may alter its form, but the essence of it always remains the same. It is due, in every case, to the placing of some obstacle between man’s energy and the use of the earth.
When capital comes into play, a new series of obstacles, complicating the social problem and disguising slavery under false names and a false show of justice, becomes available. The strong man, who formerly seized and held the land by main force without any pretense of justice, now claims to hold it justly on account of the capital he has spent in improving it, and calls upon the whole people to defend him in the possession of what he is pleased to call his landed property. The same man who, by possessing the land could force other men into slavery, can now, by means of machinery, dispense in great measure with the services of the landless, so that these can no longer obtain the conditions of life, even as slaves. When this happens, the result is absolute destitution, which would soon clear the earth of the majority of the landless were it not for the action of charity. Now, charity is an excellent thing, but it would be entirely unnecessary if simple justice were done. Charity is the greatest foe of justice and the greatest apologist of injustice. Charity is the alleviator of wrongs that justice would uproot.
It appears from what has been said that slavery has three forms or phases, following each other by natural development—chattel slavery, land slavery, or serfage, and capital slavery, or wage slavery. The working classes of our time are partly in the second and partly in the third of these forms of slavery. Chattel slavery has been abolished in all countries claiming to be civilized, but land slavery in several forms still exists, while wage slavery flourishes and spreads.
Now, the question before the American people to-day may be put thus: How shall we put an end to land slavery and wage slavery, both of which are entirely incompatible with the liberty promised to every American citizen? Let it be carefully observed that the abolition of land slavery and wage slavery does not mean the abolition of rent paying or of wage taking, but only of that system which forces men to pay, what rents other men choose to ask, or accept what wages other men choose to pay on pain of starvation. There can come no harm from paying rent or working for wages so long as men do so from their own free will, in accordance with a free contract.
The question before us, then, resolves itself into this: How shall we make it possible for every citizen to make a free contract in all matters that condition life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? This is the heart of the labor question. Nay, more; it is the heart of every economic problem, so far as it bears upon human well-being. Indeed, if we now ask ourselves, What is the principle that has guided the march of civilization in economic matters? we shall see that it has been the gradual substitution of the free contract for the tyranny of force-begotten custom or craft-begotten legal enactment. The progress of humanity in civilization has been from custom to contract. When this truth is stated in this abstract way, it meets everywhere with the most enthusiastic approval. There is nothing that your legal-minded stickler for rights demands so loudly as freedom of contract; no right of which he is so jealous. Your capitalist and your landowner talk about interference with freedom
p. 7, col. 2 of contract as about something utterly sacrilegious. And they are entirely right, only they remind one of those Roman Catholics who are loud in praise of religious freedom when they are in the minority, but utterly abominate it when they are otherwise. Their loud protests are, indeed, purely hypocritical, for all they care about is freedom of contract for themselves. To freedom of contract for those whose labor they require in order to make their capital or land profitable, they are utterly opposed. Indeed, if freedom of contract were universal, the capitalist and the land owner would be at once stripped of all the unjust advantages which they now possess, and very few would be able to make large fortunes. Nearly all large fortunes are the fruit of unfree contracts. If working men were so secured against want that they could fix their own wages, they would not only be free, but they would be able to render impossible those large fortunes which corrupt men with dangerous power, and so ruin states.
The great question of the day, then, is: How shall all workingmen be secured against want? or, How is it possible to secure to every workingman (and woman) the means of earning a livelihood without becoming a slave? This question, I maintain, the government of this land is bound in honor to solve practically. It is, in one word, bound to secure every citizen willing to work the opportunity to make an honest, free livelihood. Until it does this, it is a sham and a lie. It is not bound to maintain any human being able to work; but it is bound to make it possible for every citizen to maintain himself.
Now, I think there is but one way in which it is always possible to secure the necessaries of life without the sacrifice of freedom, and that is by having free access to labor’s necessary complement and correlate, the land, and of this access man cannot be deprived without a gross violation of justice. There is, indeed, one other way which some propose, of attaining the same end, and that is so-called socialism, in which the state, owning the land and all the instruments of production, and forming itself into an universal industrial corporation, would find work for all its members. But it takes only a little reflection to see that socialism, though it might, if honest, secure to all the necessaries of life, could do so only by sacrificing the other two “inalienable rights of the sic of Independence, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It could do so only by entirely abolishing the free contract and reversing the course of civilization. The national industrial corporation would be an unendurable sic, managed by”bosses” chosen by the majority and distributing the spoils of office among their supporters and favorites. To entrust the very conditions of liberty and happiness to government officials, for the sake of securing life, would be a wretched bargain, the results of which would soon show themselves.
On the other hand, if every citizen were secured in his right to a share in the land of the nation, no amount of wealth, in private hands, however corrupt, could make him a slave against his will.
It is often said that land nationalization is socialism. If we reflect carefully, we shall see that it is the very opposite; that it is the opponent of and rescuer from socialism; that it means freedom, while socialism means slavery. Indeed, the first step toward true democracy, toward universal freedom will be the emancipation of the land and the securing to each citizen his natural rights in it. Till that is done, freedom and republicanism are mere words.
THOMAS 52.
LABOR SAVING INVENTIONS.
Why They Seem to Be a Curse, and How They Might Bring a Blessing.
NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 24.—A writer in one of the labor papers complains of the extensive use which newspapers make of stereotype plates. In his honest indignation he says: “Labor papers have no business to touch the contaminated things.” And again: “They are up to the times, buy in the cheapest market, and patronize everything that happens to be labor saving, even when they know that it is labor destroying.” Evidently the writer has studied only the surface of the 53? when the cause of the evil lies much deeper.
He forgets that the editor of a labor paper is the victim of a system he has not created, and that it is not his fault if there are more people willing to write editorials or compositors needing employment than he can reasonably find room for. He is bound to give the sic a paper at the current prices and avail himself of those economies which will keep the costs within a certain limit. The object of the labor paper is not, or ought not to be, the giving of employment to the unemployed, but to educate the masses and explain to them how and why there are so many men unemployed; and also to indicate the reforms which are necessary to prevent in the future the continuation of such an unnatural state. The labor-saving device in itself cannot be an evil, especially in regard to printed matter, of which, when not corruptive of morals, there never can be too much, nor that too cheap. That it is not policy to encourage the use of labor-saving machines, for fear of destroying the opportunities for labor, is an argument no better than the one the protectionist would make us believe, viz.: that it is better to produce in this country certain articles at double the cost than to import them and pay for them with articles we can produce ourselves at single cost. Men will not work more than they can help. The existing labor-saving machine will be perfected, others will be invented, and a day will come when, by wiser and more just laws, every drone of the community will be compelled to perform his share of the common duty. Then, pulling all together, instead of fighting each other as we do now, three or four hours’ labor a day will produce enough to satisfy all necessary wants and a good many luxuries besides.
Let not the well meaning correspondent be alarmed and believe as he says, that “removing the necessity for labor means idleness, idiocy, disease and death—social suicide.” When the happy times which I have referred to come, there will be a good deal of useful leisure—not elegant leisure, as now in certain classes. Then labor will be honored, not looked upon with contempt, as now by certain classes. Then everybody will in a certain measure have a chance to follow the bent of his natural talent instead of having to drudge for ten or twelve hours a day in some uncongenial occupation.
For the present state of society the labor saving machine has not improved the lot of the average toiler. A sewing machine may be a very useful invention to the lady in good circumstances, but the working woman who bends her spine over it for twelve hours a day has never been able to get more than a precarious living out of it. Though the benefits of labor saving machines are immense, millions are toiling harder than ever. All the advantages have gone to those who have monopolized the natural sources of wealth. Owning the soil, they owned the men; owning the men, they soon owned men’s genius and controlled their product. This world as first intended by the Great Designer was well enough, but selfishness stepped in and made a mess of it.
Let those who have been despoiled of their natural rights unite and reassert them, and labor saving devices will prove a blessing.
EDWARD 54.
Pretty Soundly Educated Already.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The defeat of the militia bill and the failure of the legislature to pay the men who were called out by the governor in 1885 are to be regretted, and show that public sentiment in this state requires education on this subject.
p. 7, col. 3
The Rack-Renting Landlord.
