freedom. In distrust, said Demosthenes, are the nerves of the mind. In discontent, I would say, is the motive to all attainment. Our revolutionary fathers were discontented with their lot in England, and Plymouth Rock and all it signifies was the consequence. Martin Luther was discontented with the sway of the Pope and all Protestantism testifies to what that meant. No new thing ever comes to bless mankind until discontent has protested in some way against the old. And the significance of our form of government, if it have any significance whatsoever, is that clearly recognizing this principle it provides a way for the safe expression of discontent and the removal of its causes. There is nothing therefore to be condemned, certainly not from an American point of view, in a wholesome discontent with one's lot. It is human, it is divine, to aspire to be better off than one is; and it is the same sort of aspiration, which it is to be hoped leads us all to long for the better, to worship the ideal, which at this moment moves the weary hearts of the laboring classes. It would be indeed a sad sign of degeneration, if burdened with all the ills of a toil in which they have no interest and therefore feel none; with poverty staring them in the face and ignorance threatening the future of their children; with drudgery their lot and recreation only a dream of the unattainable; it would be a sad sign of degeneration, I say, if after all the advance toward free government and with all this staring them in the face, they could be contented. I lay it down as one of the axioms of a reformed political economy, that the measure of labor's discontent is the measure of its civilization.

THE CRITERION OF DISCONTENT.

But we hear it said frequently that this discontent is unreasonable because the laborer is better off than ever before. He has higher wages than formerly and the poorest can now enjoy what the richest could not centuries ago. And those who put forward this proposition seem to think it conclusive. On the other hand a moment's reflection will show that it concludes nothing. Col. Wright says (Report of Mass. Bureau

for 1882, page 419): "No comparison as to the prosperity of industrial communities can be just that does not take into consideration the relative case with which the workingmen in those communities may procure the means of subsistance, and the relative amount of comfort attainable for a given outlay of time and effort." Suppose, for example, with an increase of ten per cent. in wages in a given time and locality goes an increase of eleven per cent. in prices, or the cost of living? What then has happened to the wage-receiver? Is he better off or worse off than before? It does not take a very long head to see. It is the purchasing power of wages, not their simple increase, which shows whether or not there has been real advance. But even this is not the crucial test. Undoubtedly there has been, if we take sufficient time into consideration to render a safe judgment, a large increase in such purchasing power. Col. Wright showed as the result of his investigation, that the average weekly wages of workingmen in manufacturing and mechanical industries in Massachusetts, allowing for the advance in the cost of living, were ten per cent. higher in 1878 than they were in 1860, and that, too, notwithstanding a reduction in the hours of labor had taken place. Surely, then, the objector will say, "where is the cause of discontent?" Let us see if we have yet found our criterion of judgment. What makes a man happy and contented, I venture to affirm, is not a fixed amount of the world's good things, the same yesterday, to-day and forever. The standard changes; the criterion is relative. It is the inequalities of life that produce discontent. If your children and mine are enjoying as good opportunities for getting an education as other people's children, in so far as that goes, we are contented with their lot. If they are denied such opportunities we are discontented and ought to be. If a man sees his wife working harder and wearing herself out faster than other men's wives, and this by causes beyond his control, it makes him discontented. We should respect him less, if it did not. If the man himself, working as faithfully as mortal man can, spends all his energies for a bare pittance,