T. D. Sullivan, in Dublin Nation.
There’s a mischievous monster that lives in our isle— He came o’er with the Saxon invasion— In his heart there is greed, in his mind there is guile, And his ways are a scourge to the nation; He thrives on the bog, on the brake, on the mireland, And his name is the sic landlord of Ireland— The heart-breaking landlord, The grief-making landlord, The brain-crazing, rent-raising landlord of Ireland.
Of pirates and robbers who battle for gold, We have read and heard many a story; This monster has methods less honest and bold, And his work is more cruel and gory; He thrives on the bog, on the brake, on the mireland, And his name is the rack-renting landlord of Ireland— The peace-killing landlord, The life-chilling landlord, The brain-crazing, rent-raising landlord of Ireland.
But soon shall this pest to our island of green. Like the wolf and wild boar be a stranger, And comfort and joy shall be known in each scene That he now fills with sorrow and danger; For we’ll chase from the bog, from the brake, from the mireland, That monster, the rack-renting landlord of Ireland— The heart-breaking landlord, The grief-making landlord, The brain-crazing, rent-raising landlord of Ireland.
HIGH LICENSE.
Dr. Funk Shows Conclusively that It Does Not Decrease the Number of Saloons.
Rev. Dr. Funk, in an address at the Masonic temple on last Sunday, denied with great heat and emphasis the declaration 55? Dr. Crosby and others that the prohibitionists were opposed to any attempt to restrict the sale of liquor, demanding free whisky or total prohibition. Dr. Funk declared that so far is this from being true that prohibitionists “are in favor of all really restrictive laws.” But he continued:
The high license law is no restrictive law. As Dr. Herrick Johnson of Chicago, who has watched its workings in that city, declares, “it is a delusion and a fraud.” As Hon. John Finch of Nebraska, who was the author of the famous one thousand dollar high license law of that state, declares, “it aggravates all the worst evils of the liquor traffic. It was the greatest mistake of my life.” It entrenches the foul business behind the cupidity of the taxpayer; it forces it more than ever into politics, for its financial and political interests are greater; it drives the weaker saloon keepers under the financial protection of the huge distillery and brewery monopolies. The invariable tendency wherever high license has been tried, in Kansas City, in Omaha, in Chicago, has been to add to the saloon those vile “concomitants,” which, Dr. Crosby says, make the saloon “an evil, an evil only, and an evil continually,” until it has become a proverb in Omaha: “Under low license the saloon keeper said, ‘Give me your son;’ under one thousand dollar high license he says, ‘Give me your daughter also.’”
We oppose the Crosby bill because it is not restrictive; it is a blunder, a monumental blunder, We will sic high license as long as God gives us breath.
“But why,” says one, “if high license does not decrease liquor selling, did the liquor men meet in Steinway hall the other night to oppose this bill?” They oppose it chiefly because it will increase the brewers’ and distillers’ grip upon them, as it has done in Kansas City, in Omaha, in Lincoln, Neb. Even now sixty per cent of all the saloons of this city are in financial vassalage to the manufacturer, and so are seventy-five per cent of those in high license Chicago. The brewers and distillers are not fighting this bill, except to make believe. The rich saloon keepers are not fighting it. Stokes, the owner of that gorgeous saloon at the Hoffman house, says he wishes the license was made $100,000!
Let us hear from the west. Commercially the Mississippi river empties into the Hudson, and the west can also give us wisdom. In many of the large cities of the west high license has been tried now for years, and, I speak advisedly, in every city in which it has been tried it has resulted disastrously. It has not been a harmless experiment, a striking at nothing and hitting it; starting for nowhere and getting there. It has been a starting for heaven and plunging into perdition.
Dr. Funk then presented statistics showing that in Providence, R. I., the arrests for six months of the year 1885 under license were 3,390, and in six months of 1886 under prohibition, 2,262, a falling off of about 33 per cent. As 236 arrests during 1886 were for violations of the prohibitory law, this number is deducted from the total, reducing the number of arrests to 2,026, showing a decrease of 41 per cent.
He next took up Chicago, and gave the following figures:
| Year. | License fee. | No. of sic. | Arrests for drunkenness and disorder. |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1882–3…. | $52 | 3,849 | 18,045 |
| 1883–4…. | 103 | 3,682 | 21,416 |
| 1884–5…. | 500 | 3,386 | 23,080 |
| 1885–6…. | 500 | 3,760 | 25,407 |
These figures show some slight reduction in the number of saloons with each increase of tax, yet taking the whole period covered the recovery was so rapid that the number in 1885-6, under a $500 license, was but little less than it was in 1882-3 with a $52 license; but the number of arrests for drunkenness steadily increased during the period, the increase in cost of license having no effect whatever upon it. Dr. Funk declares that the law is enforced in Chicago and that nearly every saloon pays the $500 license, but he quotes from a recent presentment by the grand jury of Cook county evidence that the increased tax has done practically nothing to drive out the low dives. “Never,” he continues, “has the saloon business in Chicago been so corrupting and dominating as since the reign of high license. The men who monopolize the huge traffic wield it as one man. They have become omnipotent in Chicago politics.”
In Kansas City, where the uniform license tax is $845 a year—three times as high as the average tax imposed by the Crosby bill—there are 405 licensed saloons, or about one to every 25 voters, more than there are under the existing low license law in New York and Brooklyn.
When to Take a Holiday.
Detroit Evening News.
There is no doubt of the need of more holidays, and possibly this day upon which organized labor has fixed for an annual demonstration of its strength is as good as any other. But there is one day in the year which the labor of the country is far more interested in making an absolute and obligatory holiday—and that is election day. It is on election day that the labor of America must win its real enfranchisement. Parades and speeches, however long and imposing the first and eloquent the second, will accomplish nothing of themselves. It is by voting right that the knights can alone bring about the reforms they seek. How can they vote right if they have no time to vote at all? If all the knights who paraded last labor day had been at the polls on the following election day they could have elected their candidate for congress and several of their candidates for the legislature.
A Vacant Lot in Asheville.
Asheville, N. C., Advance.
In Asheville a vacant lot of about one-fourth of an acre sold the other day for about $10,000. A nominal price was originally given for it by the purchaser, who claims never to have spent one iota on its improvement. The lot became valuable by the growth and industry of Asheville. The people of this community have by their own exertion and prosperity given value to something that had no value. It is the same thing as if they had placed on that lot $10,000 of their own earnings. We maintain that this belongs not to the so-called land owner, but to the community that created it.
p. 7, col. 4
A SUM IN PROPORTION.
With Some Considerations on the Profitableness of Doing Nothing.
Three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars! sic you wish you had it?
If you had $325,000, my friend, you could—you could—well now let’s consider a moment and study out just what a sum like that really means.
Four per cent is not a very heavy rate of interest, with good security. Let us suppose that you invest your money at four per cent. At that rate your $325,000 would bring you in an income of sic a year.
The average annual earnings of American wage workingmen are, let us say, about $600; of women—young, old, middle-aged, healthy and infirm—say $300, and of children, we may suppose, about $150.
Your $13,000 a year, then, will command the work for one year of:
Twenty-one men, and four-sixths of a man over;
Or of forty-three women, and one-thirds of a woman sic;
Or of eighty-six children, and two thirds of a child over.
Or, to put it another way, it gives you the power to call on the people of New York to furnish you yearly with something like:
Two hundred and sixty 56,
Or three thousand sheep,
Or twenty-six hundred barrels of flour,
Or one hundred and thirty thousand loaves of the best bread.
I needn’t multiply the illustrations. You can amuse yourself for an hour, if you like, by figuring out what $13,000 a year represents, first in one thing and then in another.
And is this the kind of idle talk with which I propose to disfigure the columns of THE STANDARD! Haven’t I anything better to tell you than a lot of old “chestnuts” about the command that money gives a man over the producing powers of his fellows? Wait a bit.
A few weeks ago a block of vacant land, comprising thirty-two full city lots, bounded by 121st and 122d streets, Mount Morris park and Sixth avenue, was sold by the Astor estate for $325,000.
Vacant land, mind you! Not land that had been built upon, or improved by tillage, or utilized for any purpose under heaven; but just land that had been kept vacant.
And simply in return for signing a piece of paper containing its gracious consent that somebody else shall have the right to keep those thirty-two lots of land vacant if he wants to, the Astor estate has received authority to call on the people of the city of New York to furnish, year by year, henceforth and forever, free of charge, the men and women and children and beeves and sheep and barrels of flour and loaves of bread represented by an income of $13,000 a year. I’m not altogether certain what an Astor estate is, but I would to God I were one! I would to God that by signing some sort of a written permission to some other fellow to do nothing if he chose to, I could secure the free services of an assortment of humanity, consisting, we’ll say, of ten men, fifteen women and a dozen or so of children, with a few society saviors or similar job lots thrown in to make full count. The situation might not be strictly ethical, but I’ll warrant it would be comfortable—for me, that is.
You think this sort of talk is nonsense, eh? and wonder what I mean by it? My dear fellow, I never was more strictly serious in my life. Regarded solely as the owner of those thirty-two vacant lots, the Astor estate has not only produced absolutely nothing—has not only never done the first hand’s turn of work itself, but it has gone farther still and actually prevented other people from producing wealth by putting a fence round the land on which they might have worked. The world is not a penny the richer nor a heart’s thrill the happier for anything the Astor estate has ever done on or to those thirty-two vacant lots. On the contrary, it is many a dollar the poorer and by many a bitter pang more miserable. Mothers’ hearts have been rent with anguish for their little ones stewed to death in tenement houses for want of the fresh air that overblows those vacant lots. Strong men have walked the streets workless and an-hungered who would have gladly delved in that sacred soil. Houseless girls have sought in dens of sin the shelter that they might have found on that idle, unused land. God has been defied, and Christ blasphemed, and prisons filled, that the fences round those lots might be inviolate. Year after year men who wanted homes for wives and little ones have tried to bribe the Astor estate to let them build upon that land: and year after year the Astor estate has steadily refused. As population grew denser and denser, the proffered bribes have risen higher and higher, until at last even an Astor estate’s cupidity has been satisfied, and it has graciously accepted the privilege of taxing the people of the city of New York to the tune of $13,000 a year forever, and in return—done what?—pulled down its fences and restored the land to the outraged people whose mere presence and pressure had created its value? Deuce a bit of it! It has turned the fences over to some one else, who hopes to hold them inviolate until he, in turn, can squeeze an extra privilege of taxation out of the crowding, struggling myriads to whom the fathers of the Christian church proclaim that God Almighty made this pleasant earth for the benefit of a favored few! Think it out until you realize the robbery! Ponder on it until you comprehend the wrong!
And then, consider yet a little more. For the privilege of using or not using less than two acres of bare ground, which God made and no man can add to or diminish, we of the city of New York consent to give the Astor estate, forever, the labor of twenty-one men out of our number.
There are on this island of Manhattan 137,000 city lots.
Some of these lots have less rental value than those the Astor estate has just disposed of, but many of them have far more. The thirty-two lots we have been considering represent, if anything, less than the average.
It’s a simple sum in rule of three. If we allow the Astor estate to tax us $13,000 a year because it “owns” thirty-two lots, how much taxes do we pay the whole body of landowners because they “own” 137,000 lots?
32: sic.
Correct; go up head. And now tell me how you like it.
Fifty-five millions of dollars yearly—the labor of nearly 100,000 able-bodied men year in and year out; the toil of 200,000 weary women—that is what we have pledged in perpetuity that Astor estates may be and saviors of society grow rich and foolish priests malign their God by pretending that He approves it all!
And, mind you, we pay an extra dollar or two in the shape of taxes—you and I and other landless ones whom God allowed to come into the world by mistake!
Ah, think of it! think of it! Fifty-five millions of dollars yearly; well nigh sixty dollars for each and every man, woman and child that lives upon this island of Manna-hatta—this island whose rental value we and our forbears have increased from nothing to this prodigious sum, and are still increasing. It is all our own. We made it and are making it; and we only have a right to it, as those who come after us will have the right in their turn. How long shall we wait ere with united action we stretch forth our hands to take our own again?
I know that it is written in the Gospel of Things as They Are that God’s laws were never meant to prevent poverty—that He, the loving One, is powerless to abolish it, even if He would. I have heard it preached from pulpit and from rostrum, but I don’t believe
p. 7, col. 5 it. Nor do you. For neither you nor I can imagine a Father in heaven loving enough to devise a scheme to save our souls from the pit of hell, yet cruel enough to leave our bodies wallowing and writhing in the dismal slough of poverty. From the lips of Him who died to save our souls came the precept that shall suffice to save our bodies: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto to sic.” Only this—a short, but all-sufficing rule. Quench and quell that dog-in-the-manger spirit that seeks to claim the monopoly of God’s free gifts to man—acknowledge once for all that our God is a just God and knows no favorites among His children—and poverty shall vanish away like some dank miasm before the rising sun; and though the Astor estate may have no slaves to work for it, it will yet find ample comfort in its just share of the bounties Heaven has provided for us all.
T. L. 57.
RELIGIOUS.
Mr. 58 is establishing a missionary training school in Chicago, and expects to have one hundred pupils, who will attend upon instruction in the morning hours and devote the afternoons and evenings to visiting non-church attendants and holding gospel meetings.
The New York presbytery has undertaken to settle a large question by a simple assertion for those who will receive its utterances. On motion of Dr. Crosby, it was “Resolved, that the presbytery hereby emphasizes the declarations of the confession of faith, ‘the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament are the word of God,’ that the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek are immediately inspired of God, and that there is a consent of all their parts.” Many men with the highest reverence for the Bible are protesting against the statement.
The Philadelphia divinity school has made a new departure in providing its students with lectures on secular subjects important to clergymen, such as the care of the body and the minister’s relation to money matters, a physician and a banker lecturing in the course.
Many members of the Episcopal church are excited over the publication of a little book for children by one of their book houses, which sets forth such advanced doctrine that Bishop Bedell calls upon his brother bishops to prevent its circulation. The publishing firm will endeavor to suppress the book in face of this opposition.
The tithe question has led to a religious census of Wales, which puts the national church in a very unfavorable light. This census was taken Jan. 9. The fact that it was to be taken was widely advertised, and resulted in swelling the ordinary congregations, both of the state church and of dissenting denominations. It is said that rectors and curates manifested unwonted diligence in visiting their flocks, and that faces appeared in the pews which had been absent for years.
The Bishop of Salisbury has refused to allow Rev. Dr. Dewe to act as curate to Rev. Carr J. Glyn of Witchampton, and gives his reason thus: “I am unwilling to have a man taught the principles which you conscientiously hold as to the amount of help to be extended by churchmen to dissenters.” Mr. Glyn had been opening a bazar held by the Wimborne Baptists.
The Madison Avenue Congregational church, of which Dr. Newman was pastor when Gen. Grant attended it, has given up its corporate existence. There was $14,000 left in its treasury, of which $8,000 was given to the Morrisania society and $6,000 to the Tabernacle church of Washington.
A small sect of Jews inhabit an Austrian village, Lagadora, who keep their rabbi in a state of almost regal splendor. The recent death of this official has called attention to the little synagogue. Each rabbi appoints a successor to take office at his death. The person in office is thought to have the gift of prediction and healing, and is called “the miraculous rabbi.”
Many of the religious papers are just now abusing the socialists, and the editorials of some of them indicate an ignorance of socialism and a fear that their readers may become converts to the theory.
A new translation of the gospels into French is to be made and circulated under the sanction of the archbishop of Paris.
On Washington’s birthday visitors to the Mount Sinai hospital reception left contributions amounting to some $5,000.
The trouble and excitement of the Polish Catholic congregation of Detroit last year have resulted in the presentation of a bill in the Michigan legislature by a senator who is said to be a Catholic, which proposes that although the bishop holds title to church property, there shall be a joint control of the property by the bishop, the vicar-general, the parish priest and three parishioners. In the excited discussion over the proposed measure the senator (Gorman) says that the purpose is to protect the interests of those who work hard for the money that builds churches, and that both priests and laymen have urged him to push it. He has been asked to name such priests, but replies that he cannot violate their confidence lest their “heads be cut off.”