while his neighbor, working less time, gets a good living and has wherewith to do and to spare, again it arouses within him the spirit of discontent. His wages, or the wages of his class, may have been increased several times within five, ten, fifteen, twenty-five years; but so has the standard of living changed; and, if the ratio between the wages of to-day and the standard of living of to-day is greater than that of the past, he is a discontented man, and anybody worthy the name of man would be under like circumstances. There is not a sphere of life in which one cannot prove by the most familiar facts how relative the conditions of contentment are. The railroad train-how long since it was a fanatics dream? The telegraph-how long since it was the subject of ridicule? Both are indispensable factors of living to everybody now; both changed the standard of living, and opened the way for other improvements, which are constantly changing the standard of living, not only for the rich, but for all the people. Think of the telephone. Men laughed at its approach. You must take me, it said. Scarcely had they enjoyed a night's sleep before they did take it. Now it says to them you cannot get along without me, and from the counting-room, the workshop and even the home, comes the reply, we cannot. The unknown quantity, the luxury of one era, becomes the familiar necessity of the next, and the statement that wages have increased, even that their purchasing power has increased, is worth absolutely nothing as an argument against the reasonableness of labor's discontent, unless it can be shown that the increase has been sufficient to preserve the relative positions of labor and capitalist. The question is not does labor receive higher wages than fifty years ago, the question is, do the relations of labor and capital remain unchanged? The question is not is laborer actually poorer than formerly but is it relatively poorer? In other words. has it received its share of the advantages of the inventions which have transformed the face of the earth and revolutionized our habits of life-that is the question. Its answer is the criterion by which the great fact of discontent is to stand condemned or justified.

THE CAUSE OF DISCONTENT.

And now, what is the cause of this great and growing discontent of labor? In a word I answer, the constant increase in the superiority of the returns which come to capital over those which come to labor; or perhaps more accurately speaking, the superiority of the returns to the few who possess the shrewd, managing faculty, over the returns to the many who supply the muscle, the inventive capacity and the thought of the time. Vanderbilt bequeathing property by the millions on one side and the hardest workers and thinkers dying poor, and sometimes in real suffering, on the other, represent the extremes of the universal process. The money-king signifies an industrial aristocracy precisely as the political king signifies a political aristocracy. There is not an argument against the latter which will not be seen some day to undermine the former. "The association of poverty with progress," says Henry George, "is the great enigma of our times. So long as all the increased wealth, which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury, and make sharper the contrast between the house of have and the house of want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent." Our large cities and our factory villages present this contrast in a way which is felt by every sensitive soul. You may tell me the hovels of ignorance and poverty are filled with a population unfit to associate with the inmates of houses of ease and affluence-suppose it to be so, that does not make the contrast any less. When people said the slave was not fit for freedom, they said what was doubtless often true. Did we, therefore, turn about and justify riveting the chains upon him? By no means. We said with Macaulay the best cure for the ills of newly acquired freedom is freedom. That was our verdict. It is the verdict of all history. I do not think we can call anybody tyrant. No individual has done this thing. But let us not on that account try to blind our eyes to the facts. There is such a wide gulf to-day between the industrial kings and the industrial masses

as outrages the refined sense of justice and stirs every philanthropic heart.

Take the single item of child labor-thousands of children of tender years growing up in all factory communities little slaves of the loom. Not one of us but feels it an evil that they should be there. They are deprived of what constitutes for childhood healthy conditions of physical, mental and moral growth. Col. Wright said in his report to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1864, and he has reaffirmed the same opinion since: "Could we have the power given us, we would not allow a girl under 16 years of age to be employed in any kind of a factory or workshop. If she could be free till she reached the age of 20, mankind would be the gainer." We know that to be a sound judgment, every one of us. What parent who honors me with a hearing, but would feel a dark night of despair resting upon his life, if his little girl 10, 12, 15 years old were born to such a lot? And what makes the fact cut deeply in the life of the intelligent workingman? What ought to make it cut deeply into every workingman's life? The reflection that while the children of the capitalist class have a superfluous accumulation of comforts, opportunities and luxuries, his child's confinement to labor must be added to his own and his wife's faithful efforts in order to keep their bodies and souls together. It is not right that it should be so. The school, the playground, the happy home, not the shop, is where the children ought to be. The melody of their own cheerful voices, not the whir of machinery, is the music to which their steps should be timed. Fresh air and bright sunshine, not the darkness and poison of the coal mine, nor the indoor closeness of even the best ventilated mill, is the atmosphere in which they should bud and bloom and grow. The offspring of poverty-poorly born, poorly bred—what a sad blight, even when they know it not, is often the certain accompaniment of their career. I do not think I am dreaming, friends, when I talk thus about the premature labor of children. I cannot help thinking how I should feel if my own little girl were there.