A tory member of parliament, Mr. De Lisle, is reported as saying at a conference in London that as a Roman Catholic conservative he denounced the conduct of Archbishop Croke of Cashel, Ireland, in openly encouraging the conduct of the Irish national league, and he said he would like to have the archbishop tried for his conduct by a jury of English Catholics in London!
There is an interesting controversy looming up in the desire of some of our Catholic journals to know why their clergy do not receive a proportionate number of appointments as army chaplains. Adjutant General Drum has been forced to write in reply a letter which is not at all satisfactory.
The church congress in the United States is to meet in sic during the third week of October. Drs. Phillips, Brooks, sic, Donald, Bishop Harris and other well known persons are appointed to take part in discussing questions which are now agitating the Episcopal church.
The Universalist refers to the taunt that has always been thrown at its church, that it is not a missionary body, and bids those who have promised to bless it whenever it may become such to get their benediction ready, as the church is moving to organize for the foreign work. The new theology men rejected by the American board may find employment in this direction to go abroad without a padlock on their lips.
THE CURSE OF LANDLORDISM.
Wretched Condition of Many of the Missouri Farmers—Plenty of Evictions.
RICHMOND, Mo., Feb. 25.—THE STANDARD and its theories of taxation have many admirers and staunch supporters in this portion of the country. Landlordism has cursed and blighted the fair face of this state as it has many others. One-third or one-half the crop is the usual rent for farms. I know of one instance in which the landlord, after exacting one-half the crop for the privilege of cultivating his soil, charged his tenant one dollar per month for pasturing a cow on a piece of land which never had been in use and was being held for higher prices. The improvements on the rented farms are usually of the most insignificant and miserable kind. In many cases the stock, having no shelter whatever, are exposed to the mercy of the weather year in and year out. The landlords refuse to make any improvements and will allow their tenants nothing for improvements. Though the state
p. 7, col. 6 is but sparsely settled, many people know what it is to be “turned out” for non-payment of rent and to be compelled to buy from some one the very privilege of breathing the air of heaven. The effects of landlordism may best be seen in the southern portion of Ray county—a tract of country bordering on the Missouri river known as “the bottoms.” This is the landlord’s paradise. The land is generally divided into tracts of four, five and six hundred acres, the owners usually residing in a neighboring town or city, though occasionally on their estates, in houses that appear to the simple and ignorant tenants much as the “dwelling place” of “my lord” or “his grace” seems to a Scotch crofter or an Irish peasant. To enter these abodes is a rare treat, and to become a guest in them is an honor seldom conferred. These estates are usually divided into farms of forty, sixty and eighty acres. The tenants are usually very poor, ignorant and improvident—the natural fruits of landlordism. Their earthly possessions, consisting of the most scanty and rude furniture, a “plug” team and an old wagon and a few old agricultural implements, range in value from $150 to $300, a sum that would not purchase a decent piano for their master’s parlor. They work during the summer season from 4 a. m. to 8 p. m., with an hour for dinner and less time for supper. If a crop fails or a horse dies, they are plunged hopelessly into debt. These men are citizens and voters of a free (?) republic; their vote counts as much as that of a sage or scholar; they are usually kept informed, by their landlord, on topics of the day, and advised how to vote on “important measures” and also as to the particular candidate that will likely make the best officer! These people live and toil year in and year out with as little hope of ever owning land as “Fatty” Walsh has of “changing heart.”
A friend, who has traveled by wagon through the greater part of the “government” land in South Missouri, which the land office offers subject to the homestead and pre-emption laws, informs me that there are not one hundred acres of it that would raise black-eyed beans, most of it being mountainous and rocky and unfit even for pasturage.
If this sketch of landlordism in Missouri is not true it is simply because I have not dwelt upon the darkest side of the picture—the arrogance, haughtiness, insolence and assumption of the landlords and the ignorance, vice, drunkenness and brutality of the tenants. It is true the tenants have the privilege of emigrating, but where shall they go? and of voting, but in whose interest are they most likely to vote? I trust that all may redouble their efforts in behalf of that noble cause, the land for the people.
RAY CLARENCE RICHMOND.
The Gospel in South Australia.
Our Commonwealth, a well edited radical paper in Adelaide, South Australia, advocates “the stoppage of the further sale of crown lands and the restoration to the people of lands already alienated.” Its argument is that all human beings have an equal right to the elements of 59?
The title-deed to this right is the fact to have been born. Since, then, every child born has an inalienable right, by the fact of its birth, to land, no one can rightfully dispose of the inheritance of future generations; and therefore by selling our lands we sell that which does not belong to us, which we can only hold in 60 during life, and which we have to give up at our death to the following generation. By restoring the land to the people we mean the values given to the land by the action of the community as distinguished from improvements on it. This value, having been created either by public expenditure or the joint action of the community, or as a free gift of nature, belongs rightfully to the whole community, but has hitherto been and still is being confiscated by a few monopolists. In order to restore this value to the rightful owners, the whole people, we advocate a tax on the unimproved value of land by which this unearned increment is gradually to be absorbed and devoted to purposes of government. The land could still be held in perpetuity, subject to periodical revaluation and adequate taxation. Amounts originally paid to the state to be treated as “improvements,” and to be exempt from taxation.
The Professionals Befuddled.
Irish World.
For the last ten years wage workers have been devoting more thought to their condition than they ever did before, and as a result of this thinking they have been gradually getting down to bottom principles. The Knights of Labor have greatly aided in this work of education, which was bound to affect politics sooner or later. The professional politicians, who knew nothing of this silent revolution that has been going on for the last decade, believe that the George movement is merely an episode in politics that will not permanently affect the older order of things, provided they use a little dexterity in the management of George’s supporters. Those who understand the real character of the revolt that the machine men expect to subdue must smile at the absurd way in which these political freebooters are trying to win back the allegiance of the men who voted for Henry George.
Land Monopoly Lowers Wages.
Dallas, Texas, Liberator.
Land monopoly and consequent ground rent drives hundreds of thousands of men out of agriculture and reduces the compensation of those who persist in tilling the earth that other men own. Those crowded out of agriculture crowd the labor market, swelling the great army of the unemployed, and by competing for employment with those already thus engaged, crowd wages down to the same level as is earned by the rent-paying agriculturist. By freeing the land many would become their own employers and labor would command, in any field, a compensation equal to that which might be earned in such self-employment.
MISCELLANEOUS.
[Advertisement] Keystone Watches
[Illustration: the works of a pocket watch seen through the open case, with the display lettering “KEYSTONE WATCHES” arched above it and “ARE THE … BEST” set at either side below. Engraved on the movement: “PAT. REG.” / “Adjusted” / “154019” / “PAT DUST PROOF” / “[illegible]” / “KEYSTONE WATCH CO.”]
KEYSTONE WATCHES ARE THE BEST
BECAUSE They contain everything essential to Accurate Time Keeping found in any watch, and in addition have the following important improvements, for which we have patents:
The PATENT DUST PROOF protects perfectly the balance and hair spring (the most delicate and vital parts) from damage, dirt and dampness.
Our Patent Compound Regulator has absolutely no lost motion.
Our PATENT STEM WIND is the strongest and simplest made.
Our Patent Dust-proof movements are free from all variations caused by dirt or dampness; an advantage which no other maker does or dare sic.
We are the only Factory using only Genuine Ruby Jewels in every grade, and all our Watches are made of the best material, and are accurate time keepers, under our own guarantee.
ATKINSON BROS., 926 Chestnut St., PHILADELPHIA, Pa.
General Agents for the Keystone Standard Watch Co.
☞ ASK YOUR JEWELER FOR THEM. ☜
[Advertisement] The Great American Tea Co.
[Illustration: trade-mark block in the shape of a T, white letters on black: “THE GREAT AMERICAN” across the top, “T / E / A” down the stem, “COMPANY” across the foot.]
GOOD NEWS TO LADIES.
Greatest offer. Now’s your time to get orders for our celebrated Teas, Coffees and Baking Powder, and secure a beautiful Gold Band or Moss Rose China Tea Set, Dinner Set, Gold Band Moss Rose Toilet Set, Watch, Brass Lamp, Castor, or Webster’s Dictionary. For particulars address
THE GREAT AMERICAN TEA CO.,
P. O. Box [289?] 31 and 33 Vesey St., New York;
Page 8 of 8contents
Page 8
8 THE STANDARD, SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 1887.
p. 8, col. 1
LABOR.
Photo-engravers and coopers struck during the past week in this city. Fifty men went out of the Photo-engraving company’s shop, at 67 Park place, to enforce an increase of wages and an adjustment of grievances. There are only about 100 competent men in this occupation in this country, and the strikers feel sure of a victory. The coopers’ strike originated with the “sympathy” strike of several weeks ago. On last Saturday six hundred men employed in cooper shops in this city, Brooklyn and Jersey City went on strike for the reason that the employers’ union would not prevent its members from furnishing barrels to the firms whose men were on strike. The men did not go out at four cooperages in Jersey city, and the bosses say that the non-union shops can turn out all the work needed.
At the Central labor union on Sunday resolutions were adopted denouncing Mr. Powderly for instructing local assemblies not to collect money for the Chicago anarchists. Resolutions were also adopted censuring Judge Brown for his decision in the case of members of D. A. 49 and the Old Dominion steamship company, characterizing the report of the Hogeboom legislative committee as unfair, and protesting against the arrest of the organizer of the telegraph messenger boys. The union was petitioned by George Ehret’s employes to remove the boycott on his beer, but the request was not complied with. A resolution was carried calling for the organization of branches of the united labor party in all parts of the country.
There is a new organization of printers in this city. It is called the Manhattan printers’ protective fraternity, No. 11, and it was organized on Jan. 12. Its object is: “The mutual protection of its members in their business relations; the avoidance of strikes; to assist and provide for its members when disabled by sickness or accident, and the payment of mortuary benefits to the families of deceased members.” It announces in its printed constitution that its “corner-stone is the principle of harmonious action between employer and employed.” “Mutual protection in business” signifies that the members of this fraternity await a strike in the printing business and then apply for the places of the strikers, or they underbid union men, cause them to be ousted by their employers and take their situations. The Manhattan protective fraternity is a fact, but the “No. 11” attached to it means nothing. The other ten branches with which the Manhattan is supposed to be attached are either myths or insignificant associations formed mainly by the non-union men of the Cleveland Leader.
Renewed activity characterizes the boycott of D. A. 49 on the Third avenue 61. It is said that spotters will be appointed by the assembly to make note of those who ride on the road, and that efforts will then be made to dissuade them, whether they or workingmen or shopkeepers, from doing so. The road has not declared a dividend since the strike of a year ago.
Co-operative building associations are attracting some attention in New York. the sic in parts of the suburbs being cheap enough to afford a field for the safe operation of this form of banking. The South Brooklyn association, formed ten months ago, mainly by printers, has sold 153 shares, or $38,250, at premiums of $10,120, sixteen members having obtained appropriations. A second association has been started by some of its members. The employes of the World have also an association.
The “state board of mediation and arbitration” will be the new name of the state board of arbitration, according to the bill which has passed the New York legislature. The improvements in the law recommended by the board in its report were in the main adopted. The number of members of local boards is reduced to three; the state board can take up a case without waiting for it to come from a local board; the questions in dispute must be submitted to the board by each side in writing, and each must promise to continue on in business or at work until a decision is arrived at, providing a decision is rendered in ten days after the investigation. The salary of the three commissioners is $3,600 each.
Missouri appropriates annually $250,000 for her penitentiary, in which are 1,600 convicts, [900?] of whom work in the penitentiary shops for contractors. There are three bills before the legislature relating to contract prison labor, two looking to its abolition and the third providing that all goods made by convicts shall be stamped. A legislative committee is consequently collecting testimony regarding the effect of contract convict labor on free labor and the probabilities of making the convicts self sustaining. One interesting fact brought to the surface was the calculation of the contractors that it requires a fraction more than the work of two convicts to equal the quantity turned out by one free workman.
Mr. J. R. Norton, owner of a large manufactory of farming implements at Ironton, Ohio, is about to open a similar establishment at South Pittsburg, Tenn. He does so to save freight on his product, most of which is sold in the south, and to secure cheaper labor, fuel and raw materials. He thinks it is only a question of time when all the products of the south will be manufactured there. The reasons that have influenced Mr. Norton are the same that have drawn many millions of capital to the south during the past year or two, and closed up or put on short time many establishments in New England and the west.
Secretary John J. Cummins of D. A. No. 1, Philadelphia, in his annual report just issued, gives the number of local assemblies in the district as 234, 180 having been added in 1886. The membership is 55,668. The secretary recommends a bureau of employment, to be established by the district, believing that it would prevent members from being exposed to the temptation of offers of wages below union rates, and that it could supply employers with responsible workmen.
The labor organizations of San Francisco are pushing the bills before the legislature which represent their wants. They are the white labor stamp act, the boiler inspection act, the act prohibiting convict competition with free labor, and the one providing for the licensing of street car employes. A great mass meeting was lately held at Metropolitan temple by the organizations, at which the legislature was sharply arraigned for its apathy in regard to the labor bills. Speeches were made by Senators Clunie and Goucher, Herman Guttstadt and Judge James G. Maguire.
The engineer of the freight engine whose failure of power caused the recent disaster at Tiffin, Ohio, had been on duty continuously for sixteen hours and fifty minutes. It is a matter of common complaint among train hands, especially in the winter season, that they are overworked.
A law has been passed in Maine forbidding any child under fifteen years of age working when the public schools are in session, and providing that minors under twelve years shall not be employed at any time.
An advance in the wages of iron workers and railroad hands at several points was one of the features of the week in the labor world. The puddlers of the eastern district of the amalgamated association had their wages advanced from $4 to $4.10 per ton on the 1st of sic. On Monday next another advance will be made to $4.20. The district comprises Philadelphia, Lebanon, Norristown, Conshohocken, Harrisburg, Columbia, Lancaster, and sic in Pennsylvania and Paterson, N. J. The molders in Fisher’s pipe foundry at Allentown, Pa., were granted on Monday an advance of fifteen per cent and the laborers ten per cent. The 1,000 em-
p. 8, col. 2 ployes of the Britton iron and steel works at Cleveland had their wages increased on Monday from ten to fifteen per cent. The Delaware and Hudson railroad company issued notices on Saturday that the wages of all trainmen on the roads operated by them would be increased on Tuesday, the advance varying from $4 to $50 per month. The order affects several thousand men.
A wealthy corporation in Rhode Island proposes to introduce a revolution in wage paying. All employes who have taken what wages are offered them for ten years are to get a bonus ranging from ten to twenty-five per cent of their annual earnings each Christmas, according to the length of time they have been employed.
The Hartford Central labor union has called a conference of the trades unions of Connecticut, to meet next Tuesday. Samuel Gompers has been invited to attend, and it is expected that the result will be the formation of a powerful branch of the American federation of labor.
The building trades council of Cincinnati represents 16,000 men. It will erect a hall at a cost of $30,000.
A committee of the Chicago Daily Newspaper association and a committee of the Typographical union of Chicago have agreed on a new scale of wages. Compositors will henceforth receive forty-six cents per 1,000 “ems” on morning newspapers and forty-one cents on evening papers. Advertisements will be set by the week. No change was made in the hours. The agreement will remain in force five years, beginning on March 5. Changes in the agreement can be made only on thirty days’ previous notice, and all difficulties are to be settled by a joint committee composed of two members of the newspaper association and the Typographical union, which, if unable to agree, will select an arbiter, whose decision shall be final and binding upon all parties.
European manufacturers of knit underwear and dress goods and plush, woolen and fancy knit goods have agents traveling in America, studying the demands of our people. American machinery is fast improving, and the cost of production is decreasing, yet the foreigners possess sic advantage in the lines mentioned to enable them to compete with our manufacturers in the home markets.
Virginia labor papers are vigorously attacking Gov. Lee for his action in sending a military force to Newport News during the late ’longshoremen’s strike at that point. There had been no violence; there was no cause for alarm on the part of the property holders, and there was a company of colored soldiers at Newport News, but Gov. Lee sent down a battalion of white men at a cost of $15,000 to the state. The Richmond Labor Herald says that Gov. Lee is the first governor of Virginia that ever used the military for the purpose of bolstering the interests of monopolists as against the demands of honest laboring men.
In their eager search for work, unemployed workingmen are often misled by groundless stories as to where it is to be had, or duped by impostors who profess to be able to find it for them. There has been much suffering of late from such hardships. Last week a swindler, representing himself to be an agent for railroad contractors, induced forty-eight laborers of Ottawa to give him ten dollars apiece in payment of their fare to Mexico, where, he told them, work at good wages awaited them. He accompanied them to Ogdensburg and then disappeared. Advertisements have been lately sent out from Duluth to the effect that mechanics and laboring men were scarce there. A correspondent writes that there are now 2,000 men idle in Duluth, that wages are low, and that workingmen should be warned against going there. The Pacific coast gives similar accounts. A circular was sent to San Francisco a few weeks ago from the Knights of Labor of Washington territo sic notice of slack work in that territory and Oregon. The carpenters’ union of Los Angeles has inserted an advertisement in the San Francisco papers asking men of that trade not to come to their city in response to the delusive advertisements of speculators. They say that in one day 119 men applied for work at one new building, and that there are more than 200 carpenters out of employment in Los Angeles at the present time.
The Knights of Labor movement is progressing steadily in the southern states. Richmond alone has twenty-six local assemblies which meet every week, besides two district assemblies which meet twice a month. There are more assemblies being organized at the present time in the southern states than in any other section of the country.
The labor committee of the Connecticut legislature favors a ten hour factory law for women and children. It has refused to modify the law under which wages may be attached for debt, and has refused to recommend a law providing for the stamping of goods as “convict made,” and one providing for the appointment of factory inspectors.
The managers of the Philadelphia street car companies contemplate making a general reduction in the wages of the men. They say that as fares have come down from six cents to five they are compelled to retrench, and that as the agreement with the employes’ organization made last April ends on April 1, a cut down in wages will then be ordered. Leaders of the organization, however, maintain that the contract with the companies was made for an indefinite period and declare that they will oppose the intended reduction, which for conductors and drivers is from $2 to $1.50. The organization has 2,800 members.
There is a national anti-convict contract association. At a meeting of its executive committee held last week in Chicago the secretary reported that he had received encouragement from legislators and congressmen with respect to future legislation on the convict contract system.
The Pittsburg Commercial Gazette says that last week copies of a secret circular, sealed with the stamp of the Chicago District Assemblies Nos. 57 and 24, Knights of Labor, announcing the boycott of those districts on the meat of P. S. Armour & sic., were distributed among the labor organizations of Pittsburg. The circular contained a list of Chicago commission houses dealing in the boycotted meat. The Chicago assemblies send the circular first to the grocers of a city at their places of business, then to the grocers’ organizations, and lastly to the local assemblies, asking them to boycott the grocers who persist in keeping Armour’s meats. A reason given in the circular for not using the meat is that the “scabs” now working in the Armour packing houses do not know how to cure it properly, and that therefore it is inferior to what it was before the strike. The Gazette says that the Armour boycott has been declared illegal by the general executive board, and that the issuing of the circular by the Chicago assemblies is nothing short of mutiny.
The senate on Wednesday passed the bill creating a department of agriculture and labor, which is to have a secretary and assistant secretary. The bureau of labor and the signal service bureau are transferred to this department by the bill.
When Irving M. Scott returned to his home in San Francisco a week or two ago, after securing the contract for building the cruiser Charleston, one thousand men from the Union iron works, of which he is in part an owner, marched to his house with brass bands, wagons gayly decorated with flags, and fireworks, and extended him an ovation. Mr. Scott addressed his workmen, speaking of the difficulties he met in taking the contract to the Pacific coast. It had been urged against him that the Pacific coast had not the facilities to build such a vessel as the proposed Charleston, but a commission had pronounced
p. 8, col. 3 the Union iron works A No. 1. It had been said that San Francisco had not the skilled labor to build her, but the records of the navy showed that after the caisson lately finished for the Mare Island dock was put in place not a file or a chisel touched it. Another objection was that the materials could not be found on the Pacific coast, but that was answered by showing the objectors a piece of steel from the Union iron works, lying on the steps of the capitol at Washington, which was the largest they had ever seen. The demonstration of the men was not only for the purpose of congratulating Mr. Scott, but to show that they entertained no ill feeling in consequence of the strike which lately took place at his works.
The International typographical union directed at its last session that the subordinate unions should take a vote between Feb. 1 and April 1 on the question of a nine-hour day. The Pittsburg bricklayers have just agreed on a nine-hour day. Two thousand painters of Chicago have decided to work hereafter only eight hours.
The first issue of the Chicago Labor Enquirer gives evidence that in his new field Joseph R. Buchanan will repeat the success he made with the Denver Enquirer. He has a vigorous and breezy style, and the newspaper that he offers to the labor world is in the line of progress.
Mr. W. S. Tisdale, author of “The Knight’s Book,” is writing New York letters to out of town labor papers. He is a man of temperate views, and is well informed as to politics and current labor news. His letters form an interesting review of those events occurring in the metropolis that have a bearing on the social problem.
[Notice] Members of Labor Organizations
MEMBERS OF sic ORGANIZATIONS and others wishing to canvass for subscribers to this paper on a liberal commission are invited to send their names and addresses to the publishers of THE STANDARD, 25 Ann street, New York.
FURNITURE.
[Advertisement] B. M. Cowperthwait & Co.
IF YOU INTEND GOING TO HOUSEKEEPING this spring or think of purchasing anything in FURNITURE, CARPETS, BEDDING, etc., you should select them now and avoid the rush of the busy season. We have just taken an account of stock and find that we have a great many things that we had better sell at
VERY LOW PRICES
and make room for new goods coming in. We have also received samples of all the NEW GOODS, and you can have a selection now of the best that the market will afford. Goods purchased now will be held to June 1st if desired,free of sic privilege of canceling any such purchases and having money refunded at any time before delivery. Cash, or terms to suit.
B. M. COWPERTHWAIT & CO., 193 to 205 Park row, between Brooklyn bridge entrance and Chatham square.
PHOTOGRAPHERS.
[Advertisement] Charles B. Schaidner
CHARLES B. SCHAIDNER,
PHOTOGRAPHER,
2280 Third avenue, cor. 124th street,
New York.
Children’s Photographs by instantaneous process a specialty.
HOTELS.
[Advertisement] Hygeia Hotel, Old Point Comfort
OLD POINT COMFORT,
VIRGINIA.
HYGEIA HOTEL,
One hundred yards from Fort Monroe (largest fortification in America), where daily target practice, guard mount and dress parade take place. Perfect in cuisine and appointments. Accommodates 1,000 guests. Turkish, Russian, electric, hot and cold sea and fresh water baths. Afternoon concerts and nightly hops. Pure ocean air, free from malaria and conducive to refreshing sleep. Average temperature for winter, 47 degrees. Only 10 hours from New York. Send for illustrated descriptive pamphlet and terms.
F. N. PIKE, Manager.
PRINTING.
[Advertisement] Concord Co-operative Printing Company
CONCORD CO-OPERATIVE PRINTING COMPANY (Ld.),
47 and 49 Centre st., N. Y.,
BOOK, JOB AND NEWSPAPER PRINTING.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
[Advertisement] Henry George’s New Book, Protection or Free Trade?
HENRY GEORGE’S NEW BOOK,
PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE?
AN EXAMINATION OF THE TARIFF QUESTION WITH ESPECIAL REGARD TO THE INTERESTS OF LABOR.
12mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50.
OTHER WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
Progress and Poverty, 12mo. cloth……………..$1.00 ” ” paper……………….. .20 Social Problems, 12mo. cloth…………………….. 1.00 ” ” paper…………………….. .20 Property in Land, paper………………………… .15 The Land Question, paper……………………. .10
For sale by all booksellers, or sent post-paid on receipt of price.
HENRY GEORGE & CO., 25 Ann street, New York.
[Advertisement] Just Out. An Account of the George-Hewitt Campaign
JUST OUT.
AN ACCOUNT OF THE GEORGE-HEWITT CAMPAIGN.
By Louis F. Post and Fred. C. Leubuscher.
1 vol., paper covers. Price, 20 cents.
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER I.: History of George’s nomination.—His letter to the labor conference.—The platform.—The Chickering Hall meeting addressed by Dr. McGlynn.
CHAPTER II.: Formal nomination.—George’s speech of acceptance.
CHAPTER III.: Nomination of Hewitt.—Hewitt’s letter to the “Saviors of Society.”—His speech at Cooper Union.
CHAPTER IV.: The correspondence between George and Hewitt.
CHAPTER V.. Mr. George declares his position and answers questions at Chickering Hall.
CHAPTER VI.:—Hewitt’s Miscellaneous speeches.
CHAPTER VII.: George’s meetings and speeches.
CHAPTER VIII.: Irving Hall.
CHAPTER IX.: Father McGlynn.—The O’Donohue-Preston correspondence.—Archbishop Corrigan’s Pastoral.—George’s Reply.
CHAPTER X.: The parade.
CHAPTER XI.: The election.—Official canvass of the vote by election districts.—George’s midnight speech.
CHAPTER XII.: Permanent organization.
CHAPTER XIII.: A review of the principles advocated by Henry George.
Address HENRY GEORGE & CO., 25 Ann street, New York.
[Advertisement] Land and Labor (tracts)
LAND AND LABOR.
The Central Committee is now prepared to furnish, postage paid, the following named tracts, at prices indicated:
Per 100 The Right to the Use of the Earth. By Herbert Spencer. 4 pages…….. 15 cts. First Principles. By Henry George. English or German. 8 pages…….. 30 cts. The Great-Great-Grandson of Capt. Kidd. By Henry George. 4 pages…….. 15 cts. Land and Taxation. David Dudley Field and Henry George. 8 pages…….. 30 cts. Platform New York Labor Convention. English and German. 2 pages…….. 6 cts. Declarations and Resolutions. Cooper Union Mass Meeting. 2 pages…….. 8 cts.
Address JOHN McMACKIN, Chairman, 28 Cooper Union, N. Y. City.
[Notice] To Secretaries of Trade and Labor Organizations
A.—TO SECRETARIES OF TRADE AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS.
We have received an order to send a copy of “PROTECTION AND FREE sic” to every trade and labor organization that may wish to have it, up to the number of one thousand. A copy will be accordingly forwarded to the secretary of any labor organization or local assembly of the K. of L. on receipt of twelve cents for postage.
HENRY GEORGE & CO.
[Advertisement] The Democrat
THE DEMOCRAT.
I receive a monthly supply of The Democrat, the organ of the English land nationalization socialists, and will be glad to furnish copies to friends of the cause. Single numbers, including postage, 5c.; annual subscriptions, $2.50.
SAMUEL BENNETT, 262 Fifth avenue, Brooklyn, N. Y.
[Advertisement] Tax Reformer
TAX REFORMER.
The first paper published in America devoted to the advocacy of the principles of “Progress and Poverty.”
Subscription, one year, with a copy of “Progress and Poverty,” given free, 50 cents; with “Progress and Poverty” and “Social Problems,” 75 cents.
M. BATTLE, 9 Spruce street, New York.
p. 8, col. 4
[Advertisement] PROSPECTUS OF THE NATIONAL CONSUMERS’ COMPANY OF AMERICA.
THE NATIONAL CONSUMERS’ COMPANY OF AMERICA IS IN PROCESS OF ORGANIZATION AS A BODY CORPORATE with an authorized
CAPITAL STOCK OF $10,000,000,
DIVIDED INTO
1,000,000 SHARES OF $10 EACH.
The stock is offered for sale on the following terms:
$2.00 PER SHARE……………………ON APPLICATION. $2.00 PER SHARE……………………ON 1ST OF APRIL. $2.00 PER SHARE……………………ON 1ST OF MAY. $2.00 PER SHARE……………………ON 1ST OF JUNE. $2.00 PER SHARE……………………ON 1ST OF JULY.
TOTAL, $10.00 PER SHARE.
The stock, together with the dividend coupons, will be delivered on or about July 15, 1887, in exchange for the receipts for the above payments.
It is proposed that the profits earned by the Company before the delivery of the stock be accumulated and distributed on the first of August.
On making the second payment each stockholder will be entitled to a card insuring him the right to PURCHASE MEATS at the Company’s stores at fixed wholesale prices. This represents a daily dividend amounting from $18.25 to $36.50 a year on one share.
Forms for application for stock may be had by addressing
MARQUIS DE MORES & COMPANY, NO. 40 WALL STREET, NEW YORK,
who will immediately forward a receipt for the same. Or, the application may be made to the cashiers at the stores of the National Consumers’ Meat Company of New York, at the following addresses:
N. E. Cor. Third Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.
605 Sixth Avenue.
28 and 30 Avenue A.
1690 Broadway, Rink Building.
583 Hudson Street, Ross Building.
Manhattan Market, Room 12, Foot of West Thirty-fifth Street.
OBJECT AND MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPANY.
The Company’s power embraces all occupations necessary for manufacturing or furnishing to the consumer all articles of necessity and daily consumption; but for the present it confines its operations to breeding, raising, fattening and slaughtering all kinds of live stock, and the manufacture and disposition at wholesale and retail of all the products thereof, including the meat, hides, hoofs, horns, bones and blood.
The affairs of the Company will be managed by a Board of Directors, who shall be elected annually by the stockholders. The number of Directors can be increased from time to time by the stockholders, and all interests shall be fully represented.
CONDUCT OF BUSINESS AND PAYMENT OF DIVIDENDS.
It is proposed that the Company conduct a strictly cash business, and distribution of the net earnings be made monthly or at such other intervals as the Board of Directors shall determine; dividend coupons, payable to bearer, to accompany each certificate of stock, representing one hundred shares or less; and that dividends upon such stock, when declared, be payable upon surrender of the proper coupon at the stores of the Company, either in cash or merchandise, at the option of bearer.
HOW THE COMPANY CAN BEGIN OPERATIONS AT ONCE.
To enable the Company to begin business at once upon an assured and money-making basis, and to facilitate the working of the enterprise and diminish the risks, the following obligations and duties have been undertaken and assumed by Marquis de Mores & Co.
1 To sic of all the authorized stock of the Company at par.
To procure a transfer to the Company of all the rights, privileges, franchises and property of the National Consumers’ Meat Company of New York, together with its present business and the goodwill thereof; to procure an outlet at New York and other places for an advantageous disposition of the Company’s products; to procure a transfer to the Company of a new and valuable process’ for sic soups, extracts and army rations; to secure the slaughter houses and refrigerators necessary for the business of the Company in the West, and to obtain the necessary refrigerator cars to enable the Company to transport its own meats at a proper cost.
To procure competent and trustworthy men as heads of the necessary departments and pay their salaries.
To manage, conduct and superintend the practical operations and business of the Company for a period of 49 years, subject to the control of the Board of Directors, without salary.
To so perform the foregoing obligations and duties that, within a period of five years, the Company shall be able to dispose of and sell an average of one thousand head of cattle per day.
DIVISION OF PROFITS.
As compensation for performing such obligations and duties Marquis de Mores & Co. shall receive a portion of the profits of the Company, but only after a dividend has been first paid to the stockholders.
The Certificate of Organization will make provisions for the payment from time to time (monthly if possible) of non-cumulative dividends, computed on a basis of not less than ten per cent per annum on all paid-up stock, before any other distribution of the net earnings of the Company can be made, and after the payment of such dividend for the distribution of the balance of the net earnings, if any, as follows:
An amount, not to exceed such dividend, to Marquis de Mores & Co. After that an amount, not to exceed such dividend, to the salaried employes engaged in the business of the Company. And after that the balance, if any, shall be divided equally between the stockholders and Marquis de Mores & Co.
WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH $2,500,000.
The purchase and erection of a feeding establishment…….. $100,000 Purchase and erection of complete slaughter houses and pork-packing establishment, with suitable facilities for slaughtering 500 cattle, 500 hogs and 500 sheep a day…….. 250,000 Purchase of 500 cars for transporting the meats…….. 550,000 Necessary running capital for the purchase of 500 cattle per day; $15,000 per day is needed for the meats. and can be sic over every twenty days…….. $300,000 $3,000 a day is needed for hides and tallow, which can be turned over every sixty days…….. 180,000 | 480,000 To supply necessary pork, mutton, veal and lamb is required a capital of…….. 250,000 To pay for the new process of meat preserves and for the plant and business of the National Consumers’ Meat Company, payable in stock…….. 250,000 To establish the necessary stores in New York, Jersey City and Brooklyn…….. 600,000
Total…….. $2,480,000
This amount will enable the Company to sell 25 carloads of meat daily, with at least a profit of $200 per carload, namely, $5,000 profit per day. On the division of profits proposed this would give to the stockholders, on a capital of $2,500,000, a dividend of above 21 per cent.
With a larger capital we can increase our business and establish our system in other cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, etc.
BENEFITS TO BE DERIVED BY UNITING IN THIS ENTERPRISE.
Statistics show that the average family consumes five pounds of meat per day, or 1,825 pounds per year. By the reduction in the price of meats, to which each stockholder is entitled, the first and immediate result is, that a man by the mere fact of purchasing one share of the National Consumers’ Company of America, will secure to himself on his unavoidable and daily expenses, with an outlay of $10, a net and secure profit of five cents per day, or at least $18.25 per sic
Besides this, the cash dividend of 21 per cent will give him on each share…….. 2.10 ”
Making a total net profit on one share of…….. $20.35 ”
Assuming that each family buys 5 pounds of meat per day, at an average of 10 cents per pound, the annual expense, amounting to $182.50, will be reduced to $162.15 by owning one share of $10.
Profit on 10 shares $39 25, reducing expense to…….. $143 25 ” 20 ” 60 25, ” “…….. 122 25” 30 ” 81 25, ” “…….. 101 25” 40 ” 102 25, ” “…….. 80 25
Profit on 50 shares $123 25, reducing expense to…….. $59 25 ” 60 ” 144 25, ” “…….. 38 25” 70 ” 165 25, ” “…….. 17 25
The possession of 78 shares at a cost of $780 will pay and give an annual profit of $182.05, or the entire cost of his meat for a whole year.
It comes to this: That with a capital of $780 once paid, a man can secure meat for himself and family free of charge for all his life.
This may seem exaggerated, but we are ready to demonstrate to those who doubt it that, in all likelihood, the annual profits will increase rather than diminish the above figure of 21 per cent on the money invested.
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 24, 1887.
MARQUIS DE MORES & CO.
[Advertisement] TO THE CONSUMERS AND LABORING MEN:
Universal experience shows that those who hold power often try to rule and take advantage of their fellow men.
To-day capital is the power. We see it on every hand brought together to crush every kind of opposition and to monopolize all industries and trades.
This allows the few, to the great detriment of the masses, to raise the price of articles necessary to sustain life as they choose. This state of things constantly paralyzes all enterprises, all trade, and renders fruitless the efforts of a lifetime.
The man who begins with a small capital hopes, by perseverance and hard work, to establish a small trade, and to make from it, if not a fortune, at least enough to place him beyond the reach of want. But soon he finds that this industry is already monopolized by powerful hands against which he cannot compete, and that he must earn his daily bread by working for others. His savings and the remnant of his capital are then put in the bank, but only to be loaned out to the capitalist to augment his power and extend his operations. If he tries to compete alone he is sure to lose his capital for the benefit of his rivals, and the result is always the same: “The water flows to the river.”
On account of the high price of the necessities of life, the man who gets a salary,’ sic for manual or mental work, is obliged to spend daily nearly all he earns. As a result, old age finds him, after a long life of hard work, poor and perhaps destitute, his earnings consumed by the daily wants of life.
From this arises the general dissatisfaction existing among the laboring classes, manifested by violent and fruitless crises on both sic of the Atlantic. Violence or illegal acts will not better the laboring man’s condition, but puts the wrong on his side, and thereby strengthens capital.
Labor has from time to time organized to resist capital. To force an increase of wages has been the object, and thus far strikes have been the only effective means. These strikes are costly to the laborer, and create public dissatisfaction; and even the increase of wages thus obtained does not improve the laborer’s position, because it is followed by an increase in the price of the merchandise he daily consumes.
The only way of bettering the condition of the laboring classes is to get, by association, what the capitalist gets by his money.
The remedy, in other words, is to make the consumers furnish themselves with what they consume, and in that way get at wholesale price what they need, making besides a profit on what themselves and others consume.
This can be done by united action, for union is strength.
The task is not difficult.
Let 100,000 laborers each pay $1 per month, and in a year they will have a capital of $1,200,000. Employ this capital under the management of trusty men to organize and superintend establishments where all they need may be procured and the problem is solved. All are co-proprietors and will share in proportion to their contribution in all profits realized by these establishments.
THE RESULT WILL BE THAT THEY WILL MAKE AN INCOME OUT OF THEIR EXPENSES.
Crushed, as so many others, by monopoly, we have been looking for the means of resisting it by uniting in a practical way with those who, like ourselves, try to make their future by their work.
This has led to the organization of the NATIONAL CONSUMERS’ COMPANY OF AMERICA.
The name of the Company shows its aim. It must be worked by and for the people. It operates on merchandise of daily consumption, and among these MEAT was chosen first, because it is the basis of the laborer’s food, and the greatest source of wealth to this country.
The shares of this Company will be ten dollars each, and will be offered on very easy terms, so that every consumer or laboring man will be able to take at least one share. No one will be allowed to purchase for cash more than one hundred shares, in order to avoid the absorption of the concern in powerful hands.
For this enterprise we have obtained the control of the shops and organization of the National Consumers’ Meat Company of New York, and also of a new and valuable process for the fabrication of army rations.
These will be brought into the Company fcr the benefit of sic, and their value taken in shares.
In addition, we have made in the West the necessary arrangements for the production of meat by the Company at once, and for the future increase of the business to any extent, thus making the producer and consumer one. We will in fact at once be in a position as good, if not better than the great Meat Dealers of America. We will make the same profits as they do on sales to those who are not stockholders with us, though we sell better and cheaper meats for the benefit of the people at large, thus the consumers who become shareholders in this Company will buy their meat from themselves and realize all the profits. So far as meat is concerned the consumer or laboring man will no longer leave his profits in the hands of monopoly.
The prospectus will show what the profits will be.
THAT IS NOT ALL.
We intend to declare a daily dividend; that is to say, this Company being a co-operative society, the stockholders will have a more direct and more immediate advantage and be placed on a better footing than the public.
The stockholders will have the right to buy their meat in the Company’s stores at wholesale prices. This means one to two cents per pound below the cost of the meat to the public. Every stockholder will receive a special card, insuring this right.
Figure for yourselves what this means.
This will leave for each stockholder, as shown in the prospectus, a net earning of 5 to 10 cents a day, or $18.25 to $36.50 a year. This means that the stockholder will get back in one year not only the price of his share that cost him $10, but will make besides a profit of from $8.25 to $26.50.
Besides this, dividends will be declared and paid in cash from the additional profit.
As far as we are concerned, we bring to this enterprise the elements mentioned above, a complete organization and perfect staff, our experience, and our purpose to make it a success. We have incurred, in addition, heavy liabilities, but our faith in the enterprise is so great that we ask for no guarantee, sic any part of your cash capital. We are satisfied to be reimbursed for our expenses and paid for our work by a share in what profits remain after giving you your meat at wholesale prices and after paying you in cash a dividend equal to 10 per cent annually on your paid up capital.
Now, gentlemen, you must judge whether our proposition is just and fair. In any case, come what may, we shall be happy to have been the first to find practical means of putting labor in the place of capital and giving the consumer an income from his expense.
We to-day apply this idea to meat, because we have gone through its details in all its branches, from raising the cattle to retailing the meat.
But the system can be applied as well to all other articles of daily consumption, and the day on which our system becomes general, monopoly will die.
This must be the desire of all real friends of the people.
We hope to have been fortunate enough to show the advantages of what can be done, and that you will not allow yourself to be influenced by the critiques and attacks that may be pelted at us directly or indirectly. Monopolists, as you will understand, cannot be friendly to our system, for they well know that it will put an end to their power.
MARQUIS DE MORES & CO.